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Does your business invest enough in intentional leadership development? And is it directly targeted at driving business performance?
For many employers, the answers to these questions are likely begrudging ‘no’s.’ But at global customer experience firm Alorica, leadership development is carefully structured and placed at the heart of operations.
Angel Villarino, VP of Global Learning at Alorica, joins the HR Grapevine Podcast to discuss the firm’s Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program (LEAP), a case study in high-impact leadership development at a global scale.
Villarino reveals how LEAP has been designed to combine academic rigour with real-world applications; why participants are exposed to live business problems and AI decision-making; and his tips for designing modern L&D experiences that go beyond traditional training to drive measurable impact.
Host: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the HR Grapevine Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Broomfield, head of content here at HR Grapevine. And my guest today is Angel Villarino, vice president of global learning at customer experience solutions firm Alorica. Angel is a seasoned leader in the business process, outsourcing and consulting space, bringing more than two decades of experience driving large scale learning and talent strategies across global organizations. With a strong foundation in operational excellence and people development, he's built a reputation for aligning learning initiatives with business outcomes across diverse markets. And over the past eight years, at Alorica, Angel has taken on a global leadership role, overseeing learning delivery across North America, EMEA and the Latin America and Caribbean regions. And today, we're discussing Alorica approach to intentional leadership development, including its Leadership Accelerator program. So a great episode in store. But first and foremost, welcome, Angel. Thank you for joining us.
Guest: Hey, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
Host: Wonderful. Well, it's great to be here. I'm going to kick off with, with a fairly, uh, hard hitting first question and be great to hear your thoughts. Are businesses investing enough in intentional leadership development?
Guest: I would say that needs to be a priority. I think companies can do better because at the end of the day, you're building the future, right? For the business that that we're driving. So I would say in my case, Alorica is spending quite a bit of funds and also time developing its leaders that the company really thinks and looks forward to what's ahead of us. And for that, you need to have leaders that are going to be ready to take on the next challenge. So yeah, I would say in the case of Alorica, yes, the answer is they do spend the time and effort and money on intentional training and development. So yeah.
Host: Absolutely. Well, and I'm sure we're going to hear all about that over the course of the episode. And I'm really looking forward to diving into it. Firstly, maybe we can look at what is Alorica 's Leadership Excellence Accelerator program, otherwise known as Leap. When and how was it first created?
Guest: So it's a it's an immersive leadership accelerator program. It's about a six to nine month executive development experience designed to prepare our BPO leaders to lead high performing, technology enabled and globally distributed operations. Unlike traditional classroom training, participants learn by solving real business challenges through simulations, AI powered coaching, executive mentoring, and cross-functional innovation projects. So that's really, you know, the description every time someone asks me, how do I describe the program? That would be the description that I would give them. But it's really a learning by doing right, we'd really put it's not conceptual training. It really immerses our leaders into our industry. What's trending in the market and how to lead high performing teams. How did the program originated? It would say about three years ago. I report to the president of the Americas, and he asked me to create a program. The region was growing pretty fast, and it was just, you know, the beginning a program to have a bench strength of leaders that could potentially take over a new country or a new site. And the program from the first generation evolved into, I'm going to call it almost a, an MBA for the BPO industry, where not only are we preparing our future leaders, but there are also growing, you know, personally and professionally at the same time. So it's really an exclusive program where, you know, we have folks that at the beginning we had about fifty folks that apply to the program. This year alone, we had one hundred and twelve folks that wanted to be part of this program when we started our roadshows to let them know what was going to be the curriculum. This year, we had over four hundred and fifty folks that attended the roadshows that were interested, and then about one hundred and twelve that applied. So it started as, as a, you know, a leadership development program, and it turned into this massive exclusive, you know, leadership accelerator.
Host: Fantastic. When it comes to that, that process of selecting participants, obviously, it's wonderful to hear that, that increasing interest in the program. I mean, how do you go about identifying, selecting the people who are going to take part in the program and what's the support that they get throughout this structured multi-month experience? What can they typically expect?
