L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Trusted Learning Advisors: Earning Trust and Claiming a Seat at the Decision-making Table

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

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

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, I speak with Keith Keating. Keith is Chief Learning and Talent Officer at Archwell and the author of The Trusted Learning Advisor. Keith's career in learning and development started at 17 years old when he spontaneously picked up a job as a trainer helping workers learn

simple computer programs. Since then, he has also held senior learning leader positions at GP Strategies Corporation and General Motors. Keith recently earned his Ed.D. from UPenn, where he wrote his dissertation on chief financial officers and their perspectives on training and learning and development programs. He maintains that working full-time as a CLO within a company and teaching, which he does at Penn's Graduate School of Education, are critical practices to making sure he stays ahead of the L&D curve. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I have on the show Keith Keating. Keith, thank you so much for

joining me today. It's great to have you on. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I spoke with Nigel Payne on the show probably five or six months ago. He was one of my earlier guests, and we opened up with a very passionate statement from him about how L&D needs to change. And it was grandiose. It was broad, but it was a clear, distinct message that we need to be taken more seriously, that L&D needs to be taken more seriously, and practitioners must demand that. demand that. And at the time, your book hadn't been released yet. But what you've written and what I've read from it really seems to kind of take what he had said to me and put it into a clear identity with terminology, with steps to take to achieve that, and a whole system of thought behind it. And if you don't mind, I'd love to just turn it over to you real fast. What is the central problem with L&D right now? We're order takers. We've been order takers inherently since the beginning of our industry, mid-1800s. You look back at the

industrial revolution, manufacturing revolution. You had managers who were making these decisions on what employees needed to do. And so they told the trainers, train my employees to move this widget here. So we began as order takers. The problem is, however many, you know, hundreds of years later, math isn't my best suit. We're still order takers. And so we're at that crossroads now where we have to evolve or else, and it comes down to one word and that's irrelevance. By not evolving, it means stagnation. And in today's world, stagnation is a step backwards. And we've stepped back so much now that we have an option. And the option is either we evolve or we risk being irrelevant. I have heard from so many practitioners and even folks on the show about how difficult it is to just be taken seriously by leadership

at their organizations when it comes to budget be taken seriously by leadership at their organizations. When it comes to budget cuts, and in the last three years, we've had a lot of reorgs and budget cuts and that sort of thing, how L&D tends to be often, it feels like at the top of the list. And in our sort of pre-chat that we had, you referred to it as a cost center, as opposed to a profit center. Leaders of companies aren't looking to get rid of L&D, they're looking to get rid of cost centers. And they're looking at every single department and every branch and saying, okay, what's really costing us here. And it's clear that a change needs to be made from, you know, cost center to profit center. And a lot of things need to be changed to achieve that. So you use the term trusted learning advisor, that's kind of the

central idea of what we should achieve as L&D practitioners. And I'd like to start off by asking, what are the three major drivers? You talk about this in the book, three major drivers that encourage us as L&D professionals to move from order takers to trusted learning advisors. And can you say a little bit about each of those as well? The most important one you've kind of hit on this a little bit is self-preservation. We're burnt out. We're exhausted. One of the things that I talk about with the book and keynotes and webinars and things like that is it's more of a therapy session. And I start off the session by saying, what we do is hard and it's often thankless. I can't remember ever having somebody say, thank you for helping me develop as an employee. Thank you for creating a career path for me.

Thank you for helping me develop the skills that I need. Thank you for cross-training me so that I didn't get laid off and I have another opportunity internally. We're just not acknowledged for the power that we truly have. And if you look at learning development has the power to change lives. Learning changes lives. And that's what we do in our industry. But that's not how the business looks at us. Everyone seems to think they can do our job. But what's so frustrating is if you look at IT, HR, and even marketing, if I went to somebody in IT and said, hey,

I want you to do this. If I gave them an order, they would look at me and say, that's not part of our process. And I would say, okay. And then I would follow their process. The same with HR. They have these processes we have to follow. And marketing as well. We have all these other services where the customer tries to give them an order and they say, no, that's not our process. But L&D, for some reason, is not treated the same way. Anybody comes to us and they give us an order and they expect us to execute that order. They determine who, what, where, when, why, and how a learning intervention occurs. And they give it to us and they want us to execute it. And then when it fails in six months, because maybe that

wasn't the right thing or didn't it be a be learned intervention, come back and blame it on us. After years and years and years of this, you just get burnt out. You get beaten down almost into submission and you just continue that cycle of being an order taker because it's easier. And I say easier, but it's really not easier because in the long run, it's detrimental to our employees, to our organization, to our industry, but it just feels easier because you get tired of fighting. And I'm there as well. I mean, I'm tired of fighting. I've been in the industry for 25 years. It doesn't matter my job title, doesn't matter the organization. It is always a struggle getting people to recognize that we truly have value to add in the organization and that we can drive change and again, have value. So number one, we've got our burnout, we've got our

