Developing L&D w/Loren Sanders
Episode Overview
Welcome back to another episode of "Making Better"! Today, we have a special guest joining us, Loren Sanders, to discuss the exciting world of Learning and Development (L&D). In this episode, we delve into the importance of building relationships with the business, understanding audience analysis, and measuring the effectiveness of training programs. We'll explore Loren's journey into the field of L&D and the valuable insights they've gained along the way. From project management to instructional design, negotiation to personal development, we uncover the multifaceted nature of the learning profession. So, grab a cup of coffee and get ready to discover how to develop L&D and make a lasting impact in this dynamic field. Stay tuned for an engaging conversation that will leave you inspired to make better connections and bring about positive change in the workplace. Let's dive in!
About Loren Sanders
Loren Sanders is the author of the book Empathy Is Not a Weakness and a long time Learning and Development professional. In L&D, we talk a lot about developing others, but not so much about developing ourselves. I know Loren has a lot to say on this topic so I wanted to have her on.
Full Transcript
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Loren Sanders [00:00:00]:
My feeling is if we aren't developing ourselves, we're not going to get better, we aren't going to advance our profession. And that prioritizing yourself is going to help you look beyond just the core skills of learning and help you make better connections to both the business and what matters to them, as well as to your craft.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:20]:
Welcome to Making Better, a podcast from Better Everyday studios devoted to helping small learning teams have a big impact. Today we are talking to Lauren Sanders, author of the book Empathy is not a Weakness and longtime learning development professional. In L d. We talk a lot about developing others, but not so much about developing ourselves. I know Lauren has a lot to say on this topic, so I wanted to have her on. Let's dive in. Lauren, I am so excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?
Loren Sanders [00:00:50]:
Good. I'm excited to be here. You're one of my favorite people to follow, so you might call me a fangirl.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:56]:
Oh my gosh. Well, I am definitely a fan of you as well. I mean, in fact, we were talking recently for the first time and I was just really excited. You have such a background, such a wealth of knowledge in the L D space. You've been in it for quite a while. You have a lot of amazing thoughts. So I think to kick things off, I gave a little bit of introduction. But I'd love to hear, in your own words, how would you describe kind of your path through learning and development?
Loren Sanders [00:01:24]:
Sure. Thanks, Matt. My learning career, I would probably describe it as an accidental learning detective. I fell into learning because I facilitated well and I would get called on for special projects that required people to teach something and I kept finding gaps in the content. So I organically just started creating bridge content to fill gaps. And at the time, I didn't even know that there were jobs outside of actual facilitation of training sessions. Over time, I was working in a role that I felt like I could do in my sleep and saw an opening in the learning space and applied for it. And I was cast sideways into a role where I did design, development, programming, and training with no formal background at all. I was very lucky to be on a team of amazing people that taught me how to use the tools in the toolbox, but I still never felt like I was very good at it. So I started reading and studying as much as I could about the process of learning, and I was also teaching part time in an MBA program and started noticing that there was an interesting difference between education proper and corporate learning. And I started thinking about where they came together and where they were different. And once I started learning about learning, I just kept going and all of the pieces just fascinate me. And that's kind of how I got here.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:41]:
That's awesome. I got to stop you on that point because I felt the exact same way when I first kind of got into this. No formal background in L and D and was always interested in that similarities and differences in the education space and the corporate training space. What were the things that you kind of looked at and saw as where they met or what was the same and what was different?
Loren Sanders [00:03:07]:
I'm a huge analyzer of things. So I look at the education space as very focused academically on knowledge and not as focused on practice. Unless you're in a program that has some sort of cohort that's being taught by people that actually live in the space that they're teaching about, because then you can blend it a little bit better.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:32]:
Yeah, I think, man, that's just like, exactly spot on. I think in my experience as well, especially when we talk about when we have so many people come from education, so many people are teachers who come into L and D is kind of pinpointing that difference in focus from knowledge to practices is so essential.
Loren Sanders [00:03:54]:
The other thing that I learned on the way, and I didn't know it was a problem until I started studying the measurement of effective programming. And it was we cared about what people got done, but not really if people learned what they needed to or could apply it. And that was curious to me. On the academic side, we would do things, but we never actually knew what happened when they went back to work. It was an executive MBA program, and I'm still teaching in it, but we're starting to do better things to measure how it works on that side. But then I also learned in the learning space, while we talk about measurement a lot, not everybody really understands how to measure the effectiveness of programs. And I keep finding myself saying in the corporate space, we are not measuring the effectiveness of people. That's not what we do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:54]:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. Okay, so then what do you think we should be on that front? Like, what should we be doing?
