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

Elevating L&D: From Fast Food to VP with Jess Almlie

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Join us as we explore the fascinating world of Learning and Development with seasoned expert Jess Almlie, whose nearly 30-year journey reveals the art of crafting impactful learning experiences. From her early days at McDonald's to her pivotal role as VP of Learning at WEX, Jess shares her unique insights into transforming traditional classroom leadership development. Her master's thesis challenged conventional methods, emphasizing the synergy between education and continuous practice. Discover how Jess turns everyday training into opportunities for real behavioral change, offering a fresh perspective on the evolution of L&D.

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. I am joined with a very special guest today, jess Almle. Hi, jess, how are you?

Jess Almlie:

Hey, I am doing great and I am thrilled to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, Jay.

Jay Johnson:

Me, too, I've been looking forward to this all week. I know that the insights that you're going to bring the audience is just going to love, so why don't we get the audience to know you a little bit better? Tell us about your story, jess, and how did you get into this talent development space?

Jess Almlie:

Yeah Well, I've been in the talent development space in one way, shape or form. I'm going to tick into 30 years here within the next year, which is crazy. Yeah, and that doesn't count, what I call my very first L&D job, which was I was a crew trainer at McDonald's in college.

Jay Johnson:

Okay, that's kind of cool.

Jess Almlie:

It was kind of fun. I think that was the first time that I thought, oh, this is kind of cool, I wonder if I could do more of this as a career. And so I did end up working in a variety of industries and I've done everything. I like to say I've done all the jobs, but I've done the orientation coordinator, the LMS administrator and all the way up to my most recent corporate role, which was as the vice president of learning for a company called WEX in their benefits division, and now I'm out on my own as a consultant. So that's a little bit about my story, I would say, if you want to know more, one thing is I only wear silly socks, so I will not wear regular socks.

Jay Johnson:

Nice. That's awesome. So you've actually done everything. You know that's an incredible career, but you've actually done something that I think a lot of trainers, talent development people and even HR people didn't do. You you've been on the administrative side of like the LMS, but you've also been facilitating. How, how did you develop? Or like, where did all those skills? Did you just jump in? Was it something that you were like? Today, I am going to figure out an LMS system Like how does that happen? Because I know that some of our audience would love to know that.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, and I will have to give the caveat that when I did that role where I was administering an LMS, that was probably 25 years ago and so LMS looked very different than it did now. But I was the first person that was asked to administer an LMS within the company that I was at at the time and they sent me to training in Chicago because that was when you still sent people to training in person there wasn't virtual yet at that point and the role that I had was as a training coordinator for their HR department and they wanted to add in an LMS. So I would say it was a combo of them saying we are now going to do this and you're going to administer it, and here's the training for the LMS specifically.

Jay Johnson:

That's. That's pretty awesome, so I'm very grateful. It's actually my sister is a coder and technology person and has helped to put together our entire AOM and all that fun stuff. Because I looked at it and I'm like, nope, not for me. So, Jess, let's get into the core of this, because a big part of the reason that I am so excited for this conversation is you successfully transformed an organization's learning and development programs and you and I have had some great conversations already about hey, talent development is failing. You've got a podcast and a newsletter. I'm going to definitely highlight that for our audience as well. But let's get into talk me through. What did that look like for you? Start from the beginning, because I think that this is so important.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, okay. Well, if we want to start from the beginning, part of it has to do with how I approach work in general. I am one of these people and I suspect that many of us in L&D are like this talent development. I think you are like it too, Jay, where you have this little voice in the back of your head that says there's got to be a better way, something isn't working here. There's got to be a better way to maximize the work that we do. And so earlier in my career that there's got to be a better way, when I was in roles where I was like a program manager, facilitator, doing leadership development, that there's got to be a better way was how do we make sure that the experiences that people have are engaging and interactive and impactful and they're getting what we want them to get out of it and they're learning and changing their behavior as a result? That was how it looked earlier on.

Jay Johnson:

Right there, you said something, changing their behavior as a result. So that was how it looked earlier on. Right there, you said something changing their behavior as a result. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, continue, it's so important yeah it really is.

Jess Almlie:

Well, and I just had this suspicion that the formal, traditional classroom style learning, which is what we leaned on so heavily, was not the best, and so I actually did my master's thesis study on can leadership be learned in a classroom? So the answer won't shock you. It won't shock most people who are in talent.

Jess Almlie:

The answer is sort of so if we come all together into a room and we have some engaging interactive experiences that somehow tap into our emotions or something that makes us say, ah, that's interesting and we maybe practice that a little bit. It can carry out into the rest of our lives if we practice it afterwards again, so sort of like it can be part of our learning. But it can't be the only thing. And that was really what came out of that series of focus groups on leadership.

