A senior L and D executive who owns the training strategy for the hours you need one. For sales organizations that are buying training without production moving.
A fractional chief learning officer is a senior learning and development executive who owns a company's training strategy on a retained, part-time basis. Not a trainer who delivers a course, and not a vendor who sells one: the person who decides what the company teaches, how managers coach, how a new hire's first 90 days are built, which vendors stay, and how the executive team will know any of it worked. Companies with a few hundred producers need that person and cannot justify the full-time salary. The fractional model closes the gap.
The signs a company needs one are consistent across industries: training is happening and production is still unpredictable; the best managers coach well and the rest do not, and nobody has written down what the best ones do; onboarding is a checklist that stops at system access; and the training budget is spent on events nobody measured. 10 Signs Your Brokerage Needs a Fractional CLO lists the ten I look for.
The first 30 days are a diagnostic: what is actually interrupting production, by role and by office. Usually it is not a knowledge gap. It is some mix of sales reluctance in the producers, inconsistent manager coaching, an onboarding that never built a prospecting habit, and meetings that inform rather than practice. The strategy is built from that, not from a catalog.
Then the system: onboarding redesigned as the first 90 days of coaching; a manager coaching standard (the one to one, the scorecard, the standard held with top producers); a sales meeting format built on practice; the assessment step, using the R2R and CDSI so hiring, onboarding, and coaching speak one language; and the vendor decisions, including which programs to stop paying for.
Then measurement that an executive team can act on: leading behaviors by office and by manager, reported monthly, so the question "did the training work" has an answer before the quarter closes. 21 Things a Fractional CLO Actually Does goes through the job in detail.
The real estate practice has its own page, fractional CLO for real estate brokerages, built on ten years running learning and development at one of the largest brokerages in the country. The mortgage and insurance work uses the same instruments and the same diagnostic, because a loan officer who will not call a referral partner and an insurance producer who will not ask for the appointment are showing the same pattern as the agent who will not prospect; the loan officer and insurance agent pages describe it in those settings. For any sales organization whose revenue depends on people doing conversations well, the question is the same: why are trained people not executing, and what in the system would change that.
A diagnostic conversation about what your training is producing, what it is not, and whether a fractional engagement is the right shape.
A senior learning and development executive who owns a company's training strategy on a retained, part-time basis: the curriculum, the manager coaching standard, the onboarding design, the measurement, and the vendor decisions, without the full-time salary. The company gets a CLO-level operator for the hours it needs, typically one to two days a week.
Sales organizations between roughly 50 and 1,000 producers that are buying training without production moving: brokerages, mortgage companies, insurance agencies, financial services firms, and any company whose revenue depends on people doing conversations well. The signs are consistent: training is an event on the calendar rather than a system, managers coach inconsistently, onboarding is a checklist, and nobody can say which program changed which number.
A vendor sells a program. A fractional CLO decides whether you need one, which one, how it fits what the managers do on Tuesday, and how you will know it worked. The CLO sits on your side of the table.
A diagnostic in the first 30 days (what is actually interrupting production, by role and by office), a learning strategy built from that rather than from a catalog, then ownership of the system: onboarding, the manager coaching standard, the sales meeting format, the measurement, and the vendors. Monthly reporting to the executive team on leading behaviors, not just attendance.
No. The real estate practice is the deepest, because I ran learning and development inside one of the country's largest brokerages for ten years, and it has its own page. The same work runs in mortgage, insurance, and other commission sales organizations, where the behavioral patterns are identical and the training problem is the same.
Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH is the former EVP of Learning & Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate and the founder and Chief Learning Officer of R2R Diagnostic Group, where he helps real estate organizations and agents diagnose and fix the behavioral patterns behind inconsistent performance.