Loren Sanders [00:05:02]:
If the world were perfect, we would teach people about measurement first and help them understand that you don't have to be a math whiz to understand measurement, but it helps, you know, if what you're doing is actually working or if you're just kind of hitting your head against the wall. Often I use the cupcake analogy, talk about this a lot, where I tell my stakeholders, well, what you're saying makes sense, but I know if I eat a cupcake every day, it's not going to be good for me. I love cupcakes. I don't want to stop eating them every day, and it's hard to stop eating them every day, but unless I practice not eating them, I'm not going to be able to stop. I'm just going to keep eating cupcakes and it doesn't matter how much I know about not eating so much sugar all the time or things that are not great for me.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:57]:
Yeah, the fitness analogy is so and health analogy is so spot on because everyone knows the right things to do in that kind of situation. I mean, for the most part it's like if you want to lose weight, just work out more or move more and eat less. There's not a big breakthrough there. The breakthrough is in getting the actual practices down and all that stuff. Yeah, I think that's such a good analogy.
Loren Sanders [00:06:26]:
What helped me was in my first learning role, I kept on training people and delivering content that was being told to me dictated. And I kept learning that for some reason, about two to three months into the role, the people weren't performing very well and I started asking questions about that and kind of reverse engineering it back to figuring out what was going wrong. And it was because we weren't giving them what they needed to actually do the real job. We had simulated things but we completely missed the environment that they were in or some other piece that in the real world they couldn't do it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:11]:
Yeah, I've seen that a lot. Is it's almost like you're teaching people how to use the wrong tool? It's like you're teaching the course, I don't know, with a power screwdriver and they just have a handheld one or something like that out in the works.
Loren Sanders [00:07:25]:
Or a lot of show me or a lot of contacts but not performance support time.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:32]:
Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm sure we could have a very long conversation about the need to tie things more to practices and principles. But I do want to make sure to also talk about the thing that I was really interested in the last time we talked about is you were starting to spend a lot of time thinking a lot about the development of learning development professionals. We talk a lot about developing other people and that's our role. But how many of us actually get a chance to develop ourselves in our role and what does that development look like? Yeah. Would you agree that gets skipped over a lot?
Loren Sanders [00:08:12]:
I do. We are great at giving other people shoes as the shoemaker, but we are not good at making our own or making sure that we even have shoes on our feet sometimes.
Matt Gjertsen [00:08:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about that, how do you break down the LND profession? Do you have different lanes or anything that you think of people being in?
Loren Sanders [00:08:33]:
I am a prime example of how somebody can work in the learning space and not really know anything about the way learning works. So my feeling is, if we aren't developing ourselves, we're not going to get better, we aren't going to advance our profession. And that prioritizing yourself is going to help you look beyond just the core skills of learning and help you make better connections to both the business and what matters to them, as well as to your craft. You learn to speak a more common language, you'll make inroads faster and then we need to question what we know already and consider new ways of thinking about our craft, which is why I love the Learning Mythbusters Group, but really it's about managing the information and prioritizing it and strategically planning how we're going to do it. And also a little bit of project management mixed in.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:28]:
Yeah, no, that sounds right. So then when you think about it from that perspective of I need to develop myself, how do I start to break that down? Like, are there different things I need to identify to work on strategically or do you have different kind of circles or practice areas?
Loren Sanders [00:09:46]:
I think it's a funny question because I currently work in a space where there's clear separations of roles and I think the most important thing we can do is be a good consultant. We have to ask the right questions, we have to make connections to the business and understand the business area that we're supporting. We have to be good listeners, we have to listen for what's important and not necessarily what we're being told is necessary. We have to understand the processes and the moments where performance support makes a difference and then we have to negotiate and influence. And to me that's the meat of the learning profession. We have to help the stakeholders believe that there is no 40 hours expert and that learning is an ongoing process, not a one and done thing. Until we can do all of that, it doesn't matter how beautifully you can design something because of course we need people who can write and we need people who can do graphics and we need people who can do multimedia and other engaging things. But none of it matters if we get the needs wrong.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:50]:
Yeah, so it's really starting out from the point of view of, like you said, becoming that consultant. That's where it all starts. It's like how do you work with stakeholders, how do you ask questions? I would imagine maybe it's like the first because I think we spend a lot of time talking about making good content. That's what a lot of people talk about. And then maybe the next thing, at least in terms of what you talked about, is doing needs assessment and then the next thing maybe after that would be managing the relationships. But if you can't manage the relationships then kind of nothing else matters. So maybe are you saying that's almost where you need to start is like learning how to have those relationships?
