Writing SOPs w/MJ Hurley
Episode Overview
Welcome to another episode of Making Better, the podcast that explores strategies and insights for improving ourselves and our work. In today's episode, we have the pleasure of chatting with MJ Hurley, a seasoned professional who has spent over 25 years in the field. Throughout their career, MJ's focus has evolved from simply delivering interesting projects to becoming a trusted advisor, engaging with stakeholders in a curious and collaborative manner. MJ brings a unique perspective to the table, sharing their thoughts on training and development, the importance of asking the right questions, and the need to address performance issues beyond just training. Join us as we dive into the world of writing SOPs with MJ Hurley on this enlightening episode of Making Better.
About MJ Hurley
MJ Hurley is an Executive Trainer at Hurley Write. One of the biggest barriers to effective training is a lack of documentation for what we are trying to train. Documentation happens to be MJs specialty!
Full Transcript
-
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:00]:
You talked a lot about kind of the idea of like building a relationship with stakeholders and subject matter experts particularly. I was wondering if you could kind of go back to that and expand.
MJ Hurley [00:00:10]:
On that at all. Sure. I mean, gosh, it's been over 25 years that I've been doing this and I was just thinking about not that long ago, what has the progression been? And first started out, it was all about the the interesting work, the development or delivery in a classroom work. Working with stakeholders was very much order taker transactional and not surprising, new in your profession, new as a professional, but over time transitioning from that to I think it's the trusted advisors out there. But understand coming at it instead of a transaction, coming at any engagement with stakeholders from the perspective of being curious about them, their needs, understanding their business, their language, their goals and outcomes that they're trying to get, and then taking a collaborative approach rather than an order taker approach.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:59]:
Welcome to Making Better, a podcast from Better Everyday Studios devoted to helping small learning teams have a big impact. Today we are talking with Joe Leggett, a talent and development leader with over 25 years of experience managing effective training programs in a variety of industries. I recently chatted with Joe about the importance of building strong stakeholder relationships, so I wanted to have him back on the podcast to go a bit deeper. Joe, welcome so much to the podcast today. How are you doing?
MJ Hurley [00:01:27]:
Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. I'm doing great. How are you today?
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:30]:
I'm doing awesome. We first met and chatted a couple of weeks ago and as soon as I talked to you, as soon as we started talking, I knew I had to have you on the show. One thing that I'd just love to start with, because I feel like almost every conversation around learning and development starts with how people fell into learning and development. But that's not quite what happened to you. Right? If I remember correctly, yours was a little bit more systematic, like you're at an actual formal L and D professional.
MJ Hurley [00:02:01]:
Almost correct. Yeah, I guess if you go all the way back to the start, I somewhat fell into it. I took a gap year after graduating my undergraduate degree and was trying to figure out what to do. Was looking at potentially going back and getting a teaching degree, teach English in high school. And when I found out about this thing called training and development. So teaching adults in business situations instead looked into it and immediately decided to go that direction. And I went back to school, got a degree focusing on that area and after a couple of years was in the field.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:39]:
Awesome.
MJ Hurley [00:02:40]:
Been there ever since.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:41]:
Yeah, exactly. And so, I don't know, have you seen as you've been in the industry, how has that kind of changed your has it changed your view at all when you think about other people that you meet, the fact that you've kind of done this from the beginning of.
MJ Hurley [00:02:55]:
Your professional career, how has it changed?
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:00]:
Or just like, do you have a different view you feel like, than what you see from other people's?
MJ Hurley [00:03:04]:
I think a lot of times I do have a different view, and I think I do see some similarities with people who identified training and development as something they're interested in, went out and got the education and then started practicing and kind of put together their calling plus their profession, plus their education. I think there's a little bit of a difference. I tend to see more of that deeper level of the technical, theoretical, neuroscience background in people who've pursued the education. Not entirely. I think you have plenty of people who are new to it, and they're fascinated by it and dive right in and learn that. But I see different things brought by people that come from other disciplines, and sometimes they don't go back and get the fundamentals to the same level as somebody who started intentionally with the education and practicing and building has.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:59]:
Yeah, I can see that. And I think that's something it kind of makes me think of something that I know Heidi Kirby on LinkedIn talks a lot about of there seems to be a pretty sizable gap sometimes between the theory and the practice on our profession.
