Here’s a written transcript of my conversation with Mary Slaughter Published in June of 2020.
Chris (00:01):
You’re listening to learning is the new working and welcome to this episode, which is part of our season three, which we call ‘here come the learning scientists’. When I recorded this conversation with Mary slaughter at the beginning of this year, she was executive vice president of global practices and consulting and a practice lead of culture and leadership at the Neuro Leadership Institute. I knew when I asked her to come on the podcast, that she’d be a great voice to add to our conversation on the new learning science, since she has a track record of being a great CLO.
Chris (00:51):
And it also just spent a couple of years working at this super interesting NeuroLeadership Institute where she was running, analyze global practices and consulting functions, as well as doing cultural and leadership practice life of course moves on. And whilst we worked through our excellent backlog of recorded conversations, the world changed a lot. It’s jolted into pandemic lockdown, and Mary took a new position. She’s working now as managing director in the people advisory services practice at Ernst and young, where she’s working on purpose, culture, leadership, and inclusion with an emphasis of course, on behavior change at scale and grounded in science technology and data insights. Mary has held a CLO roles and talent development roles in organizations, such as the sun trust bank, Alcatel Lucent, and Wacovia she’s led human capital consulting practices at Deloitte North Highlands. And of course, NLI. And she served on the board at ATD, which is where I first met her quite a few years ago. Now she has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and masters of communication. And I think she’s really well positioned to think through how neuroscience and academic thinking can be applied in practical ways, the organization. So let’s listen into my conversation recorded earlier this year with Mary slaughter.
Mary (02:22):
Hi, this is Mary slaughter. I’m executive vice president of consulting at the NeuroLeadership Institute.
Chris (02:29):
So Mary, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to them, excited for our conversation and welcome to learning is the new working. Thank you, Chris. It’s always good to be with you. As you know, in this series, we’re really interested in exploring how our practice, the practice of modern learning and development might benefit from the application of both scientific practices and methods and also be kind of better informed by academics and the scientific world around us. I think you are really interesting person to talk to on this topic and very qualified cause you spend a lot of your career in L and D in talent development in industry, you also did advisory work and consulting work around that. But most recently you’ve been working at the NeuroLeadership Institute and I think the mission is to bring a sort of more concrete science-based approach to the development of leadership and talent in organizations. So I think there’s a lot for us to talk about, but I’d like to kind of focus on your unique perspective on that, if that, if that’s okay with you.
Mary (03:35):
Yeah. They be happy to, I, I like you. I think I take a lot of pride in not only doing smart things, but doing things that are practical and can actually get done.
Chris (03:45):
Yes, yes. You bet. So, so let’s start with a few practical questions then and just paint a picture of you and your career and, and your organization. And I always ask people where I’m talking to them. So where do you live and why do you live there?
Mary (03:58):
I’m coming to you live as they say from Atlanta, Georgia today. So it’s my home. I live in Atlanta. It’s a combination of things. You know, over the years family is situated themselves here and in the Southeastern part of the United States. So I have other relatives nearby, but there’s probably two other things. The weather is certainly one of them. I’m just not a cold natured person. And then lastly, as my business life has always mandated that I have access to a good airport and the airport in Atlanta has the dubious honor of being the world’s busiest airport. So I can pretty much get anywhere. I want to go oftentimes with just one flight. So it’s a, it’s a easy way to,
Chris (04:44):
I spent many, many hours in the Delta lounge in Atlanta, but it’s a great city as well from, from many respects, the history and so on and so forth. What is your job title and what do you really do for work? Cause they’re not all the same thing
Mary (05:01):
My title is executive vice president and I oversee the global consulting function for the firm. What that really means is when clients have complex difficult behavior change issues that they’re trying to operationalize in their businesses, they tend to come to us to ask for help. And how do we crack that nut to get people from just talking about things they should do differently to actually doing them differently. So I do a fair amount of C-suite advisory work but in particular paying a lot of attention to human capital practices and, and really do have the pleasure of working with [inaudible] CHROs heads of learning, heads of talent, heads of diversity inclusion. It’s, it’s a pretty robust range of,
Chris (05:51):
And I know you use the phrase behavior change and that’s, that’s very important and drill into that a little bit, but could you just describe generally the sort of mission and operations of the NeuroLeadership Institute?