Jay Johnson:

I'd love to read that, because when we think and I make the joke, but it's seriously like imagine. So one of the things that I love to do is survival weekends. I want you to imagine coming to my classroom, sitting in, learning about all the flora, the fauna, all the things that can kill you, all the things that you need to do to survive, and then me packing you a bag, dropping you off on the side of the woods and saying good luck, Jess, have a great one. No one would expect that that would be a great experience. Why should we expect that you come to a classroom, sit and learn about leadership and then just be like here's your bag, here's your toolkit. Go, Good luck, Be a leader. Let us know how that works out. So I love that you were thinking that way and and obviously thinking that way all the way back to the master's thesis. So keep going. And this is so fast, Sorry. I get super excited about it because that's a big piece.

Jess Almlie:

Well, I think we nerd out on the same kind of things.

Jay Johnson:

And that's part of it.

Jess Almlie:

I like to say we all have our nerdisms, and you and I are smack in the middle of ours right now. That's right, smack in the middle, so yeah. So I did that and then eventually I ended up starting to lead L&D teams. And so then it shifts your perspective a little bit, because you're not just responsible for your own work, you're thinking about as a leader how is my team going to be most effective? And I like to say I had a rock star team because I think I did. They were awesome, they worked hard, they did high quality work, and I kind of led them to do the same thing I did, which was let's maximize any of these learning experiences.

Jess Almlie:

We called them learning experiences, not classes, because they weren't limited to a single class. We made things as multifaceted, as engaging as we could, but it wasn't enough. So it wasn't enough for us to spend all of our time perfecting our product, because the challenges and problems within the organization where we were working weren't getting solved. So oftentimes people would come to us and they'd say we need this training, you know, as our stakeholders would, and we would do what we did really well. We would ask questions about the learning outcomes. Well, what do you need people to know at the end of this course, that kind of thing. And we would assume that the solution was a training course, that kind of thing. And we would assume that the solution was a training course, and then we would create a lovely, lovely best practices learning experience based on what was asked for. There would be kudos up front and then pretty soon somebody would say well, this didn't work. No behavior is changing.

Jay Johnson:

The behavior didn't change.

Jess Almlie:

Yes, and so when that happens I mean number one it's a little bit defeating because you've just created this wonderful product and spent all this time, but because it didn't work, it's really a waste of everyone's time, energy and resources, and not only that, but it dings the credibility of the L&D team. So, even though we were doing great work, the finger of blame was getting pointed back to us to oh well, this didn't solve it. The training must not have been good enough when it comes down to it. In so many instances and I can share a couple, but in so many instances training would have never solved the problem in the first place. We should have never said yes. So that?

Jay Johnson:

was another aha moment.

Jay Johnson:

I want some of those instances, but I want to reinforce and draw that out. This is everything that we're preaching right now because the L&D function. I'm watching L&D departments literally get dismantled right now. I'm watching their budgets get slashed. I'm watching trainers get let go and now they're looking for other positions and they're not understanding necessarily why. How can they do this? Learning is so important and everybody wants to learn and they're giving us kudos, but at the end of the day, there is a business objective to training, to development, to learning operations, and if we're not hitting those business objectives, we're gonna lose that reputation, we're gonna get sidel reputation, we're going to get sidelined, we're going to be a luxury, not the necessity that we all know that we should be. So preach, go on, Jess. Give me those instances.

Jess Almlie:

I mean ding ding, ding, ding to all the things you just said, Jay, we back ourselves into a corner as a nice to have. This is what I discovered by doing the things we think are going to help the organization, which is respond to their requests for training, which is not push back, which is not show up to the conversation with a business hat on. These are all the things I learned along the way. So I knew something had to change at that point in our organization, but I didn't really know where to start or where to go, and there wasn't much out there at the time in terms of how do you run your L&D function differently. And so I went to parallel industries so I studied things like performance consulting, project management and stakeholder management, marketing, just business in general, business acumen, business finance, that kind of thing, and I got everything I could get my hands on around. What do these other parallel industries or thought processes do? And what we ended up doing was what I now say we shifted. I shifted our work from a place where we were very much order takers, responding to the requests of the organization, to one where we were then working as what I called strategic business partners. So it looks very different, because instead of somebody coming to us and saying, hey, I'd like a 30, I need a 30minute e-learning on X to solve my problem, they would come to me and say we're having this challenge on our team, can you help? Which is a very different conversation, because now we've started as a partner to them, a collaborative partner in solving their talent challenges. We also then understood the strategy of the organization, and so we were in lockstep.

Jess Almlie:

What we were creating then at that time and what we were offering was to enhance the business objectives that were the biggest at the time for the organization. We didn't have to figure out what are we going to do this year for leadership development or for whatever it's written into the business objectives, how the business wants to improve. So now it's up to us to put on our learning expertise hat and say all right, how are we going to help this business improve? How are we going to partner? I don't even like to use the word help, help because I think that we in L&D one of the things we do in talent development we approach our work as a support function in our heads. So we're saying, oh, I'm here to help, I'm here to support you, what can I do to help? What can I do to support you, but that we have already minimized our position in terms of our ability to. Sorry, don't understand. That was.

