L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders

Far too often, we classify our emotions as “soft” skills, effectively secondarizing them behind the skillsets we think of as critical to our work. Ironically, communication with others is perhaps one of the few “skills” almost all of us share across our professions, and practice every single day. This week, Dr. David Caruso joins the show to help us better understand how and why our bodies and brains experience emotions, as well as how we can best control and utilize them as managers, learning leaders, and human beings.

What is the most effective way to assess learning among employees? What is the most efficient way? What's the most affordable? What's... the best way? It's likely that the answers to each of these questions is unique, and could even be different from organization to organization. If you're anything like the rest of us with too much data and not enough time, you may be hoping that AI will eventually step in and support the learning evaluation process, addressing at least most of these concerns simultaneously. This week, we speak with CEO of Bongo, Josh Kamrath, whose service offers a unique perspective on the efficacy of AI-enhanced learner feedback.

Conversations at work are different from conversations everywhere else. Whether you’re speaking with your boss, an external partner, or an internal stakeholder, it’s likely your dialogue won’t resemble what you might experience with a friend or family member. All too often, a greater degree of detachment from the people in our professional lives means that we’re more likely to fall into bad communication habits. This week, mindset and mental wellness coach Kirsten Larsen helps us identify and work through the thought patterns and conversation traps that have negative impacts on relationships of all kinds.

Evidence continues to build that building diverse teams with high grades of psychological safety greatly increases the chance of organizational success. Many leaders understand the organizational, social, and ethical need to build such inclusive teams, but feel as if they lack the resources or knowledge to do so. Minette Norman, award-winning author and this week’s guest, describes how leaders can overcome the traditional expectations of emotionless, hard-nosed leadership, and build thriving, joyful, creative teams.

Artificial Intelligence has made a noticeable impact on the world of learning–especially since the launch of ChatGPT and the advent of generative AI. However, the degree to which AI-enabled tools are being implemented and delivering positive impact for organizational learning remains unclear. To help determine what kind of progress has been made in the world of L&D, Egle Vinauskaite, co-author of AI in L&D: The State of Play joins us on this week’s episode.

It’s no secret that Human Resources departments often receive the eye of skepticism from C-suite leadership. But what is it that results in HR taking on the stigmas of being a blocker to progress, or just a compulsory administrative arm for hiring and firing? According to Jessica Winder, there’s a lack of forthright communication between HR and leadership, and HR has a tendency to operate within existing bureaucratic expectations. Jessica shares her insights on the kinds of conversations and initiatives that get leadership on the same page as HR early and effectively.

The more an organization grows, the more complex its Learning and Development function must become. And in the modern business landscape, learning and development professionals have a duty to be increasingly ambitious about the impact their programs have on learners. As we observe greater competition, more scrupulous consumers, and an ever-growing pool of technology with which to optimize work, L&D can have a greater business impact than ever before. Join Litmos’s Chief People Officer, Kyile Stair this week for insight as to how to drive an organization through integrated, precise learning initiatives.

What if, instead of accepting requests from leadership and acting on them to the best of our ability, L&D delivered solutions we devised on our own? Beyond that, what if we identified the root problem of the symptoms typically identified by leadership, and devised a bespoke learning fix? What if leadership had such strong trust in L&D, that they came to us begging for a creative, mission-critical solution, any time they had a problem that could be resolved by learning? This evolution is the mission of Dr. Keith Keating, author of The Trusted Learning Advisor, and guest of this week’s show.

The relationship between learning and work is experiencing a period of rapid evolution. Whereas we once trained as apprentices or students for a very specific skill set that could reliably carry us through a lifelong career, we now enhance our abilities on a daily basis with the help of technology. Soon enough, we’ll have to embrace an entirely new paradigm that posits work as learning and learning as work within a system that encourages us to define our own roles through constant discovery of knowledge.

