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MELISSA LANIER PRESTON: In the old days, having a mobile phone plan meant that you had very few options, right? You had contracts and terms. And so when T-Mobile decided to do something radically different and eliminate contracts, we branded ourselves as the un-carrier, not the typical phone carrier approach to doing business.

In my role as the Director of Career Development at T-Mobile, my teams are focused on four very distinct things. One is the running of our high potential programs. And that is anything from the programs that help a frontline person get ready to be an associate manager through programs that help folks get ready to be an executive. We also have a strong focus on developing our people managers. And that is a lot of different options, tools, services, programs, approaches to help you get even better as a people manager.

We're also very focused on what we call talent stewardship. And that is a set of enterprise wide tools, resources approaches, and systems to help the organization make great choices about how to deploy the potential of the people of T-Mobile. And then last but not least, my teams are responsible for the learning experiences that develop inclusive leadership and build a culture of inclusion.

The ability to create direction and alignment in a world that is constantly moving and constantly shifting, that's a different sort of skill from a leader, right? Because in the old world, you had a lot of hierarchy, you had positional power, you had things that you could really rely on to create alignment across the organization. And in today's world, things are just moving so much more quickly. And we have to be able to move quickly. So those old tools, they just don't work the way that they did.

We've found that one of the best ways to help leaders learn about truly being agile is through an experiential activity, and that experiential activity is improv. So we have a two day leadership seminar. And it uses improv activities throughout the course of the two days to help leaders experience discomfort, and to start to build an ability to be comfortable within their discomfort.

And it's a fun activity because what if that they're planning for is the zombie apocalypse. Participants get cards that give them their situation, their roles, the obstacles that they're going to have to overcome. But it also very clearly teaches the lesson that you can, in fact, plan for the unexpected. Maybe not every aspect of the unexpected, but many of them.

Building the director pipeline is really important to us. We've launched a program that looks at new ways to build that really important pipeline from manager or senior manager to director. And part of that new approach was to give the folks in the program an incredible amount of choice over the way that they approached their learning. And so as a participant in the program, you can choose which of the paths that you take. You can choose the order in which you take them.

Working with your mentor, you go through a very light 360. It gives you some feedback about how you're doing from a competency perspective, but there's no requirements. It really is focused on what the upcoming executive needs to learn matched with the opinions and the insight of their mentor. I come to work every day feeling like I have the opportunity to reinvent learning, development, talent management, HR practices from a wide range of sources.

It is an unending quest to find the next better thing. And that's why I love T-Mobile.

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