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Stephen Choo, PhD, is an international facilitator, educator, and consultant with more than 25 years of experience in workforce transformation, talent strategy, and leadership development across Asia-Pacific. He is currently CEO of Digital Survey Research Insight, where he works with international organizations on industry engagement, growth strategy, and partnership development within Western Australia.

Stephen’s path into talent development took shape during his 10 years at Korn Ferry, where he served as vice president and managing director (digital). There, he worked closely with leaders across the region who were navigating cultural change, developing future-ready talent, and guiding their organizations through periods of uncertainty and transformation. Supporting executives in diverse markets taught him that sustainable performance comes from aligning people, purpose, and strategy. 

At Qualtrics, where he later served as Senior Solution Strategist  (ASEAN), Stephen deepened his understanding of how data and employee experience intersect. He partnered with HR and business leaders to integrate employee listening, behavioral insights, and analytics into daily decision making. His work reinforced a simple yet powerful truth: talent management begins with paying attention to what people say, how they grow, and what they need to succeed.

Since 2021, Stephen has collaborated with HRD Future, Asia’s leading HR learning partner, where he facilitates the Employee Experience & Engagement Masterclass. For two engaging days, he guides practitioners in making sense of AI-powered employee experience insights and turning them into meaningful, human-centred strategies that strengthen leadership effectiveness, workplace culture, and organisational performance.

Alongside his facilitation work, Stephen teaches MBA and postgraduate units in strategy, leadership, and organizational behavior at Curtin University. He holds a PhD from the University of Western Australia and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Stephen also contributes to community and industry through several board roles, including vice-president of the WA Chinese Chamber of Commerce, member of the ABC Advisory Council, and non-executive director of Geniusto.

Stephen Choo

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The worldwide talent development community is diverse. Our members bring a wealth of experience and insight to their work. We're spotlighting their stories.Stephen Remedios has been a member of ATD since 2018 from India. Here's his story in his own words.Tell us a little bit about yourself.I grew up in several cities throughout India, changing schools and friends with every transfer that my father took. After studies in economics and management and a decade in sales and marketing roles, I discovered my true calling: enabling people to achieve their fullest potential in the domain of their biggest strengths. I spent the next decade working with people as a facilitator, coach, and consultant to help them achieve their goals.I live in Bangalore, India with my wife and three boys. I spend most of my personal time indulging the diverse passions of my family. My wife loves gardening; my eldest, electronic dance music; my middle, tennis; and my youngest, word games and spelling bees.What are your personal and professional goals?My personal goal is to create the supporting conditions and scaffolding for everyone in my family to realize their fullest potential in an area of their choosing, which translates into giving them unique experiences that give them a glimpse into their future should they continue to work hard at their craft.At work, I strive to demonstrate the effectiveness of an engaged and enabled organization. Most organization transformations fail because the underlying culture isn’t addressed. There is a people dividend that isn’t being fully realized, and I make it my goal to champion this agenda.What challenges have you had to overcome in your career?Making the shift from sales and marketing to people strategy midcareer was a significant challenge that I had to overcome. When I began on my own as a trainer, facilitator, and coach, I did everything from arranging rooms to training in small towns in $10-a-night hotels. Over the years I gradually progressed from training tellers to CEOs. There were many moments of doubt along the way when I was tempted to go back to doing sales and marketing roles, but I resisted just long enough to get the next break.What’s the most valuable thing you’ve gained or experienced during your membership with ATD?I have always found the State of the Industry reports useful to understanding global trends and the direction of the industry. I make it a point to attend an ATD conference every other year. It is the most efficient way to enhance your network and discover all the newest thinking in our field.Can you share any professional tips, specific to talent development, that you have picked up along the way?I am always struck by the number of people who are living lives that someone told them they ought to be living. The key to talent development is a deep understanding of what you are working with. Executives with decades of experience struggle to articulate what their strengths are, what kind of work renews them, and what kind of people they do their most productive teaming with. Great talent development always begins with a grounded assessment of the individual that’s closely aligned with their perception of self. Once you have that baseline, the sky is the limit.What’s a common misconception you see when it comes to talent development?In talent development there’s this misconception that you can easily buy, build, borrow, or (ro)bot talent when people leave. Replacing quality talent is the hardest thing to do in a world where performance is more transparent than ever before. I often argue that you can clearly establish a talent to value mapping and ascribe revenue to a person with a few simple assumptions. Organizations don’t pay enough attention to their most important players.Do you have any advice for people looking to further their careers?Start by looking at the domains where you do your best work, where you are most energized, and where you whistle to work. Ask your peers and team what you do best. A career is a marathon more than it is a sprint. To get to the finishing line and have enough in the tank for a glorious retirement requires you to think of sustainability earlier rather than later in making career decisions. Building a career that allows you to use your strengths most of the time sets you up for success and sustainability.What is your personal definition of talent development?Investing in an appropriate manner to enable every individual in the organization to perform at their fullest potential in their jobs such that the organization outperforms.How do you stay motivated?Working with many clients who are looking to solve their unique challenges keeps me on my toes. The recent developments in the understanding of how the brain works and the growing stature of behavioral economics in making lasting behavioral change means that we live in exciting times. Being in this domain at this crucial time and having the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution is a huge motivationHow do you find meaning in your work?In this work, you make a lot of friends and build relationships for life. I’m in touch with several people who I have coached or have run workshops for. They call me long after our business transactions are concluded. To know that I have made a difference to another fellow traveler no matter how small creates meaning in my life.Have your own story to tell? Share it with us.

