L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Highlight Episode II: Emotional Regulation, Barriers to AI Adoption, and The Great HR Debate

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

For this 50th episode, we take a look at the top moments from the show since our last highlight episode. Guests include best-selling author Roberta Matuson, globally renowned Executive Transition Coach Navid Nazemian, getAbstract book award winners Minette Norman and Kevin Wilde, and Donald Taylor in his return to discuss the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. Hello, dear listener. Host Tyler here. This week, we're doing a highlight episode. We just crossed the 50 episode threshold, so let's take a look back at who we've met

and what we've achieved so far. Since the last highlight recap at episode 20, we've done special coverage on the topic of AI, taken interviews from vendors and attendees live at L&D conferences, and celebrated our first anniversary as a show. I've been lucky enough to meet some of you fans and listeners out in the world and I am so grateful for your support and dedication to the show, and for your dedication to the learning and development profession, of course. If you'd like to give any feedback, recommend a guest, or just say hi for any reason at all, I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. Reach out!

Now, let's dive in. We'll kick the highlights off by rewinding all the way back to August of 2023. This is Rachel Lauren. I'm an advocate for ERGs. I think ERGs really help kind of carry the work in the workplace. Groups that actually, you know, are that ladder up to whatever DEI program or individual might be in the organization. Those definitely help and you tend to find champions. You absolutely need

champions throughout the organization. Yes, it starts at leadership, but they're only, they only know so much about what's happening and so it's important to have people at different levels. With different understanding, there's no way to build an inclusive environment with one mindset or even just with one level of leadership. So I like to pull from throughout the organization and oftentimes when I go in even before doing a training or anything I ask like who are the champions in your organization who comes to mind if they don't have this already built out.

And there usually is an answer people know who those individuals are and they're usually really excited to do the work. Up next my conversation with Kevin Wilde. It was a fascinating little model that came out so what is the correlation between coachability excited to do the work. Up next, my conversation with Kevin Wilde. It was a fascinating little model that came out. So what is the correlation between coachability and self-confidence? And we found it's not linear. It's a curve.

So if you think about the lower starting point, low confidence, low coachability. And I call it the I can't zone. And it could be I can't because I feel threatened or I can't because I'm really tired or I can't be go, whatever. And I've been there myself, like not now. Then the opposite extreme is the really high confidence or let's say too much confidence,

not enough humility. And I call it the I don't care zone. I don't care if you give me feedback. I don't care what that 360 says. But then the sweet spot was the middle, enough confidence to be open to learn and enough humility to want to. And I think back to the, what does it take to be a highly coachable leader or get your learners into that coachable mode

for whatever your development, it's how do you get them into that learning zone? Point number one, highly coachable leaders are aware of their learning zone and can get them in that sweet spot of, I have enough confidence that I can be open and vulnerable to learn and enough humility to care to get better.

Okay, here's a clip from Erin Shearer. When you think about buy-in, how do you get people to understand the need of where we're headed and why we're headed there? Not in a manipulative way. And I think sometimes leaders and corporations will not really be fully transparent with all the things that they can be. And that is where you break down trust. There are different orders of change for people. And so some people, change is no big deal to them.

It's just like, this is what it is and there's not emotion to it. And so I can just live with it. I'm just thankful to have a job or whatever their mentality is. For some people, change every single change, whether it is small or large or however you would describe it is very hard.

And so if leaders utilize the person who changes no big deal to them as their benchmark for changes no big deal, then they will not get change right for their team or their workforce. All right. Now a snippet from Helen Marshall, fellow L&D podcast host. If you're creating and delivering learning initiatives for your wider business, you should be speaking to those people in your business to determine what they actually need.

That just is the common sense behind learning and development, essentially. But yeah, the trickier part comes in the actual application of doing that. How do you do it? How do you align any initiatives that you're running with those broader business objectives? And actually, I think that's probably a great place to start is thinking about what the business is trying to achieve and what those

overall objectives are for the business, which potentially hasn't been the focus of some L&D teams, certainly that we've worked with and that we hear about within the industry as well. So there's a little bit of alignment required there from a business perspective. But ultimately, yes, having conversations with people, understanding what their needs are, what their gaps are, where there's opportunities to either increase people's performance or increase their capability to do something within a role. Here's a moment from my talk with Carol Sanford. You have to build a developmental community that's working on developing function, being, and will. Function is action. Being is who we are. Will is what really motivates us in terms of what we care about and think is right.