Mary (06:07):
Yeah. you know, we’re very science driven and we would say that if, if the recommendations and the ideas are not grounded in science, we try not to speculate. We try just to talk about what either the neuroscience or the social sciences or cognitive psychology tells us about how the brain works, how it processes information in codes, information and applies information. So we’re very much focused on humanizing the workplace. You know, it’s such a push toward technology anymore, trying to find that equilibrium between the goodness of technology and where people still are, the best lever that you have. And clients, as I said before, typically come to us because they want to figure out how to rapidly change behavior at scale across the organization. So not just with a handful of people, not just some significant coaching for a few select leaders, but at scale across the organization.
Chris (07:13):
And just what kind of people work at NLI, what kind of resources do you bring to bear on those problems? I know you, you, you talk about being science-based and I know you work with, and through a lot of academic practitioners, can you just sort of sketch out the kind of people that NLI hires and works with and how that works?
Mary (07:33):
Yeah. there’s probably a few domains that make sense. Of course, there’s the sort of classic back office functions that any corporation has, but in terms of expertise we, we tend to have two major levers that we pull with clients. One is on the consulting side where our S where I said, and then the other is on learning and development. And so we have probably as our, as our core function, either people that are scientists themselves, so neuroscientists or social social science as social psychologists as sort of the core of the foundation of research. So it might be research that we do or research that we curate across academic institutions. So we’ll have some people that are inside of NLI that are technically employees of the firm, but we also have a very broad science network. And so there are at all the major universities, most of them have research labs and either neuroscience or cognitive psychology.
Mary (08:38):
And so that network of scientists plays a role in what we do and how we formulate our thinking. So we try our best to pull, not only from inside of NLI, but also just the best thinking that’s out in the marketplace, scientifically around how the brain works, how cognition actually works. And then back inside we have two other sort of classic spaces. One is the consulting function that I laid. And then the other is our client experience team. And they’re the ones that help to collaborate with our, with our clients to design learning strategy. I’m based in neuroscience as a matter of fact. But a team that looks at what those learning issues might be, what the behavior change that needs to actually happen. And so we’ll either take programs that we’ve already created ourselves and the sort of off the shelf kind of learning programs, or if a client needs a custom program, we’ll do that as, as well too. So that client experience team is a blend of instructional design and instructional delivery as well.
Chris (09:48):
Got it. And what are the kind of solution areas and where are people coming to you for help? Obviously you talked about, you know driving change at scale. Is this about purely leadership? Does, do you work with learning teams to help mechanistically people get better at building learning cultures? What are the sort of, what, what, what are those sort of solution areas that you’re focused on?
Mary (10:15):
If you went to our website and just looked up our practice areas, you would say three major practice areas, you would see culture and leadership as one, the second would be diversity and inclusion, and then the third would be performance and performances, not only performance management, but coaching and, and feedback and manager development, you’d see sort of those three major domains. Those are all true for sure. But there’s also two others that don’t have their own sort of dedicated space on the website. One is certainly around learning. So we do have quite regular interactions and also engagements with clients around learning strategy maybe to perhaps do audits and review sort of their approach to how they are tackling learning and what’s working and what’s not. So very much the neuroscience of learning. That’s an area that shows up. And then another one that is fairly hot has been for the last 18 to 24 months is the big T word transformation.
Mary (11:27):
And it’s more than just sort of the classic change management. I would say if a client was looking for, for that, they probably wouldn’t come to us. They might go to Katar or someone like that, that, that sort of sort of does large scale change management. Ours is more around what does it take in the brain to have the agility and also the motivation to be willing at a human level to actually embrace change. So digital transformation is a fairly classic ones. So if a firm is undergoing, which, you know, 90% of them are undergoing some level of digital transformation the conversation with us would then be all right, well then what do we need to do to get the accompanying human behavior change, to go along with just the technology or transformation itself. So business models, change technology changes, and then they often turn to us for the human side.
