Let’s Talk Start-ups w/Brian Morrison
Episode Overview
Welcome to another episode of Making Better, the podcast where we delve into all things personal and professional development. In this episode, titled "Let’s Talk Start-ups," our host, Matt Gjertsen, sits down with special guest Brian Morrison to discuss the importance of learning and development. As an expert who has worked extensively with HR teams, primarily in HR and sales, Brian shares his insights on how inefficiencies within the organization can contribute to issues such as customer retention and churn rate. He highlights the impact of aligning language and expectations, the role of cross-functional communication, and the need for continuous training and updates to ensure everyone is on the same page. Additionally, Brian emphasizes why the learning function should be given early consideration and integrated into the planning process of any organization, particularly those in the scaling stage. We also explore strategies for hiring learning professionals, the significance of being utility players early on, and the creation of a learning charter. Tune in as Brian provides invaluable advice and shares his experiences in building a culture of continuous learning. So, whether you're a founder, a manager, or an individual looking to enhance your own professional development, get ready to dive deep into the world of L&D and discover how you can make better!
About Brian Morrison
Brian Morrison is the Senior Director of Learning & Development at Heart. Over the last 10+ years, Brian has scaled the learning teams of companies you have probably heard of like livingsocial, Ziprecruiter, and Bambee HR. Living in Long Beach with his wife, daughter and two dogs, he is always trying to keep the good vibes flowing.
Full Transcript
-
Brian Morrison [00:00:00]:
There's two, there's kind of two parts to the way that I think about this. There is. When do you need to hire somebody to manage learning?
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:07]:
Sure.
Brian Morrison [00:00:07]:
And when do you need to start thinking about the learning function? And I think there is never, you can never be too early in your planning around how are we going to continue learning in this organization.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:21]:
Welcome to Making Better, a podcast from Better Everyday studio videos devoted to helping small learning teams have a big impact. Today we are talking to Brian Morrison, senior Director of Learning and Development at Heart. Over the past ten years, Brian has scaled the learning teams of some companies you have probably heard of like Living Social, ZipRecruiter and Bambi HR living in Long Beach with his wife, daughter and two dogs. He is always trying to keep the good vibes flowing. So let's get started. Brian. Welcome to the making. Better podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you. How are you doing today?
Brian Morrison [00:00:55]:
Doing great. Excited to be here in the middle of training a new cohort of sales reps. It's week one.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:04]:
Excellent.
Brian Morrison [00:01:04]:
Just getting up to speed on, you know, molding some beautiful minds this week. So doing well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:12]:
Awesome. That is one of the best things about our profession I think is one, there's always more to do and there's two, always new people to impact and help, which is so great.
Brian Morrison [00:01:23]:
Yeah, I definitely love variety and being in this position and having new higher class after new hire class get a chance to meet a bunch of new folks. So that is a beautiful part about this job.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:37]:
Yeah, for sure. Well the intro to the show kind of went over just how extensive your experience is at scaling new learning teams. And so I'd love to start with just like the simple question of when does a company need learning? Because I think so many people, they come into established teams or they're at bigger companies, but when a company is just starting and I often get asked this question when is a company ready for learning?
Brian Morrison [00:02:04]:
Honestly, look, there's kind of two parts to the way that I think about this. There is when do you need to hire somebody to manage learning?
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:13]:
Sure.
