The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

Transforming Work Environments with Inclusive Design Featuring Katherine McCord

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 6

Share episode

Unlock the secrets to creating inclusive, sustainable work environments with Katherine McCord, a trailblazer in HR and talent development. Discover how universal workplace design, inspired by architectural and IT principles, can revolutionize your company's culture. Katherine's journey, from her early exposure to HR through her mother to her innovative career, offers profound insights on maintaining mission-focused strategies while fostering growth and adaptability. Get ready to transform your HR practices with actionable advice on developing flexible, inclusive spaces that empower and support everyone in your organization.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development. Today, I am joined by special guest Katherine McCord. Welcome to the show, catherine.

Katherine McCord:

Thank you so much for having me, Jay. I'm super stoked to be here today.

Jay Johnson:

Awesome. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Before we dig in there, could you give our audience just a little background on yourself? Tell us how did you get into this talent development space and what are some of those key aspects of your experience and career?

Katherine McCord:

Yeah, so I actually have been fascinated by the world of talent since I was a child. My mother worked in HR and in recruiting and often had me around her as she worked and I was utterly fascinated. I even played interview. I played HR. I fired my mother when I was six. It was kind of ingrained.

Katherine McCord:

And I'm also a big researcher and I love to perpetually learn and educate myself and innovate. And so as my career advanced, I did a lot of research. I kept seeing problems in the workplace and I would research you know why is this happening? How do we fix it? You know what are the different things? And and I started really formulating what's now my primary product, which is universal workplace design, that took years of kind of coming together and at one point I worked for a recruiting company that did tech recruiting for large banks and corporations and I just got it. I just got recruiting, I just did.

Katherine McCord:

And what was crazy to me was how poorly it was being done just in general not just that company, but I'm not faulting them. They were doing all the standard things, but the standards really aren't very good, let's be honest. And even just how people were treated in organizations, how organizations just weren't really built to support their people. All these things kind of came together, and so now I speak and teach internationally on the topics of HR, inclusion and and hiring very much from an innovation perspective. I also designed and built the first ever anti-bias applicant tracking system. Well, I need to stop saying I built it, I can't code, to save my life, but I oversaw the build. I coded exactly one feature and it sucked. Yeah, so yeah that makes me feel better.

Katherine McCord:

I could have exactly one feature and it sucked. Yeah, yeah, that makes me feel better, but, um, so that's, that's a little bit about me. I absolutely love you topics and uh, yeah, so that's it. That's, that's who I am.

Jay Johnson:

That's what I do. That's incredible.

Katherine McCord:

I've been in business now for 10 years. I nearly forgot that I have been in business now for 10 years, beautiful.

Jay Johnson:

Well, I'd really like to dig into this universal workplace design concept. Can you give us a little background on it? What is that about?

Katherine McCord:

Sure. So universal design in general is an older concept that originated in the field of architecture, spread like wildfire over into IT. It just eats that up. Whenever I say that, say that phrase in a room full of tech folks they're like oh yeah, we totally get it.

Katherine McCord:

No, immediately what I'm talking about. Everybody else is like what, what's going on? Even in architecture, it's not as popular as in the IT world, although it is still very much a founding principle. But in the workplace, specifically, what you're talking about is designing so that it works for everybody, has inherent sustainability and flexibility, and that all the correct tools are in place and trainings are in place. So it's a very big concept, right? It's huge. This is how you're designing.

Katherine McCord:

Yeah, it's organizational. And what's interesting is it's one of those things that it's like inclusion you either have it or you don't. There's not a middle ground. There's not. You have some universal design. You either have it or you don't. And it sounds complicated when you think that you're going to design for everybody and you just need to be flexible. You need to plan for growth First of all. If you're in business and you're not planning for growth, you've missed the mark.

Jay Johnson:

I don't know I'm probably having some other issues but it's really not.

