Leading With Learning featuring Nicole Papaioannou Lugara

Luis Malbas  
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another session for our talent development event. Crafting success. Thanks so much for being here. Let's take a look. We have a few people in there Cindy interested. Just he is back on your feet. And yeah, Dan has been here, Jan. Let's see Trish ward. Thank you. Miss Scott Hussein, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, so this is the last event of the year for TL DC. So I'm very happy that those of you that are here are here to share it with us. Just two more sessions, and then we're gonna be done for the year. And, and yeah, it's been absolutely fantastic. We have done 12 events this year, ranging from like this one, we just have over 300 registered to, I think over the summer with close to 1500 registered for one. So we're looking forward to 2024 with another at least a dozen more events. And we'll just stay busy that way with our community. And so it's with it's an honor once again to have our next speaker. Nicole Wait, I forgot papa, papa iguana. Did I say that right?

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Oh, yeah. Bobbi, I know sometimes it just depends on who you're talking to in the day.

Luis Malbas  
Back with us, I know you've done a couple of sessions with us in the past, and it's always great to have you. Let's see, Nicole is a learning strategist and the founder of your instructional designer, a social learning agency for corporate l&d. Nicole's enjoyed working with clients ranging from Fortune 100 orgs to solopreneurs in a variety of fields such as aviation, medical and baby behavior, health, fashion and consulting. Her work is translated into real transformations. I think that's kind of been one of the themes of this particular event. Reduction of costly incidents, improved product sales, better earning potential engaged employees and happier clients. Her mission is always to make learning that matters to her clients and their people. So Nicole, thank you so much for sharing with us you're leaving with learning session. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and hide myself in the screen and let you take over.

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Thank you. Yes, hi, everybody. I'm just gonna do the traditional trainers thing but like, let me know if you're here and you're active. And what I'd say is I try to keep my workshops somewhat participatory. So there's a few times that wish I may ask you to grab your smartphone and scan a QR code or join in a little activity. I'm also going to say that like my second monitor has gone out and so I'm riding the struggle is with technology at this moment. So please bear with me if I just have a total brain fart for lack of better words on lead that's being recorded. But maybe let's just start with like a really simple little thing which is dropped for me in the chat the last book about lnd read and or your favorite one just so you can see kind of the trends that bubble up here

it's gonna be quiet so I'll tell you the probably the last one I read I can't think of it but it Oh, man, that is a really good one. I love make it stick. I feel like I recommend that one all the time needs assessment on a shoestring. Oh, I've heard that one. What do you think Cindy? Like it good. Last book Learning Experience Design Essentials by Karen north. Haven't gotten that one yet. But I hear good things two times from APA. Yeah, I think I tell everybody who joins this field to read map it and make it stick. Those are like the two. So in true social learning theme, I think these are good things to pick up. These are from learners, learning leaders in our field. And they're sharing their insights and expertise. And so in order for us to get further in our careers, we need to constantly be sharing and learning from others and that is sort of the whole crux of my business. And if you're here today, you are a leader perhaps not in title, but you've shown up to continue educating yourself and to stand out among the crowd. You may be a training manager you may be a director or something else and so you may have it in title as well. But I consider you all leaders in one way or another. So I'm gonna jump us off to this slideshow and let's see if I don't break my internet Okay, um, the challenge with me is that I can't really see what you are chatting at this very second so I'll have to figure that one out. But let's jump right in. So today I want to talk about basically the three top skills I think everybody needs to have as a leader and I know this will vary from conversation to conversation, but it's really learning through leading or leaning through learning. And so there's three ways that we think about this in simplest terms, which is really learning about ourselves, learning with others and learning about others. And so for the sake of this conversation, I'm going to translate that into these three, which is strength, building, collaborative growth, and negotiating and influencing. And so sometimes we'll talk about this in terms of teams, but anything that is applicable to a whole team can absolutely just be applicable to yourself if you are not managing people at this point in time. So in the chat, I'm going to ask you if you know your strengths and opportunities. And let's say sorry, we're having fun with this. So what would you say? Let's just start with that. What are your strengths as a leader as a TD professional talent development? Do you know those strengths? And do you know your opportunities for growth?

