L&D in 20 is your go-to podcast for quick, actionable insights on employee learning, training, and development. Hosted by Dan Hayward, Go1's Chief Customer Officer, each episode delivers expert advice in just 20 minutes.

With a deep understanding of the L&D industry, Dan leverages his experience at companies like Degreed, LinkedIn, Yum! Brands, and now Go1 to bring you interviews with influential thought leaders. Together, they'll explore strategies to build employee engagement, drive organizational success, and foster a culture of continuous learning.

Hear insights from industry leaders, learn new strategies, and elevate your L&D game — in just 20 minutes

L&D in 20 Podcast

(00:52) Practical AI use cases and personalized learning 

How is AI being used by the workforce, and how should L&D leaders leverage AI to improve learning outcomes? In this episode, Marc Zao-Sanders, Co-Founder and CEO of Filtered joins Dan to discuss how the workforce is currently using AI, top use cases and the benefits of personalized learning, and determining its ROI.

Marc Zao-Sanders is the Founder and CEO of Filtered.com, a tech company that leverages AI to enhance learning and upskill individuals. With a degree in Maths & Philosophy from Oxford, he has founded two social enterprises supporting disadvantaged youth in their education and career paths. Marc is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and other publications, focusing on AI, learning, and timeboxing. He recently keynoted the Harvard Business Review AI Summit in São Paulo and has relocated to the South of Spain with his wife, three children, and pets.

In this episode of L&D in 20, Dan sits down with Marc Zao-Sanders to discuss how AI is being used by the workforce, and how should L&D leaders leverage AI to improve learning outcomes.

AI use cases for personalizing learning and measuring impact with Filtered’s Co-Founder and CEO Marc Zao-Sanders

Dan: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go to resource for all things workplace learning brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer and industry veteran. Today, we're going to be speaking with Marc Zao-Sanders, co-founder and CEO of Filtered, a learning tech company that helps organizations get the best return on their L&D spend.

Marc is heavily involved in shaping the future of educational technology, focusing on personalized learning experiences, powered by intelligent algorithms. He's also the author of Time Boxing, the power of doing one thing at a time, Marc, welcome to the show.

Marc: Dan, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dan: know that Filtered technology has recently conducted a survey around kind of generative AI in the wild. I'd be super interested to hear kind of what was some of the, the most common and real world applications that you uncovered.

Marc: Sure. Well, what we wanted to do with the research was to get to real gritty. You know what people were actually doing, not the pontificating commentators of which there are just, you know, there's so many so that approach, which was unusual, really resonated with people and actually the graphic made it into the print edition of Harvard Business Review.

And what the research said, well, number one, I mean, there are a hundred use cases and for each use case, there are several stories that we've dug up mostly from Reddit. The number one use case really resonated for me personally, because that's how I use large language models myself, mostly is idea generation.

So you're thinking about something, you're writing something, maybe it's a business plan and you're looking for some ideas to get you going. And bring that momentum to you so you can get going. So, I do that a lot and that was cited by the greatest number of Reddit users. So that was number one. I think number two was therapy as a companion, which, you know, makes, it raises some eyebrows and makes some people laugh.

I mean, personally, I think it's very interesting because there are some aspects of using an anonymous non-human LLM that are actually an advantage versus a human; a human adult to speak to. So, I think, you know, working out in general where generative AI has an advantage through not being human is a really interesting take and that's a great example.

And because you and I work in L&D, it's nice also to see that positions eight and nine, there were two learning entries. So, the first was to enhance the learning experience in general. Yeah, so an example is I'm learning if I put in one like, um, talk to me, explain this concept as if I'm a 10 year old, that was very effective for someone who's not super experienced with the programming language.

And then number nine, which will be, you know, close to your, to Go1’s heart was personalizing the learning experience. So personalized learning. And of course, with the generative, with generative AI, the whole experience is personalized because you're putting in that prompt. It's very unlikely that exactly the same prompt would be put in by someone else.

So, so actually the whole experience is personalized anyway. And then, you know, very much from, it's very much from within our L&D world. If you think about pull versus push, so the whole experience here is pull and not push. So, so there's so much and, and obviously a lot of it, it touches on education in some way.

Excel formula was, was another one. And one that I quite liked was making complaints. So very often something will happen in life, which is a, you know, inconvenience, you kind of feel like you should complain and move the world on in some way. And we'd also get some, you know, revenge on whoever's imposed on you in this way, but it just takes too long, it's too much hassle.

So some people, someone said, you know, their car was wrongly towed away. They made a complaint, they got some money back, justice was done, and the world was a better place. But I say, if anyone listening, watching, who is interested in this, there is a, there is an HBR article. I'm sure you guys have put the link out there.

There is the graphic that's in the magazine, but more importantly, or more usefully, I think, there is the, you know, there's the report. The report has all the actual use cases drawn out of the depths of Reddit. I mean, it was pretty painful, to be honest, going through tens of thousands of posts. But that's what we did.

We mined it. And, you know, for your viewing, reading pleasure.  

Dan: Yeah, that's great. I think kind of just to double click on the companion piece, one of the, an interesting article I read recently was around AI as kind of like coach and mentor, so less of the companion, but more around. Okay. Yeah. I may not have a mentor in my workplace, but I can ask those sorts of questions.

Is, was that a use case or something that you came across or something close that came up?

Marc: Yeah, exactly for that use case. So, it was therapy companion. I mean, those are the two words that we use to describe the category. Anything that was mentor or, or coach fell into that as well. Actually, Sam Altman, about just over a year ago, so maybe three months after ChatGPT came out, he was asked on one of the podcasts here, what do you think is the best use case that you can see helping us imminently?

And he said, a learning mentor. So very close to what you're talking about there and very close to our industry. So I think this is one of the respects in which, of course, everyone's interested in what's going on here. But if you work in L&D, you really should be because if, you know, the CEO of one of the world's most influential companies, certainly in this area, is saying that, you know, learning mentor is one of the best use cases, you've got to have some ideas about how to be implementing that or experimenting with it or deciding not to experiment with it, but at least to be intentional and have thought about it.

