Maximize Smiles per Dollar

Getting the most impact from every invested hour

When I reached the 30 year mark of my software engineering career at Microsoft, I decided that was long enough to devote to software development. I made a pitch to upper management and our HR partners that there was a need for more attention to be paid to people development. They approved my pitch, and the Windows Director of Learning and Development (L&D) role was created. That was my last role at the company, and overall my most satisfying role. It brought together every muscle I had developed and made me a high functioning team-wide resource.

The corporate functions of Microsoft provide all of the standard Microsoft-wide training around culture, business conduct, security, etc. But technical training is provided by the engineering teams themselves. These teams, amidst all of their product development, have to find time to create training. This tradeoff is not unique to Microsoft, or even unique to the tech industry. Stephen Covey¹ called this ubiquitous challenge “the P/PC Balance,” the balanced investment in both production (P) and production capability (PC). An engineering organization needs to develop the products in its portfolio, and at the same time it needs to develop the people that are developing those products.

In our Windows organization, I had observed our P/PC balance was off, and that a lack of structure and coordination was undermining our learning resource efforts. My pitch emphasized the importance of one dedicated resource to activate and organize all of these side hustles. Here is the opening of my L&D pitch (bolding added here to set up the equation that follows):

There is no shortage of learning programs and pilots across this company, and the metrics for each of these efforts shows appreciation, impact, and progress. But the majority of these efforts are currently happening in silos and are working inefficiently due to a lack of awareness and alignment, resulting in an inability to leverage related programs. There is inconsistency in the learning and growth experience.

The vital missing step in the growth of our learning and development experience is coordination. The multitude of learning programs are typically run by people as a part-time investment. With the time constraint and the established local needs that launched each program, it is predominantly outside of the owners’ time and scope to invest in coordination and alignment. We need to support the investments of these passionate proactive individuals, showing them how their contributions advance the overall learning experience.

Marrying this bottom-up organic energy with top-down coordination² will bring consistency and sustainability to all our learning and development efforts. Proper organization and structure will maximize the scaling potential of successful grass roots investments and maximize the adoption potential of established top-down initiatives.

I originally summarized my Director of L&D role as, “Ensuring my team members have maximal impact for every hour they spend creating learning resources.” Over time this was abbreviated to, “Maximize smiles per dollar,” where “dollar” referred to the forever constrained time³ and money spent on the development of learning resources, and “smiles” referred to the positive impact to the team members consuming these learning resources. I’m a big fan of emojis (I’ll dive into that love in a later post), so eventually I created an emoji shorthand for this expression: ⬆️🙂/💲.

Armed with that expression, here is how I executed on my mission.