Growth is influencing. Okay. So you want to build those skills in influence? I think this is always an interesting question. Because working with college students, before I got into the l&d space, I would ask students, what their strengths were in writing, and they could almost never tell me and I don't think that's necessarily the truth, they may know innately. And it's the same thing for the talent development fields, we probably do know, on some level what our strengths are. But everybody always goes for the gaps. And I just, I want us to take a moment and also celebrate the fact that we have lots of growth opportunities, this field is a constant growth opportunity, but that we also come with things that we're already really good at. Oh, and so Cindy and I are probably on the same page today. All right, so let's jump back over to the exciting slides, that I apologize, it's a little extra layers here today, thanks to my screens not cooperating but so we are going to be doing a skills inventory. And Cindy, I would love to see yours and see how these overlap. But this is a tool I actually use with my team. So I don't typically do this just in isolation. But I have everybody fill out this map together. And essentially, you know, start by saying who we are. So we know who's here. And then the skills I'm using. So what skills am I using in my day to day work. The second part of this is the skills I am not using but want to. And so people often come to work with this whole big expansive set of experiences and knowledge. And they don't always get recognized in the workplace. Maybe they weren't in the job description. Maybe they were but they haven't been utilized yet. And so this is an opportunity to share those skills, then there is skills I want to develop, which is the obvious one, right? Those are your growth opportunities. And the last one is skills I have but don't want to use. And so just for me, for example, you know, as I tried to step further and further into my role as the leader, the founder, more of the CEO and less of the instructional designer these days, graphic design is one of the ones that come up like yes, I can do some intermediate level, not advanced intermediate level instruct graphic design, but like I don't really want to be doing that day to day. So I asked my team to fill this out. And it leads to some conversations, but we'll get there in a minute, what I'd like to do is jump everyone over if you'd be willing to participate on to Miro. And so I think it might actually be easier if I probably just bring the slide off and put it in the chat. But we will actually take a few minutes to do this exercise for everyone who's in the group right now. So let me again, stop sharing and bring us back together. And I'm gonna drop that in the chat. So maybe over there, and we'll start filling it out

all right, I see a few visitors. So if you're not super familiar with Miro, if you hold your spacebar and drag, you can kind of move the board around. If you scroll up, you go and zoom in. If you scroll down on your mouse, you can scroll out and so you'll see some of my examples up here. But I'd like each of you to pick your own column and let's take about Ah What's a form it's like a minute per column and you can grab some sticky notes on the left side here and start filling out your box levers timer you can even set one?

Evening checking out where we all wound up

see let me see making some really good progress down there

don't be shy go ahead and grab those posts we got about 45 seconds left

okay so that's our time's up warning. This exercise could take you a little bit of time. So it probably four minutes is fast just trying to get you through. But as you can see, you know, I see Louisa started Trisha has started to already filled out some of the things I think some of you are kind of working in. You know my boxes, sort of pre populated ideas. But when you do this exercise, what you can start to see really quickly at a glance is well, what is my team think of themselves and so you can scroll in pretty close and start to see all of the different skill sets. Now that's only a piece of the puzzle of course because the other part of the puzzle is to people act like what do you do with this information? Shouldn't once you have it, right, so people have opinions about what they think they know and what they don't know. And that might not tell you everything you need to know. So, you know, take the time, what I would say is, as a learning leader, if you have a team of people, you can get your whole team to do this. And like I said, we do this periodically throughout