Chris (12:28):
Yeah. And it makes a lot of sense. I’ve learned so much in my research this year about how important the human factor is in, in, in and around technology driven change and, and, and digital disruption. It’s absolutely top of mind for many, many people. Let’s, I want to focus primarily there’s loss. We could talk about, of course, but I want to focus primarily on the learning side of the house because of, because of your experience and, and some of the good work that I’ve seen coming out of NLI. In fact, we had Heidi grant who is part of the organization involved with the organization talk to my team Microsoft maybe 18 months ago about the neuroscience of learnings, really fascinating stuff. And I think it’s sort of a, an essential prerequisite now, before you launch into learning programs is to understand how the brain works around the learning process. One of the reasons it’s so critical these days and our discipline of L and D is, is in such turmoil and such demand is because leaders, business leaders are increasingly concerned about skills, about access to skills and about developing skills quickly. What, what do you think as a participant one time and also an observer now, what do you think is the state of the current learning and development industry?
Mary (13:55):
You probably feel the same way about what I’m going to share, which at least up front crisis, that the opportunity has never been bigger
Mary (14:04):
Because there is so much disruption in the world of work and the halflife of one skillset, as, you know, as a contributor and individual contributor or a leader in an organization is getting shorter and shorter, smaller, and smaller, and your ability to observe the environment that you’re in to adapt to Morphin change. And, and, and not, it’s not just about keeping up from a pace perspective because on, in some ways there’s so much information, so much opportunity to learn, being presented to us that we have to prioritize and down select and focus and much around the volume of information and the number of channels of distribution right now, I’m not helping, it’s making, it’s making it worse. So as a strategist be it as a chief learning officer or someone that manages a curriculum or someone even inside an organization that serves in that business support function, where you’re the learning solutions advocate for a line of business or in inside trying to coach and advise them.
Mary (15:17):
It’s never been more important for a learning leader to have a point of view about what it does take to actually get behavior to change. Now, the need to still be deeply connected to the business strategy. Hasn’t changed still there but left to their own devices. It’s not most business leaders role to figure out the capacity of an organization to learn or the sequencing or what good learning really looks like. And, and you know, people are overwhelmed. They’re exhausted. They’re just not enough hours in the day. So more than ever becoming a really strong advocate and advisor, not just for a program, but to S to step over the program level and go to how do we get the associated behavior change for the business strategy, that strategy that we are, you know, trying to implement that role has never been more important.
Mary (16:21):
I would also say having a point of view around technology, staying, you know, you don’t have to be deeply technical in any and every range, but you have to stay abreast. And then this extra domain that is not one that I had, frankly in my wheelhouse even 10 years ago, was a deeper understanding of neuroscience and just the cognitive capacity in the brain and how information flows and how learning works or doesn’t. You know, I think once you sort of get a sense of, of the neuroscience component, you can probably look back like I have all over your career and go, Oh, well, I probably shouldn’t have done that, but it seemed like the best idea at the time. So net, net, I think it’s the advisory function that stronger than ever.
Chris (17:10):
Interesting. And I, boy, I share your horror in my case. And some of the things that, that, that I worked on with, in all good faith to try and help people learn in the organizations where that was my job, and this is why I feel very strongly that we need to be much more science-based because time is so precious. And I think it’s really incumbent on learning and development teams to build, build, and maintain expertise on some, some of these fundamental things about how people do their best work.
Mary (17:43):
And, you know, Chris, you probably heard Heidi mentioned this before, but you’ve, you’ve probably sort of seen this in some of NLAs work in the marketplace. You know, if you’re around us for any period of time, and you’ve ever seen, you know, with someone from an ally present, you will eventually bump into two slides that sort of tell the same storyline every time we, we are in the market. And that is, there’s a conventional wisdom side that all of us as be it learning or human capital practitioners have learned either through our suppliers or through our own experiences over the years. You know, that there’s a conventional wisdom that says, well, you know, of course this is the right way to do something. And then every now and then you’ll see us say, that’s true, but you know, what the science says about that is conventional wisdom isn’t working for you, it’s actually working against you. And it usually has something to do with recall. It has something to do with motivation and capacity and the biases that exist in our brain. Naturally, they’re not bad. They’re just there to keep us safe and protected. And how do we work around how do we mitigate biases that exist that are just getting used in inappropriate ways? So that conventional wisdom versus science is a big deal.
