How do you move from hosting disparate training events to creating an intentional learning journey for learners across the organization? Caitlin Murphy, an organizational development specialist at Franciscan Alliance, recently helped to launch the first tier of Franciscan Leadership University to guide learners through recommended courses.

Franciscan Leadership University is a three-tiered program to help team members gain skills suited to their role, regardless of whether they’re brand new or seasoned leaders.

“The idea is you can be a leader at Franciscan, and you’re growing whether you’re new or you’ve been here forever,” Murphy said. “We also include some connection with our mission and our values, which is huge for us as a mission-driven organization.”

Tier one is for new managers and focuses on foundational management skills. New leaders are automatically enrolled in the program through a learning management system (LMS). In addition to Crucial Conversations® for Mastering Dialogue and Getting Things Done®, managers take courses related to Franciscan’s software systems for finance, timekeeping, and more.

Within Tier One, Murphy said her favorite course to facilitate is GTD®.

“I’m pretty comfortable with the content, and it’s just had a huge impact on me personally,” she said. “That translates when I teach it. I really enjoy helping other people, and the GTD skills can have such a big impact on your life.”

The plan for Franciscan Leadership University goes beyond classroom content. Each course includes pre- and post-work, from surveys and evaluations to discussions with leaders. A SharePoint site provides learners with additional resources, and Murphy said they hope to add an online community to foster peer-to-peer learning and discussion.

Murphy is certified in four Crucial Learning courses—Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue, Crucial Conversations for Accountability, Getting Things Done, and The Power of Habit—and she uses the resources in Trainer Zone to create a learning experience that goes beyond the classroom.

“We have the discussion guide set up in our LMS so it is automatically sent to the learner and course manager about 10 days before class—to remind them to meet and talk about their traning goals,” she said.

The program’s structure includes a six-week follow-up conversation with the course manager to see how well leaners are implementing what they’ve learned.

“At about 45 days or so, people start to feel a little wobbly—all the excitement is gone,” she said. “It’s helped learners to know that a follow-up is coming. They’ve encountered some challenges, and as their instructors we can help them address them. It also gives a chance to ask what else they want to work on. It can be hard to implement everything all at once. It’s definitely a journey.”

Plans include launching tier two, which will focus on talent management skills, engagement, retention, and career guidance. Tier three will be for higher levels of leadership and focus on strategy and mentorship—giving back and teaching newer leaders.

“We’ve paused before we develop tier two and three to get a focus group together and really look at the program,” she said. “We have competencies, but we want to look at those and say, ‘What does it look like to do that in real life, and what are your challenges for that as we develop and choose content for those things?’”

Beyond Franciscan Leadership University, Murphy offers performance consulting, where she partners with leaders to assess team issues and find solutions—and often shares ideas from her other Crucial Learning course of choice, Crucial Conversations for Accountability.

“When I first started out doing performance consulting, I didn’t really know what to do—and then it clicked as I was looking over the Crucial Conversations for Accountability content,” she said. “I realized this is basically what I’m doing. I’m helping people close gaps.”

The post Caitlin Murphy and Designing an Intentional Learning Journey appeared first on Crucial Learning.

How do you continue the learning journey when your organization has trained most employees? Kara Cuzzetto offers coaching sessions and holds semiannual refresher sessions to help her team keep their Crucial Conversations® skills sharp.

Cuzzetto works as a senior continuous improvement manager in the Finance and Business Operations Division of King County, the county in Washington state that includes Seattle. King County has ingrained Crucial Conversations into its culture. All new employees attend Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue during orientation, but training doesn’t stop there.

“Crucial Conversations is part of our clarity map goals and our strategic directional—what we call our true north—and the concepts and the tools of Crucial Conversations are part of how we expect team members to show up,” Cuzzetto said. “It’s more than, ‘Oh, you need to have a Crucial Conversation with that person.’ It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, ‘Let’s role-play that. Let’s have a conversation on how you might go about having that conversation.’”

Cuzzetto seeks to keep these skills at the top of team members’ minds by hosting a virtual 90-minute refresher session every six months. She advertises the session in her weekly division newsletter for the two editions before the session, and people who sign up to attend receive a reminder email the day before. After the session, Cuzzetto sends attendees the slide deck and posts it to SharePoint for broader reference.

