Laurel will share her lived experiences in leadership challenges and successes at a major tech company. She will also share strategies for female leaders on how to define a team vision, build and lead a diverse, inclusive team, and successfully coach and retain team members. She will focus on strategies to move from survival to thriving as a leader.
Cyndi Nagel
Hello and thank you Laurel for being with us today. My name is Cindy Nagel, a little introduction. I'm a brown skinned Hispanic, Latina and the prime of my mid life. I have brown children Elaine pear, and I'm using a white headset today's to hear all of you and see all of you. I'm wearing a multicolored blouse My pronouns are she her and or a Yeah. Because I love my my showing my Latina side. I'm a talent development manager in consumer electronics for Belkin International and happy to moderate this session with Laurel. Before we get started quick reminders chatted away. We love to see an active chat. And if you have questions, there's a q&a pod that makes it easier for us to see those questions. LAUREL will be presenting and I will be moderating that chat and helping her flag any questions or comments that will come up during the session. So a little bit about Laurel. Laurel is a Senior Director of learning experience at SAP concur. She holds an MS in education in learning and technology from Purdue, and a bachelor's in education from Eastern Michigan University. LAUREL has earned the master performance consultant certificate through the Association for Talent Development. She has served as the president of the Ann Arbor Association for Talent Development. And she was invited to present at the 2023 and 2022 ATD international conference and expo or ISE, and the 2021 DevLearn conference. So we're really lucky and and we have a lot of gratitude for your giving us some time oral today. We'd appreciate it, though, please take it away.
Laurel Schulert
Well, thank you so much, Cindy, and Louise and really the entire TL DC community, it's always been a dream of mine to be part of a Women's History Month event. And this is my first one. So so here I am. Shout out to my team and my mom, my mom's in the audience today, I think she was able to sneak in and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her. So just awesome. And thank you so much. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen for this presentation. And when I do so I unfortunately won't be able to see the chat anymore. So Cindy is going to help me keep an eye on the chat. But what I would love is for everyone just to jump in, use that chat functionality. Use those comments. And Cindy, interrupt me at any point in time, if anyone has any comments questions there. This QR code here that you'll see on screen should take you straight to my LinkedIn profile. I really invite all of you to connect with me or follow me so we can keep this conversation going after the fact. So let's jump in for what you're here for. The learning leader job is no small feat. I think I know why you're here today. And that's because this job can be a challenging job. And New Leaders often struggle with uncertainty, indecision as they really venture into uncharted territory. And they're asked to make high stakes decisions on a daily basis. When you're a learning leader, finding resources and guidance tailored specifically to your needs can be really time consuming. Because not very many professional development resources are tailored specifically for you. There's a lot of content out there on leadership in general on learning in general. But there's not really much out there for learning leaders. And so that was my inspiration for really putting this all together is to really give you tailored advice in your moment of need. I've also found that learning leaders often lack an internal network of peers, especially if you're the only l&d team in your organization. So with all of this in mind, developing yourself as a new l&d leader can really slip to the bottom of your to do list. There's a lot of urgent matters that you deal with every single day, such as hiring and competing for your organization's resources. And maybe you're even dealing with your own feelings of inadequacy, especially if you're struggling with these day to day tasks and what you thought was going to be your dream job. So I know this because I've been there. And that's again, why I decided to create this session and really help share some strategies that I found that have made me and my team are really successful. So it's my hope that this session empowers you to really thrive in the environment in your first l&d role, whether you currently hold that role or you aspire to hold it soon. So over the next hour or so we'll discuss several items to help you alleviate these concerns. You'll learn how to position yourself as the ideal candidate for your dream leadership role. You'll make a personalized action plan for that role, and we'll explore how to recruit select and retain your l&d talent, you'll have the opportunity to do some personal reflection and we'll make a lot of use of the chat tool. So if you have any questions before, during after, don't hold back and I really invite you to keep this conversation going. So first off We're going to explore how to build your personal brand. And personal branding means taking control of your reputation. It's how you stand out from the crowd, and a strong personal brand really opens the door for you to explore different professional opportunities. The key to a strong personal brand is it really must be supported by your network. It's more than how you see yourself, and it's reliant on how others see you. So a few aspects that make up your personal brand are your core values, your personality traits, your strengths and your skills and your vision for yourself. So let's actually pause here for our first discussion throughout the session, we'll see this discussion symbol a couple times. And this is the cue to really open up those floodgates that discussion area, the first question I have for you, I want you to think about these four prompts here. And consider your values, your personality traits, your skills, your strengths, what aspects make up your personal brand? And how do these aspects make you a strong leader, go ahead and enter your thoughts in the chat. And I'm actually going to stop sharing my screen momentarily, so I can see what you're saying here.