So this is the big deal. The research was done at Harvard by one of my mentors and found the truth three to eight years to make these kind of changes. Next you'll hear the voice of Martin Holechko. I think that this like playful experimentation is the best approach. They run different challenges in the company, but we ask the, you know, people to form little teams in between departments and it runs for five, six weeks. They get a little budget and then we actually ask

for the most like exciting usage of that particular technology. If you put it in such a like low pressure, playful setup, a lot of creativity comes out. The moment it's fun, people just engage and they put in their own time and their own energy and both benefit both the company and both both themselves. They own something new and the company has some new ideas too.

Now we'll hear from Mark Zao Sanders during a talk that we did for Get Abstract's Get AI campaign. There's been some quite smart stuff that goes that, but it's not, and it's adaptive, but it's really quite limited. What you've got with this is the ability to, and they're quite limited to domains of knowledge, like arithmetic. Arithmetic is pretty closed, you know, a little bit like chess, or spelling. That's also closed. There's only a certain number of words you're going gonna test a child on. But with this, you can now expand to really any topic.

And actually the question becomes, what do we actually want to restrict, especially amongst young people? So, yeah, despite showing some cynicism at the start, I agree with you. It's a very, very good use case. It's really positive. Sam Altman in an interview that he gave earlier this year was suggesting that as a private tutor,

that may be the best and most valuable use case, you know, all of the many use cases of GBT, three and a half as it was then, but now GBT4. Also from hashtag get AI, this is Steven Miller. Also from hashtag get AI, this is Stephen Miller. There are a handful of special kinds of organizations that are known for a safety first approach where people are seldomly penalized for making errors, actual misses and near misses surfaced. How do you start collecting cases about errors, near misses, and actual misses?

How do you turn those into context-specific case studies that are stories that can be shared. Based on that, how do you then not necessarily deliver more classes, but give people the resources and do the simplification of the work processes that makes it less likely that these things will occur? All right, up next, Sam Keenly. I'm sure everyone here can remember at least one onboarding that contains a week

of some type of like classroom training, which was basically history of the company, how great the CEO is, three days worth of HR videos, how to set up your email signature, like all that fun stuff that is not really fun. And before you know it, like two weeks have passed and you've lost all your initial enthusiasm of getting started. Like that's such an undervalued time when someone joins an organization.

So the approach like throw them in the deep end, isn't so much just like, here you go, here's your desk, go have fun. It's basically taking that initial two weeks and then constraining it to the first day. But by day two, they should be starting to at least get into the organization. So one thing I like to do is on that first day, I meet with them one-on-one. I go over my expectations, but I also go over like, and want to understand what excites this new hire and how can I start to overlap what they are excited by with some of the things that I have

envisioned for that role. Now you'll hear from the learning pirate herself, Lauren Waldman. If attention is the mechanism to focus, well then what is attention? And where can my attention be taken in any given moment? And then how do I harness that to focus? If you know that there is one line that's gonna take your attention from the visual system and another one's gonna take it from the auditory system,

there's another one that's going to go to the executive function. Okay, that's three I've listed already. What can you do to dim the noise in order to help you utilize your resources better in order to focus? Do I have to listen to music? No, I don't. If you're stressed out and your system is just completely hijacked with, you know, an emotional response, well, the executive function isn't working as best as we want it to. Is that out, and your system is just completely hijacked with an emotional response. Well, the executive function isn't working as best as we want it to. Is that the best time to learn?

No, it's not. If I do want to work, but I do want to learn, but I'm feeling like this, what are some practical things that I can do, whether that be through meditation or breath work or change of environment? Okay, this next clip is from Shalmina Babai Abji. Tyler, earlier we talked about the fact that I was afraid to speak up. There was this voice of fear. Don't speak up Shalmina.

They're going to realize you're stupid. Your ideas don't matter. They might even fire you. And so I want women to first and foremost and all your listeners know that your ideas matter. In fact, the more unique your ideas, the better. The next time I had an idea that voice of fear on fire again, telling me not to speak up, but this time, there was this tiny voice of courage and it was fueled by that shift in my own mindset from my ideas

don't matter to my ideas matter. That's the day I realized I can decide which voice wins by feeding that voice. And that's when I coined this term, power quotient. Your power quotient is your ability to scan your mental chatter. You can scan it and you can intentionally pick an empowering response. Here's a snippet from Minda Zetlin.