Chris (19:12):
Yeah, I think maybe as one of the learning professions, sort of one of, one of the imperatives for us moving forward is to maybe adopt the policy of, of do no harm. And I’m not sure that that I can say that that was true of me in the past. And, and sort of paying attention to the science, I think is one way to try and avoid that. Can you talk a little bit about the, how the work of academics and brain scientists are impacting learning organizations today?
Mary (19:42):
I can, I can, I can, maybe, maybe what I can do is reference just a few ways that we’ve, we’ve seen it come up. So I just mentioned one a moment ago, which was around bias. And I have learned just even in the past two years, Chris, I’ve learned so much about how bias works in the brain and that you know, w w w we love the phrase. If you have a brain than you likely have bias as well, too, because it is a natural mechanism learned over the evolution of the brain. That’s there to be a shortcut in decision making, to conserve energy and the brain and protect you from things that might cause you harm. And so it’s a sort of a long evolutionary form of pattern recognition. And then what happens is, is we take these very old archetypes that are buried deep in our brain and the bias, the triggers for, for enacting those.
Mary (20:49):
And we end up using them in inaccurate places. So let, let, let’s take bias in, in decision making. So we now, instead of going in and talking about unconscious bias training, which I would wager the learning profession has probably invested as much in unconscious bias training in the last 20 years as it has in just about any other subject area. Yet we still today are having conversations in every firm about how to be more diverse, how to be more inclusive, how to allow everyone’s voice, you know, into the mix. So what we’ve learned from the science side is stop, stop talking about sort of this, this somewhat elusive, a theorial desire to be inclusive, but instead of back up and talk about what’s happening in the brain and the different type of biases, there’s actually over 150 different individual documented biases that exist naturally in the brain.
Mary (21:57):
And so there’s strategies to recognize those, to label them, to call them out and, and to handle them. So biases like similarity bias or expedience bias or safety bias. These are all things that show up for us day in and day out. That’s that’s one example feedback, such another robust area to talk about. I would say every program that is you and I went through our formative years as business professionals, you know, we were taught you know, how to give feedback. The emphasis was always on giving feedback, giving feedback, giving feedback. Well, it turns out it’s a more favorable cognitive state to teach people how to ask for feedback as opposed to teaching people how to give feedback. And so the asking of feedback actually reduces a threat state in the brain for both the giver of the feedback, as well as the receiver of the feedback and creates a much more frictionless exchange in between individuals.
Mary (23:07):
That’s that’s a second. And then the third and I’ll, and I’ll pause on that. One is in leadership. So I, I can imagine this is true in, in sales training as well, but we, as learning professionals have been brilliant at creating competency models you know, with every domain and every sub behavior across multiple levels and career paths in an organization, and you end up having all of that, which does on some level help with instructional design. I, I get that it sort of focuses you on the right behaviors to pursue, but when it comes to the individual consuming competency models, it’s, it’s virtually impossible. The cognitive load is way too much. And so what we’re seeing now, as the pattern in leadership development is to boil things down to a few essential principles. Microsoft did this beautifully, but to boil things down to the essence of the most important things to focus on, and then what the brain does, it’s, it’s a bit like drafting and, you know, bike riding. The brain then starts to connect things that are related through neural pathways, without you actually even asking the brain to do it. It does it on a nonconscious level. So if you can focus the brain on the most important things than quietly behind the scenes, you know, it’s helping you by figuring out what are the related things in your life and the patterns that the brain has seen you engage in that need to be activated. Whenever you talk about those essential areas such as the level of focus has changed tremendously.
Chris (24:51):
In that case, you’re sort of like hijacking the bias mechanisms and the, the propensity to sort of recognize repeated patterns in order to kind of in order to get the behavior outcomes that you want to get.
Mary (25:05):
Yeah. And, and you know, what the smarter way get we get on our own way? Sometimes to be honest, I mean, so whether, you know, we’ve gotten our master’s degrees or, or doctoral degrees in instructional design or adult learning theory, and we fall in love with ourselves. What, what, you know, w without, without meaning to do any harm where our intentions are actually quite the opposite, very, very positive, and the more complicated we make things, the more layers we put into them, the more complex the structures are that we create already inside of a very complicated business world and complicated personal lives that we all have as well, too. We’re not helping our learners, we’re making it worse. So we’re almost having to drive the opposite direction, which is a reductionist view. I say this to clients all the time, you know, if you ever and this is usually pretty early in an engagement, I would say, if you ever find yourself getting irritated with me as a consultant, helping you or NLI it’s because we’re probably pushing you to say it in fewer words, to do less, to focus on fewer things, to reduce the cognitive load, to the point that the most important things become quite sticky and recallable cause our fundamental belief is if you can’t recall it, the likelihood that you will do it goes down pretty substantially.