The refresher session builds on the entire Crucial Conversations model, focusing on the core of each module within the Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue course. Two weeks before the refresher session, Cuzzetto reviews her files and makes updates based on any questions that learners have brought up in the six months since the last refresher.

“What does it mean to be stuck, right?” she said. “We talk about that. ‘How are you not moving forward and even stuck in old patterns, tactics, and techniques you’ve used that haven’t worked?’ And then we move into asking where is your intent? ‘Are you going into the conversation to win or place blame? Are you really going in with that sense of curiosity, and how do you make sure that you’re sharing just your facts as facts and moving into your story and then genuinely asking, from a place of curiosity, how do they feel?’”

Cuzzetto seeks to make the refresher sessions as interactive as possible, using polls and role-playing, like in the course, complete with an initiator, respondent, and coach.

“The Crucial Conversations content is easy to customize and to make it very relatable to our work environments and how we show up, and we’re able to tell real-life stories around similar situations,” she said.

As for the content, Cuzzetto said she reminds her learners that the Pool of Shared Meaning is the most important piece.

“It’s about the dialogue and the conversation that happens there,” she said. “It’s the Spider-Man rule for me: ‘With great knowledge comes great responsibility.’ We are responsible for keeping that dialogue going. And so, when we recognize the conversation is going off the rails, I really try to remind them of those skills like CPR—thinking about content, pattern, or relationship and what is the right conversation to have? Is it about what’s happening now, or is it deeper?”

Equity and social justice are significant initiatives for King County, so Cuzzetto said she tailors Crucial Conversations content to meet the county’s focus on those conversations.

“It’s not just about places that your organization might be missing those conversations—it’s also about opening up for those equity questions,” she said. “We’re always looking for opportunities to use the Crucial Conversations framework to have those hard equity conversations.”

Cuzzetto said about 30 to 90 employees will attend the refresher sessions among a staff of about 200.

In addition to the group refreshers, Cuzzetto offers one-on-one coaching sessions to her course graduates. She said they know they can put an appointment on her calendar to workshop how to handle a specific situation they’re facing.

“Stakes are high,” Cuzzetto said. “We have a lot of emotions, and we might not be on the same page, so we really feel like Crucial Conversations gives all of our employees that foundation so they can move into areas where people might be feeling uncomfortable and gives them some skills and some tools to navigate those conversations with the results in mind, always thinking about what we as a team are trying to achieve.”

The post Kara Cuzzetto and Keeping Crucial Skills Top of Mind appeared first on Crucial Learning.

Creating psychological safety matters in any workplace, but in the oil and gas industry, that safety can make all the difference in maintaining a physically safe workplace.

That’s where John Menzies comes in. As a certified trainer at Plains—a midstream company that sources raw products and processes them into end-user oil and gas products in the U.S. and Canada—Menzies seeks to equip everyone with the skills to speak up and have Crucial Conversations, from frontline leaders and influencers to the unionized foundational workforce.

“Our goal is to create a safe environment, where all our procedures ensure the safety of our employees, the public, the environment, and our assets,” he said.

That means creating a culture where everyone in the organization can ask questions and voice concerns, regardless of title or experience level.

“Safety means being able to say, ‘I don’t understand this’ in a meaningful way so we can have that conversation,” Menzies said. “When an employee feels safe to ask questions regardless of time in the role, and a leader makes it safe to ask questions, then there’s less of a chance a question isn’t answered.”

Menzies brings a unique skill set to Plains—he has operational experience that helps him relate to the frontline workers, plus a passion for personal development. This combination positions him well for spearheading the companywide initiative to roll out Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue to any of Plains’ more than 4,200 employees who want the training.

“I’m always grateful to have two days of someone’s life, to create the experience and event for them,” he said.

Noting the importance of the training and subsequent conversations, the company has provided space and time to train every employee in the district.

Questions and clear expectations are vital starting points for communication among Plains employees, Menzies said. He referenced Nancy Willard’s quote, “Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.”