Dan: Yeah, if you think about kind of the L&D professional right now, where are some of the ways that you think that they should be thinking about incorporating AI or some specific kind of like first step use cases if L&D teams are starting to kind of dip their toe in the water here?

Marc: I think there are two things to say here. One is that to first of all see your role as facilitating the, not so much the learning of your workforce, but the performance of the workforce and learning is a means to an end. And if you see it that way, and if you buy some of the studies that say that this technology can enhance the speed of knowledge workers by 25%, improve the quality by 40%, even if you dispute those numbers a lot.

Let's say you bring them both back down to, say, 10%. Makes you 10% quicker than 10% better at what you're doing. Well, you compound that for a start and you've got 21%, so that's a substantial shift. And that's already a lot lower than some of the studies. It's one of the Harvard studies in particular that came up with this 25, 40 percent quicker.

But anyway, if you discount substantially then, and you see L&D is being there to enhance performance. It really is incumbent on us to help the workforce make sooner, better, safe use of the technology. So, and to do that, I mean, what do you need? Well, you need safe experimentation. You need to help people find the use cases, and this is a nod back to the research that we did, but obviously it's not just our research, you know, there's lots of research into use cases, because the use cases won't necessarily just fall into people's laps.

So helping people find the use cases that really make sense, and getting that to happen, I think is the, is a, is a, you know, the best thing that L&D can do being. Also being really clear as well about what the risks are, what the policy at the company is. Some companies we speak to say, okay, we want our staff to do this, but we don't want them to do it at work because we don't want to have any of the risks.

So that kind of unofficial policy is experiment on your own time and there'll be benefits for you back at work. So there's a few ways of doing and also recognize that, you know, whatever your company is, however, sort of tech sort of progressive it is, even Microsoft. They don't have everyone just using generative AI all the time, be it in a copilot or some other version.

So every company is still sort of, you know, exploring and finding out where it's going to work best. I mean, just like, you know, that happened with the internet. It's been around for what, 30 years now, but it wasn't mainstream like the start people didn't know how they're going to best make use of it right from the start, and it's very similar.

Dan: Yeah, obviously, a lot of the work you do is around personalization. So, can you just talk me through the listeners through kind of what do you see is the real benefits from a personalized learning and development experience? What? How would you frame that up? As, you know, as a benefit to the organization.

Marc: Well, if you think, okay, so personalized learning, I mean, certainly in our industry and our sorts of conversations, it's become a little bit of a cliche. And the problem with cliches is that then people are hearing it and using the term unthinkingly. So I just want to remind people that are listening, watching that what's the opposite of personalized.

The opposite personalized is where everyone does the same thing. So you have an entire cohort, an entire workforce doing a piece of learning or, you know, some sort of click next experience, which is what you get, actually, with mandatory learning and compliance. Personalized is different from that, because it is an individual finding or being led to some learning experience that they just wouldn't have otherwise, which expands their minds, um, really kindles their curiosity, makes them more confident in their role, these are really important things that I think we lose sight of a lot of the time in conversations in, in L&D.

So I think that's the main thing, that people will encounter experiences, think about things in ways that they haven't, and which aren't appropriate for the, the colleague next door or, you know, in their department, but with different interests. That said, I would say kind of, not against it, but just to sort of, you know, give a measured response.

It is hard to aggregate and benchmark the benefits of personalized learning over non personalized learning because, you know, if you're trying to help people with their curiosity and to satisfy their interests and intrigue, putting, um, you know, a dollar sign, pound sign, euro sign by that is very difficult.

I mean, arguably impossible. So I think as always in conversations with learning, um, getting to the ROI precisely in financial terms is, it is tough. Um, but the benefit of personalized learning is those, um, those magical learning experiences that happen to us all occasionally. And, um, and part I think of our job is to make those experiences happen more frequently.

Dan: That's great. And then can you kind of just talk to how you're seeing kind of the advent of AI or kind of those initial steps into AI really being able to offer more impactful and personalized learning?

Marc: We actually don't do it now, but we've, we were in that game for our personalized learning experience, intelligent learning recommendations.

Most providers will do something on this now. I know Go1 does, but it's become kind of more or common. I think the idea has caught on in learning because of, or largely because of social media. So with social media, we all are presented with a personalized feed, be it on LinkedIn or Instagram or X, whatever the platform, there's so much content out there.

How do you give an individual exactly the content that they want to need to see? And with social, it's very easy to measure success because it's just eyeballs on the page. That's it done. It's clicks with what we're doing is that. But it's then it's a little bit more, you know, to provide a worthwhile learning experience, you're staying with the user with the learner in some way over a number of weeks, months, I mean, maybe even years.

And some of that, you know, the positive impact of that is hard to capture. But that ultimately is what AI is, is, it's doing right now and doing for us in our industry is getting people to the right content through, you know, these intelligent learning experiences. Of course, with generative AI, it's, there's additional functionality.

I mean, you can generate new content. So there's so much content before and now there's, I mean, near infinite amount of content that can be generated. So I think we're going to have even we call it the content chaos. Problem of content chaos. That's the problem that we feel to the trying to you know, address.

That problem became, you know, 10x, 100x, 1000x more difficult. We're in, actually it's getting on for two years ago that OpenAI came out with ChatGPT. So yeah, that's, that's an additional benefit for power. So a capability that the industry now has, it's also a danger, but that's the case with all technology that, you know, it can be used wrongly, can be used to good effect.

Dan: Yeah, so the ROI challenge has been around, you know, as long as I'm guessing both of us have been in the industry and wait, and long before that, but I think what I, yeah, what we see a lot more now, and I know that's something that you advocate is really around. Maybe it's not just tracking ROI, it's actually tracking progress against skills.

So, I think kind of one of the, one of the things that you see within social, I see with my, you know, my, my own kids, you know, my son taught himself to play guitar from, from YouTube. Yeah, it's very hard to be able to track kind of the ROI of hours sat there on his phone or on his, on his, on his laptop. But, I can see the level of, yeah, the skills that he's at.