Jay Johnson:

Siri, hey Siri. Welcome to the conversation.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, hey, Siri, welcome. We've already minimized our place in that conversation. Instead of how can I support and help you, we needed to shift our mindset to how can I partner with you to create a solution, and so we even outlawed that language of we're no longer going to say we support or help. Whenever somebody comes and says can you help us, I will say something like yeah, how can I partner with you to create that solution? Or I'd love to partner with you to figure out how we can move forward.

Jay Johnson:

Language creates that reality, you know, and if you start positioning yourself as a strategic business partner as opposed to the uh, the, the background cast and crew that's there to you, know, support your needs that's gotta have an immediate shift. It's gonna not only have a shift with you, but also with the people that are looking like, oh okay, well, this is a strategic partner, not necessarily my lackeys who are going out and educating the team and I'm not saying that they think that per se, but there is sort of that hierarchical structuring in our brain when we say I'm here to support you versus I'm here to partner with you in a strategic venture to make you successful and to make us successful. I want to unpack one thing that you mentioned there, Jess and I think that this was a really interesting aspect is a lot of people have a very big difficulty, especially in the L&D function, not necessarily just pushing back, but and I'll say pushing back but even just having a conversation or a dialogue they get the executive leader that comes in, or maybe the CFO or whomever it is, that comes in and says we have a problem with sales. Put together a sales training, get that out to the team. I want it out by next week.

Jay Johnson:

And I think a lot of L&D people take a step back and go. These salespeople have been here for 25 years. They've had great years, they've had not so great years. People have been here for 25 years. They've had great years, they've had not so great years. Is it really a sales training that's going to get them to move over this mark or is it something else? They may think that. But wow, when you're facing down that executive or when you're facing down that person who's at least according to our data generally a lot of times we're going to call it very driven, very passionate, probably very outspoken, can come off sometimes a little aggressive or a little dominating.

Jay Johnson:

And here we are, as L&D people going. Do I say no? Do I say, do I challenge this? Do I push back just a little bit to say are we sure that this is going to solve? Because they're the leader, they're the CEO, they're the exec or whatever it is, how did you, I'm going to ask first, how did you build the courage to take that first step and say you know what? And I would imagine some imposter syndrome might've come out. I would imagine some of the oh my God, did I just tell them no, like what. What brought you to that courage, point to step in and say maybe there's some other way that we can partner on this, rather than put your 30-minute e-learning sales training out?

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, I think there's a couple different things. One, it's that mindset shift, because if I say in my mind I am showing up as your partner, that's very different. I'm going to start by asking different questions. That's one thing. The other thing is, when I do need to take that training request, what I do differently with that training request. So let's talk about both of those. So one is if I'm showing up as a partner and I'm asking different questions, instead of launching into well, what do you want people to know at the end of the training, I start by asking questions about what got us to this point. So the questions that I'm asking that leader are things like oh, can you give me some examples as to how you know this isn't working right now? I wanna make sure that we come up with the best solution possible. So I'm very. I never say to a leader no, there's no way we're going to do that, you're wrong. It more comes from a standpoint of curiosity and almost playing this part of this detective. So let's figure out together how we can come up with the best solution. And yeah, it might be a learning solution, or part of it might be a learning solution. I don't even say to them right away we're not gonna do this.

Jess Almlie:

I had a very almost what you just described scenario where I had a sales leader who came to me at one point and said we need a bootcamp on communication for our salespeople because we've got a higher sales number to reach this year than we've ever had to reach before and they need to be better at communicating. And so I started to ask those same types of questions Like well, tell me how you know that they're not communicating well right now? Like what's the evidence? And then there wasn't much evidence, it was just this gut feeling. And then I said, okay, well, what does it look like for somebody to communicate well? And how would you know that was getting done? And again there wasn't much answer. You know, I kind of almost had stumped this guy and I said you know what? I think I can help you. If you give me a little bit of access to your people and your data, I'll dive in and figure out what the missing chunk is for this communication piece, and then we'll go from there. And he was more than happy to at that point turn this over to me.

Jess Almlie:

So then I could run really a full performance analysis, and what I did was I looked at their data. I interviewed people that were managers and that were sales people. I asked for their highest performers and their sort of just middle level performers to figure out what made the difference. And then I also sat in and listened in on a lot of sales calls and kind of just took notes and then from that I could determine where really the gaps were, and you know what? They weren't in communication. So the gaps were in a couple of different things.

Jess Almlie:

What we found was that the highest performers had a really solid system for watching their numbers. They knew exactly where they were, which customers they needed to reach out to at which point. And there was also some leadership issues. There were some the leaders weren't necessarily doing the best job at coaching these employees. The best employee, the best salespeople, had figured this out with the sales numbers, but it wasn't because their managers were coaching them to do so. So we could kind of come at it from a couple of different angles then. Like let's figure out how to make sure everybody understands how to utilize their numbers and put some systems in place. There were a few other things. It's rarely one, but long story short, we didn't end up doing a boot camp. There was no communication boot camp. That happened for sales leaders.