“We want those questions,” he said. “Their headspace, their ability to be fit for duty—we support that environment where employees are not only physically fit for duty but also mentally fit for duty, where no one shows up to the job upset or thinking about a negative interaction or anything less than a meaningful interaction. If they feel safe, they’re more likely to be safe and have their mind on their task.”

Another important facet of Menzies’s Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue approach is explaining how brain chemistry changes when someone is in fight or flight—a concept that may be unfamiliar to those in his workforce.

“The brain doesn’t know if the threat is physical or emotional, and someone going into the facility for work who emotionally isn’t fit for duty puts themselves and others at risk,” he said. “You wouldn’t send someone who just got hit in the head with a baseball bat out to the facility. So don’t send someone out who’s been hit by an invisible baseball bat and expect them to perform the same way. Avoid that scenario. Do what you need to do to invite them to dialogue.”

Success comes as people are more open and willing to move from silence and engage in dialogue, Menzies said, and as decision-makers have conversations that help them make smarter decisions as a group.

“I believe that being exposed to the tools and the opportunity to practice Crucial Conversations changes people’s lives,” Menzies said. “You can’t unhear it, and you can’t unknow it. You can choose to ignore it. You can choose to fool yourself that you’re right. That’s an option you have once you know it, but you can’t unknow it.”

The post John Menzies and Creating Safety—Physical and Psychological appeared first on Crucial Learning.

Marketing may not be second nature for most learning and development professionals, but it is for Patrick Maurer. Before joining the employee development team at the City of Tempe, Maurer developed marketing acumen running his own business. He’s applied some tried-and-true techniques to promote the city’s learning and development offerings with its employees.

“Rather than doing emails, I used to mail people supplies to make s’mores and do these things that broke the mold,” he said. “People were like, ‘What in the world?’ and then they would read the thing because it was something different—the type of stuff that just pops out.”

Each December, the City of Tempe sends a glossy, full-color printed course catalog to every city employee, personalized with the employee’s name and address—“like the toy catalog you used to get,” Maurer said—showcasing the upcoming year’s employee development training opportunities. Each course gets the full-page treatment with descriptions of the course, dates, and a testimonial quote from a course graduate within the city staff. (Click here to see sample pages.)

“We were finding that people have so much email, and sometimes course information is accidentally marked read, or it gets buried in the inbox,” he said. “And we were definitely missing people.”

Maurer, who initiated and continues to lead the catalog project, said he lifts the course descriptions largely from CrucialLearning.com.

“The catalog allows people to reflect on the courses a bit more, and we get a spike in signups early on,” he said. “Once we sort of get that spike early on, we leverage referrals. The group who goes through January through March will encourage a colleague to go through those next batch of months. It’s a beautiful entry piece that is different than everything else we put out.”

Another piece of marketing prowess is in how the City of Tempe times their course offerings. Getting Things Done gets scheduled at deliberate times throughout the year—in January to align with New Year’s resolutions, around the start of the school year, and then before the holiday season—and as each session approaches, the marketing message ties into the pain point facing prospective learners.

“We’re like, ‘Hey, it’s about to get really busy, and you’re going to have so many different things going on—wouldn’t you like to have less stress?’” he said. “So that became our model for Getting Things Done, and once we had that, we started recognizing where we could place the other courses and how we could unite the message around it.”

Marketing to individuals within the organization also follows an intentional learning journey. Getting Things Done and Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue are the entry points for Crucial Learning courses, Maurer said.

“We found that when people became more able to manage their tasks, be productive, feel efficient, and not be stressed out, they felt like they had room to do other courses,” he said.

Once learners have taken one of these courses, they’ll get invited to take the other course—and about six to nine months after Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue, the next invitation is to Crucial Conversations for Accountability.

“It’s sort of like, ‘Are you ready for the next piece?’” Maurer said. “What we’ve loved is that the people who come to the Crucial Learning pieces are like, ‘This is really good, this makes sense. Why have I never thought of it this way?’ We really try to space out how much learners go back to back—sort of unlocking that next step for them without giving them too much all at once. We want some gaps so that they can just apply what they’ve learned. But then when people are ready, we want to give them that next step.”