Chris (26:38):
You know, I’ve spent time this year. I’ve had time this year to look at science and to talk scientists and look at some of the research that goes on. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s its own world. It’s very dense academics, usually working on very, very kind of small problems. And they iterate many times. Of course people are starting to use the word science, like it’s a sort of panacea for everything and, and it, it too is always changing. It’s, it’s constantly sort of innovating. So if you’re not in the world of science, so you’re not in the world of academia, you know, you’re in business and you’re trying to deliver results. It’s almost impossible to, to keep up and stay in touch. And it’s also very easy to be bamboozled. And I’m seeing examples of this from, you know, many, many companies who sort of claim to have, you know, brain science, some fundamental brain science, kind of underlying that product or service as a way to legitimize it.
Chris (27:41):
You know, we’ve, I’ve heard it called neuro bling which is a sort of a humorous way of sort of referencing that. And I’m absolutely not suggesting that NLI is doing that at all, but I am interested in the work that analyzed doing because it sort of helps codify that science and put it into frameworks that, that, that you can use and that you can deploy. And we mentioned this sort of earlier, one, one example might be the work from, I think it’s Lila, Davachi at Columbia on this ages model, edge AGSM model. If people are not familiar with it, it might be useful for you to describe what that is as an example of this technique of taking science and making it applicable in the workplace.
Mary (28:29):
Yeah. Th th th delighted to, and it’s, and it’s quite ageless is quite specific to learning. So I’m glad you, you chose that one, there, a couple of others that your listeners may have heard about from NLI scarf is a, is an acronym for a a model around motivation and seeds is an acronym for model around bias, but ages is specifically about learning. And the, and it’s, as it sounds a G E S and it’s an acronym that stands for attention, generation emotion and, and spacing, and this squarely falls into one of those categories, Chris, of, if I’d only known, then what I know now I might have designed and delivered, you know, learning differently. And I, even as a parent, I find myself using ages when I talked to my teenage children about how they’re studying in school or how they’re preparing for a test and in particular.
Mary (29:35):
But what ages is about is Laila did some work on figuring out what causes things to to Incode what causes information to encode from short term to longterm and how it, you know, how memory is affected by how we approach learning. So what attention is, is about focusing people, focusing individual, focusing your brain on the right things, but fewer things. So just as we mentioned before, your example at Microsoft about the leadership principles model, that’s a form of attention, which is not asking everyone to look at the whole horizon of possibilities, but picking the things that are most important. So focusing attention very important generation means the active interaction between your need to retrieve and recall information, not just recognize it, but actually retrieve it from working memory to pull it back out and to be able to apply it.
Mary (30:45):
Teaching is frankly, one of the greatest ways in terms of generation. And another example is people that will I used to do this in college. I didn’t realize what a nerd I was at the time now looking back on it, but I would make my own tests in preparation for a test. So I would force myself to recall the information before getting into the situation of actually taking a test. And then the recall was easier for me. So generation is when you are requiring yourself to, you know, reach back into the brain and pull information forward. Again, emotion is when you connect the feelings that you have about a particular topic to that topic. So probably the most classic example of that is story telling. So if you were describing a country or a group of people, or, you know, a type of vacation that you like to take, storytelling is an interesting way to evoke emotion, not just evoke recall, but evoke emotion and the emotion itself makes recall stickier.
Mary (31:57):
It makes it more likely that it will encode in a stronger way and that the neural network associated with all of that becomes become stronger. And then the last, this is the one where I really screwed things up the most in my corporate life was spacing. Think of all the classes that you and I have been to where we went off somewhere for three days. And then we came back to the workplace having been immersed in whatever we were being immersed in. Well, if it turns out from a learning perspective that the brain much prefers learning, something, stepping away from it and not actively thinking about it, then going back to it again, doing the same thing, interacting with it, generating it you know, attributing emotion to it, or integrating emotion, then stopping, going away, coming back again. So I’ll give you a practical example.