Jay Johnson:

Now I just so I'm going to follow this argument to the end of the line Trainers, coaches, hr consultants that are listening to this. Imagine if you were to put that communication boot camp into play. What would have happened? You'd have got to the end of that training 30 days later. 60 days later, nothing changes, and that sales manager, sales leader looks and goes you failed, you didn't help me hit my numbers. And it's just so important that we really start looking at things this way Because, again, if not that's the last time you're getting hired for a communications training or if you're an internal team, you're starting to lose your reputation. So continue on in this story, jess. These are such powerful, powerful insights, yeah.

Jess Almlie:

I can give even a more simplified example, because the sales one got pretty complicated pretty quickly, but this is the one I like to say. When we think about what, if we had created this training, what would have happened? So I had a team come to me and say they had this team had two tasks, primarily, that they had to do. They had simple tasks and they had complex tasks. So the simple tasks they could crank through and the complex tasks took a little bit more time. And they said nobody is doing these complex tasks on our team. We need training. They don't know how to do them.

Jess Almlie:

And instead of saying, okay, we'll create that training, we dove in and asked a few more questions and what we found was this the team was incentivized. They got a bonus and these were hourly employees. They got a bonus based on how quickly and accurately they could complete the task and the volume of tasks that they completed in a day. So if they were working on the simple tasks, they could get more done and they were more accurate because they were easier to do versus if they were working on the complex tasks. It took them more time, they couldn't get as many done and they were more likely to make an error just because of the complicated nature of the task. So so, in essence, I mean, anybody who's ever tried to make money to live knows that you're going to do the thing that makes you more money. So it wasn't that people didn't know how to do these complex tasks. It was that if they took them on, they literally had a smaller paycheck.

Jay Johnson:

And a higher risk calculation.

Jess Almlie:

Exactly so. Had we created a training for that more complex task, it wouldn't have made any difference in this instance. Instead, what I did and again, I rarely go back and say no, we're not going to do this I said to those leaders here's what I'm seeing, you know, I'm going to suggest that you try to fix this incentive problem first, and then we'll come back and do the training if it's still needed. And they did. And guess what? We never did a training Because the moment that that incentive issue was fixed and people made more money doing the complex tasks, they were literally scrambling to do them and they were doing them well.

Jess Almlie:

So another instance, where training would have never solved the problem. Even if it was fantastic, wonderful best practice, highly engaging, highly interactive, that wouldn't have mattered.

Jay Johnson:

That you spend a ton of time and energy on perfecting before it goes to market and, yeah, still not effective. But I think this is a great example of being a business partner and being like a strategic business partner. And you know, going back to something that you said, you invested time into project management, into marketing, learning a larger business function. I mean, essentially you pulled back from the narrow lens that we have sometimes as L&D people and said let me get a better handle on all of these external pieces that are actually in, and I'm sure that that served you well in this exact scenario of going. This isn't a training problem, this is a structural problem with your incentives or the way that these things are functioning. And asking those powerful coaching questions and even just exploratory, curiosity-driven questions helps you to be an effective business partner or a strategic partner.

Jess Almlie:

Great example of that. I don't know if this is the right language, but we can't expect to be taken seriously as business partners unless we act like business partners, which means we need to show up to any meeting, to any conversation with a business hat on first and we bring our learning expertise along, because that's ultimately how we're going to make an impact. But our job is not about us, and I suffice it to say it's really not solely about learning. Our job is about how do we help or how do we partner to move the organization forward in the direction it's trying to go. But if we're going to do that, we have to understand first what that direction is. We need to understand the context in which our work is done and show up with a complete understanding of that context before we show up with our learning hat in check.

Jay Johnson:

And I think that, intuitively, we know this as human beings. Right, we don't invest a whole bunch of money into a college education without some level of at least expectation of, return on investment. We don't invest into going into other programs, into learnings. Now don't get me wrong. Some people love to learn. I love to learn, I love sitting in on things Probably half of the things I will never use in my life but I'm like, oh wow, that's curious, that's fun. But that's not everybody.

Jay Johnson:

And the executive function of the organization is to make sure that the organization is healthy. Sinking money into something that doesn't have a return on investment is not something a leader is going to do over and over and over again, something a leader is going to do over and over and over again just because it's nice or just because people are excited about it. So you know, bringing that to the surface is something that's so important. Those business objectives, strategic business objectives, and being able to align what we're doing. That's going to move that needle forward. Powerful, really, really powerful. So continue forward here. Jess, you've got this mindset. You've got this rockstar team. You've seen the writing on the wall. You've walked out of Plato's cave. Now you've got to be able to communicate it back. What was your next steps in that transformation?