Although most courses are open enrollment for all learners at any time regardless of role, Maurer said they emphasize Crucial Conversations for Accountability for supervisors and Crucial Influence for city leadership (for now).

Maurer said periodically he and his team will run reports in their learning management system to see which employees are good candidates for upcoming courses and then email invitations to these prospective learners.

“Now we can filter in and encourage, ‘Hey, just check out this opportunity,’” he said. “‘This one’s great. It’s great to reconnect with you.’ Doing those little pieces will at least get it back on their radar so they know that there’s something else if they want it.”

The post Patrick Maurer and Marketing Mastery appeared first on Crucial Learning.

We spend a lot of time looking ahead to upcoming events and to-dos, so I want to pause for a moment and reflect upon all the hard work you’ve done and amazing things you’ve accomplished in 2023. It truly is a joy to work with each of you!

What were your training highlights this year? Share in the comments!

New Additions in 2023

One of the highlights this year was debuting a Trainer Spotlight feature to highlight the best practices and implementation ideas of fellow trainers. I love chatting with trainers and hearing about their experiences and unique takes on helping their audiences learn. If you haven’t read these yet, please do! Thank you to the trainers who participated:

• Caitlin Ryder and the Power of Authenticity
• April King and a Culture of Dialogue
• Alyssa Willet and Assessing Learner Confidence
• Laura Larsen and Creating Unity through Crucial Conversations
• Jeremy King and Testing a New Crucial Course
• Katrina Greene and Driving Influence
• Nicole O’Brien and Tailoring Delivery for Learner Needs
• Russell Virgin and Improving Generations through Crucial Skills

If you have a story to tell, please email me. I’d love to hear it!

Another new addition for 2023 was the annual trainer verification in Trainer Zone. This automated process helps us keep our records up to date so we can reach you with the information you need to stay current in facilitating our courses. Thank you to the 5,650-plus trainers who verified their data this year! You’ll start seeing this pop up again one year from your initial verification, beginning in January.

Trainer Numbers in 2023 (as of November 30)

• 1,272 certified trainers completed a trainer certification course.
• 309 trainers completed a Fast Track certification.
• 227 people joined our Crucial Learning Trainers Facebook group.
• 495 people joined our Crucial Learning Trainers LinkedIn group.

Lives Impacted 2023

This year we innovated our Lives Impacted recognition program with two changes. Every earner received a copy of the new edition of Crucial Influence with their reward orders. We also invited them to an exclusive Lives Impacted Live online event with Crucial Learning co-founder Joseph Grenny, where they could spend an hour asking Joseph questions and connecting with one another.

If you want to participate in Lives Impacted 2024, there’s still time! Access is earned by the previous year’s trainings—meaning that the trainings you log now will go toward your Lives Impacted status next year. Click here to log your trainings before December 31!

Lives Impacted by the Numbers

• 681 certified trainers qualified for Lives Impacted.
• 20 countries are represented by Lives Impacted earners, including Afghanistan, Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.
• 90 trainers earned Platinum Status (9+ trainings logged).
• 120 trainers earned Gold Status (6–8 trainings logged).
• 471 trainers earned Silver Status (3–5 trainings logged).
• 3,436 learners taught within sessions logged in Trainer Zone (so far) that will count toward 2024 Lives Impacted status.

Grant Program

Did you know that Crucial Learning has a grant program? We’ll donate learner guides to qualifying nonprofit organizations in tandem with certified and/or master trainers who donate their time and skills to facilitate.

This year 18 certified trainers facilitated pro bono grant training sessions, and we’ve sent materials to them as well as six trainers whose sessions are coming up in early 2024. If you’re interested in participating, click here to learn more and apply!

Grant Program by the Numbers

• 554 learner guides donated to nonprofit organizations through the grant program this year (includes a handful for upcoming 2024 trainings).
• $115,161 saved by nonprofits thanks to donated learner materials.
• $225,500 saved by nonprofits thanks to pro bono facilitation.
• $4,600 retail value of the 200 paperback copies of Crucial Accountability donated to The Other Side Academy
• $345,261 combined value of facilitation and materials donated to grant program recipients—which is almost $50 of value for every $1 Crucial Learning donates!