Guest: So the application process, you know, you'll go through your normal application process. We have a platform where participants will apply and one key component or one requirement that we always ask the participants is the letter of intent. Why do you want to be part of this program? Why are you looking to get out of the experience? And then there's a series of assessments that the participants go through. One of them, we call it the BPO assessment. And that's where we ask participants, you know, we measure their business acumen and experience in the BPO industry from all angles real estate, finance, human resources, talent acquisition, training, operations, reporting, analytics. So every engine that puts together our company, we measure their knowledge and an experience. Now, I will tell you that assessment alone gives us a good sample of data, of areas of the business that we need to continue to polish in some of our leaders. So it was not only to just evaluate them, but we also use the data that we gather from the different assessments to Uh, you really understand what are some of the areas that we need to touch and we need to close gaps so we can continue to build training for, you know, our company leaders, right? So we find that probably finance or analytics is not so strong. It gives us the ability to start building additional training for the leaders. That way we can close those gaps. The third assessment that we apply is called the metrics assessment. So not only are we measuring the knowledge and business acumen, but we're also measuring what motivates our leaders, other persona, who they are as a leader. So, you know, I think this generation alone, it was very holistic how we evaluated the participants. And obviously, based on the results, we ranked them. And then this year, we selected a total of twenty four participants that are part of the program.
Host: Fantastic. I'd love to hear a little bit more about sort of the end result of the experience for these participants, some of the things that it's delivered for them. Um, I'm sure you're sort of taking on, on feedback or potentially looking at measuring some of that impact in different ways. So what have you seen there in terms of the impact that it's had for those leaders who've completed Leap?
Guest: It's been transformative for sure, because not only it's not, it's not only a in-house grown program, but we, we did partner with an Ivy League university. So our, our participants, what, what do they get in this generation out of the experience? They will go through a green belt Six Sigma certification with an AI technology, uh, training embedded. So as they go through the training, there's going to be, there's eighteen modules that they'll go through, but they'll understand right, what's out there in the industry from a technology perspective that they can apply into what they do. So it's not just about a process improvement program. It's about how I am learning. It's going to have an impact into what I do. So the university that we partnered with tailor fitted the program to the BPO industry. It's not just your generic Six Sigma program. It's, you know, everything that I'm learning. How do I apply it in operations or in marketing? Right? And something I want to call out is this program was open to all leaders from different departments. So folks that joined the program are not necessarily driving operations. We have some folks that came from marketing. We have some folks that came from human resources as well as training and development. So when you mix all of these departments, it's a great experience. They get to apply what they're learning in their areas and also in the industry. So once they're done with the program, they'll, you know, they'll get obviously their certification. And in Greenbelt, Six Sigma as well as AI technology. And there's a second certification that our folks are going to get, which are negotiation skills and driving emotional intelligence teams. And that is going to be facilitated by Harvard University.
Host: Brillant, Spoken a little bit there about sort of that experience participants, which by all accounts, as you share, has been so carefully crafted and designed. But I think increasingly, obviously, when we're looking at any of these kind of programs, especially programs relating to, to learning and skills development in the workplace, is that that impact on the business and on the organization. So how have you been able to tie or correlate the impact of leap to business performance or any other of those sort of relevant operational KPIs? And are there any really exciting improvements that you've seen as a result of the program and its different cohorts?
Guest: Yes, we've seen a good impact, obviously, in in how they drive their teams and their organizations two ways. One is KPI performance. So we've been able to measure the folks that have gone through the program. How are they driving their accounts in their business? And, you know, we measure it from the, you know, before they were in the program and after we've seen a great lift in their key performance indicators for the accounts that they support, That would be either on customer satisfaction or average handle time, but also profitability, right? So we we've seen an uplift into the business that they manage up to eighteen percent versus before they were in the program. And from a leadership standpoint, every year our company measures the satisfaction of our employees through two engagement surveys. The results that we gather from those specific leaders in their business units, from Verbatims, directly from the teams that they manage, have been very positive just on their approach to the team. How do they manage the business holistically, and how do they integrate all of the teams that, you know, contribute to that program? So we've seen it from their teams directly through, you know, verbatim feedback. And then we've seen it also as well in the key performance indicators.