And now it's, we're in a hybrid world where he has a, you know, has an instructor as well. So talk to me a little bit about how you think about kind of like tracking, measuring skills through, you know, through this, this interface. And as we move forward, forward with AI, some of the opportunities there.

Marc: Well, I think, okay, so with measuring learning, it's, it's very difficult.

I mean, one of the, we faced this ever since the beginning of Filtered, which is now some 15, 15 years ago. One of the things that we can do, which gives you some sort of an ROI to start off with is that because what we do is we run algorithms through content. Match them with skills. We say we get give a some advice to a client.

Okay, well, given the skills profile that you're after it, your workforce, you maybe don't need this library. You don't need this library. You could bring this one in, and that makes better sense for, for you. The great thing about that, in terms of our ROI is that you could just say, well, there was this cost saving.

So that's not all that interesting, but it is ROI. That is a number that you can really point to, to make the case. And then, of course, you're the downstream impact of learning and discovery and all the wonderful stuff. The magic that can kind of be added on top. So, I mean, the other thing I'd say, though, is that with  AI coming in, it may be that we can use the technology to give us a better sense of how we're progressing. I mean, for example, I don't know, let's say, let's pick a specific example. One I generally use is listening attentively, which is important in an experience like I'm having with you right, right now. Okay, so it's how are you going to assess?

Whether I listen attentively or not. I mean, you could ask me some questions about it, but that would just test whether I know what is involved in listening attentively. It doesn't mean I listen attentively. You can't stay with me over the next three months and monitor my progress and give me a score, but AI potentially can.

AI can get its claws into a lot of areas that no human being can. So I do think that if that's a, a path we want to go down, we really want to track everything, you know, and take the opposite approach of this tech company I just mentioned, then AI potentially does offer some solutions. Against that though, you've got privacy issues, because for AI to really know everything about you, it needs to know everything about you, and that might be good for your boss, if you have that kind of a boss.

Or, uh, but it may not be good for you. You may not choose to, to have people delving into, you know, every email that you've written, every team's message that you've sent. So, you know, again, there's a flip side with all of this technology. It comes with tremendous, it comes with a, it's very powerful and that can go either way.

Dan: Awesome. Thank you, Marc. So now let's move on to our next, uh, it's called the 60 second budget breakdown.

So obviously you're working with a lot of L&D leaders, and I'd be interested to get your perspective on if you had to kind of advocate for them to focus their budgets on one or two things, what would that be right now?

Marc: I think first of all, you need to think about what your strategy is. So the best CLO is the best learning leaders that I've come across.

The ones that have found that I found most impressive when they talk about what they're doing at their firm. It always starts off with developing a strategy. And actually before they're developing a strategy, they're finding the lie of the land. They're working out what's going on in in the industry. So that sounds very obvious. Is it always done? I mean, absolutely not. And if you've got a strategy and some sort of a vision, then the downstream decisions, they don't get taken care of. But you've got a guide for each and every one of them.

So I say that's number one. And I find it particularly impressive when you hear from CLO that what we really were focusing on these two things or these three things and then everything else came off the back of that.

I think the second thing is, which is really important as well. Obviously it's getting the right team around you, you know, the right people on the bus, you might say, now, this is a point of contention. You want the team on board first in order to develop the strategy, or maybe you need the strategy first in order to recruit the right team.

I don't know. I think that's a little bit chicken and egg, and you can kind of argue that either way. But I think say those two are very important.

Dan: Yeah, that's such a great answer. And I think kind of on a couple of the other podcasts, we've had conversations around L&D. You know, when L&D functions best, it's a strategic business partner.

So you're kind of, not only your strategy, but your strategy is, is aligned in a lockstep with the overall objective of the organization so that everything you do, every lever you pull is impacting the, you know, the broader business and then your, yeah, your CFO, your COO. 
Marc: And you're more likely to win an argument that way internally, but if you're aligned, you're not then busting heads with it or marketing or whoever it is, you know, you absolutely want to be aligned.

And it's so easy to say it's much harder to actually do because you know, you get in the door and there's all these other pressures and what have you, but, the basics are basics for a reason..

Dan: Great, thank you. So moving on to the next segment, Lifelong Learning.

We'd love to kind of, for you to share a situation or a challenge that turned out differently than you expected, kind of positively or negatively as you've kind of progressed throughout your career.

Marc: Well, look, I mean, things turn out unexpectedly, all the time, every single day, I mean, probably within every single hour, and it's very easy to be put out by them going, their plans going awry, going wrong, using that kind of terminology even, but every one of those setbacks, annoyances, insults, even detours, roadblocks.

Here's an opportunity. And I don't, it reminds me this question of the Rumi poem. Do you know the guest house? So the idea is that everything that happens, you should treat it as a guest in a guest house. If it's difficult, it's a challenge to be used. If it's joyful, it's something to take, take joy in. You know, a lot of those cliches, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

Well, it's sort of the same kind of idea. So, so keeping that in mind, actually the end of the poem goes, it's very nice. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. And of course, you know, when you're in the thick of it. It's not like I just recite this poem and I'm instantly, you know, not feeling irritated anymore.

But when you can come back to a mantra like that, it can help you 20%, 30%, and in some cases more than that with, you know, with the unexpected, with what might feel unwelcome at the time.

Dan: Yeah, no, I love that. That's very stoic. You know, every obstacle is the way it makes you.

Dan: Fantastic. Okay. So the final segment now, it's kind of Self Development Hacks.

So very interested to kind of understand where do you go to grow? What would be your favorite kind of L&D resource, content that you like to go back to anything like that?

Marc: Okay. So I'd say two things. I mean, one, I am a big fan of Harvard's articles because they're short, they're generally high quality, and if you get the right topic at the right, you know, time for you, then it's really handy.

So I'd actually just encourage people to think, you know, what's your favorite HBR article? One of my favorite articles is from HBR is called ‘Clear Writing means Clear Thinking’. It's from 1973, so that indicates there's an evergreen component to it. It's been around for over, over 50 years. The other thing I would say about this though is I like gifts that keep on giving.