Somewhere along the line, I think it might've been after I wrote the book, I interviewed this guy who was working 80 hour weeks and had a stroke in his 40s. And the doctor said, How many hours do you work? And he said, Oh, none at all. Because you know, because he was following this thing that if you do work that you love, you're not working a day in your life. And I think his wife was there and she kind of crossed her eyes and the doctor said, Okay,

seriously, how many hours do you work? And then, you know, and the doctor told him to cut it way down and he did cut it way down to something like 25. And guess what? He was more successful after he did that. For one thing, it forces you to really figure out what matters. You know, the whole, the 80-20 rule that, you know, 20% of your effort yields 80% of the results.

When you force yourself to cut back on those hours, then you force yourself to figure out which 20% that is. And that's a super powerful thing. Also, brain research tells us that a well rested brain works better than an overtaxed brain to a great degree. So I think that's another reason. Okay, here's a quick look at my conversation with Get Abstract's own Danielle Goodrum. We were recapping DevLearn 2023. I think my conversations look very similar to yours. They were very specific to the target audience

and the learners within their corporation. So what they're working on was very tailored to their learners. So when it comes to topics, I didn't notice a lot of themes, but there were definitely themes and making sure that they were ahead of what was coming out technology-wise, what's best practices with across the industry and other organizations to make sure that when they

are developing these assets, this content and training for their learners, it is cutting edge. So I think the biggest trend there was making sure that they were creating things that were interesting, engaging, and helping them meet their end goals. So it was fun to be around a lot of people who were looking to be innovative in that space and really pushing the edge of what's next so they can be ahead of that for their learners. Up next is a snippet from Roberta Matreussen.

I don't believe in job descriptions. I believe in results descriptions. I believe that when you're putting together what the job is going to be, you should look at what are the results I'm looking to achieve, not what are the tasks this person is going to be doing for the person who's filling this job. Um, you know, we're looking for them to build our social media out. That would include our tick-tock. That would include our Instagram, Facebook, and any other resources

that you deem necessary. But I'm not going to tell them we need 25 posts done a day because they may say 25 posts on TikTok is a waste of time. Why don't we do three really good videos and put them up on LinkedIn for our market? They have the autonomy. They come back and show you the data. Look, it's working. We're seeing more quick throughs. We're seeing results. I want results. I want our marketing to, you know, create more opportunities for salespeople. Now you're going to hear from Dr. Rachel Fichter. There is a shift in the relationship between work and learning. And that

traditionally, when we were thinking about learning in the workplace, it was mostly there to serve the goals of the organization, identifying what are the needs, the learning needs, and then from there developing training that would help people develop the skills in order to be able to deliver on their goals. Right? Now there's a quote that's attributed to Einstein that goes something like, you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that you use that created the problem in the first place.

And I think the learning-based work concept is very much in that vein, which is to say that if you put learning into the job description of the people and you make it a priority, then the work can emerge. Moving along, next up is Dr. Keith Keating. Trusted learning advisor to me means strategic business partner that's embedded in the business.

I think for far too long, learning L&D has considered themselves separate from the business. I think for far too long, learning L&D has considered themselves separate from the business. We have to understand them. We have to speak their language. If the CFO's job is to determine the value of each business unit, and we've never had a relationship with the CFO, how do you think the CFO is determining our value? They're not. Create a relationship with us because you haven't. Two, kind of don't send me these ROI calculations. Work with me to figure out how I determine value in the business unit or in the organization. Don't just send me quantitative data. How about some qualitative data? Who are those people that you've helped develop from being maybe a frontline

and worker to a senior executive? Who have you cross trained or cross skilled in the organization? All right, let's listen in on my conversation with Kylie Steyer. Organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop novel products and processes, 52% more productive, 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services, 17% more profitable than their peers. Starting with the needs of the business,

where we need to start with the prescriptive baseline for all employees. And a lot of times that does start with compliance, right? Or for the company, it starts with compliance. We do need something like that. And I think actually compliance is a really great place for people to start to build this learning culture. If there was an investment case that an individual can make

in some sort of technology to help with that, to track it, you know, the completion that's really key in compliance to be able to track everything, there are really great ways to start putting some sort of gamification around it or other things to do to like build that baseline. This next one is from Jessica Winder. One of the questions I ask at the final interviewer when I'm talking to like the CEO or whoever I'm talking to is I ask them what is their perception of HR. I want them to tell me, and some have told me that, I don't like HR. HR people get quote unquote get in the way,

they're there to say no. And I always want someone to tell me that because I just want to know what have they experienced before? Have they had HR that was a team player that they felt like they could tell the honest truth to and kind of get feedback and it was more of a coach relationship? Or have they been a blocker or barrier?