the year at your instructional designer, so I'm having all of my people fill this out, and then we start the conversations about it from there. But if it's just you and your solo, then you can start to use this sort of, to send you as mentioning before and start to sort of map out where you need to go next. So I'm going to bring us back to the main air meet room. But you can feel free to check into this mural board, you have the link. So if you need to go back to later or anything like that, definitely feel free. So let's take us back to it. So now that you've got this data, theoretically, we can sort of start to see the trends among our team. And so you might see that you have three people who are really great at instructional design. And under that maybe it's visual design. But maybe you don't have somebody who's great at writing, or perhaps you're looking for somebody who's really strong in technology, and technology assessment, or perhaps, you know, you start to see where we're going. So at this point, you've got the basic data from your team, and you're gonna start to review industry benchmarks. So it's not just the gaps that you're seeing within your team. But it's also thinking about, well, what does the industry say we need. And if you're an ATD member, they've just released their book of knowledge. So that can be a really great place to go. There are lots of skills maps available if you start Googling, obviously, as well. And you can check places like Glassdoor or if you want just kind of a quick estimate, you can grab a handful of, I would say job descriptions and start to parse out what you're seeing in there. So you can then start to compare the data that's in that skill inventory against industry benchmarks. And again, you'll use that data to figure out where your gaps are. So what are the skills that we don't have yet that need to be developed, thinking about who's the right person to develop, and seeing where your strengths are, maybe there's things you're really good at, and that you should be assembling the team around them, or planning future projects around those things, or, you know, designing products around those strengths. So that's part one, part two is projecting future needs. And so the industry benchmarks will give you what you think is relevant now. But it may not tell you what's going to be relevant in five years from now. And that's a bit of an exercise, it's a bit of pretending we're actually being a futurist. But when you start to think about what comes next, what do you see, again, we're looking at that skills inventory, seeing if there's gaps, and going back and forth, then the last piece is determining whether you train or hire. At this point, you might want to call in other data. So if you have performance review data if you have data from your performance management systems, and you can see more than just what your team has self reported. That's great. But a lot of teams don't have those tools. I work with a lot of midsize and even small businesses, and they definitely don't have those tools. So for us, again, Skills Inventory first step. And the last step is now we know what the benchmarks are. Now we know what those future projected needs are. Now we know what we've got where our strengths and our weaknesses are. So do we train? Or do we hire? If it's yourself, you might think about are these skills I logically need to develop in myself to be competitive and to have a fulfilling career? Or are these things that I should find a place where I can work with, you know, team members? Or perhaps if your external grab partnerships and things of that nature? If it's internal, you have to start looking at who's on your team and deciding Is this an area of growth for them? Are they going to make the next move in their career by learning this skill? Or do we need to hire and that might happen if you need somebody who has the skill immediately, and you've realized there's a big gap. So this is a really simple exercise you can do, but it's very impactful. Again, I do this with my team, usually two to three times a year. And it starts to help us thinking about what talent development we need to institute in our own team. So with that said, I'm going to ask you all to go into the chat and talk about how you can support team growth and team bonding. So what are you doing at your own organizations? Or if you're not part of an organization, or whether you're solo or you know, seeking future roles? What can you do to support growth and bonding with your peers? So I'll ask that kind of two ways just to make sure we've got all our bases covered.