So if you follow the right person's Substack or X account or LinkedIn account, then you get their posts, you know, now and, um, and forevermore. And there's, there's two people I call out here. One's Peter Gostev. He's, he's always certainly on LinkedIn and I follow him there. He's an AI expert and just produces good stuff all the time.

And then, and he's less known than some people. And then Nicholas Thompson, who's the, I think he's the CEO of the Atlantic or the Chief Editor. But anyway, he does a very good video on tech every morning and every day. And I think that's really good as well. But yeah, gifts that keep on giving are even better gifts than just give once.

Dan: I love that. I love that. That's awesome. Well, Marc, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all of your insights and a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much.

Dan: So thanks for tuning into the show. I'm Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20.

We hope you found today's discussion as engaging as we did. Whether you're listening on the go or at your desk, we'll catch you on the next episode. And until then, keep learning.

Episode 3 - AI use cases for personalizing learning and measuring impact

(00:58) Elevating skills through compliance training 

How can you use compliance training as an opportunity to advance workforce skills? In this episode, Dan sits down with Jennifer Dowdy, Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts at Emtrain,  to explore innovative ways to transform traditional compliance training.

Jennifer Dowdy leads Partnerships and Strategic Programs at Emtrain. Bringing 30 years of expertise in technology sales, she is responsible for driving new revenue streams through channels and strategic client initiatives touching the HR and HCM technology sector. 

Beyond her professional role, Jennifer is actively involved in supporting domestic violence prevention and advocating for safe housing in her community. In her leisure time, she is camping and searching for waterfalls on the rivers and lakes of the Sierra Nevadas.

In this episode of L&D in 20, Dan sits down with Jennifer Dowdy, Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts at Emtrain, to explore innovative ways to transform traditional compliance training.

Unlocking value and professional growth through compliance training with Emtrains’s Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts, Jennifer Dowdy

More than a checkbox: Unlocking value and professional growth through compliance training with Emtrains Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts, Jennifer Dowdy

Dan: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go to resource for all things workplace learning, brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer and Industry Veteran. Today, we'll be speaking with Jennifer Dowdy, Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts at Emtrain, where she has spent nearly seven years helping organizations scale employee learning and analytics to enhance inclusion, trust, and performance.

With over 20 years of experience in major account sales and partnerships across multiple industries, Jennifer leverages data driven insights to improve workplace culture. She's passionate about empowering businesses to make better decisions for their people.

Jennifer: Thanks, Dan. So happy to be here.

Dan: It's great to have you. Okay. So, the topic of today is compliance training as an opportunity to advance skills, which I just love. Um, so a couple of questions to kind of kick us off. Um, so some employees or many employees within the workplace are only getting, um, upskilling when it comes to compliance training, can you kind of describe the opportunity that that creates and how you think about elevating the employee experience during compliance training?

Jennifer: Yeah, I think it's important to start off with what most people think about when they think about compliance training. And it's typically these routine for the business, for the sake of laws and regs, or for the sake of mitigating risky behaviors or poor behaviors in the business and in the communities we serve, such as our clients.

Uh, and when we think about compliance training, it's, it's this have to do, not get to do, right? And what is in it for the employee or the learner is typically a distraction from their regular productivity day or their lives where they have to sit in these hours long trainings. They're compulsory. And a lot of what happens in these trainings as, as everybody has been through them at different phases of their career is that you're sitting there and you're really faced with a lot of policy, laws, and or obvious scenarios of what to do and what not to do. And for different people, it can be less obvious depending on where they are in their career. So when we think about an opportunity to advance skills, the way we want to think about compliance training is it's an opportunity to develop skills.

Every moment that you engage your employees and especially in a compulsory fashion where you have to do a mandatory training is an opportunity to engage the employee or the learner and give them something additive and valuable that not only they can apply in the business but in their, in their lives.

Dan: Yeah. I love that. So, so practically what are you seeing in terms of some of the content and how are you integrating some of those other skills into that, that compliance training?

Jennifer: My founder and CEO Janine Yancey says it perfectly. And for those who have pets and for those who don't, you know someone who does. Uh, we think of this as the pill and the peanut butter. So, when you think about, you know, having to take a medicine, give a medicine, it isn't an ideal situation, but it is for your health or for your animal's health in this, in this metaphor.

Uh, so when you think about being able to, uh, reach an entire audience of your employees, your, your audience of your business, and you are thinking about what can I do at this time. Advancing skills like how to communicate better, how to resolve conflict, how to take a step back, slow down and slow our judgment down, slow our thinking down.

Checking your bias. Uh, different, different elements of the human condition you can tackle as part of a compliance program. Because what compliance is really addressing is not so much laws and regs. Those follow behavior. Behavior is what gets us into the position of having to have mandatory programs for compliance.

And so when we think about behavior, what an opportunity to address skills development and actually address a condition that we're all experiencing in our lives as well as at work.

Dan: Okay, that's great. I love that. And so then, as we think about kind of now that we've captured some of those, uh, those, um, those passive learners or those compliance learners kind of interest, we've piqued their, their interest. Any, any, um, thoughts or experience of the, you know, the multiple clients that you work with, of how they've kind of transitioned some of those learners from kind of doing just the required learning to then moving on to kind of more inspirational, inspired learning?

Jennifer: Absolutely. It's how you say it and it's how you tackle it. So, I have a 30 plus year sales background, and in sales training, you learn a lot about how marketing engages the audience, you learn a lot about how you're engaging your buyer, your prospective buyer, we learn about personas, and we learn about the motivations of buyers.

Your learners are buyers. Your learners are another audience. And if you think about it, like any marketing or really well done advertising, you have to connect with what the learner is interested in and whatever it is that you're trying to roll out in a compliance program should be no different than what would interest me to purchase something off of social media.

You are trying to appeal to a sense of career development, advancement, and most learning programs are coming out of talent and talent development, talent succession strategies. In compliance, oftentimes we find that the stakeholders are going to be legal, risk, uh, employee relations, often there's a lot of attorneys involved.