Cyndi Nagel
I'll help you monitor. I was gonna say for me, and I want no need to put it in the chat. But one of my values is continuous learning. So I've always made it a habit of no matter what I'm doing, you know, to look at every project after it's done and and evaluate, how could I improve it? You know, so my personal value, what that means to me is to always look around, look around me and see what what I can do better, or what we can do better of that. Seeing a
Laurel Schulert
lot of great things in the chat to a lot of inclusivity authenticity, encouraging love of learning. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. All right. Alright, let's get this going again. So thinking about these items here. And what I want to also encourage you do beyond just putting this in Shannon, I really encourage you to say this out loud, Cindy, I love what you did there, I promise and you didn't know this next prompt was coming. But beyond just thinking about it and typing in a chat, I really want you all to practice saying it out loud. I think there's a lot of power in hearing yourself, describe what makes you a strong leader. And this will really help you say these things with more confidence and more competence. The next time you apply for an interview, or apply or interview for a leadership role. So I'm going to stop talking for 10 or 15 seconds here and just give you the chance to say it out loud, whatever you just put in chat, say out loud to yourself.
All right. So now that you've identified your values, and your traits, and other really important aspects of your personal brand, it's time to think about how these aspects impact how you show up at work. It's not uncommon for leaders to feel impostor syndrome, especially when they're new in their role, or even if you're only even considering applying for a leadership role. So it's really critical to know the value you bring, and that you can have the confidence to pursue these opportunities and the fortitude to succeed once you're in the role. Many years ago, I actually began my career as a high school teacher, probably many of you did as well. And at the time I was in the classroom, I really wasn't much older than the students. And standing in front of the class can be really terrifying at times. So a teacher I was working with told me I needed to develop a teacher persona, I needed to radiate confidence, assume a position of authority, and really establish that I was the leader in that setting. And now high school students really present a lot of challenges you don't face in your typical corporate job. But what I realized when I was applying for my first leadership role is I needed to develop that leadership persona, that persona of who I wanted others to see me as. And so I thought back to those early days of teaching, and really the same lessons applied. So to establish my leadership persona, I did a couple of things here, I stepped up to lead larger projects at work, I made my vision known and I wasn't shy about sharing the fact that I aspired to hold a leadership role. Outside of work, I volunteered on the nonprofit board of directors, that was the ETD chapter that Cindy mentioned earlier. And through that experience, I gained actual leadership experience that I wasn't getting yet at work. So when I interviewed for a leadership role, I had actual experience to talk about and taking actions based on my values, my personality, my skills, my strengths. And that really led me to embody that leadership persona that I wanted to be several years ago. And I hope you all know, the workplace needs good leaders, and if you have the desire to be one, you can find the courage and the confidence in yourself to really rise up and having that clear confidence of what your personal brand is and really intentionally taking actions to present yourself as a leader will really go a long way to helping you succeed in that leadership role. So once you have that role, a really great next step is defining who your team is. And you'll want to take a few actions early on in your current environment, and really start planning your path ahead for where you want to go with the team. So a practice that my team has found really helpful is to conduct a SWOT analysis. And this stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And these conversations typically involve whiteboarding ideas, whether in a four square grid or in four columns, as you really discuss how you relate to each of these areas. Now, you might choose to do this alone by yourself, or include members of your team, or even invited others from across your business if their feedback is valuable to you. And this might seem like a really simple exercise, but I've actually found doing this annually with my team, it's really valuable for all of us, we use an online whiteboarding tool because we're permanently remote. So we're all virtual. And through that tool, moody our SWOT analysis, we all annotate each other's ideas with reactions and comments and sticky notes. And whatever ideas get the most reactions across the group are clearly the ones the group wants to spend time talking about. So then we'll meet as a team synchronously and talk about all these all the ideas that came out of this discussion. And we found that doing this year over year, some themes remain true, some disappear over time, new trends emerge. And this reflection process is really valuable for us to look back on over time, and it helps us plot the path ahead to this is also our first step every year in setting individual and team goals. So for example, anything that we say is a