Many thanks to this year’s grant program trainers for providing Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue, Crucial Conversations for Accountability, or Getting Things done to their respective nonprofits:

• Greg Miller—Frederick-Grayslake Middle School PTO (Grayslake, IL)
• Melanie Gao—Anonymous (Nashville, TN)
• Jenny Jones—Veterans Community Project (Kansas City, MO)
• Dina Austin—Home of the Sparrow (McHenry, IL)
• Sherene Walters—Master-Pieced Inc. (Lexington, KY)
• Deron Poisson—Ascend Services, Inc. (Manitowoc, WI)
• Rozlan Luck— East Birmingham Church Ministries (Birmingham, AL)
• Renée Powers— LeaderFlow Development Program (Los Angeles, Seattle, and Houston)
• Michelle Wood—Valley Community Church (Pleasanton, CA)
• Tina Howell—Yorkminster Presbyterian Church (Yorktown, VA)
• David Reyes—Fielder Church (Arlington, TX)
• Christine Skynar—St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center (Detroit, MI)
• Jackson Ford—Dauphin Way United Methodist Church (Mobile, AL)
• Maria Moss—Shelter from the Rain, Inc. (Savannah, GA)
• Henry Maynard—Science ATL (Decatur, GA)
• Greg Stephens—World Relief Chicagoland (Chicago, IL)
• Ken Sauby—Foster First (Yakima, WA)
• Jane Gregg—First United Methodist Church of Seattle (Seattle, WA)

Big thanks to everyone for making this year so outstanding! As our mission says:

We believe in a world where all human beings can be great at being human. We know that, with the right skills, everyone can learn to behave in ways that make their lives, their families, their organizations, and our world better. We are driven to find those crucial skills and share them with people in ways that make a difference.

That work would not be possible without the force for good you certified trainers are. Keep up the good work—here’s to a bright 2024 ahead!

The post 2023: A Year in Review appeared first on Crucial Learning.

Can teaching crucial skills create a ripple effect that changes generations? For Russell Virgin, that beautiful concept is reality. As comprehensive services deputy director for Early Learning Essentials, Russell facilitates courses for 160 employees across three Utah counties who, in turn, model and share the skills with the nearly 600 children and families with whom they work.

“If we’re serious about helping families overcome poverty and become successful and supportive parents for their kids, then there’s some real barriers for the families we’re working with,” he said.

Early Learning Essentials (formerly Mountainland Head Start) runs a federally funded Head Start program for children who come from low-income families and/or have disabilities. The program provides preschool, health, mental health, and nutrition services for children and social services for their families.

Virgin is certified in all five Crucial Learning courses, but he primarily facilitates the two Crucial Conversations courses for his entire staff, alternating between Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue and the add-on version of Crucial Conversations for Accountability. He’s taught Getting Things Done and The Power of Habit to his leadership and management teams as well, and he specifically trains family advocates in Crucial Influence.

“I love each course,” he said. “They each bring such a different set of tools to our staff. It’s such a critical set of skills to build the culture we want here.”

The challenge, Virgin said, is finding time to get everyone trained—particularly teachers, assistant teachers, and aides who can’t step away from the kids in their classrooms for days during the school year. Instead, they provide a stipend to bring them in during summer, and Virgin coaches staff through challenging conversations as needed throughout the year.

He’s also implemented monthly follow-up sessions to continue learning beyond the course.

“It just feels like a single training’s insufficient for them unless they’re really intentional about it themselves,” he said. “So we come up with practice scenarios or use some of the ones we’ve gotten from Crucial Learning, and we work through them, have people ask questions, and then practice. Each month we’re practicing different scenarios.”

Although Virgin doesn’t facilitate sessions for the families they help, he finds that arming family advocates with an understanding of the Six Sources of Influence makes a difference in how they work with their clients.

“They go into the homes of our families, and they’ll talk with them about their needs and their strengths,” Virgin said. “When they’re doing that, one of the tools we’re trying to have them use is the Crucial Influence model to work through the barriers to their major life challenges. They’ll go through the different sources of influence and talk about those crucial moments and vital behaviors and everything.”

Creating a Crucial Conversations culture benefits everyone within the organization, he said.