Roberta Matuson’s prolific career started in one of the least comfortable ways imaginable–being thrown into executive leadership at the age of 24. Through a nearly 40-year career since being put “suddenly in charge,” Roberta has written 7 books, spanning the topics of leadership, attracting and keeping talent, and feedback and communication. She shares her insights on how the greatest leaders set themselves up for success, allowing the resources, people, and opportunities they need to flow naturally to them.

Early Q4 every year, tens of thousands of learning professionals descend on the Las Vegas strip to share insights with each other and explore what’s new in ed tech. This year, your host joined the getAbstract booth at the Mirage Hotel meeting with dozens of attendees, vendors, consultants, authors, and other L&D practitioners. To discuss some key learnings from the event, getAbstract’s Head of Sales, America, Danielle Goodrum joins the show this week.

Author of Career Self-Care Minda Zetlin joins us this week to explain how organizations and their employees can double down on genuine wellbeing for all by refocusing on what matters most and stepping back from toxic competitive tendencies. Minda’s approach centers the principles of hard work while forcing us to reconsider platitudes like work-life balance, pursuing one’s passion, and even the nature of hard work itself.

Still today, if you fill a room with 10 software developers, there’s a good chance that 9 of them will be men. In the technology industry–and in a handful of particular roles inside and outside of tech–women are vastly under-represented. Women of color even moreso. But by now, it’s also common knowledge that a more diverse workforce is more capable of innovation and creative problem-solving. So, how do we ensure that women not only move into lucrative, historically male-dominated roles, but also end up in leadership positions?

It controls our every move and it houses our every thought… but how many of us understand how the brain works? Truthfully, there’s more that we don’t understand about the brain than we do understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t capitalize on what we have been able to glean through neuroscience and psychological studies over the years. To help us do just that on the perpetual journey to becoming better learners (and educators), Lauren Waldman, the Learning Pirate joins this week’s episode.

Talent intelligence platforms such as Loxo have been helping recruiters turn seemingly limitless data on candidates into simplified and expedited recruiting decisions. This week, we speak with Sam Kuehnle, VP of Marketing at Loxo, about the benefits of talent intelligence, and how to get the most out of such technology as its human collaborators.

According to this week’s guest Steven Miller, the answer is the virtuous cycle of automation AND augmentation. Steven is a co-author of Working With AI. He has spent 40 years researching and working with cutting-edge technology, beginning with robotics in the 1980s at Carnegie Mellon University. For the last two decades, he has been deeply involved in digital transformations via academic, government, and industry arenas, working with teams in IT, L&D, R&D, executive leadership, and others.

We very well may be living through a historic inflection point. The point at which artificial intelligence grows from an esoteric machination to a tool that revolutionizes how most of society does its work. But what industries and aspects of our day-to-day lives will AI impact most? And what should we watch for as that impact begins to be felt? This week, Thomas Bergen and Marc Zao-Sanders join the show to discuss AI’s impact on education, work, and our lives at large.

Thanks to ChatGPT and its competitors, we may very well be witnessing the first generation of humans who will grow up having ubiquitous access to advanced AI assistants. At the same time, there’s likely a plethora of technologies on the horizon we can’t even begin to fathom just yet. So, how can we be sure our kids are learning effectively for such an unpredictable future, where work will look radically different from what it is today? This week, Martin Holecko joins us to offer some his expert insight from decades working in technology, and organizing educational events for youth.

What if addressing the many global ills we face in business and society today–anxiety, complacency, insecurity, even inequality and injustice–required us to approach our work and daily lives with an entirely different frame of mind? What if our calling, our “essence” as components of a greater whole, was far more grand than the jobs we do, or the problems our organizations solve for others? This week, Carol Sanford demonstrates how questioning everything we know is the only way to do the work we were truly meant to do.

Every organization is teeming with untapped synergy between people. Especially in larger companies, there’s a plethora of opportunities for collaborative learning among employees who don’t typically work with each other. Mentorships, skill exchanges, and peer-to-peer feedback opportunities could be identified and capitalized upon… if only we had the right tools in place to help. On this week’s episode, Helen Marshall describes how ed tech can help us create personalized social learning experiences.