weakness could become a goal for either an individual or the team as a whole to work towards fixing and threats are items that we help to eliminate or influence. And so this exercise helps us understand our current state. The next exercise really helps us plot the path for where are we going together next as a team. So a common technique for athletes is to visualize success, visualize your dream performance. For example, in baseball, imagine hitting a homerun and workplace for homeruns doesn't really have to be any different. So if you imagine what a homerun looks like for you, and you're setting, if you can feel the weight of the bat in your hand, if you can hear the roar of the crowd, you're so much more likely to actually achieve that goal someday. So every year after we do our SWOT analysis, I asked my team, what do you want to be known for? Or what do we as a team want to be known for next year? One of my previous leaders wants to ask me this question. And when I considered my answer, I realized this really opened the door to creativity in my mind, and really helped me set that vision for myself. So when I've asked the team, this examples of things that we've wanted to be known for is our expertise in adult learning, and our overall creation and innovation, creativity and innovation. And we do this exercise after our SWOT analysis for a couple of reasons, it's a chance for us to build upon our strengths, and to really be intentional about seizing opportunities and addressing any weaknesses. Just like the SWOT analysis, this also helps us set individual and team goals. Because if there's something we want to be known for, we make a goal to go out there and do it. So this brings us to a third activity that I really recommend all new learning leaders perform. And that's working with your team to write a mission and a vision statement. Now, these two concepts are often used interchangeably, but they actually mean two different things and serve two different purposes. So your mission defines the organization's objectives and how it plans to reach them. And your vision is more future focused, it describes your aspirations and where you're going. And even if your company as a whole, or your larger department has mission ambitions in place, there's a lot of value in drilling down into your specific team, and identifying what are your unique values? What's your unique purpose? How do you uniquely bring value to your departments to your wide organization. And what we found with our team is that having these missions and vision mission and vision statements in place has been really impactful. And it helps align us into a really cohesive group with a shared mindset. So shortly after moving into my leadership role, I led the team and writing our mission and vision together as a group. And we did this as a group because it really empowered each individual to have an equal voice and defining who we are as a unit. And we look at these statements annually. And so we have them posted, but they're not carved in stone. And we can and we do, and we really must update them over time. Because just like the business changes and evolves over time, we want to make sure that our group does as well. And changing these over time helps us be a little more agile and respond to change in our business when it happens. So think about this in relation to how learning objectives frame the focus of a course. Having this shared definition of who we are and where we want to go has really led us to work in harmony. And it's helped us with everything from making sure we're taking on the right projects, because let's face it, not everyone in the business knows what a learning experience team does or is supposed to do. So this helps us take on the right projects. This helps us how Are the right individuals to join the team. And this really helps us support the business as only we can as the l&d experts that we are. So a couple of these things like the SWOT analysis, and the mission and vision really require more time than we have here together today. But one activity that we can do is a quick brainstorm of you envisioning your future state. So let's pause for our next discussion. And I'm curious, what do you want yourself and your team to be known for? I'm going to stop sharing again. So I'd love to see the chat for this. But the question prompt again, is what do you and your team want to be known for? I'd love to hear your thoughts in chat.
Cyndi Nagel
I've added the question into the chat, as somebody requested that.
Laurel Schulert
Thank you. I'm sorry to make the questions go away when I stop sharing, but I don't want to miss it too bad. I'm so curious to hear what everyone says.
Love this. Ellison says building community improving employee experience, particularly early experience, yes has such a good focus. Anyone else? What do you want you and your team to be known for? What do you want others in the business saying about you thinking about you?
Cyndi Nagel
I like Caroline's comment of honor, integrity, work ethic, value enhancement, support and engagement, collegial support engagement, love that. Love this. Great. All right,
Laurel Schulert
I'm gonna get the share going again.
Cyndi Nagel
Love that Laurel. And I just wanted to add that a team mission statement, mission vision statement can be critical because it really helps to remind your yourself and in terms of I see my audience as my internal customer. Right. So whatever service I'm providing for them in the training that I'm giving is important. So that's debt that requires a mission and value statement for sure.