So when we think about what we can do, it's how you say it and how you engage the learner around a set of skills that will develop them, not only for their role within the company that they're performing in, but for their career and in their lives, dare I say.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, that's great. And just to kind of, uh, jump onto a, a little, um, comment you made, made there. I think one of the really interesting things about compliance training is those multiple stakeholders. So you just kind of mentioned there's, yeah, there's going to be probably the legal team, uh, compliance, um, HR, uh, what may be involved.

L&D might not be the primary buyer. So could you just talk to me a little bit about kind of how you navigate, um, you know, how to navigate that internal stakeholder kind of, uh, discussions and what you've seen work well.

Jennifer: I think that what really works and what I've learned, uh, because L&D is a newer part of my career, right? I've been doing this, this space for seven years under, uh, compliance as a specific part of learning and development. And L&D typically is the platform that the compliance program sits in. And so what I find to be some of the most inspired client scenarios that we see is where corporate communications, internal communications are involved.

And we are finding out what other programs employees are spending time on, whether they're company sponsored or they're things that are more grassroots level, where, where the organization has sponsored employee resource groups, where there's different groups of representation. So, when you're finding out how employees are engaging outside of the actual funded program for compliance or even the L&D programs, and you're bringing that perspective that you've gathered out from the field into the L&D's visibility. L&D is wanting to listen. They are wanting to innovate. And often they're just so slammed with what is the typical L&D program. So being able to be creative and bring back that perspective from the field. Um, also the companies that we see working really effectively on programs that are engaging employees around skills.

Are not limiting it just to an L&D funded initiative where you see, you know, an annual compliance program, you see other skills development and other learning programs, leadership development, uh, even, even new employee onboarding programs. When you think about the different training programs that L&D has to steward for the organization.

The thing that we see working really well in some of the most innovative companies, um, some of them are our clients, uh, is that they are actually putting the programs, not just within the learning system, or, or just within where people can go and, and this is where we get the idea of passive learning, um, where we can actually put programs where, these kinds of skills can be developed and entice an active learning culture.

And so if you have a CRM, which most organizations will, if you have a community site and you are able to put these programs and also the results of these programs is shared in data driven storytelling, out to the employee base and actually maybe duplicate the areas in which you're going to engage employees around the business, making it available outside of the learning management system.

That's been a really important mover that we've seen some of our more innovative clients doing.

Dan: I love that approach. And I think, you know, what we see typically within organizations is like those different functions will have different expectations and different objectives.

So a legal team coming and checking out compliance will make, will be very different to that kind of internal communications team. But I think kind of aligning internally around kind of what are our expectations, not just, uh, from one functional, but organizationally and how are we uplifting and up leveling the workforce through this acquisition of great compliance training.

That's fantastic. So, I know one of the things we spoke about, uh, previously, you and I was the fact that in compliance training, there's a, there's a real need to create a speak up culture. And at the same time, we now have multiple, five generations, uh, in the workforce with different kinds of cultural practices, and we're, can you talk to me a little bit about, you know, what you've seen and how you've seen, um, the differences of creating a culture to navigate, you know, these generational differences in the workplace?

Jennifer: Absolutely. So we think a lot about multicultural differences and how to bring people together around a shared understanding of topics or concepts like respect. So often times, again, when we talk about compliance training, we never want an organization we're working with to call it their compliance program.

It is called their compliance program. But what we try to do is help them with a message around respect, inclusion, belonging. And when we think about those concepts and ethical decision making, we want to have a concept of what good looks like. So, establishing things like a shared language for your skills development program is a really important strategy in how you're going to roll out any program.

Again, it's how you say it, what's in it for the learner, and appealing to those audiences. And across five generations, what is readily, um, available at the tip of most of the emerging workforce's tongue is some of these issues of what work should feel like, what good looks like, and being vocal about your needs.

I am a stepmother to a 17 year old boy. What he is comfortable talking about is not what, you know, older generations or more experienced seasoned generations of executives. Or even in our own family members at the dinner table. It's not the same as what they're comfortable talking about. So things like politics, religion, conflicts in the world, climate.

These things are at the tip of a, an emerging workforce's tongue. And so knowing how to navigate that across five different generations at work, plus adding in multicultural layers, there's a real art to that, but it gets down to our shared experiences as human beings. So, when we think about tackling what things feel like at work, and tackling some of these concepts that may be drier, more legalistic concepts to impart, we get down to our basic behavior skills and how we make each other feel at work.

And it gets down to good manners. Or also being able to create space for multiple generations to tackle things. So, when you're teaching skills around uh, let's just say anti harassment, right? Often times it boils down to, are people having a bad day and they just lost their manners for a moment? It doesn't necessarily have to be the end of that meeting or the end of that professional relationship.

You can teach people how to navigate multiple generations in the workforce by teaching respect skills. And also how to apologize, how to navigate a misstep, and how to actually recover the opportunity to deepen the trust just in your own team meetings. So starting there with your one on one and your team relationships, as well as figuring out, that leadership needs to advance the skills to be able to manage these multiple generations in the workforce.

And that also comes down to how we approach manners and professionalism at work. You've got to teach people to be comfortable in creating space, and it's often called conflict resolution, but we think about it a little bit more. Deepening that relationship and trust means holding space for accepting, but also understanding and being curious. And finding commonality in our lived experiences at work and being able to apply that into any program that you're, you're putting out at scale to develop.

Dan: Yeah, no, I love that. I love that insight. I think kind of the, the commonality piece definitely feels like a, you know, like a, a key, a key opportunity for a lot of organizations. Okay. So now we're going to move on to our next segment. Uh, it's called the 60 Second Budget Breakdown.

Uh, so from a, from an L&D perspective, uh, or from a, yeah, from a perspective of you supporting your many, many clients, kind of what, what would you say the most important three things that you'd advocate that they spend their money on right now?