Coming back to the chat.

I'm going to drop that one in the chat just so everybody can see it as we talk about it.

So feel free to continue putting in your ideas, I'm gonna move us back to where we started for a moment, which is to think about how we can do this. Lisa isn't sticking to regular one on ones for a long time, that's a great way to keep your team invested and to show that you care, genuinely expressing certain interest. I think the theme of all these things, regardless of what I'm about to say, naturally is caring, right sharing, showing you care as a leader showing you're invested in the well being of other people. And that's going to be whether you're a team leader, or a thought leader in the field, if you can show you care, people are going to want to follow your lead. And they're gonna want to know they're supported. So when we talk about learning with others, at your instructional designer, we're usually talking about it in one of three buckets. And this is super broad, like, there are obviously a million ways that you can learn with others through social learning. But these are kind of the big three that we tend to create, which is community and community is, you know, open format. It doesn't necessarily have an MD these are people organically learning from one another. They're usually purpose driven, sometimes identity driven. So for example, I am a resident of New Jersey. And so I may identify as a Jersey girl, and I hang out with my other Jerseyans, right. The second way is the cohort model, which is really popular right now, I've used a little hammer, because it's more of the stack situation, right, you're meeting with the same people week over week establishing rapport, but they typically are outcome driven. And so there's some kind of deadline, or final outcome that will happen as a result of this learning that goes on in this cohort. And then the last one is a single event. And so that might be your one on ones that might be training like you're experiencing today, that might be mentoring sessions, things of that nature. And so there are opportunities to learn in just one event from other people. So thinking about that, we tried to share some practical tactics. And so I'm just gonna go through them quick. And these two, perhaps give you some ideas. But learning with people is really important. And so when you go to train your people on these next layers of skills that you've identified through the Skills Inventory process, you might start doing any of these things. The Social Learning Network is the most holistic, and this is really a network that brings together all of your people and all of your learning and collaboration tools for us at your instructional designer, breezing workplace by meta to facilitate this sort of experience. And we do the same for some of our clients. And really what it is, is all of our communities, all of our chat channels, all of our knowledge, base content, links to some of the work we're doing, sharing that happens, you know, of posts and articles, things of that nature, learning pathways, that's all happening in one space. And so it means that you're continuously putting learning and work again, in the same space. And so it encourages it to happen organically continuously. And rather than across the hierarchy. You know, different people from different levels are able to access one another. And so it creates a lot of growth together. Documentation. This is a step that a lot of team leaders miss. But as you grow in your leadership role, whether again, that's solo or you're a thought leader, start documenting your processes, I cannot under emphasize like overemphasize the amount of importance that there is behind documentation, collaborative problem solving, this is another great strategy for learning together. And again, it doesn't have to be led by, you know, leaders in the formal term. But when you have people coming together and solving problems, you get different perspectives, different solutions, it's typically better than one person in isolation, doing it alone. And that's also like group brainstorming is a great strategy. We've got knowledge sharing, that's another great one. At my organization, knowledge sharing happens all the time every day, and I'm sure that's true in yours as well. Again, we're using chat channels, we're using knowledge bases, we're sharing articles and posts and things of that nature. We have a podcast that we use externally, and that comes with a community. And so there's a lot of ways we are sharing the knowledge that we have mentoring and coaching that is another great strategy for starting to build your team skills, inventory gaps, stretch projects, with support, you know, people like to give stretch projects, but sometimes they forget that the support is needed. And so the social still has to happen there. There still has to be learning with one another. Storytelling, that's probably an obvious one, perhaps the theme, and then observation sometimes you just learned from being in the room with others or maybe you're not in the room but you're observing them online or something of that nature and So as you start to think about the skills gaps, I want you to think about which tactics you'll be applying and how you'll start to fill those gaps. Okay. So as we talk about social learning, I also want you to think about one more set of things. So it's wonderful to have all of these tactics in place, but you've got to be doing, I'm just gonna scroll them all up, you have to be doing these things as well, if you really want to create a meaningful culture of learning a meaningful community. And so that is reiterating purpose for organizations purposes, usually, your mission, your vision, but personally, you may need to remind yourself of your why onboarding is always going to be a key piece here. If people aren't brought into the expectations of the organization, if they're not, you know, being led to understand what it means to be part of this workplace community, then they're not really going to be able to participate fully. This one's specific to communities, but willing available caring moderators. And so sometimes this looks like you as a team manager, sort of moderating the team community. But sometimes this means literally you have to have moderators, like in your chat channels and things of that nature. Responsive resourcing is another tool, we found that's really helpful for learning with one another. And that essentially means that as you're hearing the gaps, right, perhaps it's coming up in your chat channels, perhaps it's coming up in your readings that you're responsively finding and supplying resources to your team members to help them fill the gaps. Participant matchmaking is about connecting people who have either similar needs, or one has experience where one does not. And so that's not always again, team leader to direct report, it may be that, you know, Julia is really good at building things in Storyline. And Bob is really good at writing stuff, and you want them to cross pollinate. And so maybe one has questions the other can answer and vice versa. You put them together, rewards and recognition. This one we all know I mean, badges and all that stuff is great. Shouting people out is great, but thinking about how you can meaningfully reward people for their participation, and also how you can meaningfully reward people for doing behavior that you would like other people to imitate. And then the last piece is internal marketing. So as you think about your learning culture, how you're driving it as a team leader, how you're driving it as a thought leader, how are you creating buzz around this, and so that might be tapping into your internal influencers. It may be creating genuine campaigns just like people do for products, it may be that you're filming teasers and sharing nudge emails to remind people of things. But if you're doing all these things, in addition to the tactics, you're gonna have a much higher chance that you're going to be able to close those gaps. Alright, so the next one. And business acumen is like a real hot topic in l&d right now, it just so happens that I've been thinking about business acumen probably for my entire career at this point. And so I would just ask you to think about what you believe are the three critical goals for business? Because that's one that we don't always ask ourselves. So I'm going to drop that one in the chat as well. I know moving through kind of fast. So if you need to slow me down on anything, just let me know. But what are those three critical goals for business? If I had to ask you, what would you say they are? supporting customers supporting employees supporting self, I like it.

Trustee a definitely gets gold star for participation right now, just for the record. Let it be stated.

