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

Beyond Training: The Art of Speaking Leadership's Language with Traci Austin

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 44

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Why does executive leadership often fail to see the value in talent development initiatives? Traci Austin of Elevated Talent Consulting reveals the critical disconnect between HR professionals and the C-suite that's creating frustration on both sides.

The conversation explores specific techniques for gaining trust in challenging industries where vulnerability isn't welcome, including the one question that transforms any training session: "What would make this hour a good use of your time?" This simple approach demonstrates respect while opening the door to meaningful engagement.

Whether you're in HR, talent development, or leadership, this episode provides the missing translation guide for creating stronger partnerships across organizational divides. Connect with Tracy through Elevated Talent Consulting or join her weekly People's Strategy Club for continuing conversations on bridging workplace gaps.

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, a special guest comes in with an HR background. That is incredible and I can't wait to talk to her. This is Traci Austin. Welcome to the show, traci.

Traci Austin:

Thank you so much for having me, Jay.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, so let's dig in. How did you get to where you're at now? It's always interesting to learn the journey of fellow HR and talent enthusiasts in this space. So what got you here?

Traci Austin:

Absolutely Such a fun question, right? So I spent my first 10 years starting HR departments from the ground up in nonprofit organizations, and then I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and became a nursing home administrator and decided it really didn't have the people piece, that like heart for people that I was really interested in and started doing consulting work. However, in every single piece it's always been the training piece. How do we elevate the people in our organization and how do we see them bigger than they see themselves so that they can be fulfilled in their work?

Jay Johnson:

I love that, hence the name Elevated Talent Consulting. I'm assuming it sure is. All right, awesome. So what was it like starting? Okay, so I've done a lot of work with nonprofits, mostly working with boards of directors and helping them like with their like boards, you know, like Robert's Rules of Order, or helping them structure their decisions. Okay, I can't imagine what it's like doing HR from the ground up with nonprofit entities. Talk, talk me through that. What did that look like?

Traci Austin:

Figuring it out I mean it really did.

Traci Austin:

It was a lot of figuring it out and I started very much as a lot of folks do, where you kind of fall into HR and it's like, hey, will you do payroll? And oh, there's this handbook thing and can you handle that? And then you get your lawsuit and then you get this, and so it just kind of snowballs into, okay, what is in the best interest of the organization and what is in the best interest of our people, and so it's looking at this and both, and so part of this was what do my executive leaders need? What do the folks that we're serving need? Because in nonprofits you have three bottom lines. You're measuring to, you've got an impact bottom line, you have a people bottom line and you have a profit bottom line. And that was the best learning is how do we truly elevate our people through that? And so in those kind of figuring it out all on your own, you're just dancing and that's fun.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, and you know, in the nonprofit world I have seen a lot of very interesting dances, so I can only imagine, you know, obviously with the nonprofit there's generally some level of social good or social impact or anything else like that. But I have found that nonprofit is very often full of people, people and what I've also found is that they are also the area of second chances, that they have a difficult time maybe enforcing rules or anything else like that. Was that at all your experience as you were sort of navigating some of that space?

Traci Austin:

You know, that was definitely some of the experience. And I think another key piece of the experience and this really got me into the training, learning and development area was what are those reasons that we're not hitting the specific outcomes in an area, and or what are the reasons we're not promoting a specific group of people? You know so I worked in a community action agency and what we found was we served about 80% of minority you know, I'm going to say minority population With that we had, I think it was about 15% of our staff that was minority. And when I looked at the promotion of minorities I was going okay, why are we not promoting? And they were lacking skill sets Okay, valid, yet we can do something about this. And that's where, quite honestly, that love of learning and development in the training piece came in. Because what I found was where were they lacking?

Traci Austin:

Business writing, communication and general computer, excel and Word, I go. All of those things are solvable. Why aren't we investing in the training of our people to promote from within instead of continuously going outside? Thus we're losing the institutional knowledge that we currently have.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, and that makes a whole lot of sense. So there's gosh. There's so much fun stuff to unpack here. Tracy, I'm not even sure where to go. Well, I do know where I want to go.

Traci Austin:

I know where you want to go to.