Loren Sanders [00:11:33]:
Yeah, because if you don't have the relationship, the business is not going to trust you enough to tell you really what they need or to give you the information you're looking for. And I think when we talk about audience analysis as part of our needs assessment or however we set it up, because everybody does it differently, it really comes down to not just knowing who the audience is and what someone is telling you their needs are, but what kind of environment are they actually working in? Is it what you're being told, or is that nirvana getting into the root cause of really why there's a problem, and having as much data as possible to uncover things that may not be said so that you can ask the right questions in the language of the business makes all the difference in the world. And where it gets really interesting is when we talk about measurement, and I see a lot of newer I'll call them learning consultants, for lack of a better term, to go in and start to do that analysis and start with a question of, well, what are the KPIs? And half the time the Stakeholder doesn't even know what their KPIs are or what a KPI is. And so I've always told the people on my team, why don't you ask them what they measure at the end of the year when they're doing the performance management, what are they measuring, and then somehow reverse engineer that back into the objectives of whatever it is you need them to be able to do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:03]:
Yeah, I don't think you can ever under I'm not sure it'd be over underestimate. Just how many companies don't really know a lot about what they do and what good is a lot of them just don't know it. And you have to do that work with them in order to figure out what to train.
Loren Sanders [00:13:25]:
Well, you go back to that 40 hours expert thing, right? One week of training, and I'm going to be an expert in this. According to the Stakeholder, they went to new hire for a week. Why can't they do their job perfectly? We're not in the business of creating 40 hours experts, but what we do need to do is be able to communicate that we are measuring the program's effectiveness during the program and after the program. And if we're doing it according to Kirkpatrick, for lack of a better way to describe it, because that's when everybody knows we shake your hand at day 91, and instead of just falling off, we're following you. But if your performance measurements for that role aren't tied to what we're teaching and training and are not tied to all of that measurement, you're never going to get the results that you want, and it's going to fall off.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:18]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was funny. I was actually having a conversation with somebody about onboarding recently and developing onboarding, and I said something like because a lot of times I think it's all about, like, a customer relationship and figuring out who is your customer for this. And really onboarding, I think we normally think of the customer as the person in the room. And we spend a lot of time in training thinking about the customer, as in the learner. But especially in onboarding's case, the customer is the frontline manager. That's really who you're serving. And so it's figuring out what their expectations are of this person as they walk out of orientation.
Loren Sanders [00:15:00]:
Which is why you should have support tools for them tied to your programming so that they can help it live on. Otherwise they don't know what to do. You have to tell them what to do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:11]:
Yeah, exactly. So we've talked about a couple of things there. There's figuring out what you want to measure, but before that, you need to have a relationship so they will have that conversation with you. What tips do you have for getting started in that relationship? Like, if somebody identifies, okay, I want to develop myself as a professional, as a learning professional, and I want to start I know I need to develop this skill because right now I'm just kind of an order taker. People are just telling me stuff and I want to really get involved and be able to ask them those questions. How should somebody get started with that?
Loren Sanders [00:15:44]:
I think the path is not linear. It comes down to interest and then opportunity. And the opportunity has to be created by people like us who are LND leaders. And we have to want to connect people and give them opportunities to try out and practice things that they're interested in no matter what piece of LND it is. But they have to do it in a safe and meaningful environment. I think that we need to reimagine the scope of the LND practitioner and help people who are interested feel like partners. And that's a mindset shift for us. We have a lot of opportunity when it comes to being I like to think of this as this is talent management, this is talent mobility. That's the type of practitioner we should be beyond the day to day of what we do. Our job is to make connections that pave the way towards improving business outcomes. And that's done throughout the entire L d. Space. We teach people to problem solve, we teach people to communicate. We teach people to think differently in different environments. And that matters beyond the day to day. So as an L D leader, my job is to, hey, if I want to build a bench, I need to find people that are just genuinely interested in LND and then help them learn about the different pieces and test and try things. We all have conversations about what's the best part of LND or can you do this and still be able to do that? Can you be a good measurement person and a good facilitator? Can you be a good facilitator and a good program owner or instructional designer? What I've found is very few people love all of it, but you'll usually find a piece of it that resonates with you that your heart goes into. And our job is to help people find that, especially if we want to keep our profession going.