Well, I'll tell you, I'm sort of the model that I used to think about it and it's not my model. It is a model from the 70s. And that is, I never know how to pronounce it. I usually say I raucous but they may see it differently. And so it's really three things. You got to increase revenue, avoid costs and improve service. It's that simple. That's every single business. These are the things they're trying to accomplish. You know, they may have slightly different SMART goals under each of those three broad goals, but this is what they're trying to do. And I don't know if we're always thinking about that as l&d professionals, I think we get really hung up on improve service. Like we always want to improve the experience for the learner. We always want to improve the experience for our team. We're very people driven and I love that about us. And I love that for how we operate. But at the end of the day, we do have to cross those lines. And often if we're trying to get talent development opportunities for our team and start to fill those gaps or perhaps we're trying to hire the person who's then going to come into our team and And he may have to make these arguments. And so I'd like to spend some time just thinking about that. So negotiation, that's what this next skill is all about. And this is really the learning about others, because negotiation starts with listening to understand. A lot of times people think that negotiation means you know what you want, and you go in, and you punch down until you get it. But that's really not what it is. And so, once you start to learn the art of negotiation, you can definitely move further faster as a leader. And so this is the biggest question. I think I say, All right, I have the slide. And like every presentation I've done in the past few years, but it's, it's this question that really drives us. And so I know we think about what's in it for me, as you know, TD folks. And again, that's like user experience related, but what's their currency is a bit of a different question. I'd say it's the precursor. And so what this is really asking you is, what is this person or this audience willing to trade their time and energy for that their currency. So for me, I willing to trade my time and energy for I'm definitely a affirmations lovely, which kind of gal. So if you're telling me I'm doing a good job, if I know you feel that I helped you, that gets me like, I'm always willing to trade my time and energy to help somebody. But you may be dealing with somebody who is only willing to trade their time and energy for money. Or maybe you're dealing with somebody who's only willing to trade their time and energy for awards and recognition status, right, maybe you're trading your time and energy for I'm trying to think of what else there is out there. There's a whole bunch of things you might be willing to trade your time and energy for. But you get my point, which is to say that what I'm willing to trade, my time and energy for isn't necessarily the same as every single other person out there. And so in order to be a good negotiator, you really have to start to think about this answer. And so these are the three questions that you need to so aside from what's their currency, which can help you understand what gets them motivated. The next thing you got to ask when you get to the negotiation is where's your commonality? And again, negotiation is not about punching down. If you know your team needs a specific skill, and you need to help them build it and you're trying to like, convince your boss of this, for example, what is the thing that both of you want, you're both working for a single organization. So chances are, you've got some kind of bigger goal. I've also seen this happened with subject matter experts sometimes, you know, they're they seem disagreeable. And I try to remind my team, it's okay, because at the end of the day, what we all want is a really good outcome or a really good product, we all want to make sure this audience is being helped. And when you start to remember that you could start to work together rather than think about, oh, I'm trying to convince this person I'm trying to get over on them, or I'm trying to push them. Instead, we're both trying to work together towards a common goal. And the last piece is what's the win win. So this is not where it does not have to be a zero sum game. Think about how what you need and what your team needs can be a win for the larger organization. If it's just you as an individual, then you might not be dealing so much with this, but it's still good to keep in mind because you'll probably deal with this when you are working with clients where perhaps other individuals or you're trying to find partnerships and other opportunities. So I'm going to give us a bit of a scenario and I'm going to ask you how you would recommend we convince the boss in this scenario. So Jamie's team decides leveraging generative AI in their course development workflow is a skill they need to develop pretty common right? The company has tons of compliance training that needs to be produced each year and the small team can't keep up. Jamie's boss, however, doesn't trust the robots and doesn't want to invest time or money into training GPS team. The boss is vying for a promotion that would take her out of l&d. How are we going to convince Jamie's boss

so I'm sorry to do this. I'm going to shrink the screen while we come to this conclusion.

And I like to put everything in the chat. So I'm gonna drop sheeny scenario in there and just ask you, how you start to negotiate that keeping in mind what Jamie's bosses currency is, what their commonality is and what the Win Win would be for them. That Cindy Jamie needs to tell the story of what is possible time saved using the tools. I agree. That's a A great one Cindy, tried to convince the boss that working with generative AI is not specific to learning development and can be applied in a variety of other industries business groups areas. Yes. So what I'm hearing between Cindy interested to hear is one, there are some performance outcomes and those performance outcomes can make the boss livid. Right as boss you want to look at so saving time, that's a great one. And the other piece of the puzzle is this person is trying to move out of l&d. And so showing them that this is a skill they're going to need in other spaces, and that they're not just turning their gears as they wait to get out of l&d is a good thing. And so, as we start to think about, again, what does your team need? There are different layers are you going to need to negotiate with leadership to get buy in to develop these skills are you going to need to negotiate with your team members to get buy in to develop these skills, maybe they're not convinced this is the gap they need to fill. Or maybe they're unsure about pursuing a leadership role, for instance, or they don't really want to spend the time on this skill right now, because probably being a manager is like three years away. So thinking about that can help you really move the needle and start to really influence your team influence leadership around you and make good headway as you build those those skills. Cindy's also got a really great description here, the employees in the organization are probably already using generative AI, which I'm sure you're all seeing right now. It will help them get ahead by upskilling. And supporting future skills, the ease in the org will be needing, yes. So there's a lot of ways right to start capitalizing on that conversation, and moving the needle forward, once you know what genius boss wants to achieve. And once you know what businesses typically need to achieve, which, aside from all the wonderful things we got in this column, often fall under, well, here you go, you can improve service, you can increase revenue, you can avoid cost.

So that was an awful lot. And this is really what it came down to. In order to be an effective leader. As you grow into either team leadership, or you know, you're growing as a thought leader. It's really about finding identifying the strengths and building the strengths you don't have yet. Thinking about how you can collaboratively grow the team so that they're not just building their skills, but they're also growing stronger together by learning with others. And then negotiating and influencing so that you can get the things you need for your team, and also the things you need for yourself. So let's just go I'm open for questions if anybody has them or just discussion, because there's a lot of really bright people in this room, and I don't have to be the center of all things.