Jay Johnson:

I want to dig right in. I'm going to go straight for what I see as one of the biggest challenges the connection between CEO or executive leadership and HR slash talent development. You and I both know there's a massive gap there, and I mean it is the grand canyon of gaps, and not a single day goes by that. I'm not talking to somebody in either of the fields talent development or HR that has expressed some level of frustration, some level of disappointment and feeling like they were, as my friend Jess Almey says, order takers as opposed to strategic partners. And just recently I had yet another friend reach out to me and say hey, I was laid off by my organization because they didn't see the value of what we were doing in the talent development space. Do you know anywhere that I can go? So let's dig into this. What generated this massive gap? What is going on here?

Traci Austin:

We're not speaking the same language.

Jay Johnson:

Okay, and I've heard that I 1000% agree with this. Let's dig into that.

Traci Austin:

Absolutely.

Jay Johnson:

What is the language of upper level leadership, executive leadership that we're just missing in your opinion?

Traci Austin:

Okay. So I'm going to take a step back to take a step forward. There is a key distinction between outputs and outcomes. An outcome is the end result of what we're getting. So your friend that called and said you know what? They said? That they're not seeing the end results. Okay. And output is? I'm going to put on a training program Great. What is the outcome of that training program, which is the output? Well, it is that we want to promote 20% of our people within the next year. It is that we want to XYZ. Hr and talent typically speaks in terms of an output. Our executive suite and our CEOs are interested in the outcomes. We need to speak the language of an outcome.

Jay Johnson:

Yes, hallelujah, thank you, and that was really really well stated. Actually, that's probably one of the clearest. So, in other words, if I was to say but Tracy, we launched 53 training simulations this year and we rebuilt this entire LMS and we did all of these programs for our people, how would you respond as a CEO?

Traci Austin:

what results did it get me to hit my? What result did it get me to hit expansion in three different states, increase of revenue by 25% and a reduction of cost by 10%? Did it hit those three outcomes?

Jay Johnson:

See, and I love that right.

Traci Austin:

And this is oh, go ahead. And typically the HR person will go. I didn't even know that those were the outcomes you were shooting for. That's your problem.

Jay Johnson:

It's a huge problem and that is, you know, and I'm gonna take a little of the. I'm gonna take a little of the weight off of HR and talent, but not all of it, because I do think that this is, it's an and both. It's got to be on both right, like leadership does have to be more clear. And what is my objectives? What are my main priorities? What are the key performance indicators that we're actually needing in order for this business to thrive, survive whatever it is and keep all of our people gainfully employed and profitable right? But there is also that aspect of we can, as talent development and HR, sit there and go gosh. They're not telling us what they need or what they want, rather than us taking ownership and jumping in there and really digging in and saying no, no, no, what is your priority? I need to know this so I can match our outputs to get to your outcomes right. So I see that in both directions.

Jay Johnson:

One of the things that I really try to focus on, at least in my own company, is telling people hey, so you sent three emails to get this information. Was that successful or not successful? Because three emails does not get you the info If that didn't get you the information. You need a different strategy. You need to do something, because the information is the end game. That's the goalpost, right? So how can we better equip our HR leaders, our talent development people, to start thinking more strategically at that sort of senior leadership level? What are your thoughts?

Traci Austin:

I think number one is to ask better questions and then confirming what the outcomes are. So you know that could look like you know you talked about, you know the LMS and this and that and whatever else, but to say to your leader hey, jay, what is? You know? This is a significant investment that the organization's making. What is the outcome that you know the organization is really looking for, based on this investment, so that we're aligned on the implementation of this LMS? What is it that you want? And then they may say X, y and Z and say, okay, I really want to make sure that we have a measurable for this. So if you are measuring the return on this investment, how are you in the leadership team going to be measuring this so that I know that we're putting in place the right levers to ensure that we can actually measure it at the end, so we know we hit the goal?