Brian Morrison [00:02:14]:
And when do you need to start thinking about the learning function? And I think you can never be too early in your planning around how are we going to continue learning in this organization. Scaling companies, one of the things that I think is the hardest thing for them to do is making sure that they're documenting processes and learnings that they're going through on this journey to whether it's profitability or funding or whatever their goal is or their KPIs are. Because so many times when I've joined these companies it's been, hey, we got all this stuff and it's in like ten different places you can go. We have a learn center over here and there's like a couple of softwares where we got some specs that our engineers put together. So I think that for founders or for people that are just like they're just getting to the point where it's inception and they're just starting. You can never start thinking about this too early because look, eventually you are going to need a learning professional. You're going to need a trainer at some point in time. Why not have a little bit of infrastructure in place that they can take over, make their jobs a little bit easier? So again, I think it's never too early to start thinking about it. Start strategizing on how you're going to kind of give those teachings or those learnings that you've had early in your time as a founder to the next person that's going to maybe take that on. Eventually, every founder gets to the point where they just can't be involved with everything. And at that point you're going to have to have somebody that owns this. But it is one of those things that goes left. It's an afterthought, right? Everything else is accounted for. But the learning function is one of those things where at one point, either that founder or that team looks around and says, well, how do we scale this now? And we're going to need to take care of this part of our organization and we don't have anybody to do it. Let's bring somebody in and have them figure it out. Right? Yeah, you got to do that early. And then the second part is like, when do you hire that learning professional? And I think there's a number of things you have to evaluate there. I think if it's going to be a sales organization, probably earlier than other companies because you need good salespeople. And regardless of what your thing is that you're kind of selling, there's going to be some nuance to it and you want to figure out what's the best way to go to market, how do you sell it effectively. And you got to be able to replicate that. And the only way you could do that is tribal knowledge or you get somebody that's going to help you scale that team. So look, it could be a player coach. You could have somebody that can run L and D and be a sales manager at the same time. Sales enablement, sales manager. So there's a couple of ways you can handle that because obviously bootstrapping and being scrappy and all that stuff can sometimes prevent companies from wanting to pull the trigger on a learning hire, which totally makes sense. But there's certainly ways that you can do that in a scrappy way where you're not necessarily just earmarking this particular person is just doing the learning function. I've wore that hat before.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:42]:
Yeah. So on that note, if it's not like the full time, we're diving into the L and D role fully. What are some things you've seen work for whether it's that player, coach, model, or what are some things you've seen work. If you're not necessarily ready to go full in, or even if you do have a learning team, what's helpful? If there's like a solo learning person, what are some effective ways they can use other people out in the business to learning ends?
Brian Morrison [00:06:11]:
Yeah, so I'll touch on the first one first. How have I seen it work? Effectively, I think what you look for is somebody that's multifaceted so that you can kind of check a couple of boxes. Now the best person for that kind of role is somebody with an HR background because now you have somebody that can kind of serve to help you with some of your HR strategy, which again, I think can never happen early enough. If you got a handful of employees, you're going to need somebody that's going to be looking out for you from an HR perspective to make sure internally and externally you're covering your bases. And a lot of times HR professionals have a little bit of L and D experience in some capacity. If they're sherm certified or whatever like myself, you're going to get some of that exposure to L and D through your certification. Absolutely. So I think that is a great way to get somebody to be able to help you with the L and D function is make sure that they can do kind of more than one job. So that way, look, you're paying for one person, but you're actually getting maybe two or three roles out of it. Because if it's super early on in the organization's development, you don't really need a full time L and D person building a little content, doing some new hire classes. Maybe you're hiring one person a month or something like that. And then again, have them work on your policies. Have them work on internal things around culture and things like that that still need to start from somewhere and that HR person can serve the purpose. Now the second part of that is having somebody in the L and D function, that's a singular force. And outside of giving them a multitude of roles, when you get this person in the organization, I think having them approach all of the different areas of the business and figure out where are my subject matter experts, who is the person that knows the most, where can I find and where can I extract information from? I'm only this singular force. So maybe during onboarding it's me doing a lot, but then I can bring in subject matter experts. I can bring in the CEO. If the company is small enough, the CEO would probably be excited to do that, right? So you got to lean on all of the folks within the organization to kind of help you with that onboarding process, help them put the content together. A number of years ago, I met with a head of l and D at a company in Santa Monica and we were just shooting the breeze and asked him, how many learning professionals do you have in your organization? He's like, 371. I said, that's insane. What are you talking about? He's like, well, that's how many employees we have. And I was like, well, tell there you go. He's like, well, 371 people. What I did is I put a survey out and I said, who can teach our employees something? And everybody can teach something, right?
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:11]:
Exactly.
Brian Morrison [00:09:12]:
What they did is they started saying, like, all right, so on Thursday afternoon, open Forum, there's a class for bicycle repair. There's ten seats available. Who wants to show up and learn something about bicycle repair? Everybody was teaching something. It's about creating the learning culture. Let everybody be an educator at a certain point. Usually when you're that small, that scrappy, you're usually pretty aligned with the goals and the vision mission. So get them involved and they can probably teach something. So I think the subject matter experts are important, but again, you can kind of lean on everybody to help out in that situation.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:48]:
That's so great. And I think it really comes back to kind of the YouTube era and the creator area that we have of so many people are teaching other people without any formal training background. And then as us as learning professionals, it kind of twists that where we're much more coach of learning of how to teach people than traditional facilitators are standing on the stage teaching people. It's a very different mindset.