Laurel Schulert
Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. So once you have those factors in place, once you really know who you are, who your team is, what value you all bring to your organization. One of the next questions you might be tasked with is hiring. And hiring is one of the most critical decisions that any leader can make and l&d leaders have really unique factors to think about when it comes to hiring. And so when you have vacancies on your team, it's really important to figure out what mix of skills and responsibilities are needed for your team to achieve your goals. So you can begin by reflecting on the reason that positions open in the first place. Is your team growing to meet new demands that someone leave for a specific reason. And you can use every new vacancy as a chance to evaluate whether your team is appropriately staffed with the right job descriptions and the right skills that will help bring your vision into reality. Here on this slide, I've listed roles that often exists in l&d teams. It's not a comprehensive list. It's just a sampling, as well as some roles that partner closely with l&d teams. And depending on your team setting, you might hire for l&d specific roles and responsibilities, as well as some that fall outside that traditional l&d skill set. So I do want to pause here for one more discussion. And ask yourself what skill gaps currently exist on your team? Or what new skills would you like to introduce? If you are hiring today? How would you fill that role? I'll leave this question up. But I'd love to hear from Cindy or any others. What's what's happening in the chat? What new skills would you like to add to your team?
Cyndi Nagel
I'm a team of one. So for me skill building is a personal decision. It's an ongoing decision to right now. I'm working on trying to understand how I can use more of the chat GBT AI functionality in my design.
Laurel Schulert
Yes. I bet you're not the only team of one here on this call today. And I realize I'm talking a lot about teams being a large group. But in just a few moments here, we'll have some content on how to retain people, especially when they are that team of one. Because teams of one really face a lot of pressure that the large groups don't necessarily say so well. We'll get right back to that in a few minutes. I'm glad you brought that up.
Cyndi Nagel
I also love Claudia's comment of data analysis. That's huge. That is huge. You to so important.
Laurel Schulert
I'll put in another plug for another woman in l&d, actually, Kristin Torrance and that's Kristin with two eyes k r i s t i n. She just released an ATD TD at work guide today all about data and learning. So hot off the presses just came out today. So I definitely recommend googling her and checking her out. All right, let's hop on to recruiting and then we can get to that team have one conversation In a few minutes here as well. So hiring one of my leaders once told me hiring poorly is one of the worst mistakes you can make as a manager. And those words really stuck with me and they're top of mind every time I hire. So before posting a job opening, think about your team's current state. Think about everything you learned in your SWOT analysis, everything you're trying to accomplish with your mission and vision. And really think critically about what responsibilities and what roles will help your team work towards those goals you've set for yourself. If you've identified any gaps in your abilities, your performance and new opening gives you the opportunity to bring on new talent and help close those gaps. So first up, you want to determine the title and job description. And this might sound really obvious, but I really recommend putting some thought into this. So for example, many l&d roles require really high attention to detail. And candidates who fit that description are going to look over every word in that job description, and think should I even apply for this. And so the first place to really catch their interest and to get it right is that title and that job description. Titles are the first thing they're going to read there. And so think about factors like the responsibilities of the role, the positionality of that role within your team or within your business and industry standards. If you don't have a great title, or the right title, or if you have a poorly written job description, you might dissuade candidates from even applying, I really recommend writing the job description yourself and not just using something you found online or using some blanket thing that HR gave you. Hopefully, your HR lets you write your own job descriptions. And that way you can really craft the role and craft the job description to be accurate and representative and what you need it to be to help your team achieve that vision. If you're working with a recruiter, it's also critically important that you and that recruiter are on the same page about what you're looking for in your hiring experience. Talk to your recruiter about what their experience is recruiting for similar l&d roles before, I've worked with recruiters who are my candidates primary point of contact, and they've never never hired somebody to work in l&d before. So I find myself having to do a little bit of education with my corporate recruiters to really make sure they know what I'm looking for. So they can accurately screen and select and interview and recommend candidates based on what I know is going to be successful on my team. Keep in mind, the recruiter is often your candidates primary point of contact, if you have a recruiter if that candidate might have to work through them to get to you. So it's very important. Your recruiter understands what you're looking for, how to speak about the role and how to answer candidates questions about the role as well. When you do talk to the candidate, make sure you show your passion. We're all very passionate people, I see a lot of great ideas coming through the chat. So show that passionate people that you interview and share your team's mission and vision. Let them know