The second part of it is I think it's really interesting to have HR people that have different HR backgrounds. Someone on my team right now, her background is social work. She has the ability to communicate and understand the dynamics of teams better than I ever have because I've never been a social worker. I've only worked in HR. So even that component has been a game changer for how we set up systems, how we talk about how we do presentations, because her background is social work. Here's a moment from my conversation with Eglavina Skajta. So let's get into the barriers then the things that make it hard to adopt AI. Among business blockers, I would say for large companies, it's compliance. In some

cases, it's outright restriction when it comes to AI tools, but in other cases, it's just a lack of clarity about what is acceptable that prevents people from actually using and trying to imagine how they can apply these tools in their work. For smaller companies, it was often the cost of time to proficiency. Even if you can access, if you can afford the licenses for AI, it is about getting to a point where the AI output is worth the effort. It actually results in time savings. At the individual level, it's simply trust.

Trust in AI sources, trust in AI's outputs, even trust that AI is going to keep the data safe. Next up, listen to my conversation with Get Abstract Book Award winner, Manette Norman. Our brains are designed to keep us alive and safe, and they do that very well. If someone criticizes your idea in a meeting or your partner yells at you, your brain responds that you are in danger. And that's, as you said, the fight, flight, freeze response. And it usually doesn't serve us as well in a social or professional setting. When we're

feeling defensive and we fight back, when that happens, we basically have no access to our prefrontal cortex. So we can't think clearly. And what we can do is notice what happens when you get defensive, because each of us will have physical responses. And then what we can do is we choose that we're going to not respond instinctively. We're not going to lash back out. And then when that happens, it doesn't take long, honestly. That one breath, that something physical that you do, you can now say, oh, I have a choice in how I'm going to respond.

Here's a quick snippet from Kirsten Larson. I have to believe that showing empathy or showing care is a skill that can be accumulated. For those folks that it doesn't come so naturally to, I think that it's still a skill that can be practiced. I think it's really important to get to know who you're working with. I think that sometimes people are so agenda focused. They're not necessarily thinking about, wait, what's the connection that I have with this person? How can I connect with this person? The more people feel like they understand another person or have a connection or a tie, the more empathy naturally they'll have. If you remain a mystery or an enigma, maybe I don't really care what's going on

with you. If I assign or learn some aspects of you that feel human, naturally I'll be you know, more empathetic to that. Moving along, we have Josh Kamrath. It wasn't cramming the night before that actually taught me, if you will, or where I learned. It was sitting in front of the class and participating in the dialogues in the actual classrooms or participating in completing case studies. And actually, that's where most folks have the most effective learning take place is by actually doing. Most people aren't willing to raise their hand for every question and wants to participate. That's a reality that people don't want to feel like they're judged

by their professor, their manager, their peers. People don't feel like they're being judged when they're just being evaluated, they're getting feedback from AI. An environment that's conducive to practicing skills or practicing application of knowledge is leads to much better outcomes. Okay, up next is David Caruso. I like alliteration, so we have these four M's. And MAP is about sometimes called perceiving emotions. So how are you?

That's the question. And what about the people around you? Can you map the emotions of your environment? Now once you do that, if you get that matching, that means one of two things. Can you match your emotions to that of the other person? We call that emotional empathy. The other part of matching means you match the emotion to the task. And then the meaning of emotion.

Why do you feel this way? How might you feel in the future? I say it's an emotional what if analysis. What if I send that email without editing it? How might my staff react? And then finally is moving emotions. How do I move your emotions and my emotions in order to accomplish the task? Here's a good one. My annual chat with Donald Taylor on the L&D sentiment survey.

