The Learning Culture Podcast

Joining me this week is Allison Sword, the senior manager of revenue enablement at Restaurant365. She has an incredible track record within sales enablement, and has been been around basically since the beginning.  She was a sales leader herself before that and brings so much unique perspective and experience to the role. She's also very involved with the WiSE community in Chicago and has connected and grown a lot through networking with other women in the space.In this "Rapid Fire 5" segment, I gather her first thoughts on five key questions related to learning and enablement.Allison Sword LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-sword/

This week, we have a special episode.Today, I want to share with you an article that I wrote from a review that I did of my first quarter in 2023. I spent the first quarter doing a lot of journaling; it is a new practice that I have taken a lot more seriously this year. And at the end of the quarter, I go away and lock myself up—in this case, in a farm—for 48 hours. And I review all of my notes from the previous quarter and write a synthesis of that.What came out of this particular one was identifying five main themes or pathways that I have found, am walking, and will constantly walk for the rest of my life. I think you'll find them valuable. Well, I hope you do, because I think maybe some of them you'll find valuable, and maybe others you won't. But these five were really essential and will continue to be essential for me to continue walking this path.In the second part of the episode, I talk about how I applied the lessons that I've learned from walking those five pathways to my business. And I share a little bit about our point of view, our purpose, our vision, and a little bit about our strategy too.If you're interested in how we are building this Revenue Enablement as a Service thing, you're really going to enjoy this episode. If you want to read this article, it's up on our blog. Go to https://curiouslionlearning.com/criticalpath. You can check out the full piece of what you're going to hear next, as well as some really cool AI generated images and a lot of other good stuff.With that, it is time for you to sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode with me.

In this special episode, I've invited one of my team members to join me. You're about to hear from Theshel Govender. Theshel is a Senior Learning Architect on our team at Curious Lion and the recent author of a post on our blog that went viral in our corner of the world.We started a project this year in which everybody on the Learning Architect team started to write articles and publish them on our blog.Our goal is for the world and our clients to hear from our team and for us to expand our own understanding of our expertise. Theshel has stepped up as a leader of this project.The article that you'll hear came, at least for me, out of the blue. I didn't even know she was writing it. I hadn't seen an early outline for it; I didn't know anything about it.And I will never forget this - I was at a brewery with my wife and son. I got a notification on my phone from Slack, saying that an article had gone up on our website. Whenever I see that, I’m immediately drawn to reading them.So, I quickly asked my wife, who said it was okay, and I just started reading this article while sipping a beer. My jaw just started to drop as I was reading.I don't want to give too much away, but a big theme of the piece is loyalty. It's an incredibly vulnerable piece in which Theshel shares a difficult period for her creatively and personally that she overcame, and that she feels like she's overcome by working at Curious Lion with the incredible team we have.It made me think about my style of leadership, which I can best describe as inclusive leadership. I've realized from reading Theshel’s article that inclusive leadership is what inspires loyalty, and loyalty creates massive leverage.That's ultimately my goal - to create a workplace in which everyone feels like they can bring their best selves to do their best work.I'll hand over the microphone to Theshel, who's going to read her amazing article. Please sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode with Theshel Govender.

Joining me this week is Stephanie Middaugh, who is the founder of Phoenix GTM Consulting. Stephanie also has an incredible track record and career in enablement. She, as she says in the show, was a victim of the layoffs but had been building Phoenix in the background for a while. So she clearly always had the intention and passion to go out on her own, and that's what she did. We talk a little bit about what that's been like, which is a fun way to start this conversation.The main episode is about Hackathons. Stephanie has been running these Hackathons with the Sales Enablement Squad that she runs with her partner. It is an incredible format for coming together, and it's in person. Participants fly in and get together for an afternoon of workshopping actual problems that these people want to focus on, that will be super useful. No slides, no presentations - this is just stickies, notebooks, pens, papers, and whiteboards, and off you go. And it's been a really good run that they had last year. They're now running six or seven of these next year.If you want to find out more about those workshops, you'll learn all about them, how they work, and how to set them up. And then we talk about how you can use Hackathons for sales team training or sales enablement. And this was really cool. It definitely came up with a really helpful, cool, six step framework to help you think about how to do this. And this was not prepared, we didn't plan to come up with that, a testament to how much fun it was to have this conversation. Please, sit back, relax, and enjoy this long-awaited episode with the meme queen, Stephanie Middaugh.Stephanie Middaugh LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjmiddaugh/