where your current state of your team is and where you're hoping to go. This will help them decide if this is a good opportunity for them to pursue and also your passion shining through will really help them figure out if this is a great place for them to be or not. If you're hiring for an instructional designer, I highly recommend asking them to submit portfolios of work samples along with their resumes, and this their total application package. This gives you really tangible artifacts to look at to really assess if their quality of work and work samples or what you're looking for, for your team. And and it can also help you make decisions about who to interview and ultimately who to hire. If you are going to be including portfolios as part of your selection process, make sure you make that clear right in the job posting. So everyone knows to make sure they have that included when they apply. Following that if you do require portfolios, don't ask them to do any other homework throughout the interview process, let their portfolios speak for themselves. Anyone who's ever built a portfolio knows it's agonizing. It's a lot of work to put that together. So you shouldn't really need additional homework assignments throughout the interview process or portfolios probably can stand for themselves. And the last piece I recommend in recruiting is include your current team members in the process. And this is really a win win for everyone. It lets candidates get an idea of who their potential teammates are. Your current team members will really appreciate having a voice in the hiring process of who you bring on to join the team. And it really gives you a lot of opinions to draw from as you're helping make your decisions about who to pursue and who to ultimately hire. So, what I want you to think about as you go through the hiring experience as a leader is being intentional about recruiting a team with a really wide range of skills and experiences and different backgrounds and different passions. If your team has diversity of thought, you'll have the strength and innovation to really evolve and change as your business evolves and change. And it'll make you overall so much of a stronger unit as a whole. For this slide right here, I didn't plan a formal discussion question because if you're not currently hiring, this might not be really relevant to you at this time. But I do want to pause. Cindy, are there any kind of questions, comments coming out? You want to stop and call out here at this point in time about around recruiting?
Cyndi Nagel
I have not seen any new questions in the chat around that.
Laurel Schulert
All right, well, that felt like the requisite seven seconds or so to give folks time to enter a comment. If one comes up, just go ahead and drop it in, I promise we'll get to it.
Cyndi Nagel
I can, I can give just kind of a personal anecdote. Please do before I took my my current role. I'm the talent development manager here at Belkin. The role was listed as talent demand or manager of learning and Dei. So, when I looked at the job description, so this this, this role did not exist before running in the talent department here. Neither did the DEI role. When I interviewed for it was very specific. And you told my told my future boss, that's two people, at least, d i deserves its own role. They took my advice, and we were able to hire a Senior Community Manager for di, who also happens to be a psychologist. So today, we have a thriving Dei, you know, element to our people team. He's also an in house doctor for us. So when we were doing lots around health and wellness and mode, and you know, all of that has been amazing, as well as learning.
Laurel Schulert
Thank you for sharing that. And I'm so glad they listen to you and hire that second person, because you're absolutely right there. I actually have a similar story just around the impact of using the wrong job title. And so I once heard about an l&d manager who was a little new to working in l&d. They'd come from a different part of the business. But they are tasked with leading an l&d team. And they were hiring for what is really an instructional design role. But they use the title content developer. And I kept hearing time and time again, we're not getting the right candidates apply. We're a tech company. And everyone keeps applying this because they want to work in the tech company. We keep getting software developers applying for this role. And lo and behold, they're using the title content developer. And they were looking for l&d content to be made. But it wasn't clear from the title, especially since they were a tech company. And once the right title and sexual designer was used. They got the right candidates. And so like going back to that core fundamentals of having the right title, having the right job description, I mean, that's the first point of entry for any candidate. So you really got to get those two steps right. Into Cindy's point. Think about how big is this job? Is this one job or two people's job? Because Cindy, and your example of one person got hired into that role, they might not stick around real long, that really should have been two people's jobs. And so that actually is a great segue to our last topic here. How do you retain your l&d talent? Once you have that dream team? How do you keep them around? How do you keep them engaged? We all know turnover comes at a really high cost. Whether it's loss of productivity, loss of morale, when great people leave, there's a really high cost to that turnover. So creating and sustaining an environment where members of your team feel supported, engaged, and they have opportunities will benefit both their performance and their attention overall. So here's a few tactics to consider when you help when you want to routine members of your l&d team. First up role clarity. So the same attention that you gave the job descriptions, when you hired really give that same attention to their work once they're on the job. Simply put, every person joined your team for a reason. And they had expectations about the work that