Brian Morrison [00:10:17]:
I love doing that too, because people get so excited when they get the opportunity to teach and then giving them a couple because they're always like, how did I do? How did I do? Was that okay? You're like, you're great. Just be yourself. It's like, it's perfect. You did a great job. Because they're so excited and usually, look, we know this, but it's just about the way you're delivering is so much what it's such a big component of what the learning initiative is. The content is super important. The agenda and everything is important. But if they're excited and they're delivering that way, that really drives it home. So I love watching folks get excited and giving them the opportunity to kind of be the trainer. It's fun.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:05]:
Absolutely. I totally agree with you on having that energy is really at least half the battle. Do you provide any resources or what specific guidance do you give around the content? That's what we do. We take knowledge and reframe it and figure out what's the most important thing to talk about and make sure we're delivering it in the right format. But that's not what other people do. So what kind of guidance do you give people to make sure that they're not just like spouting off a bunch of facts or they're delivering something that's really going to be impactful?
Brian Morrison [00:11:38]:
Well, this is where I might get a little micromanagey because I love giving people that opportunity. But I feel it's very important as the person with the learning experience and the person that's kind of done this for a while in the organization or the person that's designated to do this, we should be the ambassador, we should be the co host of the event. We should make sure because look, at the end of the day, you can't teach somebody a crash course and how to do this effectively in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. You can give them the basics, you could tell them, but sometimes people just it's just not inherently what they're good at. And so I think if at all possible, you're the co host and you kick the event off and you get excited that we got this subject matter expert here. And then sometimes what I do is I get a sense and I'm sure you felt this before, you know when there's a little bit of a lull, I know when I should jump in and ask a question and I know when I should be pushing the audience to ask questions. And I know when it's time to take a break. And those things just from experience and from what I do for a living every single day, I know when to do those things. So that's what I encourage the learning professionals to do that are in that situation. Be the ambassador, be the co host. That way you can make sure that the event goes off without a hitch because you're kind of ushering along a good experience.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:15]:
That's such a great way to think about it. It's almost like sometimes you're that star student that's always ready to ask the question and stuff like that because so often the crowd won't and it's like, oh, the energy is dying down and you can keep it going. I love that. That's a really great way. 100% awesome. So switching gears a little bit. So you've decided there's a difference between before you hire after you hire a learning person, then you kind of dive in. One thing that I always find is interesting and surprising, honestly, in some companies, is where those needs crop up first, whether it's a problem or just it becomes apparent. What are some different things that you have seen happen in the business that cause people to say, like, okay, we need to solve this? I mean, you mentioned one with the scaling where it's just like, okay, we're going to grow really fast. Have you seen other places where things commonly pop up?
Brian Morrison [00:14:12]:
Yeah, I mean, look, I've worked a lot with HR Teams account and mostly HR and sales. So a lot of the problems that I see come from inefficiencies around the way that certain things are happening within the organization. You look at whether it's retention of customers, it's the way that we're managing the accounts, it's how we're selling the customers and setting the expectations to make sure that the sales reps are selling the way that they should be selling and selling the right expectations. So when we get to account management, they're not going to churn within the first 30 days because the sales reps did an effective job of setting expectations. Working with salespeople is wonderful, inherently salesperson at heart. But when you give a salesperson commission, sometimes what comes out of their mouth might not necessarily align with what the expectations are of the product or the service. Look, you got to give it to them. They get creative sometimes in how they position things, but obviously that can be a huge issue when it comes to retention, when it comes to your churn rate and all the other things that can kind of tie into that. So those are obviously some of the things that I've helped alleviate in the past is like, how do we reduce churn, how do we set the right expectations? And those two things, I think, are tied hand in hand. Sales reps got to sell the right way and then that helps us with churn. Because when you get to account management, like, this isn't what I expected, let's get them to the point where when they get there, it is what they expected because the sales reps know exactly how to sell and what's expected. And that falls into another issue that I've seen a lot, which is this inability for there to be good cross functional communication. So it's like the engineering team is over here, the product team is over here. They have their Sprints and they are sprinting now. There is sometimes especially even on small teams and there's only a handful of people in a company, there is a disconnect between their Sprint, what's going to launch in two weeks, and what the sales reps are actually saying every day on the phones. And so I've made it a point in my current organization as soon as I came in, that was my focus, is like, I need to make sure that the training team, because I've seen it one too many times where training needs to be that connective tissue behind what's coming down the pike with product rollouts and engineering bugs that are being fixed. Let's make sure that the sales team knows that. Let's update our script accordingly. Let's train everybody accordingly. And it's got to go all the way across to customer success so everybody is clear on that. And so I think that is a big part of where LND can make major impact on a company of various sizes by just kind of like making sure that from an internal communication standpoint, everybody's on the same page.