self-preservation. Then we've got the looming skills crisis. We can talk more about that a little bit later, but the fact is we've got massive amount of the workforce that needs to be up-skilled or re-skilled, second skill, AI skilled, whatever it is, that's our job. That's what we're here for. So that's the second reason. And the third is, if you look at Gallup and any other surveys, they're saying that each year we have trillions of dollars that are lost due to employee disengagement or employee turnover. McKinsey said in 2022, the number one reason why employees were leaving the workforce was because they didn't have developmental or growth opportunities. Guess who is the group that's going to solve that? Us, L&D. So we've got the looming skills gap, we've got our self-preservation,

the looming skills gap, we've got our self-preservation, and we've got employee retention and employee disengagement, trillions of dollars being wasted by organizations across the globe as a result of this. So if you're trying to just look at some basic ROI numbers, it's right there. We have the power to create those developmental opportunities so that our employees stay engaged and we retain them longer. My last two guests on the show were Berta Matcheson and Minda Zetlin. And with both of them, I spoke, actually, there's one in between there, but more recently, I spoke with those two. And we all spoke about retention and management talent acquisition. There have been a few studies that I've read recently,

I guess they're surveys that mostly come from the conference board. That's a really big one. It's very clear that people value development opportunities in their organizations. There was a conference board survey from I think last year that said as high as 96% of employees interviewed said that that was a valuable asset within their organization. However, more recently in the conference board, I think it was actually just last month in November of 2023, one of their new surveys had talent development opportunities as very low among the non-salary compensation things that matter to people within their organization. So very high on there. I can't remember what the top two were exactly, but other sorts of compensation were very high. Number one was flexibility and autonomy in terms of where you work in the setting and the time at

which you work. And me and those other two guests that I mentioned, we were coming to the conclusion that workers seem to be inclined to do their own thing more and more these days. And there's decent evidence that remote work and all that is actually possibly pretty beneficial. It doesn't seem to be actively harming companies, which a lot of leaders do think it is. But at the end of the day, it seems as if the data, the surveys that I'm reading are indicating that people are going in the direction of wanting to create their own sort of developmental paths and create their own, I guess, work-life balance idea with greater flexibility and that sort of thing. And I'm inclined to think that people aren't very enthusiastic about the learning content that they're receiving from their

companies, that sometimes it's either just not high quality. Sometimes it just seems like a deliberate attempt to create engagement and bring people kind of into the fold, you know, like it's too obvious, like it's keeping me around and it's just not fun or exciting. What do you think about that? Is my analysis on this somewhat accurate? Do you think that learning content just hasn't been solid for the last while because as order takers, we just feel so restrained and restricted? So let me flip the question to you. Have you ever woken up and said, I want to go to the LMS today and learn something? I used to create what was effectively an LMS at a prior career. And

sometimes I would wake up and I would say, I want to go watch the video for seven habits of highly successful people. But I think that's a little bit different because it wasn't for work purposes. It was just for my own entertainment and because I was in the video about that book. So a little bit of, you know, ego inflation there, but ultimately, no, you're right. I probably haven't actually said that. I have never, ever gone to the LMS to learn something. I go to Google, I go to a colleague, I go to any app on my phone or something, but never to the LMS. So to your point, I think we have gotten a bit of a bad rap because of this focus on the LMS and asynchronous digital content. So for me, the pendulum is swinging the other way. I do not want a content library that has 20,000 courses and put it out there and just say,

okay, company, go pick what you want and learn. That is not the right way to learn anymore. We spent so many years doing that. And now we have the Netflix syndrome. I spend so much time wasting on Netflix, finding something or trying to find something to watch and never actually finding something because it's so overwhelming, my choices. So what I've been doing lately is focusing on curation. And it's not just me, a lot of the industry is focusing on curation.

What I mean specifically is we have those large content libraries, but I don't open them up because I don't want people to get lost in them. We create curated pathways. If digital content is going to be used at all, what I'm also doing more of is bringing the digital content into the cohort-based live discussions. So together, we will watch parts of the digital content, but we pull it in so that it's a synchronous environment. parts of the digital content, but we pull it in so that it's a synchronous environment.