Jay Johnson:

I love those questions and that definitely gets to a different level of understanding of what the actual behaviors are that they're going to be able to measure, and not even just the behaviors. But what are the behaviors of success? Right, like I can teach, I can teach you communication, but if you're not actually implementing any of those different pieces, knowledge without action is is a luxury in terms of an investment from business, right? So in terms of an investment from business, right? So, okay, now, tracy, I think that this is one of the things that I have heard and help me understand, because every single person that I have talked to and there's a disconnect here somewhere. All right, I'm gonna get below the surface.

Jay Johnson:

When I talk to leadership, you know, when I talk to leadership, when I talk to L&D people or anything else, one of the things is you know, when I talk to leadership, when I talk to L and D people or anything else, one of the things is you know, I really was strategic, I was giving them what the return on investment is, and they felt like they were coming at this from the place of uh, you know, from the place of delivering on outcomes and not necessarily the outputs. But then I talked to the leaders in that same organization is like no, they're missing the boat. And it seems to me that, okay, if we've had these conversations and you've sat down, you've talked to, what are the outcomes? What do you need to achieve? And there, seemingly, is still something going on where each side is not hearing and or seeing each other. Do you have any insight on that?

Traci Austin:

Absolutely. And this is, you know, I coach so many mid-level managers and leaders, and then the folks that bring them in, and so often there is that becomes almost a triangulation right, and this is sometimes where a third party being in the room to say, can you help me understand what's being missed in the room, to say, can you help me understand what's being missed and can you help me understand what you thought the objective was? This is what we call our tough conversations, because so often we're not willing to have those internally and just go to the person and say, hey, I think we're missing this because of X, y and Z, and so again, we're not speaking that same language. So there's a couple of things that we have put in place with our training programs, specifically because we offer organizations key training programs to support them internally, and one of them is we've got that individual, you know, naming up front, the leader, naming up front. Here's the outcome we want from this program for the person and for the organization, both.

Traci Austin:

And then we have them rate based on what we're training in the organization and say, hey, you know, if you could tell us to focus on anything in here, what would it be? We have them do that at the beginning, the end and six months later we also have the participant do the same thing beginning, end and six months later. Why it is now in writing and we can now start to see in black and white where the disconnects are. Our brains are beautiful things in the fact that they try to protect us and yet we don't remember and we tend to move goalposts. But if we have these things in writing where we can go back to it and do a debrief on it after the fact, we can go okay, now we can start to bridge that gap as to where the disconnect actually happened.

Jay Johnson:

So I'm loving this because it's that dual approach right, like having not only the organizational goals but aligning almost the individual there too, because I think that that's something that I also see as a gap. I'm hearing L&D people or talent development people say, well, we're providing the training, we're using best practices, we're developing with the Addy model, we're having engagement, et cetera, et cetera, and we're still not getting to the outcomes that are expected. And you know, on some level I, my first set of questions, are okay, what buy-in did you have from the audience that was coming in? You know how were you? What made you certain that it was conflict resolution that they needed and not a new process for handling difficult customers, et cetera? Like what were those things? Where was the disconnect at that individual side? How often are you seeing that? Maybe the disconnect from L&D as the middle person in between? You know the organizational objectives and the individual's objectives there at the ground floor that are actually the people being trained and implementing these things. What's going on there in that disconnect?

Traci Austin:

So I'm going to rephrase this to make sure I understand the question. And the question I'm hearing you ask is are we solving the right problem?

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, not just for the business, but also for the participants, the people that are engaged.

Traci Austin:

Correct. Yep, and I definitely see that, and that's why we do that dual approach is to understand what is the problem we're actually solving. The second thing we're really looking at is what is your anticipated outcome from this training course right Within the eight weeks? We're in this course within six months and within a year. Right, because one of the things that we see so often is this flavor of the day. Right, we're going to try this thing and we're going to go all out and we're going to do it for six months, so we're going to jump to the next flavor and the next flavor. You know like we do a lot of work with assessments and you know we're going to jump from predictive index to Colby, to disc, to true colors, to. It's like you are confusing everybody. Let's pick one lane and follow it. They all have really positive impacts, but we're confusing and there's a huge learning curve on these. Right?

Jay Johnson:

so what's?