Mary (32:52):
Let’s say you had four hours of time that you were going to allocate to studying for a test. One version might be the test is on Friday. You take four hours on Thursday, evening, you cram like crazy and you bluff your way through the test on Friday, you manage, you manage to pass, and the moment you’re done, you know kind of what happens at all falls right back out of your head. The other possibility is you might say on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I’m going to allocate one hour a night to study the material only one hour and then not only spacing, but rest. So turns out rest plays an important component in the clearing, the clutter and, and helping the brain focus on the most important things. That spacing just that simple, not introducing more time, not even changing how you study, but introducing spacing across those four hours.
Mary (33:53):
And the difference on the performance on the test on Friday is not remarkably different. The difference is four weeks later when asked to recall and reapply what you learned in that week, running up to the test. And so for me in corporate work, we’re not typically trying to teach people something just to pass the test and be done with it. We’re usually trying to help someone build a career. We’re usually trying to help someone become more proficient and or expert in a domain of, of study or an a, an a job assignment. So we actually want it to last. So I would say spacing, if I could even just pick one of the four out of ages, if corporate work could, could design more spacing into the work that we do that then causes us to use the aid, the G and the E in more frequency, but in distance, apart from one another, the likelihood that we would help people retain information goes way up.
Chris (35:02):
It’s, it’s a, it’s a great example. I think of the kind of models that, that we should be looking to to understand and apply. I was thinking while you were talking there about some research that I’ve done this year on sleep, so there’s a lot of great work being done on sleep and the importance of sleep. And obviously it’s a very, very high risk thing for mammal to do in, in the wild and yet we have to do it. It’s so critical to so much of how we function, including how we learn. And I don’t remember ever considering sleep in the programs that we built at Microsoft and our coal, in fact, probably quite the reverse. We probably really hindered people’s ability to rest and reflect and recover. And it turns out that’s one of the most important pieces of learning. So thanks for, thanks for sharing that with us. Can you share any examples of where you see organizations putting AGS or similar tools to work?
Mary (36:06):
So I don’t want this to sound overly self serving, but I do want to be true to our own work at NLI around how we approach instructional design. So what we coach our clients to do, whether they are implementing a program that we’ve already developed, or, or they want to create a custom program with us for themselves we will absolutely do a couple of things. We’ll, we’ll ask them, you know, you know, well, I guess I should say that work is constrained by all kinds of things. And so there is no perfect environment for sure, but in terms of factoring things and we’ll, we would suggest to a client, look, if there’s something you want to roll out to the entirety of an organization, you’re better off doing an hour or two per week over the course of four weeks, then you would be to bring everybody together for a day, even if that means doing it virtually because you can add attention and emotion and generation, not just facing into the mix, particularly if you do these in intact teams or with a leader in the organization, sort of leading the discussion because the, the motivation associated with performing within your own team causes the recall on the Mo the emotive state to be higher.
Mary (37:42):
So we see this all the time with clients as they’re deploying. I mean, Microsoft would be an example, but other firms of similar magnitude and size and complexity that, you know, we would think, Oh, well, you know, the, the, we, we need to choose the most complicated way of going about doing this. And sometimes that’s not true. Sometimes it’s breaking it down into smaller, manageable chunks, spacing it out over time, allowing intact work groups, to have the discussion to together and to do it. And in a distributed way over the arc of time, call that in a three, four or five weeks. It’s a very common practice that we use with our clients. And it’s so much less disruptive to scheduling and the flow of work and just the normal business routines that we all have to keep going.
