Eileen Cooke

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Eileen to the Built by People podcast. Eileen, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestYes, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to meet you. My career journey has always carried a thread, right? A thread of education right from the very beginning when I worked for the welfare department outside of Philadelphia, but working with adults and using education to help them go into whatever might be next for them, all the way through to working with the US Army on using education for enlisted soldiers through to where I am today in corporate training. So it has been a very serpentine journey, but always leveraging education development to be the product that I contribute.

▶1:27HostEileen, how do you see the role of learning and development evolving in today's corporate environment, and what changes do you believe are necessary to align learning with performance outcomes?

▶1:38GuestI was just having this conversation. I feel like I have this conversation all the time, but I was literally having it today on my way into DC. And the difference is that the only reason— it's not a difference, it's the fact— the only reason that a corporate training or learning and development team exists is to equip the workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to do their job, period. Very often we get caught up in the training event itself. People talk about how many people are going to be there, where is it going to be, what's the curriculum? All those things are important., but that's often where it starts, stays, and finishes. And we forget that the reason we are here is for the work. It's about the performance of people after the training event. And if you don't have that follow-through or the through line that follows your trainees on the job and into the data that represents their work in some form or fashion, You are just the opening act, and you never get to see what happens, how they're doing, and you become irrelevant because it is about the work, not about the training. And that's a big transition for lots of people in my field.

▶2:58HostEileen, can you share an example of a successful instance where your approach to learning and development significantly impacted employee

▶3:08Guestperformance? The last organization I worked for, very large company with thousands of locations around the United States, and the workforce that was the largest high-volume workforce was over like 70,000 of this type of role in the organization. And when you have a mass of that size that needs upskilling or reskilling and new hire training, depending on the objective, what you tend to find is it does go, have they completed it? Have they done it? It's not just check the box. I'm not saying that the quality of whatever it wasn't very good, but it becomes very much a manufacturing exercise of putting the right parts in place, making sure you attach them and sending them off down the conveyor belt. And granted, compliance and safety and all those things that are all those required things in many higher volume environments. Is absolutely fundamental, but it can't be where it ends. And what we did is we reimagined that. We didn't take away those required elements of reporting who's there, when, and what they received from education and training, but we made it very circular, meaning that you would focus on some aspect of your training, whatever that module might be, then you would have to go observe someone doing it. Then you would have to practice it yourself and we would pull it through to the next section. Nothing was a standalone piece. It kept almost this circular pulling through a participate in the instruction, what it could have been a video, watch someone do it and then try it yourself with that person watching and coaching. Because we know it is not about just about practice. It is about guided practice. That equips someone to be able to do something well. You can practice things the wrong way, and then you're not going to do great work. So in this particular example, as we reimagine— we didn't reimagine what they had to do on the job. That's decided by others. But the way we brought them through that and made sure that they practice it correctly over and over again, nothing was ever left behind. Through really what was a 9- to 10-week training program scattered across the United States. And it worked really well. People actually learned how to do their jobs.

▶5:36HostEileen, you mentioned in the past the importance of having trade-off conversations with leaders regarding training expectations. Can you elaborate on how to effectively initiate and manage these discussions?

▶5:49GuestThe best way to have a conversation with a business leader about the training you're going to do for her or his business is to talk about the business outcomes. You start there. You don't start with the training and, oh, maybe we'll do an e-learning. No, you start with the business and the key performance indicators, the metrics. What is it that they need to see because of the training? And if they say, and let's use a call center example, if they say average handle time has to be below a minute. Okay, if it has to be below a minute, that's a KPI. One of the things we're going to train people to do, be efficient, be quick, be, be really excellent as it relates to getting the answer and getting someone off the phone. How many systems do they have to use in order to do that? There's quite a few systems, depends on the call. All right, there, business leader, you are going to diminish our ability to effectively train someone to do things quickly. So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the environment and the way the environment also supports the ability for average handle time in this particular case with the number of systems at play. And you talk to them not about the training, but you talk to them about their desired results and the environment, the tools, whatever it might be that the workforce has to do their work in. And between those two, the trade-offs become very apparent. You don't hide from them. You don't blame anyone for them. You just talk about them. And then you help that business leader and your team understand what truly can be done in a training environment. You start with the business and you stay there.

▶7:36HostI love that perspective. In your experience, what are the common challenges training departments face in ensuring that learning translates into performance, and how can these be overcome?

▶7:49GuestIt's two sides. There's the business side and there's the training side. I'm going to start with the training side. There can be a tendency for the training team or practitioners to just take what is given them, to just take it and say, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. Not for very often, but, and then do their best to make it happen. They're almost, they're intimidated by the business conversation. So when I speak to my team, it's like, first and foremost, we're business people. We work in a corporation. We happen to, our craft or our trade or our contribution happens to be learning development and training, but you are a businessman or woman. You're working in a business. Understand the business. And if you don't, whoo, there's quite a few people that can help you. I can help you. The HR business partners can help you. Your leaders can. We're going to get you the business acumen you need so when you can ask the right questions of the business in order to make sure that there's realistic alignment. Now, on the business side, the problem can be, or the struggle can be, they don't actually know 100% what it is they need to be different. They just know something's not right. Something isn't working well. We are not meeting the metrics or the outcomes that they need, and they're not 100% sure why. And that's where I, as a performance consultant, has to spend time not talking about training, but talking about desired results, the current state, and what the gaps are. What's causing this problem? Because if I don't know and they don't know, and we're just gonna do some grand training, it'll be a lovely event with a good lunch, but not much else is going to come out of it.

▶9:33HostHow do you measure the impact of training programs on employee performance, and what metrics do you find to be the most valuable?

▶9:41GuestThis whole lens has to be from the business perspective. There is a fear of our learning practitioners of being measured by the business results or outcomes or even the KPIs. Not so much the results, but of the workforces that they train, 'cause they're not in control of that. They're not there doing the work, but we have to let go of it. We have to let go of it. It's almost like saying a salesperson shouldn't be held accountable for a sale. They can't control what a prospect does, but they're held accountable for the end result, which is a sale or not. So it is breaking with that fear of being held accountable for the performance of the people that you trained. That's the only reason you're there, that they can do their job. So there's that. You have to actually become okay with that. And as far as the business is concerned, the business has to be willing to share that data. If I don't know how my trainees are doing after they leave me, how the workforce is doing, whether it's cohorts or the entire workforce, I don't know what to do better. I can't help you mitigate things or watch for lead measures that aren't hitting it and pull people back and do something to refocus some sort of their performance. So it's really not being afraid of being held accountable for business metrics and getting access to business metrics. Those two things are very important.

▶11:11HostEileen, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶11:14GuestThat learning and development is the best role on the planet. Think about it. You get to work in a business and you get to be in an environment that's dynamic and it's about winning in the marketplace, whatever that might be. But you also get to be— combine that with actually making a difference in people's lives. When you're a trainer or you're developing training, You're bringing people a step closer to a career, unlocking their potential, setting them up to go and make a really great wage to care for their family. It's the intersection of two things were very important to me. I love to win. I like a dynamic environment, and education in some form or fashion to me is the secret in many cases to a really happy, healthy life.

▶12:08HostAileen, thanks so much for joining us on the Build Bike Community.

▶12:10GuestThank you.

▶12:10HostIt was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶12:13GuestAppreciate it. Take care.