Jess Almlie:

So I think transformation is the key word there, jay, because it doesn't happen overnight, and in fact, I like to say that this journey to being moving from order taker to strategic business partner is on a continuum and it can slide one way or the other, even day to day, because even when you have a new stakeholder who comes into the picture and has never worked with you before and they assume that they're going to work with you in a very legacy mindset way, which is I'm going to give you a training request and you're going to fulfill it, there's an element of training the business to do business with us that comes into play there as well. So it happens very slowly.

Jay Johnson:

I like that a lot yeah.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, and you know, when I think about training the business to do business with us, this is one thing that I realized we needed to step back and we needed to get better at running our own L&D function like a business. If we're going to show up to the table with our business hats on, we need to be acting like business leaders, and what that meant was we needed to get a couple different playbooks in play. I say we created two different playbooks. One was an internal playbook and that was for our own internal procedures, processes, how we did our work, expectations for the team, what success looked like, and that was tied very closely to performance goals for everyone on the team. So they knew exactly how to be successful and the measurement that told me whether or not me and them, whether or not they were being successful. So we needed to put all of those places, all of those pieces, in place, first for our own team.

Jess Almlie:

And then the second playbook we created is what I called our external playbook, because this is the playbook that's for that we use in conversations with everyone else in the organization, and this playbook isn't necessarily have our how we're going to create a learning program, how we're going to have our conversations with stakeholders. Instead, it has things like these are the types of questions we're going to ask when you come to us with a request. These are typically the types of solutions. You're going to see what we've done in the past and the measures that indicate that they have been successful. So I'm going to say, you know, when somebody comes to me and say you know, we'd like to approach this onboarding a little bit differently. For example, I can tell you that in onboarding projects we've done in the past with this similar type of approach and model asking these questions at the beginning. We're going to reduce your time to production by approximately 50%. So you're going to have people ready to work 50% sooner than you have in the past.

Jay Johnson:

So those are the kinds of which would be any organization's dream, right? Well, we could do it.

Jess Almlie:

And then you can. The other wonderful thing we forget and this is in this whole measurement piece is whenever we reduce time, we can attach that to money. And so we have one very specific objective that within six months we saved the company $1 million because of the amount of time that we had cut off of this was an onboarding piece the amount of time we'd cut off from managers needing to be directly involved with onboarding, from the employees participating in onboarding and getting up to speed and being able to contribute. So we had to have some measurement pieces and then we had to have some talking points around good, better, best. So a lot of times people will come to us and they're looking for the catalog, but they really just need the scooter.

Jess Almlie:

So yeah, we can create you a full scale simulation that will help to train your people and this is how long it's going to take and this is how much it's going to cost, and we have that kind of upfront so that or we can create this alternative for you and this is how long it will take and this is what it will cost and this is what the results will be. But we had to know what that was before we could even have that conversation, and that to me, means running my function like a business. So I'm not just showing up like oh, what do you want to learn, what do you want to know. I'm showing up with this is what we can do, this is how much time it's going to cost, this is how much time it's going to take, how much it's going to cost, but here's also what the results you can expect. Is that something you want to move forward? I mean, basically it's a sales process. At that point, right, but it comes from a business mindset.

Jay Johnson:

And it's so smart. Number one is that you quantified in a dollar amount. Here's what we saved you in time. This is the translation to a dollar amount. Now, if your budget is less than $1.6 million, in a lot of L&D groups that would be a very, very nice budget. Guess what? You've just justified your existence for however many times, or however many times over, you've justified investing in other programs or new technologies because, hey, if you can do that with what you got, now let me see what I can do to get you more resources. What else can you fix? And that credibility builder has a dollar amount on it and that is part of the business objective. I really, really love how you do that.

Jay Johnson:

But so audience trainers, coaches, look up some of these different functions. Like you got to do the legwork to get in there to better understand what are you actually spending. I'll give a quick example. One of the trainings that we do is on burnout, and we worked a lot with the healthcare industry and you know when you start looking at the numbers and the productivity and the number of patients that they can treat when burnout is a thing, literally, at different points in times we've been able to advocate, you know what? Give them a 40 hour week and give them a full day off in that 40 hour week. Literally take eight hours off of there. They'll be more productive in 32, even though you're paying them for 40, they will be twice as productive in 32 hours than they will be at 40 hours. Here's your data markers on that. And they went are you kidding? And they looked at each other. But I mean, when you have that background and that research and that knowledge and you can actually quantify the impact, it's a game changer.

Jess Almlie:

It really is, and I think that's where we in talent development, learning and development often fall short. We don't take the time to quantify that impact and that's when then we fall into nice to have territory because we're not showing that what we're really doing is we're saving the organization tons of money. We're making an impact with these interventions that we're doing or these experiences, or these helping people learn in the flow of work as opposed to needing to go to a class and pull them out of production, some of these kinds of different alternatives. We have that potential and that ability, but we don't tap into it. I don't think quite enough in order to do that, because you're right, as an L&D talent development function, we are generally in most organizations not a revenue producing function, which is where we put on our. I'm a support staff, I'm here to help all of those hats, but we are still a very viable part of the organization in terms of improving talent and solving talent challenges. I mean, think about how many challenges in an organization are related to talent, are related to people. If we can get in there and help and partner to support or partner to create solutions around those and then show that we made a real, viable impact.