Chris (38:38):
Yeah. And I think technology is really helping as well, because you can, you can do that spacing, you can connect people in, in more sort of convenient ways. I’m seeing a lot of technology emerge around nudging people to kind of re-engage which is quite interesting in the learning space as well, time for a few more questions. And I I’m really interested to know Mary, after your time here with NLI, are there other things that you’d wish you’d known as a, as a, as a talent practitioner that you’ve learned either from your work with NLI or your work collaborating with, with analyze customers,
Mary (39:18):
Two things that come to mind. One is just a piece of advice for those that are listening. You are not alone, who would be the first thing I would say to you? The commonality of, of both frustration and opportunity is everywhere, and it is industry agnostic. It has nothing to do with the size of the organization. We are at such an interesting I it’s been written about us like the fourth industrial revolution, but where it just such an interesting inflection point around how people accomplish work. How, what information actually is that now it’s sort of a, a bit of a read pivot back toward how useful are humans and where, where do they serve their best? W w where are they optimal and in the world of work. And, you know, I would like to think that there’s a level of wisdom that people bring into the world of work that can’t be garnered any place else.
Mary (40:23):
So everyone is struggling with how do we handle our business transformation, but at the same time enable people to still contribute and grow and be part of our future, but also helped shape our future. So it is, it is widespread and it is everywhere. So that’s my first comment. My second is more specific, and I think you and I were chatting about this last week a bit, but is this topic around leadership development? It’s another area of research where anytime I maybe do a keynote or an industry briefing about this, those that are in the field of leadership development, find this to be particularly interesting, that there are some very clear patterns around how power affects cognition. And, and we, we see it, we see it in the marketplace today. We see it in industry. We see it in the media, we see it in politics.
Mary (41:22):
We see it sort of everywhere. And it’s almost a little bit therapeutic, honestly, that when I start to describe these trends in a larger group, setting, people start looking side to side at one another, as if I, you know, they know who we’re talking about. Like I’m talking about a particular leader in their organization, but the, the reason I bring it up is is that there are things that we know about how power affects cognition. And if I were doing hypo leadership development or any kind of like early career discussions with people about as your career grows, as you get more access to resource or budget, or, or, you know, colleagues, whatever the case might be, decision-making, there are some things that you should know about how power actually affects the brain and, and some counterbalances to, to that. And so the, the three sort of domains we won’t go deeply, but the three domains are, you become more optimistic, you become more goal oriented and you become more visionary.
Mary (42:28):
And on the surface sound like really good things. The problem is, is the converse of that, that you focus less on people, you focus less on the details and you become more immune to risk. And we see these things play out in, in decision making, and there are ways to offset it. So it’s just another one of those very practical, tangible examples of early career for your leaders to see, to have people understand that it is natural for power to make you feel a certain way. And so your job then as a leader becomes to make sure you’re doing all the right things, that counter balance, what the brain is doing to you and for you, without you ever asking for it to happen.
Chris (43:22):
Interesting. It’s a little bit like the conversation earlier about biases. Like it exists, it’s there in the world, your job, if anything, is to recognize when you’re a victim of it. And, and when it’s causing you to do things that may actually be not in the best interests of, of, of, of yourself or the organization,
Mary (43:43):
Correct? Correct. You, you have read the tea leaves accurately.
Chris (43:48):
Cool. anything else that excites you about the future of L and D? I think it’s very well said by the way that people are feeling people who are paying attention interesting phrase, but people who are paying attention are anxious about the role of L and D in the future. It is an exciting time, but it’s also a daunting time because there’s so much change in the workplace coming, and there’s so much interest in attention in these things. There’s, there’s a lot of work for us to collectively do. Are there other things that excite you about the, the future of L and D?
Mary (44:28):
Well, so if I were a CLO again and, you know, forklifting from, you know, 20 years ago and, and, and fast forwarding, the, one of the biggest differences, I say that actually is an opportunity. It’s just a matter of framing your brain around it that way and think, and thinking of it in this regard, but there’s just so little need for anyone in learning to think of themselves as a, as a controlling function anymore. It’s just, it’s almost just pointless. It, you know, it’s an exercise in future futility because the transparency of information is so broad and so easily accessible to believe that you, in any way are the gatekeeper around S you know, information is a little bit foolish. So instead I would think of myself as trying to, trying to frame experiences for learners and decide what are the most important experiences that you want people to have.