So my point is that gone is the day where you have the LMS and you're buying these libraries and you're sitting by yourself, clicking, clicking through these courses. For me, that's just not the right way for me to learn. I need to be with people. It doesn't have to be in person. It can be virtual. It can be hybrid, whatever your modality of choice is, but it's bringing people together so you can learn at the same time so that you have a coach or a facilitator that you have connection to. So you can ask those questions in that moment of need. So I'm with my colleagues or other people in the industry. So we're talking about how do we actually apply this as we're learning it? What's the contextual relevance of it in the real world environment? So I guess the answer to your question is we're seeing a shift, or I hope that we continue to see a shift, away from asynchronous, 100% digital to more cohort-based learning because

that brings people together. You're able to create relationships. You're able to connect with each other. You're able to have real-time discussions on applying the relevancy and the contextualization of what it is you're learning at that moment. I was at DevLearn in Las Vegas recently, and I was engaging with lots of attendees, largely learning design folks, instructional design type people, but a handful of higher level training leads and

even some CLOs. And I heard from at least five people out of maybe 40 that they were there to find a new LMS. And I don't know why. I mean, I did get into the why a little bit with a few of them, but it was hard to tell if they were, you know, some of them seemed a little bit cagey about it, didn't want to dive too deep into the reasons, didn't want to reveal too much. But I'm curious if the reason why they're all looking for a new LMS is because they think that that's the reason why people are not learning effectively or not enthusiastic about learning because it's something with the technology and that might be miscalculation of what the actual problem is there. Maybe a symptom more than anything. But in this line of thinking, you have a list of power skills

in the book that you talk about that are kind of like advanced, I guess, soft skills in a way. But your power skills that you list, I think there's a handful of them. Among them are critical thinking and innovation. And to me, it almost seemed like that was missing when people were telling me about the need for a new LMS. Like, were they really thinking critically about what the root problem is here? Or are they just trying to slap on a new tech option because tech is always advancing and always, you know, shiny object syndrome, that sort of thing. There's always something coming up. So I guess ultimately, I'm curious between critical thinking and innovation. I also ask and wonder, to what degree does someone have to be an expert on the

business operations strategy, even like market and product analysis, that sort of thing, to be able to effectively act as a TLA for stakeholders, to be able to effectively say, I see that these things aren't working out in what we've delivered as people, as learning practitioners, because I know that our business does X, Y, and Z for the market, because I know that this is how our people engage within internally, that these are the different kinds of things that we have to do. So is getting into the weeds of the business critical for being able to apply critical thinking and innovation and those sorts of things? What do you think? So where we are today, you have to have an LMS. You have to. So it's not because that is the right way to learn. It's

because it is a record keeper, if you will. It is a central place where you can store your content, where you can have your classes and people can go and register and such. So I can't speak for the people that you were talking to, but I'm constantly looking at LMSs, not because I think that it is the solution for solving learning engagement issues, because I don't believe that it is. I don't believe that there is a solution. It is about having the largest toolkit possible. Technology is part of the solution, but again, it's not the solution. I think we get too wrapped up in that. And I have a huge issue with a lot of the vendors in the space. And I understand people need to make money and such. And technology is an enabler, but it will never make learning easy. And this is something that we forget so often in L&D because a lot of people don't have a true scientific

background in understanding the way the brain works and understanding learning. Learning is hard. If it wasn't hard, you would probably master every single language out there. I mean, I've been trying to learn Spanish for I don't know how many years, and it's not because I don't want to learn. It's because it's hard. It's hard to learn it.

And no amount of technology is going to make that necessarily easier for me. There are ways that we can lighten the cognitive load, and I'll going to make that necessarily easier for me. There are ways that we can lighten the cognitive load. And I'll come back to that in a little bit. So kind of what I wanted to say about the first part is that people are looking for LMSs because we have to have, by law, you have to have a record. I think it's seven years for things like sexual harassment and compliance training or regulatory training and things like that. So we've got to have that record of truth. Does it mean that that is, and hopefully those people are not looking at that as the solution for all of your learning needs. It is one small tool and a large toolkit that we should all have as trusted learning advisors. That being said, your question about,

do we have to be experts in the business? The word expert makes me a little cautious, but we do have to understand the business. We do have to be embedded in the business. I think for far too long, learning L&D has considered themselves separate from the business. And that's one of the reasons why we remain siloed. We have to understand them. We have to speak their language. It is not their responsibility to understand what a MOOC is, understand Kirkpatrick level three, or what an LMS or what an LXP is. I mean, there are practitioners in our field that don't actually know what any of those are. So when we use that

type of vocabulary language in our business, it completely goes over their head and it continues to segregate us. And they don't express an interest because they don't understand it. And frankly, it's not their job to understand it, but it is our job to understand their business, use their vocabulary, their acronyms, their definitions. And as trusted learning advisors, if you don't know what those are, just ask. Ask for a definitions guide, an acronym guide. Take a look at their last five or six strategy decks. Pull verbiage from there. Look at their mission, vision statement. Look at the challenges they're having and use those words because it helps to change the perception of what they have of us. Because it's our job to, again, speak their language and to embed ourself in their business. So the answer to your question is, do we have to be experts?