Jennifer: People. I think that spending your money on people and appointing them into positions that are cross functional is super important. Um, this is, this is the opportunity that will be a difference maker, especially in a time where we rely on so much technology. And we are also looking at ways to apply automation and things like AI, as well as being able to bring in, uh, different ways of engaging employees, especially when it comes to talent and succession planning, talent mobility programs, investing in your people.

And when I think about L&D and, and the hierarchical organization, you know, especially a matrix organization, when you think about the way that we staff for talent acquisition, when you think about the way that we staff for employee relations and human resources business partners, L&D needs to have that representation across the org chart so that L&D has that same agency to go in and tap for gaps and blockers and also find opportunities.

Skills assessments and skill development usually come out of performance reviews, assessing skills through different programs. L&D usually stewards that data around builds business cases. And when you're thinking about investing in those budgetary areas, and then you have sort of these outlier organizations that are integrative or trying to be integrated within the business like D&I, or you think about the sales program, sales usually gets their own bucket of training, right?

But being able to stretch across all of the functional aspects of the organization, having L&D have their own. Actual business partners that are sitting within the seat of the organization to not only tackle issues that they're identifying, but also the opportunities. So making sure that L&D is listening to the sellers, listening to the clients and the community served by the business, but also making sure that each from leadership and the executive board, all the way down to the new hires who are in their emerging career, being able to tap into what people need and what their expectations of learning are within the workforce, not just within that company, is going to really create a strategy out of the L&D programs that allow for you to meet people where they are.

Dan: I love that, that strategic learning, business partnering is, is definitely something that we don't see all that often. Is that something that you've seen in, in the organizations that you're supporting?

Jennifer: I have, I have, yeah, and some of the more progressive, this is not for every size company, obviously, you advance your, your functional staff, according to your growth, right? We have to, we have to be mindful of a budget and an investment strategy, but being able to have a culture of that established from any size company so that as you grow, and if you get into the largest companies and you're taking learnings from what the largest top performing organizations are doing around the world, really finding out how they're advancing their L&D programs and building a community around those functions that are outside of your business too, so that you're taking those learnings into the business, and applying them according to what you have the available investment to do, but always be pushing to build that business case to grow learning around concepts like curiosity.

We can't wait for the emerging workforce to advance to leadership to get leadership development quality training. We can actually tap in and start finding out and applying what learning can do for an organization at all stages of growth.

Dan: So now we're going to move on to our next segment, uh, Lifelong Learning.

So can you, uh, yeah, give me an example, describe a time where a situation that you're working on, um, turned out differently than you expected, either, yeah, positively or negatively, and what were, Couple of the key learnings that you had.

Jennifer: I would take this back to, to selling. And I think that all, all of us in business can relate to sales. Uh, when you think about putting and applying your typical sales motions, you've got a recipe, you've got a methodology, you have a process that you follow.

And I think that one of my biggest learnings around, around selling L&D was coming into the L&D space. I really, I really thought as a learner who had been taking these programs that it was one way. I was delighted to find out how much change management, organizational development, and how much data opportunity there is in this particular slice of a business.

And so my, uh, my surprise in entering this space. I've always sold according to metrics. And when you go into a compliance space, you're not really able to find metrics except for when people have claims or you read in the news about the DOJ doing an investigation. And it tends to be really juicy after the fact, but being able to actually tap into organizations who are struggling to find better ways to do that.

To be good partners together. That was one of my eye opening experiences. It's obvious around selling that people want to get to better metrics and better outcomes. But being able to tap into a community of HR leaders who I think get kind of a bad rap and L&D comes in as sort of the, the tech solutions team, but being able to see how many people want to actually do good was one of the most eye opening experiences of my last seven years.

Dan: So Jen, I'd love to know, uh, what's the biggest L& D win of your career?

Jennifer: I love this question, Dan, and the reason is, is because of selling, I think that the wins have to be the wins for your clients and the communities they serve. And so when you think about compliance programs, um, some of the, we've done this with several of our clients here at Emtrain, one of the things that I think was one of the most rewarding programs that we serve is that we did a compliance program that dealt with inclusion, belonging, and we expanded that from just the employees to the contingent workforce, and then it expanded out to the supplier and the ecosystem of our client, Cisco.

And that was a, an enormous win for us professionally. And also around a purpose, a shared purpose in the world. So these programs include things like inclusive language, uh, being able to speak up at the workplace in a productive and constructive way, um, through an upstander program, and taking it beyond those respect skills to applied skills that are relevant not only to the employee learners at Cisco, but out into their supplier and their partner communities.

Creating that kind of expansive learning program around these topics, um, is under purpose for Cisco and being able to be a provider of that kind of learning and development program where you know that these skills are going around the world into Cisco's ecosystem. That is an enormous win because people have given amazing feedback and actuallyasked more  engaged questions from their communities around how they can apply these skills and more of these programs within their own workplaces.

Dan: That's, that's amazing impact. That's great

And now we're going to move on to our final segment, Self Development Hacks.

So what is your personal kind of go to, where do you go to grow? What's your favorite L&D or learning related content or resource?

Jennifer: I thought about this question a lot and I think that to learn we have to be uncomfortable. Um, I'm a natural introverted personality, which is ironic because I've been in front of people selling for 30 plus years.

And what has been, I think, a secret to my success is pushing myself to be uncomfortable to grow. So tapping into people and, and actually pushing myself to form community and relationships that are not just within that near term window of, of achieving my goals. And actually forcing myself to work with people, practice the skills of curiosity and actually talk with more and more people, pushing myself to make introductions that are cold introductions to people that I just want to learn from, not sell to, so that I can, engage myself as an active learner, because if I am only relying on the technology that's out there, I'm relying on only my curiosity, not challenging myself to grow.

Dan: Thank you for sharing. So Jennifer, that's it. We've come up on time. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today and sharing your insights with us.

Dan: So, thanks for tuning into the show. I'm Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20. We hope you found today's discussion as engaging as we did. Whether you're listening on the go or at your desk, we'll catch you on the next episode and until then, keep learning.