See, Louise is coming back.

Luis Malbas  
Sorry. I'm just leaning on my desk. No, that's brilliant. What a brilliant presentation. That was fantastic. I'm waiting to see if anyone's going to bring any any questions up. How did you? I'm just wondering, Nicole, so you have your own business, you have your instructional designer. Right. And so I'm just trying I'm sorry, I don't know. But is it like an agency? And? Because question, really and stuff? How much time did you spend, like, you know, working for other companies or the context? That?

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Sure. So we are an agency for the last two years. So I'll give you the long spiel, which is I started out as a adjunct professor of English, my PhD is in English, I worked at writing centers for about six years, in addition, and somewhere in that whole spectrum of time, I decided I wanted to make money and not live in my parents house forever. And so I started to look for jobs. And I had no idea what instructional designer was. But lo and behold, that was the role that seemed to best fit my skill set. So in 2013 or 2014, I started my first job as an instructional designer at an ad tech company. And so we were all I've always been outsourced. l&d is what I say that company was an agency, and we had our own adaptive learning platform. And so for a while I was, you know, the instructional designer who would help our clients build in their product. And then eventually, I became the manager, that entire curriculum department. And so I had about 15 direct reports. And then I did a lot of work with our video team and our other teams internally, just because we were learning product and thus, you know, a lot came back to us. And then when I left there, I started out freelancing. And I probably worked with about 70 organizations and my years of freelancing, and then in the last two years, after think about five or six, I forget numbers now at this point, but after Several years of freelancing basically, I had started outsourcing things to people and quickly realized like, Oh, you've got 21 freelancers working with you in a year, you're really not, you're really not a freelancer anymore. And so at two years ago, I hired my first full time staff member, Rocio, who's our amazing project manager. And then now we have four team before on staff and we still leverage a bunch of freelance talent to get projects done. Oh,

Luis Malbas  
that's great. Because all of this is so relevant, and especially like, the conversations that I think that your your slides provokes, really are things that are important now, and, and speak to I think a lot of folks that are that are in this audience. So so it's really, really good stuff. It's a win, see if any of any questions came in? Oh, yeah. Here we go from Chrystia. What are your top lessons learned from the huge growth your your IDX has had over the past few years, what has helped you scale quickly.

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
So the tactics I've showed you on the one slide, and I can send these out later, if anybody's interested, I think I'm actually connected with most of you. But those have honestly been life changing. I think the first year that we really stepped into scale, we got our first really monster, you know, multi six figure project. And like, I was still trying to do too much of it myself, or like, I hired people who I knew were really smart, but I still was kind of holding on to things. And so number one was like, Get out of my own way. And then I started to use the tools that really made a difference. So putting together our social learning network with workplace has been massive, like, it's forced me to document things to get them into the learning pathways to get them into the knowledge base, it captures the questions my team is asking, we have a whole share what you learned community, and so people are constantly sharing, and you can see what topics bubble up. It's been really interesting. And then documentation, which I kind of already alluded to, but you know, I have a lot of ideas in my head. And I would train team members, I would do everything I told my clients not to do it, right, like I would train team members one on one, and then we would sort of lose that. And so especially in the last year, I've been very intentional. Our cohort blueprint is a lot of the decisions, for example that I was making when I was designing these blended learning programs. And now it's a 30 page document. And so my team goes in, and they can fill out the template. And so getting all of that has been really important. The name of the software for the social learning network is workplace, and it's by meta, it's literally Facebook without, you know, some of the creepy algorithm, bells and whistles they have on the consumer side. But it's been a massive blessing for my team. And then we use that for some of our clients. And so one, if you listen to our podcast actually talks a little bit about their experiences with it. But they've had the same experience in that it's helped their team grow. It's helped them scale, it's helped them be more social as they've moved from being like a on site team to being a national, mostly remote team. So you know, getting tools like that you can if it's teams and you kind of, you know, make it do what you needed to do. It's just really important to have those communication and collaboration tools in place. Yeah, it's really neat. I'm sure there's other great solutions other than workplace, but like, it's been my favorite for like, you know, at the decision maker, I got to pick what I wanted for my team. And we all collectively hate a team. So look for something else. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
yeah. I mean, could slack be a replacement? for that? It