Joining me this week is Stephanie Middaugh, who is the founder of Phoenix GTM Consulting. Stephanie has been running sensational Hackathons with the Sales Enablement Squad that she runs with her partner. It's an incredible format for coming together, and it's in person.  Participants fly in and get together for an afternoon of workshopping actual problems that these people want to focus on, that will be super useful.  No slides, no presentations - this is just stickies, notebooks, pens, papers, and whiteboards, and off you go. And it's been a really good run that they had last year. They're now running six or seven of these next year.If you want to find out more about those workshops, you'll learn all about them, how they work, and how to set them up in the full episode. But in this "Rapid Fire 5" segment, I gather her first thoughts on five key questions related to learning and enablement. Stephanie Middaugh LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjmiddaugh/

Nate Nasralla joins me this week for a deep dive with SME episode.Nate is the founder of Fluint.io. He teaches sellers how to sell with buyers, not to them.His whole thesis is built on the idea that the sale actually happens when you’re not in the room.And he has built a product around facilitating the how-to of his thesis: finding and framing a high-priority problem, creating internal consensus to move in a new direction, and then quantifying and clarifying a visual of the promised land (the business impact and the personal impact to come).A lot of puzzle pieces came together during this episode. Nate’s a super smart guy.I definitely have to go back to my pipeline now and tweak some things because I learned a lot from this conversation, and I hope you do, too.Please sit back, relax, and enjoy my episode with Nate Nasralla.Nate Nasralla LinkedIn -  (https://www.linkedin.com/in/natenasralla/) 

Joining me this week for part two of our conversation is David Carter.As I mentioned in part one, David became known as one of the world's top CEO mentors. In building and exiting a company, he found that character underpinned every single thing he did.If he could help his CEOs develop character or become certain characteristics, they transformed. They started to grow.There are a lot of interesting lessons here that we can take into our work in developing managers and leaders within companies.This half of the two-part episode focuses on how David has come to make his entire life about character, and how his legacy project (his current company Entelechy Academy) seeks to develop character in people.Be sure to explore the Character Matrix that Entelechy and David and his team created under Guest Links!Sit back, relax, and enjoy part two of my conversation with David Carter.David Carter LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidcmcarter

I have a really fun new episode format to share with you today.We're calling it the Learning Nugget.The idea is to share some quick, super-practical, super-tactical lessons with all of you. After this episode, you'll have something specific that you want to try right away in your current role.My first guest for this is Jonathan Mahan, co-founder of The Practice Lab. He's also a former account executive who became disillusioned with how role plays were run.Obviously, role plays are a key part of practicing the sales conversation. But Jonathan, like many of us, believed that they just weren't working.They suck, to be honest. Right?So he spent a lot of time thinking about how to make them better.And I think he's actually done it; he's received great results from people that have gone through what I like to call “literal transformations," of who they are as a person.They're better sellers because they've deliberately practiced. That's what this episode is about.In this episode, you'll hear Jonathan's four lessons, along with practical tips for each that you can implement right away.Let's dive in and discover how to make roleplays not suck. Jonathan Mahan LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtmahan/

Joining me this week is David CM Carter.David is known as the world's leading CEO mentor. He started to build his reputation by taking a small FTSE (or Fortune 5000 for Americans) company to IPO. But then he expanded, going on to help other CEOs take much larger companies public and beyond.The things David spoke about in this conversation resonated deeply with things that I think about all the time.We have decided to release it as two episodes.In this first episode, you're going to hear David explain what it was like constructing the world's leading CEO mentoring company.You'll get tons of value out of this episode on the topic of mentorship, which, as David describes in the beginning, is different from coaching.This is applicable in sales enablement and lots of manager-to-individual-contributor relationships because, in most cases, the senior person is the one who has the experience and really can be the mentor for new hires.If you want to learn more about how mentoring works from one of the world's best CEO mentors, tune in now.Sit back, relax, and enjoy my episode with David Carter.David Carter LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidcmcarter

Joining me this week is you.This episode is a special one. I’m going to break down a recent experience I had for your benefit. I’m recording this on March 1st, 2023. We conducted a Creativity and Innovation training workshop for a client in San Francisco last week.It was an incredible experience.We partnered up with Sarah Lagrotteria, who is the wife of a previous guest on the show, and the creator of the methodology that we were teaching, Dr. Angus Fletcher.In this episode, I share my experience teaching this stuff, and we’ll weave in parts of my conversation with Angus to help solidify this view.I want to make this episode as practical as possible. For that purpose, we’re going to have a goal.Our goal together is going to be to unpack training and creativity.More accurately, training innovation in a way that’s practical.I want you to take this episode and listen to it multiple times, then put these ideas into practice yourself.I really encourage you to do it. I’ve done it.I promise you: by the end of this episode, we’ll have actionable tools to take into our work to allow us to do just that — turn creativity into innovation.So please sit back, relax, and enjoy my episode with you.