MJ Hurley [00:04:16]:
Yeah, and I think you see it if you look at taking stop looking, you'll see it in anything else too, right? I mean, see it in marketing. And if I were to move into marketing, I probably would not go back and get that same level of foundational information as somebody who knew they wanted to do marketing and studied it and then started practicing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. Well, one of the big things that stuck out to me in our conversation a few weeks ago was you talked a lot about kind of the idea of building a relationship with stakeholders and subject matter experts particularly. One thing you really mentioned was kind of how your views change, like the mistakes you made earlier in your career. I was wondering if you could kind of go back to that and expand.
MJ Hurley [00:05:03]:
On that at all. Sure. Gosh, it's been over 25 years that I've been doing this, and I've gone through a couple of different industries, different individual, different leadership roles. And I was just thinking about not that long ago, what has the progression been? And first started out, it was all about the interesting work, the development or delivery in a classroom work. And I think I was very transactional. So in terms of I was thinking about working with stakeholders. It was very much order taker transactional and not surprising, new in your profession, new as a professional. But over time between, I think, mastering and being comfortable with what I was doing on my end in training and development, but also just learning about how to better support organizations. Transitioning from that to I think it's the trusted advisors out there, but coming at it instead of a transaction, coming at any engagement with stakeholders from the perspective of being curious about them, their needs, understanding their business, their language, their goals and outcomes that they're trying to get, and then taking a collaborative approach rather than an order taker approach.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:20]:
That makes sense. Yeah, I think having that curiosity I think is the key first step in developing that relationship.
MJ Hurley [00:06:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's a choice, right? I saw an article last summer, I think it was, it was a great little article. Curiosity is a state, not a trait. And a lot of times we talk about it like somebody just has curiosity. Right. And it really is a choice when you hear something or you're going to engage with somebody choosing to ask questions, not make judgments or push your agenda, but asking them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:56]:
Yeah. So on that, if it is a choice and something that you really want to do, what do you see as put yourself back in your position years ago or anybody who's out in the field right now, they're new to a company, they're just getting started with learning. What do you see as good simple ways to start exercising or developing that curiosity or showing that curiosity?
MJ Hurley [00:07:18]:
Great question. I think mastering questions is critical for a lot of roles, but especially ours when analysis is a key part of what we do. And I even step back further when I'm in my approach. I evolved from what I would call it a traditional that really focused training development. I have one hammer, so I'm going to use it on all my problems to more of a performance improvement approach. And so asking questions to figure out is training even the right solution? And if not, is there still an opportunity or a way for me to help? And if not, can I direct you to somebody else or just plain say I'm the wrong guy to come to? This is a different type of problem. So keeping an open mind, but starting off with a deliberate set of questions, I guess just basic needs analysis questions, but always having those in your back pocket and being ready to ask follow up questions and dive deeper and really understand. And again, using good questioning skill sets, rephrasing what they say and communication skills along with it so they hear that you're taking an interest in their business that you do understand now. So I think that's a big part of that stakeholder management and building the trust is not just that you are trying to understand them, but do you communicate to them in a way that they recognize it?
Matt Gjertsen [00:08:43]:
Yeah, no absolutely. One thing you hit on there was this idea of asking those questions of is training even the problem? A friend of mine who's manager or director of training at an aerospace company was saying how he finds it interesting that ever since he got his new role, he spends most of his time convincing people that training is not the answer.
MJ Hurley [00:09:06]:
It's not. And was it? Rumbler embrace his research and going back decades was something like two thirds of the performance problems were environmental or external to the performer. They were unclear expectations and bad feedback and systems and processes that are broken and things like that. And I think I can't remember which one of them was interviewed not a few years ago. And they said, do you think that still holds true? And he said, Heck no. We've gotten so much better at training that training is a smaller percentage of the solutions these days and it's more and more that environmental stuff. So helping people understand that but in a way that isn't offensive. I stuck my foot in it the first time as a brand new training manager wanted to move from this transactional order taking training to being a performance focused partner. And the solution was not training. The solution was the manager needed to clarify expectations and follow through on those because it had people that were sometimes following a process correctly and sometimes not. And if they can do it, if they know how to do it sometimes, then they know how to do it. And I went after that. I was excited. This is a great opportunity, this is the way I want to approach things. And I burned that relationship for a short time and I had to go back and apologize and rebuild it and work on it for a while, well over a year to get it back to where it was.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:37]:
Yeah. So what does that look like? How can someone be obviously it's very situational and depends on the relationship. But I would say the average relationship is probably manager from the business comes to you, you maybe know their name or know where they are in the business, but you haven't really worked with them before. What's the wrong way to handle that? What's too aggressive, you think?