I'm going to say no. I'm never going to be an expert in sales. I'm a horrible salesperson, but I can understand what my sales team is doing, what they're selling, what their challenges are, what their vision, mission, strategy is. So it's our job to understand them, embed ourself in the business. Trusted learning advisor, to me, means strategic business partner that's embedded in the business. And one way to describe that colloquially is to have a seat at the table, which you say a lot in the book, among the executives and decision makers that you need to be considered in the major decisions that are being made for the business. And actually, one way that you describe it is by creating your own table and then inviting the executives to have a seat at your table or,

you know, have them clamoring to have a seat at your table. And one example that you gave of doing this, where you really establish a highly effective learning system that the leadership sees is just clearly a solution to potentially many problems and they have to, you know, get involved with that and determine what you can help do for them is one of those things was the innovation lab. You concocted this while I think at a fortune 500. I'm not sure if you actually listed which one it was in the book, but I figured, but it sounded like a really cool project that I'd started off slow. It was very iterative. It was very experimental. But at the end of the day, it's the first example, I think, in the book that you give where you really felt like you created the table and then the leadership was kind of coming in to learn from you almost.

So can you tell me a little bit about that innovation lab? Yeah. Let me preface it a little bit. Throughout my career, and I hear this from a lot of practitioners as well, they say statements like, if I only had a seat at the table, I could make a difference. And what I'm advocating for is stop trying to sit at someone else's table. When you do that, they have the power. They are the ones who control the discussion, the agenda, the time allotted, who's sitting there. I don't want to be sitting at somebody else's table. I want to be building my own table and inviting them to sit with me so that I am the curator, I am the narrator, I'm the puppeteer. I control all of it because that is how we start to change the perception of our business partners seeing us as order takers and evolving to being strategic business partners or trusted learning advisors. So there's a couple of ways that I think about this. And I'm going to get to the innovation lab. It's actually innovation garage in just a second. But another example is

all of us in L&D right now should be talking about skills. And I know many people are. And if you're not, you should be. Whether it's upskilling, reskilling, technology skill, AI skilling, second skilling, whatever it is, we know that skills are the currency for our talent today and for tomorrow. That's not going anywhere. Now, the question that I have practitioners ask is, well, is that my responsibility? And what if somebody else is talking about it? is, well, is that my responsibility? And what if somebody else is talking about it? And my response is, who cares if somebody else is talking about it? Own that conversation. Create a skills advisory council or a skills advisory committee or a skills advisory board, whatever vocabulary works in your organization. And what you're doing by creating that council and putting that in quotes is that you're branding it. You're giving it an identity and you're the one that's controlling that

identity. It doesn't mean that you're taking over, taking away from somebody else, but there's such power in branding something. It makes it more real. So when you give it that name, and again, it doesn't have to be committee can sound a little bit scary, like, oh, I have to get permission for this. Then find whatever word works for you. Point is that you want to brand it. You want to bring people to the table to start having these curated conversations. So what I do is every six months, I have a skills advisory council meeting. And I have separate meetings depending on which business partner.

You can also bring everybody together, however you want to approach it. But I bring a couple of my key stakeholders. I bring one or two people from the C-suite. I bring individuals from the front line who are actually part of the skills that we're talking about, the workers that are going to be impacted, so they can be part of that conversation so that our strategic partners can hear them, I also bring in other people from outside of the organization. I'll look into my network and I'll bring in another CLO or somebody that is an expert in the skills area who's maybe saying the same thing that I am.

I look at McKinsey Global Institute. I look at the World Economic Forum. I look at Deloitte. All of this research is available for free. I bring that research into the conversation so that when this meeting occurs, it's not my voice. It's not Keith trying to prove a point and trying to say, oh, how great L&D is. I'm simply curating a conversation that's based on data from reputable research firms where there are other people in the room who can also contribute to that conversation. And it helps our stakeholders see us in that trusted learning advisor viewpoint,

the more that strategic business partner. One point I want to preface very strongly is that you get one shot at building your own table. One time. And when you bring those people together, you have to be prepared. You have to do your research. And I'm saying it takes weeks for me to be ready before these meetings happen so that when they happen, they are completely smooth, flawless. I know what's happening. It's a beautifully structured, curated meeting where there is intention that comes out of that meeting and there's value there for the leaders. If you don't truly invest that time, you bring everybody together and they find that it's not valuable, you're going to have a really difficult time