Katherine McCord:

But it's really not. It's actually extremely complicated because it breaks design down to be a lot more simplistic, so that your mission focus and that's really what it all comes down to is staying mission focused, and not just the company's mission, but each department, each policy, each procedure, everything has a mission and as long as that mission is being accomplished, the how we get there does not matter, it doesn't matter. For example, I used at one point my last W2 job that I had. I was building a national recruiting program for an organization. Right, and I had wonderful recruiters. I trained them from the ground up. Fantastic team. We were way ahead of schedule in terms of rolling out the program. Every branch loved us. Branches were begging to be allowed into the program early. We were meeting our marks. Time to hire decreased. Retention was increasing. Candidate satisfaction was increasing. Everything was going right, right.

Jay Johnson:

Sounds like a great program, yeah it was a great program.

Katherine McCord:

yeah, it was super wildly successful. So, having a meeting with with the powers, that be right and they're praising me going on, go okay now, how many calls are your team making every day and how team members making, and how many emails are they sending us? I have no idea. Oh my God, how can you not track that? They start flipping out? I said, oh, I'm sorry, did you hire me to make sure that my team sends a certain number of emails and calls every day? Is that our objective? Is that what we should be doing?

Jay Johnson:

Probably should have been defined in the beginning.

Katherine McCord:

If that was the case. I massively misunderstood my job description, if that's it. Well, no, no, no, you're here to recruit, you're here to fill the positions. Aha, and we can all agree that we're doing that with wild success. Yes, yes. So how we got there? Maybe not as important, and all these little minute details of micromanaging maybe not so important. Oh yeah, maybe not as important, and all these little minute details of micromanaging maybe not so important. Oh yeah, Okay, maybe you're right.

Katherine McCord:

So it's just, you know, it's that mission focus right, because and the reason that I left it very open in that team is number one everybody's unique and has individual needs, and we'll get to that in a minute and how that plays in. But also, you have to be able to pivot. Especially if you're launching something big like a company, a department, a whole new program, whole new product, you have to be flexible, and so the more details, the more minute things over which you obsess, the less flexibility you will have and the more difficult it will be to pivot. So you want to leave the ability to pivot. So that's really what it's about. It's about taking care of your people, making sure they can function at their highest level. Mission and flexibility.

Jay Johnson:

Well, I love that, Katherine. It's very consistent. Actually, when I'm coaching leaders, I have a standard that is successful and unsuccessful. There is no middle ground. You're either a successful leader or an unsuccessful leader, and we'll define what the KPIs, which will tell you you're on the road to success or not, but how we get there, then that has to have the flexibility let's talk about. You know our audience being trainers, coaches. How would they approach this, or what would it? What would be something for them to think about when they're developing or designing or even delivering training within that capacity?

Katherine McCord:

Absolutely so. First of all, universal design should be applied to everything everything, how you function in your life, how you teach, how you, you know, have everything. Everything how you function in your life, how you teach, how you have everything. Every product should be universally designed. This is just how it ought to be so when you're, when you're teaching this and when you're training this, the first thing you have to do is help somebody establish their missions. Right? And even if you're a one on one coach and you're helping leader or you're helping somebody lose weight or whatever it is that you do, help them establish their missions. What is it that is you? What is it that matters to you as a human? And then also, what is the goal of whatever program we're working on together, right?

Jay Johnson:

Okay, so that primary objective, yeah, that primary objective, and then whatever, whatever the KPIs would lead you to that's what we're shooting for.

Katherine McCord:

So first we establish the mission. Right, that's it. The next thing that we have to do is learn to defeat our biological inherent. Every single human on this planet has it biological fight or flight, ego defense mechanism and responding curiosity. So every single human and I have several neuroscience certifications and neuropsychology certifications and I've done all the research. So, but if anybody wants sources, you can google this as well, and it's really super fascinating. So we all have a biological defense that is called the ego mechanism. Now it's a little bit deceiving because people think ego, they think, oh, I'm just so full of myself. Well, that's not really what it means. If you ask a human, are you the center of the universe? Like Jay, are you the center of the universe?

Jay Johnson:

Well, part of my brain says so. I also study neuroscience. Part of my brain says yes. The other part of the logical part, the more cerebral cortex focus is like no, probably not. But I'll tell you that limbic system sure as heck thinks so.

Katherine McCord:

Yeah, but I love that you know that too. So, yeah, the truth is that, logically, we know like oh no, I'm not the center of the universe. Most people know that.