they would be doing in that role. So give them the opportunity to do the work you've hired them for and to use the skills and use the knowledge that you hired them for. You also want to make sure that you're protecting them from inappropriate scope creep, especially if people leave the team or leave the organization. You really want to set boundaries around your team to make sure that their roles aren't ballooning up just because others have left. Also, establishing role clarity between your team and any other partner teams who work closely to you really goes a long way in helping with everyone's job satisfaction. And here's where we get to that l&d team have one phenomenon that we spoke about a few minutes ago, being an l&d team of one is really common in smaller organizations. And if you find yourself being that person or managing that person, it's critically important that you establish what is in scope for you and what is out of scope for you. Because if you have to balance that trifecta of what do you want to do, what do you have to do and what can you realistically accomplish? That puts a lot of pressure on you. And that's not an easy task to weigh those three competing demands and imbalances in this area. It really leads to high stress for everyone involved in burnout. Even if you're a high performer. It's a lot to carry on. You're the only person doing this work in your organization. The next tactic I have for managers to help retain their l&d talent is help them help your employees align their work with their personal and professional goals. So when you have developmental or coaching conversations with your team, ask them In what projects, what tasks do they enjoy doing most? What work do they do that they feel is most aligned with their long term goals. And having this understanding of what makes each of your employees tick, and what motivates them really helps increase their satisfaction on the job. And it helps you better align their job tasks with what they really want to be doing to benefit your business. And this might mean going so far as to select certain people for certain tasks or in projects. You know, if they really excel in leading teams, or they excel in public speaking, or they have high attention to detail or whatever it may be, try to align the right people with the right tasks wherever you can. And that's a win for everyone, especially if they enjoy doing those tasks. And the last tip, tip that I have for you for retaining your talent is think about stretch assignments. For anyone who's interested in growing their careers or expanding their influence, or they've just been there a while, maybe they're getting a little bored. A stretch project is a really great way to give them something new and interesting to focus on. The most important aspect of a stretch assignment is the person has to enjoy this and want to do this, it shouldn't just be a burden that you placed on them because they can handle more. But another great thing about a stretch project is it's a good learning opportunity. Kind of like the name implies you're stretching, you're learning you're growing, you're reaching into new territories. A couple ideas that I've had for stretch assignments. If the person's interested in l&d leadership, consider delegating tasks of your job to them wherever it's appropriate. This could mean they ride along and partner with you on leadership calls. This could mean they host team meetings in your absence. Maybe they have supervisory roles over other members of the team that they're that sort of big buddy or mentor to new employees coming into the group. You can also think about who will your successor being when the time comes for you and move on to your next opportunity. And having that successor in mind can really give them the chance to work on some high profile, high visibility projects to really raise their profile in the business. But it also makes it less disruptive if they do move into that role when you're no longer in it. And then outside of leadership aspirations. There's a couple other areas you can explore stretch assignments for your team. You could give individuals opportunity to do some consulting internally with your team make recommendations, how can the team grow and mature and evolve over time, they could coach the team through adopting a new process. Like for example, my team started action mapping a few years ago, and we had a couple of action mapping superheroes in the group who really led the others in rolling this out. It could mean leading implementation of a new tool or a technology, maybe a new design tool someone's an expert at or a new technology like x API. This could also mean expanding their reach beyond traditional l&d and building relationships with stakeholders across your business to really raise your team's profile across the organization. The most important thing to think about is if somebody in your team has a special skill or a special talent, whether they come to you with that, or they develop it over time, while they're working with you make sure that they can use it here as part of your team. So they don't really feel that grass is greener phenomenon. It's like they have to go somewhere else to go do it somewhere else. So that brings me to the end of my planned conversation. I do want to open it up just for more chat questions, q&a, all that great stuff. And I do want to put in two quick plugs before we get there. Like Cindy mentioned, I'll be speaking at the ATT International Conference in San Diego in May, my session is actually pre recorded and they'll be available on demand. It's very similar what we covered here again today. So kind of a repeat of today. And then also coming up in June, I have a publication coming out through ATD titled assemble in a list, l&d team, also very similar to today's presentation. So if you enjoyed this, I do encourage you to reach out and we can continue the conversation offline. But now I'd really love to just dive into the chat and hear what other tips or advice thoughts reactions, comments Does anyone else have?
