Brady: Let’s start by talking a little bit about where you sit in this universe. Tell us what you do. Matt, I’ll start with you.

Smith: I am the chief learning officer here at McKinsey. What that means is I look after the learning and development of all of our 30,000-plus colleagues globally. That involves deeply understanding what the needs of our people are in terms of the capabilities they need to be successful, not only within McKinsey but also in their broader careers.

And then I turn that into a set of offerings that they can take advantage of—like leadership-development programs, internal and external courses—and make sure that we’re meeting those needs. That’s my job in a normal year.

In this very abnormal environment that we’re in now, where obviously many people are not able to go to in-person programs or attend live learning sessions, we’ve also been working very hard to ensure that all of our offerings are fit for the moment that we’re in. We’ve been doing a lot over this past year in particular to pivot much of what we do to digital and distance formats.

Diane Brady: I know from remote schooling that it’s a challenge to transfer to a digital environment. Before I go on to Liz, it sounds a little like you crowdsource programs. That’s not quite accurate, is it?

Matthew Smith: Well, I wouldn’t say we crowdsource. But we try to get the best of what’s offered externally and combine that with things that we create ourselves for our own people. I’ll give you an example. A skill like how to lead a McKinsey project team or how to solve problems in a very McKinsey-specific way, that’s not something that we can just source from the outside world.

It’s something we have to build for ourselves, for our own people. But, on the other hand, if we’re trying to teach people how to code in Python or the fundamentals of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there’s actually a lot of great material out there.

Over the past few years, there’s been just an explosion of external content available on sites like Coursera and Udemy and LinkedIn. We want to tap into that. We want to make sure that we offer our colleagues a mix of internally created programs for that very McKinsey-specific content, as well as the best of external content on skills that we don’t really need to reinvent the wheel on.

McKinsey Academy and capability building

Brady: Liz, let’s go to you. Talk about the McKinsey Academy and what drew you to that.

McNally: Sure. McKinsey Academy is our entity at the firm for building our clients’ capabilities. We help organizations achieve and sustain transformational impact by building the individual and organizational skills in areas that are required to sustain the transformations we do.

So, for example, if we’re serving a client on a digital transformation, we can embed McKinsey Academy offerings around the skills that those leaders will need to be able to lead and sustain that transformation. And similar to firm learning, it comes from the same core hybrid approach of blending together virtual programs, digital programs, reinforcements, field works, and other elements to enable our clients to acquire, apply, and sustain the skills that they will need.

Diane Brady: I’m intrigued. I was looking at your military background, which I often associate with leadership. Is that something that’s informed a little bit about how you approach the job?

Elizabeth Young McNally: A hundred percent. I went to West Point, which is one of the world’s foremost, if not the foremost, leadership institution. The leadership lessons I learned in the military had a fundamental effect on me and how I serve clients and think about leadership development.

What I would add, though, is the military is not just a leadership organization. It’s fundamentally a learning and capability-building one as well. Look at how much time militaries spend on building skills. Fundamentally, that is the bread and butter of what militaries do as well. And so it has prepared me for this role, not just from the leadership angle, but also for an appreciation of how important good capability building is.

Learning how to learn

Brady: I’m a curious person. I ask a lot of questions. And ergo I think of myself as a good learner, but not necessarily so. Matt, what are the fundamental tenets of learning how to learn?

Smith: This is a topic I’m really passionate about. Because I think what you just said, Diane, “learning how to learn,” is a phrase that we don’t hear enough these days. There’s a lot of talk about the need for people to have a learning mindset or build new skills. But there’s not enough attention on the fact that learning itself is a skill.

Brady: But we think we have it already, right?

Smith: We all think we have it. So we might say, “I’m a fast learner” or “I’m a slow learner” or “I learn in this way or that way.” But, actually, a lot of the underlying research—there are several strands of research—shows that people can actually build skills to learn new skills.

We think of this as one of the most fundamental capabilities that a person can develop for themselves. It makes you better at getting better at things. It makes you better able to adapt to the changing environment that we all face these days. This idea of learning as a skill, in and of itself, is a fundamental one, and one that we talk to a lot of our clients about and, frankly, a lot of our colleagues as well. Because they’re also curious. They want to learn. But they need to be taught. Back in school, you might have thought about this as study skills. How do I organize myself in order to get my schoolwork done? But there’s a much more sophisticated version of that when you think about adult learners that I think we all need to invest in more.