bringing them back to that conversation again. So it's kind of one example of creating your own table. Kind of going back to the innovation garage, the challenge that we had was our stakeholders didn't see us as innovate. And they told us point blank in our business partner surveys, we see you as order takers, you're not innovative, and we don't trust you. And they weren't wrong. We weren't thinking about innovation in terms of how do we solve the business problems for the stakeholders. What we were focused on was shiny object syndrome. Oh my gosh, we were at a conference last month and we heard about this new tool. Hey, stakeholder, look at this new tool. And I'm owning this. And I did that. And I was in a meeting with them and

they looked at me and they said, why would I use this? And I didn't have an answer. It was just that I was so excited because it was a cool new tool and I wanted to show them to demonstrate some sort of value proposition of, hey, look, Keith went to a conference and learned about a new tool. And the stakeholder said, do not ever bring me something again until you have it fully baked on how it's going to impact me,

the value that it's going to provide to me. And they were 100% right. So what we did was we went back to the drawing board, we thought about innovation in a different way and instead of trying to fit something into that square peg hole, it was more about what is the business problem that exists? Then what are the tools out there

that we might be able to use to solve that problem? I go back to my earlier statement about having the biggest toolkit possible. We should know every type of technology that exists, every vendor that exists. You should know what's the difference between an LMS and an LXP. What's the difference between Edcast and Degreed and Cornerstone and SuccessFactors and Docebo? It can get overwhelming. What's the difference between Philips ROI and Kirkpatrick's and Thalheimer's LTEM model? It's your responsibility to understand those. You don't have to be experts in all of those. I view us more as learn-it-alls rather than know-it-alls. I need to have an awareness

of what exists so that I can then look at the business problems, look in my toolkit, figure out which tool might be applicable because I've researched it. I've talked to other colleagues in the industry and then I can apply that tool. So we did this, but what we did was we branded innovation. Going back to the example about the skills advisory committee, we branded innovation as the innovation, and we gave it a tagline and a logo. What we were trying to do was sort of separate it from ourselves because the stakeholders viewed us in one way. And so we thought, gosh, if we could brand this and separate it, maybe they can look

at innovation kind of as something separate from us. Then what we did is we identified three potential business problems that exist and we created case studies around those business problems with ways we might be able to solve those. We packaged it beautifully into a 10-minute discussion with them. It wasn't this big, long, drawn-out thing where we were trying to convince them, hey, invest your money here. Look at how great we were. It was more of us creating space to say, we know your business. We know this is a business problem that exists right now. And here's a potential way that we might be able to solve that with one of these tools. And it's not always technology related.

And that's where we get caught up with innovation is innovation is just thinking different. Doesn't mean the technology is going to apply there. It could be process, could be a number of different things. And so when we're thinking about innovation, don't just limit that to a technology solution. It's just about thinking a little bit differently to solve a problem that exists. I like the record to show that Dr. Keith Keating did simulate going through one's toolbox by rifling through off screen as if he was a cartoon. Anyway, you alluded to a few things there that are very important to me. I do feel like L&D gets a lot of skepticism, and you seem to confirm that by the way you said that you've been spoken to about, you know, bringing back shiny objects and the way they just kind of say, what is the point here? Like,

that is kind of the conversations that I hear about from a lot of my guests on the show is just like immediate skepticism and dismissal in some cases. And also the fact that you mentioned that if the table that you build is not a good one at the first meeting, they're going to dismiss you for a while and you're going to have trouble rebuilding that. categories of information that we just have to understand, maybe not be experts in, but ultimately, trusted learning advisors must know how to gain trust. That's one of the most important things within the book, a whole chapter dedicated to it, if not much more. Getting stakeholders to trust you. You have five different pillars for trust, but to me, the ones that stuck out were credibility and professional intimacy. I'd love to go over those if you don't mind. And first off, credibility. As you've already mentioned, a lot of L&D pros, they don't really have backgrounds in like learning science or a field that's even related to L&D. And it does seem like you can kind of come from anywhere and learn on the spot in your early portion of the career before you kind of dive deep.

And unfortunately, I think that's a good way for people to become order takers because they have to kind of, you know, follow the mold and fit in. So how do we establish credibility if we didn't get a degree or have some other sort of high level qualifications that are conducive to L&D? So I am passionate about being transparent and honest. And so let me say that I am one of those people that fell into this career. You know, you look at who I am on paper now and it looks pretty solid. You know, I have a lot of great credentials. Those credentials are new. Those did not exist. In fact, what's important to know about me as a human is I am a high school

dropout. So I was actually one of the worst learners. I struggled with school tremendously to the point where at 15, I just said, I cannot do this anymore. It's not for me. And I dropped out. Now, fast forward, I am a doctor. I have multiple degrees. But that took basically my entire lifetime to get to that point. So at 17, I joined our industry by being a trainer. You know, I saw an ad in the newspaper. You're probably too young to know this, but once upon a time, you had to look in the newspaper for jobs. Not that you know, I worked at a newspaper for a while while in college.