Cyndi Nagel
Oh, it looks like we have a question. From Ren. How do you establish yourself as a learning leader in a company when the role didn't exist previously?
Laurel Schulert
That's a great question. I have not been in that in that scenario. Exactly. Because I there wasn't learning leader in my role before me. But I have found myself truly in that position of having to establish myself where the business still doesn't quite understand what my team does, honestly. So a couple things. My team is called the learning experience team. People outside of l&d don't know what that means. Most of my team are instructional designers. People hear that and they think that we're graphic designers, and we get called in to make things look pretty all the time. So even though my role is not new, and I've been in this role three years now, so I'm not new in it. I still find myself on pretty much a weekly basis, educating the business about what we do. So a couple tips I have. Learn to speak the language of the business as much as you can describe things to your business day. holder's using their terms, not your own terms. No one outside of l&d knows what a learning objective is. But everyone knows what a business goal is. So when you kick off a project, ask them what business goal are you trying to impact here. And you can derive a learning learning objective from that. But if you ask them what the learning objectives is, you're just gonna get blank stares, you're gonna get blinks, they don't know how to describe that, you might hear a lot of understand, which we all know, is everyone's least favorite word in l&d. And so really, as much as you can learn to describe the way your team operates using the terms of the business so they can better understand what you do. Another thing that's really been transformative to my team is action mapping. If you're not familiar with action mapping, I give you permission to go Google this right now, even while I'm talking. So action mapping with Kathy, more Kathy with a C, more m o r e, if you just Google that you'll find a blog that she wrote really short and sweet, you can read it in about 10 minutes, but she also has a whole entire book called Map it. And this process has transformed my team. What this is, is you take a business goal, ultimately you want to wanting to work want to work towards, and then you go three steps backwards? What behaviors on the job lead to that goal? How can you practice those behaviors in training? What is the minimal information that people need to know so they can do those behaviors in practice and training and ultimately lead to that business goal in real life. And once my team started action mapping with our business stakeholders, they responded incredibly well. People call us back time and time again, organically and say, Hey, that was so beneficial, will you do that mapping thing again with us. And it's really helps make us like a hot commodity. And like people really want us to go and consult with them. Because action mapping is so impactful. So that's my number one tip is really speak the language of the business and wherever you can work in action mapping.
Cyndi Nagel
Yeah, I love action mapping. And I was just going to say put a link to link to one of the blogs about it in the chat. Kathy, Kathy Moore does workshops around that too. And she also if you don't have time for a workshop, and you're a part of a team, you can just buy a toolkit that kind of walks you through it as well. So and they're all pretty reasonable.
Laurel Schulert
Yeah. The other thing I'll say around action mapping, whenever you see it, and particularly in Kathy Morris blogs, it's always this sort of very open, artsy creative, like mind mapping thing. And that's great. But that doesn't work with every single business stakeholder. One of the instructional designers on my team has had a lot of success actually doing action mapping in an Excel spreadsheet. And so I think that the whole left brain right brain dichotomy, my team works primarily in sales enablement. And we we work a lot with like sales strategy and sales leaders. They love their numbers, they love their Excel spreadsheets. When we do that mind map of action mapping, it kind of turned them off a little bit. And as soon as you put it in Excel, it's the same thing. Same question, same conversation, just excel columns, what is happening, it clicked. So try Excel if the mind map is a little too artistic for them.