Traci Austin:

entj mixed with the di and the red blue and yeah, absolutely, and a maverick and a captain and you know, you know a 10 on a quick start and a anagram of whatever and you know all the things. So, anyway, you know. But but going back to, are we solving the right problem? Understanding what is the specific outcomes that are expected and let's have a real, frank conversation up front is is that a realistic expectation? Sometimes it's that conversation and sometimes it's the conversation of you are not holding the bar. This isn't a training issue, this is an accountability issue and we're actually solving the wrong problem because we're having the wrong conversation.

Jay Johnson:

The other one that I love and I see is you've got 10 people on the team, you have one person who's underperforming and you have an organization that says we need training on this. Is the training for the 10 people or for the one person? Is the training for the 10 people or for the one person, for the one thing that you think that they're missing? And it's just. I find it fascinating sometimes, so let me take it in this direction. I'm using that as my context. What about when leadership just doesn't get it and when I say just doesn't get it right?

Jay Johnson:

There's a couple of different ways I hear this play out and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. First of all is well, come on, tracy, we need a communications training. Can't you have that done by next Monday? I mean, I want this now, and if you're in an internal learning and development and you're going well, I'd love to do the research. I'd love to find out if this is actually the issue. I'd love to be able to put this together. But now I've got the executive leadership telling me do it or else by Monday, and they don't feel like they've got a lot of space or a lot of opportunity to ask the right questions, to do the surveys, to do the pre-work, the post-work, et cetera. So you know, from that perspective, what is your experience in sort of navigating the demands from leadership and being able to maybe push back on it a little bit in a meaningful and productive way. And maybe this is where difficult conversations also comes in.

Traci Austin:

Yeah, and I'm cracking up because we have a LinkedIn newsletter called Leadership in the Trades, and the newsletter last week was on how urgency in an organization erodes trust, on how urgency in an organization erodes trust. Therefore, let me explain this a little bit. And that was the big old smile on my face as we just touched on this, which is great, you know this is, you know, a flavor of the day and urgency thing. Something came up, and so that key question you know that I would ask first is you know what is driving this training to be completed by Monday? Help me understand the problem that we're looking to solve. That's question number one.

Traci Austin:

Question number two is what is the outcome that you actually want to happen from this training? What are those results? Is this a check the box and cover your booty? Great, we can do that, right. And there are those that need to be done, and it is valid. There's times we have to do it Totally cool. Is this a training where you know it's actually something that we're seeing that truly is a longer term impact? It truly is a longer term impact. And then the next question that I would say is if and when we do this training, what is the support that we will receive from the leadership team on the accountability to ensure that the behavioral change that we're suggesting in the training is held to that bar by the leadership team.

Jay Johnson:

I like that.

Traci Austin:

So those are three key questions that allow us to look at that. Then question four is how are we going to measure the outcome of this training, which was question one.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, and I like that because I think that at the moment in time that you say, ok, this is a, this is a partnership, it's not just about the employees doing, it's about you providing resources, it's about you providing opportunities and you providing basically the reward, recognition and or the accountability questions of maintaining and continuing that forward, or the accountability questions of maintaining and continuing that forward.

Jay Johnson:

So it's really kind of creating the duality of ownership, both from the attendee but also from the stakeholders that are going to benefit from the attendees change. Now it's important for us to start learning the language of the C-suite. How important do you see it as the C-suite learning the language of talent development? And the reason I ask this is because we know that there are best practices in design develop. Some of them are a little aged and I'm sure that there's different and obviously more efficient, more effective ways to do some of this. Ai is also contributing to this, but when I think about something like okay, you know we need to shift our language to be more strategic partners and shifting us to being able to talk about outcomes and you know the impact, the return on investments, et cetera, at what level should we expect leaders to maybe get a better understanding of what does it mean to actually develop talent or what does it mean to create a learning environment. What are your thoughts on that?

Traci Austin:

Absolutely, and this is one of those questions that I may not have the popular opinion on this, and I'm 100% okay with that.

Traci Austin:

And there's two pieces to this. One is I do believe that core values and culture is incredibly important. If we can talk about L&D in terms of core values and culture, I believe we're going to get a significant amount of traction, because study after study and what we've seen over and over is that that culture has a direct impact on the profitability inside of organizations. Now, is it the CEO or the executive team's job to know the L&D language? The answer is absolutely not, and they shouldn't, because there's no way that they have the capacity to do their job really well if they have to know your job too Sure.