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:44]:
Yeah. So it's really identifying what the needs are of the business and where you need people to go, and then finding the right people who are interested in those options, sort of what it comes.
Loren Sanders [00:17:59]:
Down to, and then helping them get there.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:05]:
On that point. Since you've been on that leadership side. I think a lot of people in LND, they are the person doing the work. They're the person on the ground doing the work, working directly with the stakeholder. Far fewer people are in that management role. So from your point of view as a learning leader, how have you worked with your team to find those opportunities or figure out those interests and make sure you're steering them in the right direction?
Loren Sanders [00:18:37]:
It's interesting that you asked that question. I used to lead our measurement team, and I had someone on the measurement team that said, hey, I think I might want to be an instructional designer. So she applied for an instructional design job, and she didn't get it because clearly you can't have that job unless you have some sort of experience with doing instructional design and understanding how adult learning theory works. It doesn't matter how much measurement you already know, although those two things really marry well together. So when she didn't get the job, I had a conversation with her about, let's try this out. Let's see if we can find a stretch assignment for you or an opportunity for you to ride along or partner with somebody who's doing this, because let's find out if it's even what you want to do at all. And we were able to get her a partner in instructional design, and they worked on a project together, and at the end of the project, she said, I don't like this. This isn't for me. But I mean, you want as many people to do that as you do to decide that they love it and it's what they want to do for the rest of their lives. But if we don't give people the opportunity to try it and self select in or self select out, we're doing ourselves a disservice.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such an important one. And that's amazing that you were able to do that for them as a manager, because I think it's so often the case that managers get very territorial about their people and what they do, and it's just so self. Destructive. Because as soon as the people on your team realize that you care about the business more than them, it's going to go downhill.
Loren Sanders [00:20:18]:
I like to think of myself as a talent management professional first and an LND professional second. And so as a talent management practitioner, I believe in the concept of talent mobility. I believe that it is my job as a leader to help people find the things that they love at work and to create opportunities for them to test those things out, get developed, and move on. To me, I would rather have a team of people that all gets promoted than a team of people that I can keep forever that doesn't do our profession or the organization that we work for any good. If all we do is talent hoard, that's just not good.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:59]:
Yeah. Especially these days. It's just not going to work. I mean, people are at least seemingly leaving companies faster and faster. There's more and more turnover. Not only does supporting development make it more likely that they're going to stay longer, but it also just ensures that you have a plan for the inevitable day when they do leave anyway. And so by having that constant promotion, moving people forward, moving people around, it just makes for just a much healthier environment for everybody, I would think.
Loren Sanders [00:21:35]:
And if we do it right, the people are smarter than we are and they come up with better ideas that move our profession along even more.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:43]:
Yes. 100%. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, I think that's definitely a big part of what I wanted to talk to you about is this, like, how do you talk to people? How do you find the people on your team? How do you be intentional about the development of the people on your team? Anything that I didn't ask you? I know you spent a lot of time talking about this or thinking about this. Any other thoughts around this kind of thing that you want to make sure we cover?
Loren Sanders [00:22:11]:
I think from a leadership perspective, it's important to give your people space and time to think and to learn about their craft. So, for example, on my team, I ask everyone to take 2 hours a week to learn something new. And I don't care what that thing is, but the caveat is when you learn something really cool, you have to bring it back and share it with the team so that we can all learn whatever that thing is. And a lot of times we end up listening to podcasts together or separately and then coming together and talking about them and what they mean and how we can change some of our practices to do X or Y better. Advocating.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:59]:
Yeah. How do you bring that into practice? Because I think that's the kind of thing that a lot of people would aspirationally say they want to do as a leader. But then the day to day starts happening, work starts happening, you kind of forget about it. Are there things that you're doing to make sure that that time stays front of mind or that people remember, hey, I'm supposed to do this or I'm supposed to report back. Do you have any tactics around that?