So I know what they are. I've seen one. Are they still around? Not anymore, but they were when I was in college at least. So yeah, Sunday was the day where you looked here. That was the day with all the jobs. And so there was an ad for a Microsoft Office 2000 trainer. And I remember distinctly thinking, I know Office, how hard could it be to be a trainer? And it's that mentality that so many people have both in the industry and outside of

the industry. And I addressed this before, but why do our stakeholders treat us this way and think they can do our job? Part of that is because everybody has been through school. And so they think, well, I've been through school, so I know what needs to happen here. That being said, so I thought, yeah, this is easy. I could do it. And it was not easy. I was the worst trainer that existed. I did so much damage to my learners, to our industry. And here's kind of the double-edged sword of this industry

is that there's a low barrier to entry. Anybody can say they're a learning and development practitioner. What's your credentials? No one's asking about that. If you are a lawyer, of course, you have to pass the bar. If you're a doctor, medical license. If you're in tax, you also have to be certified there. So there's all these credentials that exist for these other high-skilled areas, but there's not really for us. And on one hand, it's great because it allowed people like me to join the industry and have a career. On the other hand, it's not great because again, anybody can take a Udemy course and on instructional design,

all of a sudden, poof, they're an instructional designer. And that's where the importance of credibility comes in, is you have to establish your credibility and it takes time. And I love that you immediately caught that without that credibility, you start off as an order taker. And that's exactly what happened to me. Although I was born as an order taker because my father was in the military. So I grew up taking orders. And so when I joined the industry and I was an order taker because my father was in the military. So I grew up taking orders. And so when I joined the industry and I was an order taker, it just felt quite natural. Until 10 years in, when I started to establish, I've got a lot of experience here and I've got some value to add to the conversation. And then I tried to add that value to the conversation

and my point of view, and it was completely shut down. And that's when I realized what it meant to truly be an order taker and have that kind of aha awareness moment. So the issue is when we don't establish that credibility and our skill set, we keep that cycle going of being an order taker. And also what happens is if we're not creating these great learning experiences, by being an order taker, by not having that credibility, we're damaging the learner's experience. And they may be, let's say it's an onboarding class that you're teaching and you're like, you know, it's just onboarding, who cares? Well, that person is

going to eventually grow up and get higher jobs and be promoted and they're going to be a leader someday. And they're going to remember that bad experience. And that's going to perpetuate that cycle of L&D doesn't drive value. You know why? Because I remember that class I took 10 years ago and it was horrible and I didn't learn anything. And so to me, internally, I'll do organizations, they're not worth it. And I know that because I've had leaders and organizations say that to me before. So I think your question was, when we don't have that credibility or expertise, let's say from a degree perspective, what can we do? First of all, we need to be lifelong learners as well. That's not just something that we're pitching to our organization and to our talent. It applies to us. You have to be learning and developing that credibility and it takes time. So recognize that. But there are five things that you can do just off the top of my head. One of them, you need to understand learning theories. What's the difference between cognitive learning theory, behaviorism?

Who's Piaget? You know, when I say this to people, they're like, yeah, but that was a long time ago. That's the foundation of the science of learning, the research-based learning practitioner skills. You need to understand that even if we're not applying it verbatim today, it still has value in what we do. You need to be researching, researching, researching. Just because Keith says something on LinkedIn or Josh Burson posts something doesn't mean that it is the right way. You should be researching it yourself to understand.

You should be, to that point, a critical thinker and asking questions and asking why and challenging Keith and challenging Burson and challenging what you're hearing other people say. Because not doing that, you're perpetuating these myths that have existed for years that continue to be a drain on what it is that we're trying to do. You should understand the principles of human-centered design. Who are we designing these solutions for? Humans. So there is a methodology that exists that focuses on this. Design thinking, learner experience design, user design, understand those human-centered design principles. And then lastly, give back to the community. As you're growing up in your career, as you're learning, you have value to add.