Cyndi Nagel
Yeah. And then I'll also note that Louis, Louis put a link to an interview that he did with Kathy on T LDC back in 2018. So there's a link there. You love it and watch that, watch that video? I did want to comment on that question. How do you establish yourself as a learning leader in a company when the role didn't exist? I've done this twice. I worked for my my company today, this role didn't exist. So I, I heard that there was some work being done by the HR team to acquire an LMS. And I had experience in that from my previous role, I was involved in training, but it was a very specific piece of training within the business. And I just, you know, tapped on the door, knocked on the door at HR and said, Hey, I know something about that I can help you. So that's kind of how it eventually turned into a role for me. In my previous company, again, it didn't exist that was retail. So I got in the into that role through a facilitation role. So I became a new hire trainer and a subject matter expert and trained around those parts of the business. And that's how it turned into a training manager. Well, for me,
Laurel Schulert
I love it, that that phrase, it seemed to us that I can help you that is so powerful. You know that that can be a great takeaway from today, honestly, going to your business stakeholders and just saying I can help you. In a business sense, no one turns down free help. And if you want to dive a bit deeper into that I can help you statement. Another book I really recommend is called training aid performance. It's published by the aid to the press. And they tell you when someone comes to you and says I need training and the business loves to raise their hand and say I need training and they love to tell you hey, can you just build me a quick video? Hey, can you just make elearning you know, can you just do this? Can you just do that and they love to tell you what kind of training they they want, but they don't always know if they have the right training intervention in mind or if training can even solve their problem. And that book training aid performance really coaches you to say, I can help you solve your problem. And when you say that you're volunteering the services of yourself or your l&d team, but you're not agreeing to exactly what they've asked for, until you've done your proper analysis. And you've really figured out can training actually solve their problem, because sometimes your recommendation might be training is not going to solve their problem. And to go full circle back to that question about how do you establish yourself, and you're really new in this in this industry, or new in this company. Making bad training that doesn't solve problems, really only earns you a bad reputation. If your stakeholder comes to you and says, Hey, I need a 60 minute zoom training on whatever topic in my business and you create that, and no behavior changes, there's no impact, there's no results, they're gonna think you wasted everyone's time, even though you gave them exactly what they asked for. So really taking that time to do that action mapping do that needs analysis and make sure you actually are solving a problem and only using training retraining can solve the problem. That's how you build that relationship with them. They're that you're this trusted adviser that they want to come back to and work with.
Cyndi Nagel
That's great with that actually brings us to the end of our session time, actually. So it's a perfect spot to end on. Thank you, Laurel for your contributions today. And all your knowledge, we love it a lot to take in, I put a link to the books you mentioned in the chat as well. And I also wanted to mention that TL DC is a membership. So it's a it's only $10 a month to subscribe if you want to just kind of check it out. But for $75, you can be a full member of TL DC. And we have ongoing, webinars weekly, there's something going on or bi weekly. And there's conferences like this throughout the year. And that little bit of money helps Luis put on more events, so and help pay for some of this technology that we're using. So please take a look at CLDC I'm gonna put a link to that in the chat. And Luis, if you want to come back on stage and say any parting words, we put the same link in the chat.
Unknown Speaker
For doing that, thanks for doing that, Cindy. I really appreciate it. And Laurel, thank you so much for a great session. Yeah, and I'm hoping that maybe i'll see you out there. I do attend like to attend conferences here and there. So maybe I can catch you at an event. Coming soon.
Cyndi Nagel
I'll see you there. Laurel, I'm actually volunteering at a TD OC which tip for you all that can't afford to go you can volunteer to these things if the event is happening near you and go for free.
Unknown Speaker
That's true. And sometimes well, I guess it's only for me, but I think they give media passes for free too. So I have to remember that rather than, you know, paying money to go to an event. But I really want to thank everybody for joining this week and attending for the last couple of days, it really has been even energetic for me, I am so grateful that I got to be a part of it. And I know that we're going to be planning lots more events like we have aI DC, which is the accessibility, inclusion and diversity conference that'll be coming up in the summer, probably in June. That one is always a really, really active active and big one as well. I'm wanting to do stuff on AI and chat GPT that is really, really big in my world right now. So I'm coming up with with lots of ideas, ideas for conferences. And if you have ideas for topics or events or anything that you'd like to discuss within the community, reach out to me I'm always open to having to just being able to share this platform because that is what I think is the core of this community is really being able to share with each other the knowledge we have and just lift each other up. And so with that, I am going to go ahead and just close everything out. Laurel and Cindy. Thanks again. And everybody. Have a great weekend. And we'll see you all soon.
Laurel Schulert
Thank you all so much. Bye, Ron.
Unknown Speaker
Thanks, everybody.