Katherine McCord:

Let me put it that way Most people, but our primitive brain does not. Our primitive brain, to your point, makes every single decision as though we are the center of the universe. It bases how we read other humans' responses, how we engage with others, how we process information, and what we read is correct versus incorrect. And so we have to learn to switch that off and bring it into the conscious realm so that we can do the smarter things and make the better decisions. And what's really cool is that when you learn to do that, it's actually extremely simple work extremely simple, I think, collectively.

Katherine McCord:

Over the entire time that I worked on it, it took maybe four hours of actual work to like almost perfect it.

Katherine McCord:

I'm not I never say I'm perfect or something, but almost I'd say I'm an expert level of it, right, and that took maybe four hours of actual combined effort. And so it's really not very difficult. But what that does? It actually allows our brain to change its synapses and to create more healthy patterns and to start collecting more information so that we can make better decisions. Because our natural brain says, nope, we already have a solution for this, everybody else is wrong, they're done, we're right by like that and it just shuts everything else out. But when you learn to bring everything into the conscious and say, okay, well, why is that wrong, or why do I feel that way, or, or why am I averse doing it this way, or how, what can I learn from this other way? Right, it absolutely astronomically changes not only your professional career but your personal life as well, in all the right ways. So I think that that's another huge thing teaching people to overcome that ego mechanism and to respond in curiosity.

Jay Johnson:

I love that part. One of the things that I talk about oftentimes is I want you to imagine you got a phone call from your boss, your superior supervisor. I need you to come down to my office and in the history of no one where they like, yes, I'm getting a raise. Usually it's like, oh my God, what did I do? What did I screw up? Oh my, I'm going to be fired. And then you get down to the boss's office and they're like hey, we're ordering new pens. Do you want red ones or blue ones? And you're sitting there going.

Jay Johnson:

I never even considered that that was a possibility because the brain has locked onto that survival mechanism as you speak of and say I'm now fearing for my resources, my acquisition and everything else like that, and we never switch into cognitive mode and say, okay, well, what else could this be? How can we do this? So I want to dig into that question. You had brought up curiosity as a shift from that perspective, moving away from the, you know, moving away from the primitive brain, the limbic system, you know our amygdala, our fear regulation system. Talk a little bit about how you take people through that process of shifting towards a curiosity place, cause I think that's really critical and I think it's something that the coaches and trainers here you know. How do you do that? How do you get them to move forward on that, Katherine?

Katherine McCord:

So, first of all, we have to learn to recognize it when it kicks into gear right, and so the first thing I do, whenever I teach a class on this or I teach an individual about this, is that I get them to look up things that they know they will disagree with and will make them angry. I'm like pick a thing, I don't care, maybe a few things.

Jay Johnson:

A little immersion therapy there, yeah, and.

Katherine McCord:

I was like you're going to look these things up Now. You're not going to engage with it. That's not productive to what we're doing here.

Katherine McCord:

We're just going to read the thing, listen to the thing, whatever it is. And I said, and when this happens, when you engage with it, pay attention to your body and take a note of what you feel. Now, almost every person will feel this, this process, activate around the nape of their neck, top of the shoulders, base of the neck, top of the spine, that region, the reason, the reason for that is that that's the sympathetic nerve system that activates the fight or flight, right, and so you have that whole that goes up and down your spine, and so that's where you're. You'll feel it just go, hey, we're awake now, right. And so the first thing is learning what that feels like and moving that into the conscious brain, because then you can go oh, I know what this is, I need to respond differently. It's like, okay, no, brain, we're okay.

Katherine McCord:

And what's terrible is that when that system starts, number one, your ability to process at higher levels is turned off because you need to be ready to move around and avoid the quote, quote danger. You also release adrenaline, which is not a healthy chemical. In excess. You can also get unhealthy levels of dopamine, which some dopamine is okay. Too much of it is very bad. And so these very unhealthy things start to happen to your body A lot of times. Your muscles start to tense up, you start to get physically agitated, heart rate increases. All of this and, by the way, this is an addictive process.

Katherine McCord:

People can actually become addicted to this, and a lot of those people that you see on social media that are just jerks for like literally no reason, argue beyond all logic. That's an inflated version of the ego mechanism. Thank you, dopamine, because essentially it does the same things to your body that certain drugs do. That's how I tell people think of it. That has a similar type process. So we learn to recognize that we know what that feels like.