Even if you don't have that doctorate degree or those credentials, you have value because you have experience. And what is the best way to build that credibility? Your experience. So that could be things like volunteering with your local church or a local organization to give you that opportunity to practice those skills. Look for a mentorship. Just practice, practice, practice, practice. And then when you do, give back to the community,

share your stories, and not just the good ones. I'm so exhausted with going to conferences, no names are mentioned, where everybody is sharing their Instagram moment. And personally, I leave not feeling great because that is not what happens in my organization. And I don't understand, is it just me? Am I failing at what I'm doing? Because there's a lot of failures that we have and lessons learned. I want to see more of those. So share those when you're giving back to the community, not just basically trying to make yourself look better. We're good. And I'm guilty of it too. Absolutely. It's become a pretty common refrain on my show, honestly, that learning professionals

have to be the best learners at their organizations. I mean, I don't think anybody is surprised by that, but it is something that I've heard several times where as learning and development practitioners, we can't just be delivering the learning. We have to be doing the most learning in some cases. And that means staying up to date on technology and how work is going to be impacted and how work is best done, the future of work, what's coming next. And it's a lot of work at the end of the day, but I think you're absolutely right that practice is the most important thing. Also, professional intimacy is the other item within trust that I want to address.

I don't know a lot of other folks who are thought leaders, who've written books, who use the term intimacy about work settings. It almost seems like people want to draw the line at the idea of intimacy because of how work relationships are generally formulated and thought of. But you use that word. You think professional intimacy is something that we have to establish and achieve in some way. And of course, it's just a word. It's very flexible. But I can't think of anybody that's more qualified than you to determine this as a principle because of the research that you've done. So as you mentioned, you know, more recently, you became a doctor, and your research was actually on CFOs and how they think of training and how they think of learning endeavors within their organizations. And what you

come to as far as conclusions go is, you know, what we actually need to do as learning professionals to get things approved, to have better relationships with our organizations and actually become trusted learning advisors. And I would like to jump into that. So this is a way for me to think of the idea of professional intimacy because you're advocating for kind of developing relationships with CFOs in a specific way. And in our pre-chat, you gave me a handful of specific things that the CFOs brought up. So would you mind going over those right now? What are some of the most important things to CFOs when it comes to developing these relationships? First of all, develop the relationship. Just start there. Again, in transparency,

I've never had a relationship with the CFO. And the CFO is one of the most important stakeholders, and I say this now, that we should be building relationships with. The CFO's job is to determine the value of each business unit in the organization and to create value. That's also our job. Our job as learning development practitioners is to create value. And we do that by developing employees in the organization who then create value for the organization. So we are part of that value chain. If the CFO's job is to determine the value of each business unit, and we've never had

a relationship with a CFO, how do you think the CFO is determining our value? They're not. They're probably not thinking about it. So develop the relationship with the CFO. And I'll give you a little bit of context of how this came up in one of the organizations I was with. And again, I never had a relationship. The first year I was with this organization, at the end of the year, we had about a $3 million cost savings or cost avoidance cost savings or cost avoidance and about a $1.5 million ROI. That's in air quotes. And I was so excited and said to my leader, Leo, let's tell everybody, let's celebrate this.

And finance was one of the ones I mentioned. He said, no, no, we do not tell finance. If you tell finance, they will look at that cost avoidance and say, great, we can now reduce your budget by that much. And then they'll look at the quote ROI and say, great, run that program every year. We expect you to have a $1.5 million ROI every time you run that program. Which did we actually create the ROI or was it other characteristics? Who knows? That's a whole other podcast conversation. And so I went away kind of with my tail between my legs and I thought, you know, I've never talked with the CFO. And so I reached out and I started to build a relationship with the CFO. And one of the first things the CFO told me was, why have you never reached out before? things the CFO told me was, why have you never reached out before? And why do you send me these quote ROI calculations and ask for more money? Do you know that what you're sending me is not how I

calculate ROI? And by the way, don't just reach out to me when you want to be developing a relationship or when you, rather when you want more money from me, try developing a relationship. and you want more money from me. Try developing a relationship. And so I thought, wow, this is really interesting. I wonder, in general, what do CFOs think about L&D and organizations? And how do they define the value? Or do they define the value?

And what can we do to influence that budget process? And so that became my doctoral thesis, or research rather, which is available for free. You can download, take a look at that. And what I uncovered was one, they basically unanimously said, create a relationship with us because you haven't. And by the way, when you want to, don't wait to budget season, do an off cycle so that we know you're genuine. Two, kind of don't send me these ROI calculations. Maybe work with me to figure out how I determine value in the business unit or in the organization, and then we'll work from there. Don't just send me quantitative data. Don't just send me an Excel spreadsheet that I don't

understand. How about some qualitative data? Tell me the stories of how you're truly driving impact and value in the organization. Who are those people that you've helped develop from being maybe a frontline worker to a senior executive? Who have you cross-trained or cross-skilled in the organization? Give me that type of data. I'll give you an example. In my current organization, we cross-skilled about 39% of the company so that we can make sure they have the right skills that they need to do the jobs in the next 12 to 18 months. That's a data point that is valuable to all leadership, including the CFO, because that's a true story right there that we can sort of trace back to the value. And I'm using value over ROI because value is subjective. And value is what we should be talking about with our stakeholders. And the CFO should be