“My management team has learned to resolve parent concerns quickly and respectfully,” he said. “When a parent concern escalates and they speak with one of the leadership or management team members, they often feel heard and respected no matter what their concern is.”

The post Russell Virgin and Improving Generations through Crucial Skills appeared first on Crucial Learning.

When Nicole O’Brien got certified to teach Crucial Conversations in June 2011, she planned to teach the course to General Services Administration (GSA) employees throughout the Midwest. But after a reorganization transferred her team to the central office in Washington, D.C., O’Brien and her now-retired teammate Nancy Smith lobbied to make the course available to all of GSA’s 12,000 employees throughout the United States and its territories.

Thanks to their vision, the dialogue skills taught in Crucial Conversations have been incorporated within many organizations across GSA, the agency responsible for supporting the U.S. federal government’s real estate, technology, and acquisition.

“As public servants, our job is to serve the American taxpayer and work as effectively and efficiently as possible,” O’Brien said. “These tools allow us to work together more successfully, resolve conflicts when they arise, and achieve higher quality results.”

What that learning looks like, however, has evolved with changing needs. Whether teaching virtually or in person, whether to a general audience or specific teams or executives, O’Brien and her colleagues have adapted their facilitation format to consistently deliver Crucial Learning content. That means sometimes delivering the sessions over multiple weeks, adjusting to the needs of the learners that could not have attended the more traditional delivery.

During Fiscal Year 2023, O’Brien and GSA’s other five certified trainers delivered a combined total of 14 Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue sessions to 240 learners, including project managers, architects and engineers, contracting officers, and IT professionals, among others.

“When your job is to maintain federal buildings, teaching yourself communication skills can be the last thing on the list,” O’Brien said. “It was the success of the content, and the amazing feedback we received from students (e.g., this should be mandatory training for everyone!) that allowed me to advocate for adding certified trainers and expanding the delivery. It’s still a work in progress of course, but it is something I am so proud to be at the forefront of across the agency.”

One of the earliest innovations O’Brien made was to offer virtual courses, which she did before it became the norm following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Working for a government agency, we have to be very cognizant of the money we spend,” she said.

Offering virtual courses removed costly airfare, hotel rooms, and per-diems. These courses brought together GSA employees from all over, too. In one session, O’Brien had learners from California, Hawaii, Guam, and New York, for instance.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, O’Brien was ahead of the curve. GSA went to mandatory work-from-home conditions overnight—“You couldn’t go into the office even if you wanted to,” she said—but she was able to continue delivering Crucial Conversations in a time when those skills mattered most.

“Not only could I deliver the class, it was also about all of the things that everyone was actually experiencing in the moment: not feeling safe, not being able to speak up, not being able to figure out how to talk to their family members about play dates and masking and all of that stuff,” she said. “So I really think it was the content that showed our agency that we can do hard things and do them really well because we have this foundation. The teams we had already taught this to were more able to transition and pivot to a virtual world. The people we’d trained in this content time and time again came back and said, ‘I’m not perfect, but I’m better.’”

As she’s looked for ways to extend learning beyond the classroom, O’Brien said she’s explored a microtraining approach that’s worked well for a pilot group in the Pacific Northwest. During their leadership meetings, this group of around 45 managers builds upon their learning by splitting into trios and practicing Crucial Conversations skills using deliberate practice scenarios O’Brien and her colleagues create.

“It has become a culture shift for these leaders, and it is not uncommon for me to hear them using the language—such as ‘The story I’m telling myself is,’ ‘that sounds like a villain story,’ ‘let me share my intent with you,’ ‘silence versus verbal violence,’ etc.—during their leadership meetings,” she said. “It’s absolutely beautiful!”

While measurement can be challenging, O’Brien said she looks at evaluation responses to see whether learners plan to use the skills and if they now feel more comfortable holding their starter conversation.

“When we see a problem or a Crucial Conversation, how quickly do we not only identify it but also handle it right?” she said. “How quickly do our people step up to those difficult conversations and not let them languish? It’s not just about identifying, oh, that’s a Crucial Conversation. It’s about having the skills and feeling comfortable and confident enough to speak up.”