Jay Johnson:

There's a great book If you've not read it. It's called the molecule of more and it's all about the dopaminergic desire circuit and such a powerful read. So, readers if you've not, or listeners if you've not read that book the molecule of more such a powerful, powerful resource to better understand how that dopaminergic desire circuit actually draws us into things like conflict, or how it may draw us into things where stressful environments, because it is something that triggers, just like atherine said. So I love that, catherine. I just wanted to talk about that resource real quick.

Katherine McCord:

Keep going. Great resource, by the way. I've also backed that resource. All about it. So beautiful.

Katherine McCord:

So the next thing. So now we know what it feels like. So now we practice going through the steps of recognizing it and then defeating it. So. So now we recognize it and so then you go through and you're like, okay, there it is, okay, there it is. And then you know letting you know, feeling what it feels like for that to calm down, and again never engaging. Then you create a very quick grounding action. And a grounding action just means that it's something that will snap your nervous system into the correct situation, right.

Katherine McCord:

So for me, I do a quick tap of the finger, quick touch of the side of my chair, or a very quick light, not stop, but just a light tap of my foot, like I had somebody once try to like stop and I'm like, no, just lightly tap your foot or take a very quick breath, and when you do that, spend literally five minutes. This only takes five, maybe six minutes. Just do that repeatedly and tell your brain what this happens. I have clean air to breathe, I have food in the pantry, a roof over my head, I am safe, I am in good health and just or you know what, I just kind of let your brain know that when I do this one little thing, we're okay, we're all right and it literally takes five or six minutes.

Katherine McCord:

And then you go through and you practice looking at the aggravating thing and then deactivating it. And it's fascinating because in every class and every lesson when I do this, I watch the person go oh, my God, I feel it, I feel it turn off, I was like yeah, yeah, because your brain then starts to go oh, okay, we're all right, we're we're, we're good. And then the next step, step, which is the best step, is positive engagement, and this is where you, you I teach it initially with other humans, because that's the easiest way to learn it, and then you move it to things like social and email and all that. But have them look the other person in the eye if they're comfortable. If not, engage as they are comfortable and then ask a question and truly listen to it and be excited and find excitement in that and just practice going. This is what I want to learn about and telling your brain that this is the thing I want to learn about.

Katherine McCord:

There's a little bit more intricacy to that that I won't dive into because that takes a moment, but it's a very simple process and when you activate the curiosity, what happens is oxytocin is released and serotonin, and these are healthy, happy chemicals that do nice things to our bodies. And, by the way, that process can also be addictive, but it's in a good way.

Jay Johnson:

We're being addicted to health and learning and connection Much better and connection Much, much better, much more effective.

Katherine McCord:

So that's the basics of it, so just kind of walking people through it, helping them to understand and then creating those new habits and then setting up accountability and practice sessions. You know, periodically, and what happens is you start to shift, and not just in your work life but in your personal life. I've literally got a message from one of my clients going you saved my marriage.

Jay Johnson:

Sure.

Katherine McCord:

Like I just was not getting my partner at all in our communication. And now here we go and it's the same thing, but it can. It can do the same thing in the workplace and it could do the same thing with clients. You know just whomever your children, whomever you're interacting with. It absolutely increases the quality of your communication.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and Katherine, it's so profound what you're saying and I'm 100% on board with that, and a big part, I think, is you're absolutely right we get addicted to the patterns of behavior that have served us or not served us over the course of our time. So my background studying psychology, neuroscience and communication like everything that you're talking about the one thing I want to pull out because I think it's such an interesting aspect is when you were talking about the anxiety reduction techniques and the calming techniques. One of the things that you said was tapping, and I was just recently introduced to the science of tapping, which, to be honest with you as a scientist, I, as a scientist, I always approach everything. When I hear something, I'm like all right, I'm skeptic. I was skeptical. I went and did some of the research on this and I was like holy, this is incredible. The impact that, yeah. So I love that you brought that up.