one of those stakeholders. So those are some examples. I'll leave you with one final thought. And this goes back to my earlier comment about language. The CFO largely said, I have so many fires at my feet that it's not my responsibility to reach out to you. It's not my responsibility to understand your language and your terminology. So when you're talking to me, make sure that you speak my language. So it's another example of reinforcing that as trusted learning advisors, we need to be using their language, not our own vernacular. of demonstrating an ROI. So I like the concept of, you know, figuring out how the CFO calculates that and working more closely with them. That's a very obvious way to help figure out

what the value is that you're bringing. But I've asked a lot of people this question, you know, how do we demonstrate some sort of an ROI? And I think, and you actually have said this to me again in our pre-chat where things have to be contextual, they have to be specific to the organization and just there is no universal way to demonstrate an ROI simply through learning and development programs. But I want to ask about the qualitative component of

this, because I do think that that's, you know, qualitative is pretty common in that what we often do is we give out, you know, the smiley face surveys, and we ask, you know, how you felt about this learning program? Was it a good experience? And not only are those things simple, I think, but also biased in that people don't want to say, I didn't like this. They're more likely to say that they did like it. And I just think there's issues with qualitative surveys that are just simplistic. I think we've largely moved away from those, but I've seen them in a lot of places still. How do we do qualitative descriptions of value without using simple surveys, without keeping it that simplistic,

but also without appearing too isolated and anecdotal and too focused on, you know, one example of success. I would love to see every organization has a really good number for how many people they cross-skilled, but I think there are a lot of cases where, you know, they haven't achieved something that's that impressive and they do need to rely on like specific stories. So how do we give qualitative descriptions that achieve what we want without doing those two things that I just described? Let me preface by saying I am absolutely not the expert in this topic. And I only talk about what's worked for me in, you know, the ROI is so subjective. You've got some people who are diehard ROI aficionados. You've got other people like me who are saying, I don't want to use those three

letters, partially because what I learned from my doctoral research is what we call ROI is not ROI to CFOs. They cannot take that data, the numbers, and translate that into financial statements. And so for me, I stopped using ROI. And I know you're not specifically asking that, I'm just kind of prefacing for any listeners or viewers who are disagreeing with me that's perfectly fine i think you probably already know a lot of thought leaders agree with you on that i mean i think don taylor christopher lind even maybe nigel payne like have said very similar things where you know just the numerical roi is not really what we should be shooting for and i do think that's common sentiment among lnd folks at this point because of what you just described. Yeah. So my answer is, it's about what's

important to the business. What's important to your stakeholders. I think the mistake that we make is, and again, everything I'm talking about is my own experience. So I own this. For so many years, it was what I thought was important, what I thought L&D needed to show and to demonstrate. Things like butts in seats and the surveys and the smiley sheets and all the other stuff that doesn't have as much value. For many years, I never asked the stakeholder what they perceived as value and then kind of working backwards from there. So what's important to the business? What are the organizational goals? What's the strategy?

And are you aligned to supporting their strategy, not your own? So qualitative research, one of the things that I like to do is I'm a design thinking practitioner. I love empathy research. If you're not comfortable with empathy, you can call it qualitative research.

You can call it understanding, whatever vocabulary you want to use. But I try twice a year to talk to a subset of the population, maybe 10 to 15% of the population, to gather data from them through qualitative research in terms of how we are impacting them or challenges that they're having in the organization and hearing and gathering data from them and using that to determine whether we are driving value and or identifying business problems that exist. Because one of the greatest outputs from that is when we're spending time with frontline workers, we're gathering this data, we can then synthesize this data down and we can distill problem statements. We can then take those problem statements back to our stakeholders and give them data that they may not have otherwise known was available or existed in the organization. One, it demonstrates your value because you are staying connected to frontline

workers. Two, it demonstrates to the stakeholder that you understand their business. I have surprised so many stakeholders by bringing them problems they didn't know existed because our stakeholders are often so far removed from being part of the frontline workers. There's senior management, there's multiple layers below them, but I want to spend time with the frontline workers who are actually doing the work to then figure out, are we truly impacting them? What problems exist? How can we help drive more value for them? So by taking all that data, distilling it down, sharing it back to stakeholders, for

me, that's one of the great ways that we can demonstrate value. Okay. Well, Keith, I think we're running up on time here. So before I let you go, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and your work, your writing and what else you're up to? LinkedIn is a great place or check out keithkeating.com or the trustedlearningadvisor.com for more details about the book, The Trusted Learning Advisor. Awesome. Well, Keith, it was a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. And for everybody listening at home,

thank you for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating,

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