Host: Fantastic. I want to widen out the conversation slightly. We focused on leap so far, but obviously there's a huge amount of work that Alorica has done to invest in its learning and development, culture and programs, and from yourself as a learning and development leader as well. A huge amount of experience there to draw on. So I think we're seeing the conversation certainly perhaps sort of around these, these modern learning and development experiences that go beyond traditional training to really deliver that huge level of impact in the organization. Are there any learning design best practices that you can share for some of those modern learning experiences? Is there a rethink that we need to be doing? What do you think are some of those best practices for designing really great modern learning and development experiences?
Guest: I think really the key is to understand what's driving the industry. Alorica has three pillars. One of them is, you know, being technology savvy and advanced. So the company has made huge investments over the last couple of years to integrate technology into what we do every day, not just on training and development. I could name some of them, right. So we have Performance Hub, which is our hybrid auto QA. And that's, you know, a data unified and performance ecosystem, which is a transformative coaching and quality enabling platform that has elevated our agent performance and improves accuracy and dramatically accelerates our operational insights so that, you know, that was integrated both in training as well as in our operating environment. So that would be one example of the, you know, the investments that the company has made it obviously, AI, I know it's trending in every industry out there. So as we build our training and development programs, AI has been key, a key factor. So you have our, our conversational AI, which is used in our foundations training to help our agents apply communication skills to the call center environment, right. It's a simulator for basic call flow scenarios can and can prepare agents for, you know, angry or impatient or curveball customers. Right. It Royalty rates or soft skills, as well as gives real time feedback.
Host: Fantastic. And perhaps just as a final question, I think it's one of the biggest challenges that workplaces are going through at the moment is how to ensure that their leaders, their managers and their staff as well have the skills that they need to work in this new business environment in which we find ourselves. Obviously, you touched on the impact of AI there and the opportunity it can have within the learning and development profession, but obviously there's a huge amount of change going on for, for staff and for leaders to, to manage and navigate in the organisation as well. So what are some of the steps that Alorica is taking to prepare those leaders, managers, employees for this increasingly complex, tech driven environment that we. Well, pretty much every organisation finds himself in at the moment.
Guest: So we. We have I'm going to name two. Right. So for every leadership development programme that our leaders go through, there is technology embedded. So we have different leadership development programmes. Uh, if you want to be a team manager or you want to start moving up in the company. We have a program called Step Up, right? And then for every position leadership position that our folks take on, there's also a leadership certification for it. So when we build those programs, there is technology embedded in it to where they learn, as I was mentioning, Performance Hub, how to use that tool, right? And make it very relevant to the role that they are taking, right. If I am a team manager, I'm going to need analytics and I'm going to need to know how to do root cause analysis. So Alorica has made investments as they go through that certification, how to use it to that they're going to be using on a daily basis to make their jobs obviously easier, but very effective. So I would say that's how we do it. And we have our platform called our Alorica University. And that is our company has made a huge investment to have a catalog of courses that every leader in the company can take, and it can take advantage of depending on what it is that they want to learn, ranging from Excel to emotional intelligence, finances, etc. so we have that Alorica University platform, but also every leadership program that the company has created, they have thought about what's out there in the industry that could benefit that position in our leaders, and we're constantly improving those programs to make sure that we stay relevant.
Host: Fantastic. Well, Angel, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the podcast today. It's been wonderful hearing about the success, but also the operations behind the elite program, how you've made it so successful within Alorica, but also that wider approach to learning and development as well, and really preparing your workforce, giving them the skills and support that they need. There's some really fantastic blueprint for success there for our listeners. So thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on the podcast.
Guest: Thank you for having us. And thank you for featuring Alorica. We really appreciate it.