Jay Johnson:

I can see that for sure. Continue, go ahead, sorry.

Traci Austin:

However, there's also layers and, depending upon the size of your organization and what that looks like, should your leader and I hate the word should so is it an opportunity that you can have these conversations with your leader and your leader can be a champion. For you to learn how to speak up and into the C-suite A hundred percent, for you to learn how to speak up and into the C-suite 100%. And that's where we can start to have conversations with our teams and with the leaders of our teams in order to speak into that C-suite and that ELT, that executive leadership team, with their specific language. And you can tell that. I've been in HR and nonprofit organizations because the alphabet soup just flows.

Jay Johnson:

So I am going to 100% agree with you, with a caveat that I think that you will accept.

Traci Austin:

All right.

Jay Johnson:

So the leader? In this case, I would agree the leader does not need to know L and D language, but at that point in time, the leader better know how to effectively delegate by giving the why and the what and getting the hell out of the way, as your L&D professional does, the how. Because if they're not going to be knowledgeable in this space and there are some leaders that do know a lot about talent development, coaching, mentoring, et cetera and are very, very good at it, and there are some that don't and have no interest in it, and that's perfectly okay but if you are one of those, I don't know about the best practices of developing, training, coaching, learning programs, et cetera. Give the why, give the what and get out of the way for the how and let your L&D team do their job. Would you agree with that caveat?

Traci Austin:

I would, and I'm actually going to name something. Probably you know, with this as well, I love asking the executive leaders if they have a coach. And if they don't have a coach, I run. I won't work with folks that don't have a coach or not willing to have a coach, and here's why Because there's something about having an experience of being coached and being open to the conversations If they've never been coached and or are not willing to have some sort of coaching, whether that's executive coaching, whether that is, you know, like I'm a part of strategic coach, whether that's with that, whether that's with any of these programs right, there is something about that that says, hey, I have experienced that and that's how I was able to grow to this, because I know that I have blind spots and when we have leaders, that's all ego. It's very difficult to make some of that change, which is, I love asking the question do you have a coach or have you been a part of an executive coaching program?

Jay Johnson:

Well, and I think you nailed the right word. There is a lot of times why do we not have a coach? Well, what? What is it going to do? It's a waste of my time, it's not going to teach me anything. I know this business, I know, yes, you do, but there's always room for growth. And if you don't believe that, then why are you investing in growth opportunities for your team and not leading by example? So, yeah, I dig that, but I don't think that I've ever heard anybody say do you have a coach? No, peace, I'm out.

Jay Johnson:

So I kind of like that hard line Tracy, you know, let's talk a little bit about.

Jay Johnson:

Let's talk about some of these conversations, right, some of these conversations, because I do know that this to be one of the big aspects of fear in HR and in talent development how do we push back effectively? And I know that you gave some questions and things like this, right, but oftentimes, especially now, it seems like there's so much tension in between the workforce and also senior leadership, or even just that mid-level leadership. To be perfectly honest with you, a lot of times the mid-level leadership may be hearing things at that ground floor and don't necessarily want to share that up, because if I do share that up, I'm raising my head above the sand and it's my head that's going to get cut off. So I look at this and I say how can we start the process of maybe leaning into some of these conversations that are absolutely necessary to have in a way that's going to feel more productive and, I guess, more future focused, rather than complaining about what has been and shifting it more towards a future focus? How do we start those conversations?

Traci Austin:

Yeah, absolutely. So I have two ways of saying this. So I have a spicy way and then I've got a way that I think we're all going to go Okay. So I'm going to name the spicy way first.

Jay Johnson:

I like spicy, all right.

Traci Austin:

You need to stop bitching about it and start pitching. And here's what I mean is, every complaint is just a poorly worded request. But if I say, hey, let's go have this conversation, You're like I don't know what to do with it, right? However, if I say, what are you bitching about at the bar with your friends? You know we all in HR go out as HR professionals or L&D and we are complaining about something over that beverage Guaranteed.