Jess Almlie:

There is no question who's not getting cut when the layoffs happen? Because I also have to put on my executive hat. You know what's the role of an executive in an organization. Generally, they have a couple of things that will impact learning and development and everyone else. Number one they're probably signing off on strategy. So what's the direction the organization's going to go? What's most important to us in the coming year? They're doing that kind of thing. Number two they're allocating resources throughout the organization. They're saying, yes, you can have funds or no, you can't.

Jess Almlie:

Well guess what?

Jay Johnson:

Everybody wants more than they can ever than they can ever attain right In any organization.

Jess Almlie:

There will always be more resources.

Jess Almlie:

I mean, I always have way more ideas on how to spend money than money that exists and so I need to, as a learning person, create, have something to show that the decision to allocate resources to me is a viable one, and if I don't have that for the executives, there's no way they're going to fund the programs and the processes that I'm doing. I had one time, jay, I had a boss, and this is one of my phrases that I would use throughout my career is here's what you're getting from me. I will not do nice things. And they kind of laugh and I say I mean, I'm a nice person, don't get me wrong, but I'm not here to do nice things, I'm here to do effective things. So let's make the difference and let's figure out what's effective and let's put our time and energy there.

Jay Johnson:

I love that I actually use that same concept. Leadership there's two ways to evaluate it effective and ineffective. Training there's two ways to evaluate it effective and ineffective. I think it was super interesting. Maybe this could be some key insight, because I think about the different ways in which we end up measuring some of our value for everything from conflict. How much does conflict cost you in absenteeism? How much does it cost you in retention? How much does it cost you in failed projects? Another place that we do is we reduced one organization's average meeting time by nine minutes and that doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have the number of meetings that this team was having and you start calculating nine minutes on every single one of those meetings, the return on investment was huge.

Jay Johnson:

How did you, creatively, I guess, what gave you that vision to be? Like let's measure this, let's look at this Cause I think that's honestly sometimes from a talent development side, and some of the people that I coach they're like well, how do you measure communication? Like how do you measure the quantifiable impact of communication? It's like okay, how many emails do you get every single day? How clear, how concise, how much time is spent on that? How much energy is spent on it. So how did you approach that, jess? What was something that maybe you looked at when it was like okay, this is the function, this is what we're measuring and this is how we're going to demonstrate a return on investment.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, I mean again. It's a mindset shift. In some ways it is about demonstrating a return on investment. It's also about I would often look at it from what data will help us to make better business decisions moving forward. And when you ask that question instead of how do we justify our existence, it takes some of the emotion out of it and you can think a little bit more clearly.

Jess Almlie:

But, the other thing that I always do is start with what measures already exist. So if we want to measure something like communication, for example, or efficiency in that, how do we know right now that it's not effective? What's telling us? What measures are you looking at? Are you looking at performance review data? Are you looking at how many people are on performance plans? Are you looking at how long? What's the metric of how long I stay on a phone call, how soon I'm able to resolve any conflicts with customers? Most organizations have some metrics that they're tracking around that and if that is the case, then we can figure out how we might apply some type of an intervention or learning activity, if that's the best answer and we have an existing measure up front and then we can look at. Did it move in the back end?

Jess Almlie:

So, we don't. I think we get stuck because we always think. We think we always need to make it up to find where the measures exist, but ideally they already exist Now. They don't always, so there's other alternatives if that's the case, but if at all possible. One of the things that I'm diving into, even in that first discovery phase, is basically what's the evidence that you know that this isn't working? Phase is you know basically what's the evidence that you know that this isn't working. How are you measuring it right now so that then we can ultimately use that same measure in the backend? If we have to make it up, we can, but yeah, well, and that's incredibly smart.

Jay Johnson:

But I and I really think that sometimes, like, we forget about how much data an organization actually does collect and we may not even realize it, like, for example, teams that use Microsoft Teams or Slack or anything else. You can measure the amount of messages that are sent. You can actually look and target and say, hey, this team communicates with each other X amount of times in a week. They're much higher performing than this team who communicates with each other Y times a week. So maybe communication is not the issue, maybe the leadership or the management or something is, but digging into some of that is it's time consuming. So I want to ask this question, jess how are you able to balance? Because I think a lot of times it's, it's almost daunting.

Jay Johnson:

So, number one, as somebody that's not been in the position of transforming an organization or somebody that's not been in the position of measuring throughout their career, they may look at that and go, wow, that's a lot more, that's a lot deeper than me putting together a PowerPoint and going into a space and teaching.