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:28]:
I love that phrase that you used of being the connective tissue because I think you're right, especially at earlier companies. Not only are you right that everybody's just running as fast as they can and so it's understandable that they're not keeping up with one another, but having that internal comms role is really good. On that note, I would wonder so when you come in, I mean, we chatted a little bit before this about how so rarely do we get to kind of like geek out on learning stuff. And I think every learning professional would resonate with the idea of you're in a company and nobody else in the company understands what you do. So when you're that first person that comes in and you're standing up the team, how do you level set expectations with the leadership with your leadership of, like, whether it's the CEO or head of HR, whoever you're head. Of sales. What are the kinds of benchmarks that you set for success, for yourself and your function so that you can continue to grow? And obviously that's going to depend on what the needs are. But I'd love to kind of hear how you think about that.
Brian Morrison [00:18:32]:
Yeah, so there's a couple of components to that. Obviously, it's like what are your own personal goals within the role that you've taken? And then obviously, whether you're reporting to the CEO or you're reporting to the head of HR or whoever you report to, they're going to have their own set of expectations. But I think for me, the biggest thing that we can do is get people excited about the fact that we are establishing a culture of learning within any organization. And again, that's why when I was talking about that LND leader that I met a number of years ago that said I have 371 trainers, it's like that is a perfect example of a company that has a flourishing learning culture. And I think that's the most important thing you can do, whether it's building programs, doing a book club, I mean, there's all kinds of things you can do. And this past summer I was interviewing with some companies and I was interviewing for a sales enablement role and I was doing a lot of research around how do you create an enablement charter, how do you create an L and D charter. And I think doing that is a great exercise for any learning professional to do. And I encourage if you don't have a learning charter, if you've never done that, start doing some research. You can google it. There's a ton of examples out there. I think it is such an important thing to do. It's helped me so much as a learning professional because it gets you thinking about what are my goals, how do they align with what the goals are in the organization? And so I'm walking in and I know I've got my personal goals. They're aligned with the KPIs, the OKRs or whatever we're calling them at the said organization. And it just gives you something to make sure you have focus and that can come down to, again, specifics around the KPIs and all that kind of stuff. Or it can be like within the first six months. I want to make sure that we have a good onboarding process for all employees and we have a new curriculum for the sales training. It's just getting it in a documented form. So that way it's kind of like you can call it a 30, 60, 90, if you will. But again, it's just something, it's a little bit more robust than that. It's just like having a defined plan and then getting the buy in from all the stakeholders, holders in your organization. Is it the CEO, is it the CFO? Letting everybody know this is my plan. So now they feel confident that not only do we hire a learning professional, but this person has a plan in place and we can feel confident that this person is going to be an actual contributor and we can trusted advisor in our company and they feel good about the person that they've brought into the organization. The tough part for us, as you know, is sometimes trying to show the actual benefits of our learning programs. With all the things that are happening in an organization, if the revenue upticks a little bit over a particular quarter, how can you definitively tie that to your learning programs? It becomes really difficult. And sometimes the learning professionals, like a recruiter or something like that, they can be the first one to go if there's downsizing because they haven't been able to effectively show their value and their ties to the metrics that are important. So again, I think it's really important right from the very beginning to position yourself as a professional that's going to make an impact. And I think having some sort of charter in place is a great first step in doing that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:26]:
I love that for so many reasons. One, it really is that foreseen function of what we always talk about, of getting aligned with the business, where it's just like, you're going to do this. But I think the second part I really love the most is learning is such a consistent need everywhere, whether it's formal or informal. Like every employee needs training, every manager needs something for their team and no training team can ever fully meet that need. And so how you explained it kind of what I heard was a lot of writing it down, get in the line with your boss, but then floating it around all the other leadership so everybody knows what you're working. On what you're promising on delivering, why you've made that a priority so that when you're not solving their pet project, they already know that they know why and give them an opportunity to say, like, no, but my pet project should be on the list. And then you can have a whole debate. But I love that alignment and transparency.
Brian Morrison [00:23:28]:
Yeah, and if you think about it, the CEO right, a lot of times they come up with like this is the vision and my mission for the company. You can replicate something similar to that with your own learning team. I always tell the sales reps that I'm training like you're running your own little business in this umbrella of this company. And I think of running a learning team the same way. It's our own little division of the business and our own little company and our stakeholders, our customers are the executives in this company and all the people that we serve from a learning function. I love to look at the folks as my customers because then it's not just somebody that I shouldn't be getting frustrated with them. So you think about it. Would you treat a customer if you were in a customer success role? Or the way that you sometimes would think about your interactions with your coworkers? Because sometimes the gloves come off with your coworkers. There's a thin line there between professionalism and being unprofessional. And so as long as you always have that in mind, and I think, again, you can get into that mindset really quickly by looking at this as like, hey, this is my charter. These are the customers that I'm serving. This is my mission, this is my vision. This is where I want to take this learning team. So I think that helps a lot.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:50]:
I love it. So we talked about kind of the before learning starts and when learning starts, and then kind of the goals that you typically have in an organization, but early on, but you also have helped grow learning teams at a lot of organizations. So once you get that charter in place and you're executing on those skills, what have you seen is the most common, like, first hire, second hire? What are the roles that typically get filled first as you're going from that solo learning person to two, three, four people?