"A Career is a Marathon More Than it is a Sprint"

Stephen Cooper—Why I Became a CPLP

A proactive approach is a logical extension of some evaluation systems. Talent development professionals can do this by implementing five straightforward steps.

Make Your Evaluation System Proactive

 Whether you are a Mom-and-Pop operation or one of the larger talent development firms, you probably have some sort of strategy guiding you. Hopefully, this strategy has been documented and is the outgrowth of input from key people in the organization. But even if the strategy is only in your head, it is still waiting for action.Unfortunately, many strategic plans, which are key to the future of our businesses, are rarely executed fully—if at all. In the previous blog on strategic growth planning, I mentioned that some 80 percent of strategic plans fail to get executed. (I know I have read or heard this stat enough times to think it is true. But if truth be known, I don’t have a source to share with you to validate this alleged finding. Nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that most strategic plans are not fully executed as designed.)There are myriad reasons why this is the case, not the least of which are the normal changes to a business model or that leadership demands a different direction than originally proposed, deeming the original strategy moot. More importantly, in the ever-evolving talent development industry, one could even argue that sticking to a growth strategy could be counter-productive.  But what about strategic plans that are not subject to major interferences in the business model or competitive landscape? Why aren’t they  implemented? Execution Best PracticesA March 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It,”  by Sull, Homkes, and Sull spells out several likely culprits, highlighting the myths many business leaders adhere to about strategy execution. Their research found that several practices actually get in the way of effective execution, including:inadequate alignment across business unitsundying commitment·one-way communicationstoo much of a performance cultureexecutive-only leadership.While the authors studied very large multinational organizations across many industries, these strategy execution lessons that apply to any organization.  Let’s take a closer look at each practice. Alignment:  To execute a strategic plan in a typical three- to five-year time span, senior leadership must be in total agreement about the direction the business is driving toward. Without this sort of alignment, major departments  and functions will continue to do their own “thing”—working at cross-purposes of the overall business.Interestingly, the research pointed out that while 40 percent of managers note alignment (or lack thereof) as the main cause of poor execution, the second major reason was failure to coordinate across units, noted by 30 percent of participants. Apparently, alignment alone doesn’t necessarily equate to execution—albeit it is a significant influencer.  So, while one of the primary goals of any strategic planning process is to achieve senior leader alignment, it also is important to align across all business units.Commitment: Most business leaders believe that alignment requires commitment to the strategic direction. But in my experience, alignment can exist (on the surface) without total commitment to the strategy. In this case, leaders agree with the overarching direction and some elements of the strategy, but not with all of it. In fact, unswervingly sticking to a strategic plan may impede its execution, given that many intervening factors and changes will surface over time. While commitment to the plan is initially necessary, ignoring the environmental changes taking place will undoubtedly result in leaders executing the wrong plan.Communications: The most likely reasons organizations fail to execute strategic plans:Leaders don’t provide communication to the rest of the business.Leaders provide communications that are unclear, foggy, and lack any inspiration for moving forward.Simply communicating the strategy from “on high” is too little to achieve a well-executed strategy. Instead, communications must create a dialogue that enables employees to offer input and questions so they can truly understand their role in the execution process. If a rational business case for the strategic direction isn’t offered to—and accepted at—the individual level, it will be difficult for employees to internalize the plan and their role in its execution.Performance Culture: Possessing a culture that is committed to performance is critical to execution. Organizations must establish a culture that recognizes and rewards practices like teamwork, experimentation, and flexibility, which may appear at times to slow down performance.  Although a high-performance culture values and demonstrates continual accountability, this head-down and all-hands-on-deck approach doesn’t allow organizations to slow down in the short term so they can move faster in the long term.  Indeed, the right delays—yielding the right results—should be perfectly acceptable.Executive Leadership: We often hear that true change must start at the top. But top-down involvement can impede the achievement of sustainable results. Certainly, the CEO and C-level team must lead the initial charge for execution, and even monitor its progress. However, the sooner frontline employees can internalize a strategy, the sooner they can rightfully execute it. Once the organization feels it must wait for executive approval, the process slows, engagement wanes, and innovation falters. In other words, it takes a village to effectively execute, not just a team of senior leaders who decide when and how execution should take place.Bottom LineThese execution practices are logical enough and, at some level, seem relatively simple to enact. Regrettably, they become more complicated in their actual operation. Perhaps, though, this is just the nature of most businesses that are growing—with growth comes frequent change and even alterations to the corporate strategic direction.Maintaining flexibility around strategy is a dual-edged sword, because sometimes flexibility can become an easy excuse for not following the original, well-thought out plan. Other times, flexibility makes complete sense and is, in fact,  necessary for the business to move forward. In either case, executing a strategic plan is a critical element of both the short- and long-term success of any business, including those in the talent development space. What’s more, minding these best practices can help any organization execute their strategy with success.How have you experienced poor to no execution of a strategic plan? Whether you were the leader or the follower, what were the reasons for this in your business? What were the real business consequences of the failed execution? How could the execution have been specifically improved? Share your experiences in the Comments below.  To learn more, check out my book The Complete Guide to Building and Growing a Talent Development Firm.