Jay Johnson:

You know that that's what I signed up for. I didn't sign up for all this business stuff and this is just way too complex or wow, that's going to cost way too much time and the organization that's hiring me to come do this training they're never going to pay for all of that time that I'd have to invest to do this and do it right, and it almost becomes this Gordian knot, right Like it's. Either I say no to this because I know it's not going to be effective, or I say yes to this and have to do this in some kind of an abbreviated way. How were you able to maybe balance inside of this transformation? Because at some level, the leader is still going to want some level of engagement, training, development, et cetera going on. But seeing this can take some time.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, for sure. Can I mean again, you used the word transformation, which it is, and so we didn't one day wake up and start doing all of this stuff. It was over several years' time. Over several years' time, and so the best advice I can give and the way that we balanced was you start exactly where you are and you do little things that eventually add up to something big. So, for example, I like to say let's find the opportunity in the order. So when somebody comes to us with a training request and we don't have time because you're correct, a lot of times they would be like no, you have to just go on this and you can't push back on me. I'm an executive and I'm not used to working with L&D teams in a way in which they ask these additional questions or this is a compliance issue. You have to do this right now or we're going to be under some major fines from some governing body.

Jay Johnson:

Sure.

Jess Almlie:

Okay, so we say yes to doing that, but then, within the work, we start to do things differently, very, very slowly. So, for example, we asked the question about can we do? Can we go back? Can we? Right now, we'll create, we'll create this compliance training for you, and then what we'd like to do is go back and reassess it later, you know, and can we? Yep, we'll put a PDF out on the LMS right now that people have to read and sign, which we all know isn't training.

Jess Almlie:

But, ultimately, what do we want to accomplish? And can we go back later and then change it? Can we build a closer relationship which is always possible with this potential stakeholder, so that we get to know them better and they trust us a little more? Can we add some little sparks of extra so that there's additional value that they don't expect? Can we add in something that's measurable, that they didn't think would be measurable in the end? Can we? Is there an opportunity here to create something that will scale across business units? So we're not only creating it once now, we're going to create it multiple times. So we're asking if we, even if we have to say yes within that training order it's not always even a yes or a no, it's a well, what can we do?

Jay Johnson:

So, okay, we need to say yes, we need to say yes, yeah, the old improv.

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, we need to say yes in this. But what can we do within this to slowly shift the needle, to help people see we can work with you a little bit differently, and so that's the kind of thing that we would do over time. I can share one example. If that's helpful, I can share one example, if that's helpful.

Jess Almlie:

So we had a team that came to us and said we need you to create a webinar series for our customers. So my team that I oversaw did customer education as well as internal education. We need a webinar series for our customers. At this time of year, when the largest number of customers are onboarding to our platform and to our software platform, they aren't getting the information they need. Our team members are overburdened. They don't have time to do one-on-one phone calls with all these customers. We have to do something where we can get more people to learn this information all at one time. We need webinars.

Jess Almlie:

So I'm thinking webinars are probably not going to be the best solution, but at that point I had no opportunity to say no because they had already gone to the executives and got buy-in for this decision and the time period of when all these customers, this big influx of customers in the cadence of the company, was coming soon and so there was no option. We had to create these webinars. So I said, okay, we will create these webinars and we will put our best people on it. But here's what I'm going to ask for in return After we're done, I want to have access to do a full analysis on the education, the customer education process that you're using right now, so we can really dive in and see what's working and what isn't working. Like, basically, we'll help you with this band-aid solution, but we're not going to do this again in the future. That way, we'll set us up for success for the next time, the next year, when this big influx of customers comes.

Jess Almlie:

That's number one. Number two we also want to take each of these webinars and break them down into small little videos that we also post exactly on your site where your customers are going. And then, number three, we're going to measure how many people come to the webinars, how many people click on the videos. And then the last thing is, we're going to need you to do some tracking of your people as to how much time they're spending one-on-one, and so I asked for those measures. Up front.

Jess Almlie:

I said, yeah, we'll do this, but here's what we also need to do, and, surprisingly enough, the webinars were a huge fail.

Jess Almlie:

Nobody came to them, and when they did come, and even though we created it to be as interactive as we could, there were so many technical issues that they could never get through the content.

Jess Almlie:

But the videos, the short videos that we put online got tons of hits and people were going to those, and so it gave me some leverage to have the conversation. And then later on, when I went back and did the full analysis, I found that it wasn't that people couldn't get to all the phone calls. It was that their processes were so manual that they spent almost all their time clicking around on their computer and they didn't have time left over. So in order to run a report that they had to see each daily for how many customers were onboarding and how many weren't, they had to run a report, wait for an overnight process and then manually go in and double check each person in the system before they could even get to starting to send out emails. So we talked about how can you automate this a little bit more. So the moral of that story was we had to say yes. There wasn't an option to say no, but we said yes in such a way that set us up to work more strategically in the future.

