Spotlight on Talent Development: Meet Annette Brown, Talent Development Manager

At 84.51°, our Talent Development team drives effectiveness throughout the entire organization. From seamlessly onboarding new employees to developing learning opportunities for existing team members to help keep their knowledge and skills up to date to building future leaders, the team’s efforts and expertise are woven into everything we do to drive results and enhance business performance.  

 Overall, this dynamic team of three strategizes, sources and manages development, learning and talent systems, content and other resources that, together, form a learning experience ecosystem. As part of that effort, they: 

 Provide resources to help leaders assess and develop their leadership skills and become better people leaders, and support them in coaching and developing their associates 

• Provide career planning and development resources to associates to help them grow their careers and plan for the possibilities for their future here at 84.51° 

• Help shape a positive onboarding experience for experienced new hires, new people leaders, interns and development program participants  

• Help the organization tap into Whole Brain Thinking® to enable better collaboration and decision-making and support high-performing teams 

• Provide resources that support and drive talent retention and engagement 

 One of these experienced team members is Talent Development Manager, Annette Brown. We asked Annette to tell us a little more about the HR Talent Team and how it helps 84.51° tackle business challenges and move work from ideas to action.   How would you describe your role and responsibilities? 

Our team is led by Michelle Krummen, Director of Talent. Kaitlyn Koors and I work with Michelle to help shape a growth-mindset culture for the organization where all associates think of themselves as leaders and strive to unleash their potential. We develop talent-ready, skill-centered strategies to help the organization pave the way to long-term success.  

We are a small team, so we wear many hats. In any given day, we may go from facilitating live virtual development workshops, to meeting with learning partner providers and curating learning into pathways and plans that associates can use for self-directed learning. We might use system dashboards, reporting and analysis to understand what and how associates are learning, and then design and develop communications, job aids and other resources to support our ongoing performance cycle. 

The launch of the 84.51° Values-based Leadership Model was a huge win for the organization, as we now have common language and consistent expectations of what it means to operate with a limitless mind, fearless heart and relentless delivery. We’ve recently conducted leadership 360 assessments of all our people leaders to help them identify strengths to tap into and areas to develop to become even stronger leaders. We’ve designed and developed learning aligned to our leadership model skills and behaviors, to support ongoing growth of our people and the success of the organization.   

In addition to leadership skills like strategic thinking, relationship building and influencing, roles in talent development involve general human resource (HR) expertise skills. Performance management, learning design and curation, talent systems management, facilitation skills, teambuilding, talent and HR system administration are just a few examples. Project management and strong skills in desktop tools like PowerPoint and Excel are important, too. 

The HR Talent Team works very closely with the HR Business Partners to support the needs of the business. We partner closely with the Function Talent Lead Teams of our larger functions such as Science + Technology Solutions (STS) and Customer Strategy & Activation (CSA). That helps us ensure we are in sync with the needs of the business and gain their input on enterprise talent initiatives and support function-specific learning and development initiatives.