Adopting AI at the most basic level probably isn't very complicated. Most of the barriers in terms of people adopting AI weren't about how do we do it technically, it was about how do we make sure our data is secure. People are saying I am petrified of using AI because I don't know what I could do wrong. And it's not usually a technical question, it's just a matter of guidelines and understanding what you should and shouldn't do. If you've got that sorted out, then you're ready to go. But actually, it's the whole mindset behind, I think there is a way to understand what's right and wrong here, and I know who to go to to check it and find it out.

It'll be so-and-so in the tech team. And if you've got that mindset and the ability to go and do it, then yeah, you're more likely to adopt it. Of course, if you adopt it more rapidly, you'll also make more mistakes. So you have to have a mechanism for making sure the mistakes are stopped and tied up as soon as possible.

Up next, Ross Stevenson. What I would say in sum with prompting then is one, as I've kind of covered, you have to look at it as a digital intern, so it doesn't know what it doesn't know. You want to provide context, you need to provide specificity. You also need to provide constraints. So to just go off and do loads of kind of crazy random things and try to help stop hallucinations. And what I've also seen in so research papers that have come out as an example is that it usually takes about eight prompt interactions until you can get like a pretty decent quality response. And that makes sense because if you think about

if you're conversing with the tool and it's trying to understand you more, trying to understand the task and the context behind that task, then once you kind of get to those eight prompts, it can do a far better job of helping you versus just, you know, I'm gonna give you a couple of sentences. All right, next you're gonna, you know, I'm going to give you a couple of sentences.

All right, next you're going to hear from yours truly celebrating our one year anniversary of the show. I recently attended a small gathering of L&D leaders where we spent an evening and open conversation discussing the potential for and power of self-directed learning. One of the first poignant points came from previous guest of the show, Dr. Rachel Fichter, who pointed out that we are all learning every single day. I agree with Rachel, and with Christopher Lind, and perhaps with other prior guests

of the show who've echoed the same sentiment, that every day we work brings new insights. The simplest of droll repetitive days even. There are always moments from which we can draw valuable insights that contribute to our growth, as long as we reflect. That's the crux here folks, reflection. It's important and it makes a massive, massive difference. Across many different learning contexts in various industries, reflection upon experience was observed to be as effective, if not more powerful, at solidifying and strengthening

skills than was practiced or studied. Moving along, next you'll hear from Naveed Nazimian. And so the golden thread means that there are three individual players that all need to play a role in order for the executive to transition successfully. First off, it's the executive leader themselves. It's the time they invest in this upcoming transition.

It's the energy they bring to the transition. And it's the way they shape, you know, people around them. The second player is the organization slash the HR function. I have worked for some of the most admired companies on the planet. Some of them have fantastic onboarding programs for the general public. There's this inherent belief for some reason that if you go and hire the very best executive leaders, they have everything they need to succeed and there's no more support required, which we know is a myth.

And then the third one is the board of directors. Wanting the CEO to not just to be hired, but to succeed as and when they are hired is a responsibility that falls on the shoulder of the board and more importantly, more prominently on the chair, chairman or chairwoman. All right. Here's a moment from my good friend, Ryan Berman. What I thought I learned in advertising and marketing was the importance of the importance of differentiation. Does the market truly understand like how we're unique to a competitive set? When we looked at the fortune 100, 44% of them had integrity as a value.

It's pretty sad that we would even need integrity as a value. Like what happened to us? What we've learned is that pretty good companies have gotten away with pretty good values, I roll values, right? Now I can tell you there's plenty of words to go around. So when you see companies that are exceptional and they have unique values that are creating behaviors and they're attracting the right type of employees. Last but not least, this clip is from John Ingham.

I see engagement very much as the sort of key focus that most organizations had from a strategic HR perspective of trying to help their people get more focused on doing what the business needs. So it's a business centric rather than people centric perspective, whereas well-being or perhaps fulfillment or flourishing. more natural term for the value that somebody receives from an organization for themselves rather than what helps them provide more value to the business. So engagement is a strategic HR concept, well-being a people-centric one, but we need to unpick it and understand what it means. And I suppose my central perspective to people centering HR is treating people as real customers, figuring out what they want and need and helping deliver that for them. All right, that's the last of them.

Thanks so much for tuning in and for being a fan of the show. If you made it this far, I guess I'll give you a little bit of host lore. This episode just happens to release on my birthday. If you find me on LinkedIn, drop me a cake emoji. I promise to buy you a coffee if you find me at the next big L&D event.

Let's connect. As always, thanks for tuning in and we will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode.

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