The Learning Culture Podcast

 Brett is the Director of Revenue Enablement at Instructure. He got into enablement on the back of a successful career in sales. Before that, he spent time as a missionary in Japan - so he is really able to blend that passion for teaching and coaching in this role, making an impact with the people on his team.  In this "Rapid Fire 5" segment, I gather his first thoughts on five key questions related to learning and enablement. 

Brett is the Director of Revenue Enablement at Instructure. He got into enablement on the back of a successful career in sales. Before that, he spent time as a missionary in Japan - gifting him a unique ability to blend that passion for teaching and coaching to make an impact with the people on his team.Brett is the first guest I've had on the show where it felt like at times that I was talking to myself.  It was almost uncanny how similar we think about enabling people and developing potential. So if you've been a fan of the show, I know you're going to enjoy this conversation with a kindred spirit.So please sit back and enjoy this discussion with Brett Childs.

Joining me this week is Will Mannon.Will is the Chief Product Officer for Write of Passage, an online cohort-based course to teach people how to become digital writers. They've taught over 1,000 people how to do this through eight cohorts, and I took this course in cohort two. I've been following their journey ever since, and I even became involved as a mentor in cohort five. It's been incredible to watch them push the boundaries of online education, cohort-based education, and how people really learn.I'm excited to share this conversation with Will, someone I consider a good friend. Will and I have regular catch-ups on all things online education. As you'll find in this episode, it always ends up being an in-depth, far-ranging, and very enjoyable conversation.We finish our conversation with a discussion about differences between 1990 and 2020 mindsets. I know you're going to love this one.Please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Will Mannon.

Joining me this week is Al Dea.Al is the founder of Betterwork Labs, a research, advisory, and training organization that helps other companies create better workplace cultures. I met Al after finding his research on LinkedIn, which really caught my eye. He identified six trends in how people develop themselves and their careers at work. He made an incredible graphic to go along and wrote up a post on the research. I knew as soon as I saw it that I had to get Al on the show to talk through these six trends. All of them push the boundaries of the future of Learning and Talent Development companies — and your people can leverage them. As someone responsible for developing or enabling people, learning to spot and act upon these trends is crucial.In our conversation, we unpack each of these and talk through examples of companies he's seen in the space that are offering solutions. We also discuss how to approach and navigate the landscape of these companies. There is a ton of deep insight within Al's research, and it was a pleasure to unpack it with him on the show.Please sit back and enjoy my episode with Al Dea.

Joining me this week is Kristen Hartley.Kristen is the Head of Learning and Development for Pinterest. She's a former Deloitte Consultant with a background in Change Management, who has been doing Learning and Development as a function for only two and a half years - but she's been able to bring all that prior experience today in moving into this Head of L&D role at Pinterest. She also does some coaching as a side hustle and brings a lot of those skills to the function that she's responsible for at Pinterest.I know you're going to pull a lot of great ideas from this conversation with someone out there practicing at an organization with such scale.So please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Kristen Hartley.

Joining me this week is Jo Wright.Jo is the firecracker CEO of Coaching Culture. It's a UK-based firm that specializes in the content and platforms to enable cultures of coaching, or as Jo puts it - to scale up coaching conversations.I initially approached Jo on LinkedIn because I saw something on her website that I thought I disagreed with. And I thought it'd be fun to get into a conversation about the sort of battle between our two viewpoints. But the more I read what she was posting, and the more I dug into the website, the more I realized that we're actually on exactly the same page - that of learning culture and coaching culture. These are all just different names for the same thing, and I think that's the most exciting part of this for me. It's about enabling authentic leaders to have effective conversations by giving each other honest feedback, and building cultures of trust.I took so many notes from this conversation. I'm sure you will, too.So please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Jo Wright.

Joining me this week is Paul Millerd.Paul is the author of a new book called the Pathless Path, as well as a freelance consultant and a Content Advisor to Curious Lion. He has been an indispensable help on a few client projects, assisting in assessing client’s existing Learning Cultures. This is the topic of today’s episode.Paul spent more than a decade at companies like GE, McKinsey, and BCG as an organizational consultant, assessing, shaping, and cultivating strong organizational cultures.Much of our conversation in this episode draws upon the work of Edgar Schein, one of the most impressive thinkers on organizational culture from the late 80s and early 90s.You'll leave this episode knowing what role you can play in establishing and cultivating the culture you want to see at your company.So please sit back and enjoy my episode with Paul Millerd.

Joining me this week is Ajay Pangarkar.Ajay is an award-winning Performance and Cost Strategist. He's an expert on training in the workplace, as well as on finance and accounting. He's also an author, and his books bring together his wealth of experience and insight across these various fields. His most recent book, The Trainer's Balanced Scorecard , which he wrote with his co-author Teresa Kirkwood is the starting point for a lot of our conversation. We explore the often tricky topic of measuring training ROI, and with Ajay having authored and published multiple courses on these very topics, it was a real privilege to be able to pick his brain and map new insights. .I know you're going to get a lot of value from this episode, so feel free to share any takeaways or moments that stand out to you.For now, please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Ajay Pangarkar.👉Continue the conversation with me: https://twitter.com/Bazzaruto~ This episode is brought to you by The Learning Culture Experience. Learn more at https://curiouslion.cloud/experience ~

Joining me this week is Steve Bousquet.Steve is the President of American Landscape and Lawn Science, a lawn care and landscape business based in Connecticut. Reading that, many of you are probably thinking, "That's an interesting guest for a podcast about Learning Culture". I had the same thought when I first met Steve, a self professed learning nerd who never hesitates to hire a coach or to get a certification in something that he thinks could help him in what he sets out to do.In this episode, we unpack important lessons about the learner path mindset that Steve has installed for his team of 30 people. It covers communication styles, leveraging strengths, the growth mindset, and of course, purpose. Steve shares some very practical tools that you could use to enhance these four areas of your business to promote and enable your people. Sometimes you have to look at a business entirely different from your own, to learn a new approach that resonates and can be applied to the situation you face. I left my conversation with Steve energized by his fresh perspective, and with a new set of practical ideas that I want to apply at Curious Lion. I have no doubt that you will find gems of your own hidden within this conversation.So please sit back and enjoy this episode with Steve Bousquet.

Joining me this week is Daniel Quick.Daniel is the SVP for Learning Strategies at Thought Industries, a platform for customer education. He is also the author of a new book called The Customer Education Playbook, and most of our conversation revolves around the ideas that Daniel and his co-author share in the book.I went into this conversation prepared, but still with massive blind spots on what customer education truly is. What I learned from speaking to Daniel is that this is to be expected, because the field of customer education is fresh and newly emerging. It's a bit of a mixture of instructional design, marketing,  entrepreneurship and research.I think of Daniel as an SME for customer education. His book is an incredible resource for anybody who wants to get into the space, whether you are responsible for people development internally or for people development through customers. If you do anything in the field of education or learning, there are deep insights to be gleaned from Daniel's work.So please sit back and enjoy my conversation with Daniel Quick.