MJ Hurley [00:11:05]:
I think it's jump into conclusions and you come to me and say I have the situation and I think I understand it and say, hey man, I got the perfect solution for you and just kind of force that force my agenda or something. I think you see a lot from vendors where your problem is maybe a partial overlap to their solution, but they really want to sell their solution and it's canned as opposed to again, I think it's getting back to asking good questions and using questions to kind of guide them to where you think is the right solution. Because I think also by asking those questions you might uncover something and realize, oh, I thought it was unclear expectations, but really is there is a trading component here. So I think that's the to me, it's just not going in with an agenda and a solution that you think is right. You might explore that with them, but I think asking a lot of questions and staying open minded to what you hear yeah, really.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:07]:
I think that's the key right there, is being open minded in the early stages of that relationship. Because a lot of times, especially at a lot of companies these days, everybody's just so busy and under the gun. And often when people are looking for training help, it's like the problem needed to be addressed six months ago. So how do you kind of almost thread that needle or walk that line of wanting to ask the questions, wanting to do the needs analysis, but the business leader being like, hey, look, I just want this course. Can we just get this course and get it out the door? How do you navigate that?
MJ Hurley [00:12:43]:
I think that's sometimes where I've flexed and I don't want to say lower my standards, but allowed them to drive to get that initial partnership and then use how we work together as a way to start educate them on my approach and my philosophy. So it might be sure we'll get that class going, but in order to make sure that class does what you need it to do, we have to have some conversation. I need to understand some things and then kind of do that analysis. After you've agreed to a solution and heavily understanding why they want it, we hear about a lot about that word why. It's important to understand the why, your own why, other people's whys, but why they want it, what are they trying to accomplish? And if they give you something concrete to go off of where you say, that's really not this training solution is not going to affect that outcome, start exploring it with them. And you have to know your audience there too. Some people, you can just lay it out factually. Others, you might have to continue to ask questions until they see it and kind of discover it themselves by thinking about it. If you can get them to engage like that. As much as I don't like doing that transactional order taker approach, I've done that. A couple with some people on multiple projects just to get those engagements behind us and a little bit of working relationships and then start. Trying to push for a little more of engagement up front to get a better long term solution or looking at the results with them. Okay, we did this. You said that you wanted this outcome. We didn't really get it. Let's explore why.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:24]:
Yeah, because probably the ultimate outcome kind of, as you said, is for them to kind of look at it. And because of the questions you've posed and because of the thinking you've kind of just kind of put out there, they just kind of come to this realization of maybe this course isn't the best way to get what I need. Yeah, absolutely. And I bet there is almost kind of, unfortunately, an inverse relationship of some sort where it's like the companies where training is the weakest need to rely the longest on that kind of order taker mentality in some sense because they don't have any sense of what training can do. And so they just hire somebody to just do the job, just make the courses, just get the LMS going, whatever it is. And you probably have to spend a fair amount of time just kind of doing what they're saying and showing them that you can get stuff done, build the respect that you can build what they want before you can then adjust relationship to build what they need.
MJ Hurley [00:15:27]:
I think that's a fair statement.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:30]:
Yes.
MJ Hurley [00:15:33]:
The right approach isn't a part of the culture. I say right approach, what I think is a better approach most of the time. It's not always the right approach every time, but yeah, I think what is more long term, more likely to get you the results that you want yes. Isn't always an option where they need the most.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, you also work in a manufacturing environment. I've done training in a manufacturing environment. It's different. It's a very interesting kind of place. What do you see as different about training in a manufacturing environment?
MJ Hurley [00:16:16]:
I've worked retail, grocery, my second company that's in automotive manufacturing, and then in between those two was direct selling. So it's been a pretty varied experience. And I've worked a little bit on the side with some financial institutions for brief side work. And I was thinking about that. You posed that question for me to think about. And I don't see a huge difference from industry to industry, company to company, mainly because the key ingredient in this equation is always the same people. When I've talked about this with some friends, colleagues, I think it's kind of like the discussion around how much of our DNA differentiates us from a banana. Such a tiny amount. We think we're so different from bana, but it's like a couple of percentage points, right?
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:07]:
Yeah.
MJ Hurley [00:17:08]:
So I think that's kind of like, organizations are like that too. A lot of people like to say, oh, our organization is unique, because and fill in the blanking. Well, if you've been around a little bit and exposed to some other companies and you realize how similar that is to other companies, that isn't to say that there isn't an impact like manufacturing companies are going to tend to be, I think, process driven.
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:31]:
Sure.
