Now he is the Chief Learning Officer and Senior Vice President for the Cendant Real Estate Franchise Group. Cendant has over 800 employees supporting its Franchise Group and more than 265,000 brokers and agents affiliated with one of its franchise networks. Under the Cendant umbrella are five well-known brand names - Century 21®, Coldwell Banker®, Coldwell Banker Commercial®, ERA® and Sotheby's International Realty®.

What George does now affects countless lives everyday. It is different, he points out, and yet very similar to his work for the Defense Department. "Training at DOD is a little different," he says, "because people's lives and national priorities are on the line. So you pick up a seriousness and a desire to make sure that the end result of the training means something."

And there is the similarity. "All learning has to influence performance," he says. "If it does not change performance then stop bothering people." In fact, he considers his main purpose is to instill the belief in all levels of the organization that learning drives performance. "That is the key."

Blended Learning
George and his team provide all the learning tools needed for brokers and agents to improve performance – and that means increased sales. They utilize a concept George calls ‘blended learning." Blended learning is a combination of learning approaches, including on-line, on-site, in both live and asynchronous settings.

"It has to be blended," he says. Single delivery methods, like asking students to go read a book without any context or a discussion with your peers or a threaded chat or by being part of a larger course are good for getting information, he says, but then you are relying on the learners to connect all the dots by themselves and you lose an extraordinary opportunity for learning. Much of our learning comes not from books, but from the experiences of our fellow co-workers and learners. The Cendant Real Estate Franchise Group builds its training program upon those sound adult learning principles.

Competitive Advantage and Results
Many of the Cendant real estate brand courses offered are free. "If you give agents and brokers great tools and systems and help them learn how to use them, they will perform better," George says. "They will make more money and that benefits the whole organization. So if we can make them successful, we will be successful."

And having a blended learning system that is focused on performance is a competitive advantage. It helps brokers recruit great talent, and helps agents believe in their ability to perform. "We are talking large armies of agents out there," he says. "If you add up all the brands there are over 265,000 agents, and so the issue for us is that if you can get every agent to do one more transaction because you have trained them or given them techniques to help them perform just a little bit better, you have made just a substantial increase in performance across the board."

Fostering relationships is critical
"We find that the people who stay in companies for a long time do it because of the personal relationships, not necessarily for the money," George says. "If you look back on the research done in World War II and subsequent to that about why guys in the trenches fight and die - they don't usually say things about patriotism or what…it is the guy next to them. It is the friendship and the bonds they develop in the small cohort that cause them to go to extraordinary lengths. So leadership as a function of fostering a team or sense of identity is very important in retaining agents."

The Cendant Real Estate Franchise Group's blended learning program is focused on being contextually relevant, and the context for most real estate operations is the office level. So Cendant incorporates techniques into its curriculum that brokers can use to create work environments that build upon relationships.

Learning is essential for passionate work
People tend to be enthusiastic about doing things that they believe has a reasonable chance of accomplishment. New real estate agents are often afraid ("petrified") about talking on the phone to prospects. "The learning intervention should give agents the skill and the confidence to feel more comfortable about doing the things they need to do to succeed. You can't be passionate if you're unsure or uncomfortable." he says.

"As an example, if you told me that I had to call 100 different people to try to list a house, I don't know if I would want to do that, and even if I wanted to, I am not sure how good I would be. But if I went through a longitudinal program that takes me step by step through the call process and handling objections and I practice that, at the end of that course I would have confidence in my ability to perform well. I might still not want to make the calls, but now I can act on the conviction that I can do it well. That kind of confidence and abilities and the expectation and results I think drives passion."

What is your company doing to create organizational learning systems that improve performance, build relationships, and develop the employee self-confidence that leads to increased sales, production, and organizational success? If you're lucky enough to have someone like George Selix to lead the way, you might just be on the right track.