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
could, you know, we actually try. It's interesting, because we've tried slack first. And I mentioned that we have a lot of freelancers who work with us. And some of my freelancers really did not like Slack. And they've kind of gotten on board with workplace. And really, to me, the difference is just that slack really is communication collaboration channel, right. It's a feed of essentially direct messages. Whereas workplace really has more of that community feel like you've got the news feed, you have places where you can go for more static content, like our learning guides, and things like that. So it's a little more holistic, whereas slack is a little more conversation driven, or like pushing of information or using the search to find things,

Luis Malbas  
right. Yeah, I know that I work for very technical company. And it tends to be like, where a lot of the collaboration happens is within slack, and also GitHub. Yeah,

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
GitHub is another one for sure. So you know, you may just be piecing the parts of your social learning network, if you will, together a bit differently, because it's just the model. I wanted something that had all inclusive, but if you have GitHub and you have slack, and you're using certain other tools, maybe you have a learning management system, you know, if you've thought about how they're all working together, we're great.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. And it's also the pieces I mean, with with I know slack and GitHub, you can you know, it's easy to embed code and share code that way. So I'm not sure what workplace is like, but it's probably not as

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Yeah, it's definitely not so I am And I know you know, it has integrations with Slack. And it has integrations with teams. So to me, that's also an indicator, it just doesn't do everything. For us. Is there a use case for other teams? That may not be? Yeah. How about

Luis Malbas  
the amount of effort to be able to maintain an active sort of workplace environment? Is there anything that you have any strategies that you've had to put in place to ensure that, you know, adopting a platform like that is is going to work out?

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Yes, I know. So what I love about workplace, I feel like I should be getting a kickback from that, because I talk about it all the time, but I have no affiliation with them. But what I love about it is really that it's so easy to use most people, at least Millennials have renderers, for pretty familiar with Facebook, probably the Gen. Gen X, yeah. Boomers, they're kind of familiar with Facebook do. And so when you get on, you kind of know what to do already. The onboarding that happens is, usually what happens is someone will come, you know, I can get them registered and set up on workplace. And the first thing I do is I send them a chat message, I say, welcome to the workplace. Welcome to the team. Here's where I would start if I were you. And we send them to a little onboarding. It's like a learning pathway. So it's a technically a community, but we've created the learning guide, so they can go through and do some self paced learning. And also using it as an opportunity to connect with people, you know, there's prompts to do certain things. And so that sets the tone. And then it's really easy, because after that, they know where all the resources are, they know sort of the team schedule, they know how we operate as an organization. And then from there, they usually go into their work groups. So for each project, we have similar structure in that there's an onboarding to each client, we have loom, which is also a really useful tool for sharing knowledge. And so we'll do a little introduction by project manager posts, up schedules, things like that. So everything kind of lives in its own little working team space.

Luis Malbas  
I like it. And it just feels like overall leading with learning is just a very active, dynamic, like not passive at all, you've got to really sort of just be present constantly to make it work. Yeah,

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
I think if you're leading with the idea that you know it all, and that you have to like, put it down onto people, and then you just manage performance, you're really you're cutting yourself short, from innovation opportunities, you're cutting yourself short from Ai, you really do you start to bond with people when you feel like you're solving problems together when you're learning from one another because you're bringing value to one another. And so leading through learning is definitely my philosophy.

Luis Malbas  
Love it. Excellent. I've got one more from Chrystia. Here,

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
the 30 page, the 30 page document is actually just for our digital cohorts, which is crazy to say that it is 30 pages, but it's kind of the decision tree and all of the different components. And so it's everything from like how we structure the community, how we structure the sessions, how we structure like the marketing recommendations, communications recommendations, so it's all of that basically pieced out, it's the intake stuff. Not so much the, I guess it is yeah, the high level, and cross client development standards. For the most part, what tools you're using all of the implementation, who needs to be a part of it, all of that is sketched out. And then managing across multiple team members and contractors, I think it's it's what we were saying before, like I have onboarding for every team member. And every project, whether you are a freelancer or not. Everybody who's on my team is made to feel like they're part of the team, like you might not have access to all of the tools that we use, I don't buy a license for everyone for everything. If you're a freelancer. Now, I kind of expect that you bring most things on your own. But you have access to workplace, you have access to the other members of my team, I try not to bring anyone into the organization that I don't trust me with clients. And so I actively take myself out of being the middle man. And I think people appreciate that. And so part of it is are you building? Are you hiring people who are going to fill those skill gaps that you have? Are you treating them with respect? Are you preparing them to succeed giving them expectations? Are you leaving the floor open to make sure you're available for questions and letting them know you're genuinely available for questions? Not that you're just saying it? So you're checking in with them just like you would with a staff member? And did they sort of know, I would say the lexicon of the oops, sorry, I have an AI. Camera, but do they know like the lexicon of that project? So can they all sort of speak the same language and all of that? And I've never know I think my expert that's really like I'm, I try to be very clear about documenting my expectations and making sure that people can always ask questions about that. And that seems to work pretty well for us. Every once in a while. I'm not clear like it happens, right? I'm fully willing to admit I've even sometimes I'm not and I can see it come out in the work and you have conversations about that. And sometimes I make a poor hiring choice because either we have to move really fast. And I didn't look carefully enough, or I like the person and forgot to really ask the tough questions that happens every once in a while. And so in those situations, I still try to give good feedback, leave on good terms, make sure we're both set up for success moving forward.