MJ Hurley [00:17:32]:
Which would be a little different than, say, the sales company that came from, which was relationship driven. So it might be more in the little details like how do decisions get made? Is it one person? Is it consensus driven? But I think the bulk of it, when you're talking about engaging with stakeholders and building that relationship up. People are people and everybody has an objective for their job and things that they're under pressure to do. And so the more you can help them with that, the more you're going to have success building that relationship.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:04]:
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. It's those teeny tiny differences that when you're new or from afar, they can seem like they dramatically affect the outcome. But when you really get into it, it's kind of the same nuts and bolts. That definitely makes sense.
MJ Hurley [00:18:23]:
And I guess to me, I fall back partly because the tools that I would apply, it wouldn't matter what company I'm going into, it's getting back to those. So to me, the tools and so my work stays the same. It's asking those questions, understand the situation, their priorities, and what options have been tried and what do we know about the target audience for whatever issue that was going on? What are the other factors in play? It's those questioning skills. Those foundational skills are going to be the same. So it might be a little bit of a difference in how you use them, how you communicate, the style.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:58]:
Sure.
MJ Hurley [00:18:58]:
But the substance, the skill sets would be the same.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:02]:
Yeah, that makes sense.
MJ Hurley [00:19:04]:
At least that'd be my approach.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:05]:
Yeah, no, that makes sense because you're relatively new, you're year A into your current role. Correct. How was that kind of coming in? What were some of the first steps that you took to start developing those relationships in a new organization?
MJ Hurley [00:19:25]:
Sure. Well, the first 90 days was all about learning. I had to take management on, of course, and make decisions. But as much as possible, I spent my time meeting with people to understand what their needs were. Peers in my management level up, down the organization structure, training of the teams that report to me and their customers. And again, just asking the questions and understanding what's going on. A lot of why are we doing it this way? And being really clear when talking with my team, other teams, that I'm not accusing. I'm really purely gathering information. So being careful with not asking too many of those.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:09]:
Yeah, I was just going to say that is such a question that I always try to put out there as early as possible because sometimes, especially I feel like it's our job to just always ask the dumb question. And sometimes if you don't have a relationship, it can almost come off as insulting in the wrong context. And I think I always like to do that level set of like I'm just asking every question that pops into my brain. I know this is all hard. I know there's all reasons for anything. I'm just trying to understand.
MJ Hurley [00:20:41]:
Yeah, I got my little reminder note over here because it's something I came across a while ago, but clarifying the outcome. So meeting with somebody new, why am I meeting with you? And then also what's my intent behind that? And then let's have that conversation. Or if it's a project, let's work together. So making sure they understand what I'm trying to accomplish and why and then getting to the what.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:06]:
I can only imagine how much more effective that makes your meetings by clarifying that from the get go.
MJ Hurley [00:21:13]:
It definitely helps because again, if you misspeak in asking a question or you don't realize the person you're talking to is I think it's more indirect, communicator, where a why is often viewed as an accusation question. If you started with here's what I'm here to do, here's what I want to accomplish, I'm going to ask a lot of questions. Is that okay? And then dive in. And sometimes harder to phrase a why question as a what question, where it's a little more neutral, viewed neutrally by a lot of people, but especially in the heat of the moment, why would you do that? Again, it's not an accusation, just I want to know. And if you clarify that up front, reiterate it again, reading, knowing how to read people, see if they react to that question, explore that a little bit, stay curious. I think that asking those questions up front and showing a genuine interest in their situation, their business, I think it's one of the things I've had opportunities to leave learning and development throughout my career at different companies and I've outright resisted not just opportunities, but being asked to go move to do something else. Because I love the process of learning just myself. And I think our function is positioned in our organizations in such a great place because you talk to and work with everybody and you have an opportunity to learn about everything. And I think after a while I found in past companies start becoming a connector to parts of the businesses that don't necessarily talk to each other real well or don't know how to talk to each other. Manufacturing a great example, very classic manufacturing versus engineering. A lot of tension there traditionally. And in my previous company, there was. But being able to speak their language and understand what they're trying to accomplish because I work with them on this project and then working with manufacturing this other one, you start seeing and able to articulate. Here's the six or seven things you guys already agree on, and I don't think you realize you agree. So let's get that out in the open and acknowledge is that truly an area of agreement? Cool. Now what can we build off from there? Yeah, I found myself kind of playing mediator a little bit from a performance standpoint.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:28]:
Totally. And I think also to your point about asking the why questions, since those so often don't get asked out in day to day, you find out the context behind decisions. And so engineering is making choices that manufacturing hates or production hates, but it's just because they don't understand some constraint that engineering had, which is why they had to make the decision that way. And you get such a great opportunity to make those connections and just kind of dissolve conflicts that have no reason to exist. But people just don't get the opportunities that we do to see over the fence at all the other teams or.