Traci Austin:

If you're not in that group, text me or email me, because I want to know how you are letting the steam out because that's fun, so, but within that, it's really looking at that and getting to what the request is without the story. I just want the facts. So let me give you an example. Here's a complaint no one wants to stay and work for us. Okay, that's an absolute. Do we really mean that nobody wants to stay and work for us? Because, guess what? We get so wrapped up in these stories that we're so angry we can't have a great conversation.

Traci Austin:

So, the first thing we need to do is understand what's our complaint. And now let's separate out the facts. So, for example, you go back and you look at it and you say look, we have 89% turnover in the first 90 days in our line level labor roles in our Chattanooga location. Okay, great, I can very specifically get down to that. I have facts around that. Now I want to know what is the impact, based on those facts, from the complaint that no one wants to work for us. Based on those facts from the complaint that no one wants to work for us, we can get to you know.

Traci Austin:

Now I have to be leading all these things and be on the line doing whatever that is so for L&D leaders. It could be. You know what? No, there's no leader in this organization that sees me valuable from leading these training programs. Okay, well, where's your facts on that? Leading these training programs? Okay, Well, where's your facts on that? What's your survey results say right, what's the impact on you? Well, you got a bunch of head trash going on that says you're not doing a great job, it's not serving you. So what's the other impact? We don't have the support from our leaders when we pull folks out to do training on them. Okay, let's define what support means. Well, support would be X, y, z, so you can tell. That then becomes a request. I'm requesting support from the leaders in our organization for these training programs. Support looks like X, y and Z. Now we've got very specific requests that we can actually go and have the conversation.

Jay Johnson:

Love this. You know, and, honestly, one of the things that is just dancing in my head and I will attribute this to you, but I'm probably going to say it at some point in time I'm a big fan of attribution, so this comes from Tracy Austin A complaint is a poorly worded request. That's brilliant. I love that, and that's definitely one that's going to stick with me. So the next time I hear somebody complaining, what are you requesting? In a very ineffective manner, I might use that as my coaching tool there.

Traci Austin:

Yeah, and we don't see it that way, right? And it's really important that what our mindset is, as soon as we change our mindset, the entire world changes. We just change the game by changing our thoughts.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, I love that.

Jay Johnson:

So let me, let me ask a question here, and this is because I know one of the areas or one of the spaces that you definitely do a lot of work in is the trades, and I'm going to contextualize this because I think it can be applicable in a number of different places, but generally, when we think the trades, it is often.

Jay Johnson:

It is often and I'm not going to say I'm going to use the stereotypes, because I do know quite a few people in trades that maybe don't necessarily fit the stereotype, but it's often very masculine, it's often, you know, a lot of toughness, a lot of grit, a lot of I'm not going to, I'm not going to dig into my emotions and there's a number of other industries that we see that from a probabilistic standpoint and again, this is stereotypical because it's not always true but we see that in law enforcement, we see that in a number of other I don't want to say just male, but I'm just going to say masculine, dominated testosterone, dominated areas.

Jay Johnson:

And, yes, men and women both have testosterone. Read a science book for those of you that didn't know that Men and women both have testosterone. Read a science book for those of you that didn't know that. With that being said, how can we create the conditions of learning? When we get into some of those different places that maybe it's difficult for somebody to be vulnerable and say, well, I don't know how to do that, or I'm really not comfortable with this, or this makes me feel a particular way, how can we maybe be more effective in, say, one of those environments where it's more closed off or maybe a little bit more of the lack of vulnerability, if that makes sense?

Traci Austin:

Yeah, absolutely, and so there's a couple of ways that we very specifically approach this. And before I go into that, most of these folks have an ego around them in a really hard shell, because they've had to have that to protect themselves period Right Agreed. Yet underneath that most of them, it's some great big teddy bear. They're not going to show it to you until they can trust you.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah.

Traci Austin:

So how do you build that trust Right? First off, figure out what do they need. Like the W-I-I-F-M on their forehead, what's in it for me? What do they need? And you know so if you are working with someone and there's a huge hard shell there. What do they need? Because if you can't figure out how to serve them, you are a waste of their time period. What is the outcome that they need you to produce? To be there when you can and there's. You know how I typically figure that out is. You know, hey, we're gonna spend the next hour together. Jay, what would make this hour a good use of your time?