Episode 2 - More than a checkbox: Unlocking value and professional growth through compliance training 

(00:55) Interpersonal skills in the workforce

How do you build empathy and trust on teams? In this episode, Dan sits down with Shawn Hunter, President and Founder of Mindscaling, to discuss the importance of giving trust, demonstrating that the workplace is safe, and empathy.

Shawn Hunter is an entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling author of Small Acts of Leadership, and currently Founder and President of Mindscaling, a company dedicated to creating beautiful, and intelligent online learning products.
Until July, 2015 Shawn was Executive Producer & Vice President for Leadership Solutions at Skillsoft. For over a decade Hunter has interviewed, collaborated with, and filmed hundreds of leading business authors, executives, and business school faculty in an effort to assemble video learning solutions. He started this journey as an entrepreneur, and later expanded that business for Skillsoft. Hunter originally co-founded Targeted Learning Corporation with his father Hal Hunter, Ph.D., which was acquired by Skillsoft in February 2007.

In this episode of L&D in 20, Dan sits down with Shawn Hunter, President and Founder of Mindscaling, to discuss. They dive into the importance of giving trust, demonstrating that the workplace is safe, and empathy.

Building empathy and trust on teams with Mindscaling’s President and Founder, Shawn Hunter

Dan: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go to resource for all things workplace learning brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Dan Hayward, Chief Customer Officer and industry veteran. 

Today, we'll be speaking with Shawn Hunter, Founder and President of Mindscaling, a company that builds and designs leadership experiences, hand crafting best in class courses. Shawn has over 20 years of experience in designing and building customized learning experiences that create real measurable change within organizations.

He's also a podcaster, a speaker, a writer, and the best-selling author of two books on leadership and innovation, Small Acts of Leadership, And OutThink, Shawn, welcome to the show.

Shawn: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Today we're talking about soft skills in the workforce, particularly mental flexibility, collaboration, and creativity in the workplace. 

Much of your work is focused on soft skills, so what trends are you seeing in the workforce regarding these very essential skills?

Shawn: So, my organization, Mindscaling, what, what we do here at Mindscaling is we focus on soft skills. We focus on innovation. Empathy, communication, um, collaboration, teamwork. We don't so much focus on technical skills, so to speak. And what we're seeing in the marketplace, if you look at the latest ATD report from 24 and into 25, one of the top, number one, number two, number three, is the ability to communicate.

To communicate, to communicate in a hybrid environment, in a spoken environment, in a written, you know, good writing. How do you communicate ideas? And so, addressing this, I think one of the most important things we can do to kind of upskill, improve our communication is to work through a narrative, through storytelling.

So basically, you know, if you're, if you're a coder and you're getting really good at coding or you work in user interface or something, you can improve those skills remarkably. But if you want to convey those ideas, I think you should do it through a narrative. And to do that, like, I'll give you a little example.

So, a few years ago, I interviewed the, uh, Chief Operating Officer for Starbucks and his name's Howard Behar. And Howard Behar, back in the day, decades ago, his job was to set up new stores, you know, open new shops. And he opened this shop down in Santa Monica, California, and the manager that he placed in there that he hired was a woman named Dina.

And Dina contacted him and said, you got to come down and check out this new drink we're making. So, he's curious and he goes down to Santa Monica. And they're making this frothy, you know, cold coffee drink. And he's like, oh, this is quite good. And so he goes back to Seattle, to the operations people, the headquarters, and he explains it and he, you know, shows them how they make it, et cetera.

And all the operations people, the menu people, the logistics people, they're just like, no, forget it. Like it's too expensive. It's not on the menu. We're just trying to get started. This is ridiculous. Like we don't have time for this. So, he calls her up and he says, look, Dina, I, uh, I talked to headquarters and they don't like it.

They don't like this idea, but just keep doing it. You know, you just keep making it and tell me how it goes. Like, tell me how the sales are and everything. So that story right there is the birth of the Frappuccino. Okay. The Frappuccino is their number one product today, billions and billions of dollars.

Now, inside of that narrative, there's all kinds of different things that you can identify and look to. You can look to, oh, Dina's initiative, like the chance that she took or the way she, you know, empathetically understood the customer and, and work to craft something of their interest. Or you could think of yourself as Howard.

Well, Howard's like the, you know, the executive who comes down to oversee it and he gives them autonomy. He gives them license, he gives them, you know, free, free will to go experiment. Or maybe you see yourself in the story as like the CFO who says, no, this is ridiculous. We can't do this. So, from whatever perspective you dissect that story.

You can see lessons inside that narrative and it's memorable. So back to my point, my point is to convey something compelling, focus on building it into a story that people will remember.

Dan: That's great. And so as you think about kind of, I know that you've spoken a lot about, um, driving exceptional outcomes, uh, in your book, kind of out think, how do you actually, so I understand the storytelling, but how do you kind of teach something like mental flexibility? So, in that story, like Dina kind of stood out to me.

I'm like, oh, that's, that's fantastic. Yeah. But how, you know, how do you convey that? So, if we're in a, you know, one of your, one of your clients, or if we're in an L&D function, what are some of the, the steps or the kind of the tactics that you think, um, work best?

Shawn: Okay. So, so this is about like, how do you draw out that discretionary energy, that creativity, that, you know, deep engagement from someone. And I would, my recommendation is for people to remember that we all have an emotional wake. Everywhere we go, right? In every interaction. And by that, I mean, how do you leave someone?

Do you leave someone uplifted? Do you leave them anxious or agitated? I was just, before this phone call, like I'm prepping for this little interview here. And I called my colleague, uh, at Mindscaling. And she said to me, well, you know what? I've learned something from you, Shawn, because when we have these, these phone calls, you've taught me that not all phone calls are perfect.

From your boss have to be bad news. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. She's like, you know, I leave interactions with you feeling sometimes affirmed or uplifted or, so my point is like, I had a previous boss who every time he would say like, uh, can we talk at Friday on new at noon? And I'd be like, Oh, great.

And sure enough, it's bad news. Right. So, he's teaching me that when he wants to talk to me, it's bad news. He's going to cut the budget. He's going to fire people or whatever. It doesn't have to be that way. So, in order to draw out that creativity, that energy, that innovation from people, you have to teach them that this is a safe place to be.