MJ Hurley [00:24:10]:
Our job is taking the time to ask the questions and discuss it and think about it. And a lot of people don't have that time to have that. Yes. That's not the focus of their jobs. They don't have the time. That's the luxury of taking that time. I think you said earlier we get the opportunity, we're afforded the luxury of asking quote unquote stupid questions. And you say you may even know the answer. You may think everybody in the room knows the answer, but I'm going to ask the quote unquote stupid question because I want us to get the answer out and make it visible and really realize truly that we all do agree or we might uncover something.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:45]:
Yeah, absolutely.
MJ Hurley [00:24:46]:
If you just take those as assumptions, you can go off in the wrong direction.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:50]:
Yes. No, 100% awesome. Yeah, I couldn't agree more that learning and development, when done well, has such an amazing opportunity to be a bridge connector between different parts of the company. So it's such an important way to go. Did you have anything else on that?
MJ Hurley [00:25:10]:
No, I think systems thinking you were asking some things that people could work on learning and I think questioning was one, but that's that systems thinking. See how the pieces connect, seeing the big picture, understand how the individual pieces affect one another and are currently working together or dysfunctional. I only say that because, again, I take that more performance outcome approach, not just training for the sake of training and all I do is build skill, but I want to help people be successful, achieve their objectives for their role, which is going to help, probably help them achieve their personal goals. So that's kind of where I come back to why I want to understand the system and where people pieces fit in.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know we want to watch and be cognizant of our time here. Any other things that you wanted to bring up? Any topics that you wanted to make sure to cover today?
MJ Hurley [00:26:12]:
Yeah, especially if you're talking about I think it was an interesting way you introduced this to talk about the smaller organizations and that's the bulk of the training teams out there. And I'm sitting here right now sitting on a big team at a decent sized company. But I have worked in a two person team before. I've led a three person team and worked with a lot of colleagues like that. And as I moved into bigger organizations, we had bigger teams and people were specialized. Gave me a different appreciation for the challenges that I had experienced before and hadn't even realized by not having access to somebody who's just so deeply into one subdiscipline or related discipline. So I think the question skills, the system thinking and that human performance improvement approach, something to investigate and understand, but thinking outside of just learning resources. So performance support tools, some people naturally think that's part of what we do, other people think it's not. And I would argue that it is. Again, if you're looking at I want my learners to, they don't have to learn directly from me. If they can learn what they needed from a piece of paper or a file that's out on the computer and they know how to find it and they don't have to go off to a class, it's much more efficient and more useful for them. So thinking of all the different, there's a lot of research out there right now with that learning in the moment of need and performance improvement. When I started, it wasn't much talked about. I was lucky enough, I think, to be exposed to it right at the start. One of the professors at Western Michigan where I got my degree was involved in the Society forget what's yeah, Society for Human Performance Improvement. So ATD has picked up now that kind of mantra a bit, but thinking more broadly than just I do. So it's part of that understand not just the business need, but also understand there's a lot more tools you can explore, maybe not master, but start looking at where's an opportunity to use some other tools.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:26]:
Yeah, and I think the key there too is it's really important to make that shift from training to performance. But that doesn't mean you have to be an expert in all things performance. Like, you can't kid yourself to think that the L D team is going to provide all the performance support for the company. It's about being able to identify what's necessary and then bring in the manager, bring in the comms team, bring in the HR team, bring in whoever it is that has the particular skill for the performance improvement intervention that's necessary. It's not always us. It doesn't have to always be us.
MJ Hurley [00:29:07]:
Right. So it's more of putting in a framework and tools to help subject matter experts, those experts you're working with, put some together just for the ease of the user's sake. So putting some standards together, not because you want to manage that, maybe as a training professional, but because somebody needs to in order for there to be commonality across the organization. So now I'm looking at a finance job aid of some sort and one from HR, and I know how to navigate them because they're based on the same kind of a template. So yeah, owning those templates, those access systems maybe, or partnering on those so that you're keeping the learner the end user. I think we're really good at that in training development, keep them. First and foremost in mind when you're developing solutions and systems that support them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:55]:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think that is a fantastic place to end, so thank you. Thank you so much, Joe. I'm sure we'll keep talking. And thanks again for being on the podcast.
MJ Hurley [00:30:06]:
Thanks for having me, Matt. This was really fun. Looking forward to the further conversation. Absolutely.
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.