Jay Johnson:

You're gonna flat out tell me if L&D people would ask that question more often. Put that one into your arsenal audience, because, let me tell you, people are busy and they look at and I think a lot of us know that. You know, a training is, whereas maybe if you're in L&D, you're like Ooh, training, I'm going to go learn something. This is going to be great. I'm going to be able to get away from the spreadsheets for an hour and really kind of absorb some new knowledge or some new interesting facts. If you're not in L&D, it's oh my God. How am I going to balance the other 11 hours of work that I have to do today with this two-hour mandatory training on IT security that I am being told I have to go to right?

Traci Austin:

And I'm doing four other things at the same time.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, exactly, I'm on my phone and I'm also thinking about dinner and I'm also, whatever those might be, to make sure that I can be as using my time as valuably as possible. Right, we know that people are busy, but I think that that's such a power. How could we make this hour really meaningful for you? What do you need to walk away to say this this hour was a successful hour of your time spent. I love that. I you know. In asking, you'll get the answers.

Traci Austin:

Yeah.

Traci Austin:

Sometimes you may not like the smart alecky answers, but yeah, for sure, and here's what I would say to every L&D listener today is everything I have chatted about today is taking a coach approach, and so you know it's. You know, I will tell you, my life and my career changed when I decided to say I'm really curious about this coaching thing, wonder what it looks like. When I went through those certification programs, I completely changed my business because I went at it from a coach approach. I am your partner. I am not the expert. I do not know exactly what's going on in your business. I don't know what's going on in your family, in your head. You are the expert of that. However, I'm a partner to you and I'm going to ask questions so that we can figure it out together and or you can figure it out with a little bit of accountability and nudging in order to do it.

Jay Johnson:

Yep, I love it. It's 100%. Why the assessment that we use behavioral elements. We call them guides. We don't call them. They're not trainers, they're guides If they are, if they are training. Well, guess what? We train mice, we guide humans.

Traci Austin:

So I love that.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, so I just I look at it and say that I'm with you. The coaching is really a game changer and if you are a trainer, walk in with the mentality of being a coach sometime, that you are asking questions as opposed to coming in and delivering content You'll. You'll see the difference. There's a big difference, both in audience reaction and how you feel afterwards. I think so yeah, 100 percent.

Jay Johnson:

Tracy, this has been an incredible conversation, full of some really good ideas, really great questions to ask and some of the big challenges that I think that we all see that we're facing in the industry. If the audience wanted to get in touch with you, if they wanted to reach out, if they wanted to find out where that happy hour is that you're attending, how would they get in touch with you?

Traci Austin:

Well, before we go to that, can I just name something that we're doing together that I'm super excited about?

Jay Johnson:

Yes, please.

Traci Austin:

So I host something called the People's Strategy Club every Tuesday. I bring on a strategic partner that I've typically been on their podcast, or they've been on my podcast called the People's Strategy Podcast, and Jay will be on the People's Strategy Club. It is a live one hour. We are going to go through some key topics impacting HR and L&D folks and then we close it out with actually going through our tough talk audit of how do we have these tough conversations once we figured out what our request is.

Jay Johnson:

I love this and I am super excited to join you on that. So, audience, you better be there. You better have some hard questions ready to go, because it's going to be fun. I love it. I love it. So thank you for that, Tracy. So how did they reach you?

Traci Austin:

They can find me at elevatedtalentconsultingcom or on LinkedIn at Tracy Austin. And, of course, our podcast is the People Strategy Podcast.

Jay Johnson:

I love it. We'll be giving that a listen, making sure that we put all of those into the show notes. Tracy, it's always a joy to speak with somebody. That's sort of like walked through that fire and seeing the other side and seeing what success looks like in those spaces. So thank you for being here with us and sharing your knowledge and your experiences, which I guarantee is going to help many of our audience be able to make that jump of that chasm that we're currently facing. So thank you so much for being here today.

Traci Austin:

Thank you.

Jay Johnson:

And audience as always. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where, together, 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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