Mary (45:39):
And, and what are the outcomes that the business is really driving you toward and give up this desire to try and overly control content, overly control processes, but become way more of an enabler. The builder of role of roads, not the manufacturer of cars, you know, to create pathways where people can connect to one another and then get yourself into as much of an advisory position to help people understand how behavior change actually happens. And if they need help sourcing by all means help your business leaders, you know, source good content. I’m not saying don’t, but do it from a perspective of URL, enabling them not controlling them
Chris (46:30):
A super well said. That’s a great, a great, I think called action aspirational view of what, of what learning and development could be in the future. I was just recalling the conversation I had with your, with Heidi grant. And she was when she was talking to my learning team at Microsoft, and she talked about the phrase paying attention, and she was reinforcing the fact that to learn new things, to learn new behaviors, to create new sort of neural pathways, takes effort and energy, perhaps a job in L and D is to really help make the space both a temporal space and the physical space for that to happen in our organizations and worry less about organizing content on people’s behalf, because that does seem to be a fruitless task given, given what’s happened to the way information flows. So I love, I love, love, love what you, one last question. I ask all my podcasts guess this question, what inspired you Mary to do the work that you do? Was there some particular person or event or some thing in your career that encouraged you to spend your time doing this great work?
Mary (47:50):
Wow, that’s a, that’s a great question. There’s a couple of influences and maybe a few influencers. So one, one condition that was an influencing condition for me was very, I was, I was fortunate all happenstance, Chris. It was not planned on my part. That early career, I had a job in sort of a C suite role back in my days at a T and T. And I supported a group of, I don’t know, six or seven executives. And I did speech writing. I did client events, I did a variety of things. And one of the things that struck me was that the best of the lot were the ones that surrounded themselves by people that knew more than they did. And that these extraordinary, the ones that were truly extraordinary were not the ones that knew everything. They were the ones that knew how to access people who knew more than they did to enable them to make really the most informed decisions that they could.
Mary (49:07):
And it was, I can tell you from a consulting standpoint, it, it lowered that that sense of you have to know everything when you go in to see an executive. I mean, my gosh, quite the opposite, it’s the, it’s the value of digging into the conversation to figure out what needs to be, to be solved. So I’d say one influence that I had early on was seeing very successful people and the need to surround themselves by people who were continuous learners and that these leaders themselves were continuous learners. That that was one. And then the second piece in my career was I spent a long time and in, in the world of sales, either sales, training, sales management direct sales you know, sales, operations, all of those sort of surrounding functions. And I had one leader at one point who was willing to actually have fewer people in his organization, fewer salespeople, if they were better trained, if they were better skilled, if they knew more.
Mary (50:17):
And he said to me, I’m willing to actually have 10% fewer people on the street if the 90% are 200% more effective. Right. Right. And, and yeah, I mean, it was just this, it was just this eye opening moment where he saw that the potential of the individual would far exceed just multiplying by, you know, just by numbers, like just throw more bodies at it. And it wasn’t throw more bodies. It was make the people we have better. And so at that point, I decided in my, on my learning side, it is absolutely the best work I’ve ever had the chance to do. And I’ve done a variety of things with my career. But the way I describe it to people who look at learning development, I say, every day you get up and your sole job is to make people better. I mean, who could hate you?
Chris (51:17):
What could be better than that? What could be better than that? Yeah. I want to thank you for your insights and your time today. Mary, it’s been really good. I love in particularly your sort of vision of the future of L and D. I think, I think you’re really onto something there. Where can people find out more about NLI and where could they possibly engage with you?
Mary (51:42):
Sure. so we are in as most firms are, we’re out there on the net. You know, if you just Google the leadership Institute, you’ll find us right away, but we do free webinars all the time, multiple a week. We have white papers that are, they’re totally downloadable free and accessible to you on our, our website. We do some open enrollment programs, just in markets around the U S and outside of the U S at the individual level. So even if your corporation is not pursuing this, but you yourself as an individual have an interest we do a really robust brain-based coaching program. So that’s on our website as well, too. If you’re inside of a corporation, we have corporate memberships that, you know, you can come to. We also host probably a good dozen a year, different events and different markets, just, you know, to be in town, talking to practitioners about what’s going on. And I’m usually present with the vast majority of those as well, too. So would love to have any of your listeners join us and, or access information about neuroscience and learning on the website.
Chris (52:59):
Great, Mary, thank you so much for your time. And hopefully we’ll have you back to share more of your learnings at some point in the future.
Mary (53:07):
I would love to do that. Thank you, Chris. It’s always good to spend time with you.
Chris (53:15):
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