Jay Johnson:

And that's so smart, right? You're bringing in that creative sort of longer term vision. You're solving whatever the immediate, right? You're bringing in that creative sort of longer-term vision. You're solving whatever the immediate issue is, but bringing in that creativity for the longer-term, the strategic vision, if you will, and then bringing that about in a way that's sort of like yep, I'm going to help you achieve whatever it is that you've already committed to or what you need right in a second. I'm going to help you solve that issue, but you're going to help me solve the longer term issue of when this absolutely fails to produce the results that you're looking for Well, which isn't what I I mean.

Jess Almlie:

I never said that, that this is going to fail, it's more like let's make sure that this is really the best solution for the future as well, and here's what we're going to do. So it's always framed in sort of this positive I'm going to help you because we want to get to this end solution and have everybody win, and here's how we can do that Back to the business objective.

Jess Almlie:

Interestingly enough, after we did that project with that particular business unit, they never came asking for a training or a webinar again. They completely shifted to say, okay, here's what's going on, what do you think we might be able to do about it? They became one of our biggest advocates in terms of working as a strategic business partner, but it happened because we took an order and we fulfilled it for them, but with some additional caveats and work involved.

Jay Johnson:

And that's so important. When we actually can demonstrate the value and we show up and we do it in the way that's actually meaningful, we I mean we've rebuilt that reputation we start to be like, huh, what else can you do? Oh, wow, yeah, and, and we, we create those passionate advocates for the type of training that we're actually capable of doing. Jess, I want to make sure that we get to the end of this story. I want to be respectful of time. So you've done this, you've gone through this, you've got this transformation, you're starting to get people on board. How does this story conclude for you?

Jess Almlie:

Well, for me, it concluded with an acquisition, so my company that I was working for was acquired and then we needed to shift the way that we worked entirely. So I ended up eventually ended up kind of leaving that organization as a result, because the direction we were going wasn't the direction we had been going. Result because the direction we were going wasn't the direction we had been going. But overall, I would say, within the organization before the acquisition, how it summed up was exactly what I said at the beginning, where we had people coming to us asking to help with talent challenges as opposed to asking for specific e-learnings, and then the thing that we were doing, right as the acquisition happened, was building up team members to be able to have more of those same conversations themselves.

Jess Almlie:

So it became not just a process of, I guess, training the rest of the business how to do business with us differently, but it also became a process of now, how do we build somebody who became a trainer in their team because they were really good at helping people learn their jobs to now becoming an L&D professional who thinks and acts like a strategic business partner? And so we had to put some. We put goals in place for each of our team members to, for example, even just start learning about the business, start asking different questions when they met with stakeholders. We went to a full learning business partner model where each of our senior team members were paired with certain parts of the organization so they could really learn that part of the organization well and they could understand the business in that section of the organization so that they could then be that business partner and suggest learning solutions or ask those different questions. So those are some of the things that we did prior to the acquisition.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. So fast forward. Here you are, you're out on your own right now and you are using this incredible knowledge, incredible experience that you've amassed over the time 30 years in talent development. And how is that? Who are you serving, jess? You know, if our audience was thinking like, oh my gosh, we need to be able to do that kind of transformation, is that the type of you know organizational that you're working with? What does that look like for you?

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, it does. So if there's one thing I'm really passionate about, jay, it's how do we move the needle on this profession overall, knowing that we have this potential to make a larger impact than we are making. And once I was able to make this transformation with my own team, I kind of had this thought of why doesn't everybody work this way and what holds us back, and it's some of the things that you and I just talked about. I did some research. I did some qualitative research, talking to learning leaders across all industries and backgrounds and sizes of companies about what they did well to become strategic business partners or what was holding them back, and so I found more information there. But, yes, what I'm doing right now is working with L&D leaders and teams, or talent development leaders and teams, to help them to be more strategic, more intentional with their work and have measurable impact, and essentially, that means they're becoming strategic business partners.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. So, Jess, how would our audience get ahold of you if they wanted to connect, reach out or learn more about what you're doing?

Jess Almlie:

Yeah, best way to do to start that is on LinkedIn. So connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message. We can have a conversation that way. Other ways to find out more about my work I do, as you mentioned earlier, have a podcast. It's called L&D Must Change, and that is a podcast in which I'm interviewing people throughout our profession who are calling for small ways and shifts that we can change our thinking and our approach to the work that we do. And I also have a newsletter by the same name that comes out on alternate weeks to the podcast. So those are three of the best ways to find out more about what I'm doing and connect with me.

Jay Johnson:

We're going to make sure that that's available in the show notes and obviously some incredible insights, and just it's so inspiring to hear that there is the better pathway and to be able to talk to somebody. You know, I've been working with trainers and coaches trying to help them develop these skills generally on the outside of L&D teams and to see this, you know, being able to be brought to that larger scale, that L&D leadership. I am so incredibly happy that you took the time to be here today to have this conversation. We obviously went a little bit longer than our normal 35 minutes, but I just thought it was so enlightening and so insightful. So thank you, jess, for your time and energy today.

Jess Almlie:

Absolutely. Thank you, Jay.

Jay Johnson:

And thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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