It’s not uncommon for a learning a development team to brand themselves as an internal university, but Oakwood Temporary Housing can be proud to be delivering on that message. The internal Oakwood University has been recognized as one of Training Magazine’s Top 125 for the 5th consecutive year!I have had the great pleasure of working alongside this team for the past few years and a focus on achieving business is central to everything they do. As a shared service, it would be so easy to become a support organization that just did as they were asked. Not this group; they approach every organizational need by defining the learning objectives and determining a measurement to ensure the need is met.
The team received a crystal award during a gala held at the Training 2011 Conference & Expo in San Diego. Now in its 11th year, the Training Top 125 is the only report that ranks companies for their employee training and development efforts.
Training editors also presented Oakwood with a Best Practices Award for their Hardwiring Sales Training for Business Results initiative. Oakwood was one of only five organizations to receive this award for innovative and successful learning and development programs and practices. The other recipients were ADP, Farmers Insurance Group, FedEx Express and InterContinental Hotels Group.
Many believe the secret sauce is in the playbook. In 2008, Oakwood embarked on a sales transformation moving from an order-taker sales organization to an order-maker one. I had the great pleasure of working with Oakwood University and Alvin LeBourgeois at Miller Heiman to develop Oakwood’s Sales Playbook.
It included the best practices of Oakwood’s top performers, but it was only successful because it was “hardwired” into everything the sales organization did. Leadership put the right players on the field, trained them and continuously measure performance. It’s not just a playbook on a shelf.
Learn how you can do the same and not only write your playbook but implement a program that hardwires results by downloading the free Sales Playbook chapter of The High-Performance Sales Journey.