Luis Malbas  
Wow, Nicole, that's all brilliant, amazing. Yeah, always seem to learn stuff from you. So that's a good thing, I guess. Well,

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
I mean, what are you doing? So I would just be curious, you know, you're we're in the l&d and not that you're not but you know, with tech things move so fast. And I would say, l&d, we kind of pride ourselves on being good communicators, but in tech, highly stereotyping here. But that's not always the case, right? My, my father's a developer will be the first one to be like, to the noise doesn't always work out. So like, what are you doing to make things work on your team? I,

Luis Malbas  
you know, for myself, I mean, it is really, really rapid. And I think that more than anything, we just have to kind of just stay connected constantly. You know, because I think in, in tech in particular, there, since there is so much change, if you know, if you keep your eyes closed for too long, you're just gonna, you're just gonna miss stuff. And, and, you know, you would think that, you know, as a, you know, since I work for a tech publisher in particular, especially the way that AI is impacting everything, it's just everything is sort of almost exponential in the way that the transformation is happening. And so, so, so yeah, I just have to really, I mean, make sure that I'm paying attention and that I'm staying, you know, connected to all of my team members, because it's kind of mission critical to do that right now. And I think that I'm learning a lot to like it, because I transfers a little bit over to TL DC in this community, and that there are things that I think about that I feel like, it would really, really help for people in the community to also be considering, but I'm also trying to understand whether or not some of it is really even applicable, you know, but so I'm just navigating all of that right now. But, yeah, I also love the social learning aspect of what you're doing. And I think that it's going to be more important than ever to have that just professionally out there for everyone that that's just got to be available, whether or not you're, you know, it's in your organization, or not just being a part of a community that, that social learning is a piece of that is just important, you know, to survive.

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
Business is staked on that idea. So I hope so. True. It really comes down to it. So what you said is super important from a business perspective, right, like, changes happening too fast not to talk to one another. But on the human side, like for me, I see it, but also the research supports it that when we feel more connected, we tend to be more kind. And in this world right now where people are lonely, depressed, angry, violent, like, if through talent development, I can make people feel more connected. That's, that's like the biggest one, I can have all things aside, who cares about like the learning equity at the end of the day? If people feel like they're valued, appreciated, and connected to other people that that's magic.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And just make sure that it's inclusive. You know, I think that there was, I mean, in earlier days, that lack of inclusion was almost like a way to, for people to generate revenue, right? Because everyone is fighting to, to you want it to be Felix to be exclusive. So that, you know, but now, to me, I think it's, you know, that's just ridiculous. And, and so building communities that, that Brett are welcoming to everyone is is key, and just the right thing to do, period. So anyway, I've done

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
a great job here at TL DC, every event I've been to, I feel it's inclusive. And the community is wonderful and warm. And there's so much value here. So thank you

Luis Malbas  
know, I've been I've definitely been excluded lots in my life. So it was time for me to turn it around and just make sure that I can make a place where everyone felt like they could be a part of things. So so yeah. Thanks, Nicole. Well, we have one last session today at noon. Lane. He's going to be here to talk about the power of site site, psychological safety and talent, talent development, so we can take a quick break, and then come back. But Nicole, thanks again so much, and I know that you're busy yesterday with your ATD event. I really appreciate you making time for us. And I'm really looking forward to seeing and you got any conferences or anything you're doing coming up or I'll be

Nicole Papaioannou Lugara  
at ISE in May and that's really the next thing on my lineup. It'll be a nice quiet January but we're launching our new or not launching, I should say, but we're launching our newly named services and things you've been doing for a long time that we've just packaged up. So that'll be a big, big thing. I'm really looking forward to see you Sunday and if anyone else is it is like please come find me. I am definitely the shy awkward introvert despite what you may think. And so all hang out by the corner like a wallflower until you come talk to me. Oh, please do.

Luis Malbas  
Alright, everybody, we'll see in the next one. We have just a short break. And again, Thanks, Nicole. We'll see you next time. Bye, everybody.