Growing Talent Management Firms: Strategy and Execution

Growth can be painful unless you understand and embrace it. First, you need to define what it means for you. Second, plan your business around your chosen pathway(s) over a realistic amount of time.

Winning Talent Development Firms Establish Their Growth Plan

Lori Ann Roth, Ph.D., CPTD, is the President of Learning and… Reflective Growth for Individuals and Teams. This company specializes in administering and interpreting self-assessments to facilitate trust building, playing to strengths and teamwork through training and coaching. Dr. Roth was the Director of Training and Organizational Development for the Human Resources & Payroll department at George Mason University for over 10 years. Her responsibilities included managing a talented staff and providing training and development for over 6000 University faculty and staff. She has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Communication and a Master's degree in Adult Education from Michigan State University. She earned a doctorate from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Human Development. The emphasis of her study consisted of adult learning and human resources management. She has worked for human resources departments, training corporations, hi-tech corporations, as an adjunct professor at University of Maryland University College and George Mason University’s School of Business. She was the president and owner of LARG Enterprises, Inc. (a training corporation) and specialized in Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering and Train the Trainer classes. Lori is certified in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Pearman Personality Integrator, EQ-i (Emotional Intelligence), Gallup’s Strenghtsfinder 2.0, The 8 Dimensions of Leadership, DiSC, Crucial Conversations, and Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. She is a certified Retirement Coach and a skilled facilitator. She is very active in the Association of Talent Development (ATD) formerly American Society of Training Development (ASTD) at the national and local levels. Dr. Roth volunteers for ATD and has presented at the ATD International Conference and Exposition (ICE) for the last seven years on a variety of professional development topics. She is a pilot pioneer, earning her Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD), formerly CPLP, in 2006. She is also one of 11 people to have been awarded the CPLP Contributor Award from ATD. Presently, Lori volunteers as the CPLP Manager for the ATD Sun Coast Local Chapter in Florida. Her hobbies include cooking, weight lifting, hiking, reading and beaching.

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