Brian Morrison [00:25:24]:
Yeah. Let me start by saying some of the pitfalls that I've experienced in hiring. What I think you got to be really good at doing is when you're the first person on the learning team, you have got to be a utility player. You've got to be able to do a lot of different things. And I think in a scaling organization, you have to get really good at being able to recruit and hire other utility players until your business is at the point where you can justify actual isolated roles that have a singular function. Because the biggest mistake learning teams can make is saying, I need a data guy on the learning team, I need a content specialist on the learning team, I need a trainer for CS, and I need a trainer for sales. And sometimes the getting is good. You just got a huge round of funding and like, hey, let's hire. But then fast forward 14 months and, you know, they're tightening the belt a little bit, and all of a sudden there's a headcount there and they're like, but wait, what is that? They just train CS folks that we hire only once a month and we haven't had a class in two months. But what do they do besides that? And now they're looking at your costs and saying like, yeah, maybe this doesn't make sense necessarily. So I think the most important thing scaling learning teams can do is to find other utility players. They can do a little bit of content, they can deliver training, they're decent at using data tables, and maybe they can use some of the tools needed. If nothing else, use some Excel. You got to find somebody that's going to be able to do a little bit of everything. Those are the most important and you can find them. They're out there. And I think that is the most impactful thing I can recommend for scaling learning teams is find those utility players because they're so much more impactful and it doesn't put as much pressure on you to justify the cost that you have now for your headcount. So that's the best thing, I think, best advice I can give.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:53]:
I think that's really good advice because I think I see on LinkedIn and other places a lot, a lot of debate about job titles and what they mean and what their functions are. And I always just come back to all that matters is the organization you're joining. A job title doesn't have a meaning out in the ether. That just exists. It's all about and it often comes down to, are you joining a large company or a small company? Like if you're joining a large enterprise company, then maybe an elearning developer is an elearning developer. But if you join a company of under 1000 people, they're not going to be just an elearning developer.
Brian Morrison [00:28:30]:
100%. Yeah, and I've had those conversations both ways where it's like, we're getting to the point where we're getting to that thousand headcount point and now we need to have bigger teams. But predominantly I've worked from the ground up and with a couple of hundred employees or 100 employees even, you're going to be really hard pressed to justify a headcount that does a singular role.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:03]:
Yeah, no, 100%. Well, Brian, I want to be respectful of your time. We could probably chat for a whole lot longer given the wealth of experience that you have. So I can already tell we should probably do this again sometime. Is there any last things that you want to make sure we chat?
Brian Morrison [00:29:21]:
It's just I'm so excited. Number one, that somebody with your background and guys, if you don't know Matt's background, please check him out on LinkedIn because this guy, I think you might have been to space or you've at least helped.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:42]:
Not quite. Yeah, one day. Not there yet.
Brian Morrison [00:29:45]:
But I mean, for me it is so awesome to see somebody like yourself that has such an amazing pedigree and you've done so many things. Professionally be out here with your megaphone that you have talking about how important the learning function is in organizations. Because in my opinion, it's one of those things that is in some ways not celebrated as much as it should be and it is such an important function. And if anybody's out there listening to this and you are starting a business or you have a small business and you haven't started thinking about the learning function and how you are going to document what you've learned, so far and what you're going to learn in the coming years and quarters. Start doing that now, because you're going to regret it at some point. You're going to need to know all of this information. So whether that be you start creating some sort of learn center in Jira or Notion or whatever software you're using, start documenting Google Drive, whatever, but start documenting the learnings that you've had so far, and you're going to thank yourself. Because when you hire that first learning professional, they're going to be able to just jump from that like a springboard into a pool and it's going to be amazing what they're going to do for your organization.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:12]:
Yeah. From your mouth to every founder ears. Couldn't say better. The earlier the better. Awesome. Well, Brian, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much and I'm sure we will.
Brian Morrison [00:31:24]:
Yeah, thanks, Matt, I appreciate the man. Great, great chatting with you and have a great weekend.
Thanks for Listening!
It means so much to me and the guests that you chose to spend your time with us. If you enjoyed listening, make sure you subscribe using your favorite player using the links below.