Loren Sanders [00:23:24]:
I try to remind them on a regular basis, but I also share information pretty this is a great podcast. You should listen to this. There was one not very long ago where Brandon Carson was talking about the future of L d. And it was so good that I sent it to my team and I said, listen to this. And in our team meeting, we're going to talk about all of these things.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:48]:
It's so important to be that example of that. This is expected. I expect you to go develop yourself and be interested in things, but I'm too busy and focused and I can't do that. They're not going to do it. Then you as the leader need to be setting that example that even I'm taking time to learn this new stuff and share it with you. So I kind of expect you to do the same with all of us.
Loren Sanders [00:24:14]:
We even did some project management tactics on one of my teams because we know that project management is not always top of mind for folks in our world and it is very top of mind for folks in the business. So one of my former teams, we talked about what are the words you're going to hear when somebody's talking in terms of project management and what is a task and what is a milestone? And on my current team, we started a practice where I've asked my team members, they work with a lot of different people in project teams because every role is very segmented. Every week, my program owners send an update to everybody on their project teams with project status, the milestones that are coming up in the next two weeks. And they have a little thing that says, is the project red, green or yellow? Well, everybody knows what red, green or yellow is. So if somebody like the business course owner doesn't do something or sign off on something that we need, it makes it much easier for me to escalate know, hey, George, our project is red because we don't have your sign off. George will turn around pretty much immediately and sign off on whatever the thing is, but it helps us communicate better. Just putting those practices that we're learning into place, whatever they are, just makes us stronger.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:39]:
Yes. Well, oh, geez. Now I need to have you on for another discussion at some point because it sounds like you have. I spent years at SpaceX trying to develop kind of like project management for L D for our team. Do it kind of what you're talking about. I think we got there kind of, but I think it sounds like you have a much better system than we ever got to. So I do 100% agree that the more you can, especially if you're in a company that's really busy and everybody's really project focused, the more you can act like them, the easier it's going to be to work with everybody. For sure.
Loren Sanders [00:26:22]:
Yeah. It's always interesting to hear what the business thinks we can do and what they think we can't do. For example, one of the groups that we work with said, I think we want to use a vendor for this because we want to make it engaging. And I was like, hey, time out. That's what we do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:42]:
No. How did you handle that?
Loren Sanders [00:26:48]:
We actually did a prototype for them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:51]:
Oh, great.
Loren Sanders [00:26:52]:
To show them just exactly what we could do, because that particular program owner hadn't worked with this group before. So they were used to working with whatever they had worked with in the past and had certain ideas about what LND could do or was capable of. And we're like, no, we're going to deliver on this engaging thing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:12]:
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, everybody has their own preconceived notion, and your company might have the most stellar LND team ever, but somebody came from another company where it wasn't that way. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. And the only way going back to kind of how we started this, with building relationships with stakeholders. The fastest way to build a strong relationship with a stakeholder is to quickly deliver something of quality, like don't promise the moon, don't start with solving all the problems. Just like, identify this one thing. Quick prototype. Here you go. This is what we can do. And now you have a relationship that's based on working together, which is always going to be stronger, and they have.
Loren Sanders [00:27:54]:
Something to react to.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:59]:
I think I missed that. What was the last thing you said? My Internet cut out for a second.
Loren Sanders [00:28:03]:
They have something to react.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:06]:
Yeah.
Loren Sanders [00:28:07]:
And they can tell you how they feel about it or what needs to change or what they like.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:13]:
That is exactly right. Awesome. Well, I think that is a great place to end off. So thank you so much for your time today. Lauren really appreciated it. And I do think we're going to have to have another conversation just around L. D. Project management. That sounds like it could be a good discussion. I'm down for well, have it's Friday, end of the day, so have a great weekend.
Loren Sanders [00:28:39]:
You too. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:41]:
Bye. You know, we talk a lot about developing other people, and that's our role, but how many of us actually get a chance to develop ourselves in our role? And what does that development look like?
Loren Sanders [00:29:36]:
We are great at giving other people shoes as the shoemaker, but we are not good at making our own or making sure that we even have shoes on our feet sometimes. My feeling is, if we aren't developing ourselves, we're not going to get better, we aren't going to advance our profession. And that prioritizing yourself is going to help you look beyond just the core skills of learning and help you make better connections to both the business and what matters to them, as well as to your craft.
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