Jay Johnson:

We could probably spend an entire show on that, but we've already produced some incredible tips and tactics. So I'm going to summarize, but I'm going to ask you a question after that summary is what else would you tell a trainer or a coach to really help them elevate that behavioral change? So I'm going to start with the summary of universal, so being inclusive, making sure that it's fit for everybody, thinking about all of those different aspects of it Again, probably another topic for an entire show. Second, getting them past that limbic reaction, getting them past that sort of amygdala, the fear response, the patterns of behaviors that don't serve us, and what else, Katherine create success from it and make sure that the person has a positive outcome.

Katherine McCord:

And this is part of training yourself to do it too. If you're doing this by yourself, so you want to set yourself up. So, for instance, you can take an interaction with your partner I'm just going to use that because that's something that most people can relate to so you go in, you respond with curiosity, everything goes way more smoothly, and then it's like a reward system. And then that reward system again, that's natural in our brain goes oh we like this, oh this went really well, even just things that will decrease your stress level. So, instead of engaging and being frustrated and all of this, but just asking questions, getting curious, creating a solution. I actually spoke to a mother that just thought this was the best technique ever for dealing with her child who had quite a little funny personality, and the reward system can also just be. I'm not stressed from this interaction anymore. I don't get anxiety going into this anymore because I know I'm going to feel healthy and I'm going to be okay, and so it just reduces that stress.

Katherine McCord:

It also another one is a negotiation that can go really well. If you get curious during a negotiation, that can really benefit. So creating a reward system and then also an active that's a past, kind of a passive one because it will automatically happen, but also an active reward system, something like eat a small bite of chocolate or take two minutes and watch a cute puppy video, or watch a little bit of sports or whatever. There's something short, something easy, but something that will also tell your brain we did so good. And when this thing happens, good thing happens and just kind of working that in. So creating that active reward system as well as acknowledging and processing the passive one. So stopping at the end and going, I responded in curiosity what were the benefits of that? And really absorbing that.

Jay Johnson:

I think this is so powerful because we often tell other people, hey, you should be so proud of yourself, celebrate, and so on, but we often don't really take the time to celebrate our own behavioral wins or our own behavioral successes. Don't really take the time to celebrate our own behavioral wins or our own behavioral successes. So, trainers and coaches out there, get your participants to celebrate their wins, their successes, no matter how big or small, and reinforce and reward that dopaminergic hit that they're going to get from doing something. That is that shift. Katherine, I love this conversation. I can already tell you we're probably gonna have you back to talk about some of these other issues in deeper depth, but where would our audience be able to connect with you and get ahold of you if they wanted to reach out?

Katherine McCord:

Thank you, jay. It's been an absolute blast. I'd be glad to come back anytime. So number one I'm always on LinkedIn. Reach out to me, message me. Even if it's a personal reach out, I am perfectly fine with that. If you just have a question, let's connect, let's talk about it. You can also go to kmacordspeakingcom. That's my speaker site. You can book me to come in and talk to your group, talk to your organization, help you out with some coaching, whatever it is that you need. And then also my professional site for the HR side of things universal design, recruiting, all of that that's titanmanagementusacom.

Jay Johnson:

Amazing. We'll make sure that those links are in the show notes.

Katherine McCord:

Katherine, thank you so much for being here with us today. I'm so sorry, jay. I just forgot I have an event coming up I'm supposed to be inviting people Invite, invite, invite please, by all means.

Katherine McCord:

So we're having an in-person event. It's called Peopleverse. It's just peopleverseorg is the site. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be at the Planetarium in a little theater called Pocket Theater in the Dallas area. It's going to be incredible coming together, learning things like responding and curiosity, building innovation, creating universal design, and everybody's going to be bringing their own projects and we're going to help each other solve problems in an active, collaborative way. This is not a sit and listen. This is let's do the work and let's have some fun doing it and eat some really good food too. So if you want to check us out, it's very inexpensive. Five meals are included. Join us at Peopleverse in October.

Jay Johnson:

Amazing, and Dallas definitely is a place for good food. So thank you again, Katherine, for joining us here on the Talent Forge. We really appreciate your insights and your wisdom and we'll definitely look forward to a future conversation.

Katherine McCord:

Sounds great.

Jay Johnson:

And thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge. Stay tuned for our next, where we will shape the future of talent development.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

Host