Dan: Mhm. Yeah, I love that. And I think one of the interesting things is that intrinsically with soft skills, they're, they're, they, they are, they're human behaviors, right? They're, they're, they're things that I think all of us have in some shape or form. Um, but to your point, being able to identify that and draw that out.

So, what are some of the ways that you, maybe you, you know, you'd assess that within a work population or within a cohort of learners?

Shawn: Well, you'd want to be looking at how much initiative are people taking, like how reticent are people in these meetings? Are they speaking up? Are they taking initiative? And then encourage that. So, and one way you can do that is by asking more powerful questions. So if you ask questions like, Uh, which one or how many, these are kind of binary questions that have simplistic answers and people can tell you, you know, like if I, if I ask you, can you describe your high school? You're like, oh yeah, I could, I could do that. But if I asked you, um, in five years from now, if you were, if you had no constraints, what, where would you like to see yourself in your career? Well, that's a much more powerful question and that's going to bring out from you, like more ideas, more expression, more ambition, more aspiration.

You'll take more chances and that creates a vulnerability loop, you know, or, or self-reinforcing. So back to the original question, how do you get people to be more creative? My answer is. They are, they are now in their book clubs, in their, in their guitar, in their writing, in the things that they're passionate about.

Dan: Yeah, I love that. And I think one of the things from an organizational perspective, quite often we talk about creating a culture of learning as if, you know, the people that we employ are not learning outside of work, they're not in book clubs, they're not doing jujitsu or going, you know, getting better at bowling or, or whatever it is, right.

And I think kind of intrinsically, the vast majority of us are interested in learning and growing in some aspect. It's really about how do you bring that into the workplace? I don't know. We spoke previously when we spoke previously, we talked a little bit about kind of like empathy being at the core of this.

So can you talk to me a little bit about how, you know, empathy shows up in, in the, in the sessions and the, and the work that you do, I think kind of creating that, that safe space, allowing people to kind of grow and be innovative, but really interested in terms of, from a, from a leadership perspective,

Shawn: I'll give you this perspective on empathy because it is, you know, in and of itself, uh, one of the key ingredients in innovation, in collaboration, you know, the, the ability to walk in somebody else's shoes, see from, you know, somebody else's perspective. And we're, we're taught, of course, in our podcasts and mindfulness, uh, journaling to express gratitude.

You know, be grateful, express gratitude to your colleagues, your kids, your wife, to your life. And the twist that I put on this is recognize that when you express gratitude, thank you for your contribution in that meeting. Thank you for asking that really powerful question that opened up and unlocked a new way of designing the user interface or whatever it is.

When you're expressing that deep gratitude. You're not just saying, thank you. What you're saying is I see something in you that I want more of in myself and I want to grow into. I want to become, I want to adopt that passion, that way of speaking, that way of learning. You're, you're, you're basically building a compliment into that expression of gratitude by saying, I want, I see something remarkable in you and I want more of it in myself.

So that in and of itself. Is an act of empathy. So you can start with a little piece of gratitude and acknowledging that and adopting those behaviors yourself. And that is in and of itself, empathy.

Dan: Yeah, I love that framing. That's great. And then I guess one of the, you know, uh, maybe the flip side to what we've been discussing now is we talk a lot about kind of, uh, teaching, training, soft skills. What are some of the biggest or most common mistakes that you've seen as you've kind of been brought in to help organizations. 

Shawn: Hmm. We were at Mindscaling, we work a lot with small and medium sized businesses. I mean, I've done work with giant companies as well, but what we see in small and medium sized companies is they might be, uh, an L&D operation of one, you know, or two and they're, and they're trying to, you know, upskill and build collaboration or drive the behavioural objectives of the organization from, you know, a small footprint.

So, my recommendation is, you know, once you've built the curriculum, the learning paths, curated the library, aligned it with the behavioural objectives of the company, then you have this almost like a marketing challenge. You know, how do you get people to take it, to attend, to go through the learning path, et cetera.

And my answer is, co-opt the leaders in your organization. And what I mean by go to your Head of Sales, go to your Head of Marketing, go to your Head of Operations and Logistics and bring them in because they do have deep expertise. In their skillset, make them the subject matter expert, allow them to share their insights and ideas.

So, all of a sudden you've now populated your learning and development curriculum with the experts inside your own organization, who will then go out and be ambassadors for what you've created. And bonus points. It doesn't cost very much.

Dan: No, that's, that's awesome. And I also think what's, what's interesting there is it quite often it generates a, you know, it generates an inter, you know, internal to the company sense of kind of ownership and even competition amongst those executives. Like they want to make sure that it's their function that is, you know, that is the top of the, the, the stack and rack, um, in terms of kind of adoption and engagement.

That's, that's great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. So now we're going to move on to our next segment and it's called the 60 second Budget Breakdown. Uh, and so from a, you know, and, and obviously, uh, I know that you're supporting a lot of L&D, um, functions and working with a lot of different organizations, but if you had to kind of give advice, uh, what would be the, the three things or the three most important things that you would recommend that your clients or someone in an L&D function spend their money on? 

Shawn: My top recommendation, as I said a second ago is, to leverage the key expertise you have in your organization, but start small, like start with a deep cohort of people that, you know, are invested in what you're doing, that have your back and hand pick them and build that success.

So then when they go back to their colleagues and they rave about, you know, the workshops they went to and the, and the asynchronous learning and the mentoring they had and the job rotation and all of these different practices that you implemented into your curriculum. All of a sudden, they too also become ambassadors.

L&D in 20

About L&D in 20

Episodes

AI use cases for personalizing learning and measuring impact with Filtered’s Co-Founder and CEO Marc Zao-Sanders

More than a checkbox: Unlocking value and professional growth through compliance training with Emtrains Director of Partnerships and Strategic Accounts, Jennifer Dowdy

Building empathy and trust on teams with Mindscaling’s President and Founder, Shawn Hunter