That’s the goal for O’Brien and the team. Tailoring the training for her organization and people is helping them achieve it.

The post Nicole O’Brien and Tailoring Delivery for Learner Needs appeared first on Crucial Learning.

“I live and breathe it,” Greene said. “I really love the idea around the Six Sources of Influence and understanding that poor performance is not just because somebody’s lazy or unmotivated; it could be other factors that are inhibiting them from being able to implement the change that we want to implement. When somebody tells me they’ve got a struggle, I respond with, ‘Alright, well, let’s source this,’ and then I draw up the six-source chart.”

For the past 11 years, Greene has led training and development for HCA Healthcare’s hospital systems in the Kansas City market. Her job “encompasses everything that I love about leadership and organizational development,” she said, including talent management, succession planning, career coaching, executive coaching, strategic planning, engagement, and retention.

But most of all, Greene loves being in the classroom.

“I get the joy of seeing the lives I impact through the knowledge, information, and content I share, in addition to all the other things we do,” she said.

Greene brings to the table a unique background, having been a photographer, broadcast journalist, and print reporter for the U.S. Navy. Pair that experience with her Bachelor of Science in organizational training and development and her Master of Education in human resources development, and Greene has a keen insight for how to develop content, package information for useability and stickiness, and get to the heart of an issue.

This special skillset is a large part of why Greene—along with her HCA Healthcare colleague Michael Cole—was invited to test Crucial Influence in the classroom while the course was being revised.

Greene and Cole teach Influencer Training within HCA Healthcare’s Leadership Institute Academy, which exists “to equip leaders to execute strategy effectively, drive operational excellence, and lead others to effective action,” according to HCA Healthcare’s website.

“I have the benefit of being out in the field and living every single day with my learners, understanding the struggles and barriers that they have to overcome as leaders,” Greene said. “As I teach content like Crucial Influence, I understand the specific scenarios and struggles my leaders have and explore how these concepts will help change a behavior in them and become a better leader.”

When asked about evaluating new courses, Greene said she looks at content through the lens of the ADDIE model: analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate.

Questions she uses when evaluating courses include:

• How does this content impact my learners’ needs?
• Can I facilitate in a way that keeps people engaged?
• How do we ensure people retain what they’ve learned?

At the core of quality content is designing a learning experience that will ultimately lead to behavior change.

“It’s not just, ‘Okay, that was a great training, and Katrina is really entertaining,’” Greene said. “It becomes, ‘Wow, I really learned something, and I’m going to change the way I look at this problem in the future based on the skills that I learned in that particular class.’”

Greene said that because the Leadership Institute Academy utilizes cohorts, she has follow-up opportunities baked into the academy structure. As the group reconvenes for the next course in its six-course curriculum, she’ll ask her learners how they’ve implemented the previous course and where they’re struggling.

Crucial Influence extends beyond the classroom for Greene as well. She said that it’s implemented through conversations every day at work.

“Anytime I’m in a meeting and they’re talking about a change initiative, I immediately draw a six-source box and I work through tackling the personal, social, and structural motivation and then ability needs of this particular situation?” she said. “I ask, ‘Why is a person doing or not doing what we need them to do?’”

She said her learners in the Crucial Influence test course responded positively to the material and experience and left the course with a clear and concise action plan to tackle a real-life problem using the Six Sources of Influence.

“They’re going to be more open and receptive to hearing how they can be a leader of inspiration and influence versus just making things happen and getting things done—which is another big ask of our leaders as well right now,” Greene said. “They’re asking us to teach this because they need help with it.”

Helping with the Crucial Influence beta test wasn’t the first time Greene has partnered with Crucial Learning. She was integral in developing our case study “Research Medical Center Transplant Institute Improves Employee Satisfaction.” The study looks at how employee engagement jumped from 51 percent to 88 percent—an increase of 37 points in just one year—by implementing behavior change strategies inspired by the Delancey Street model showcased in the Crucial Influence course.

Greene said Crucial Learning has played a part in three pivotal moments in her life, for better or worse: she came off of maternity leave early to take Crucial Conversations at a past job, missed her son’s first day of kindergarten while in Nashville for her trainer certification course, and spent her 40th birthday presenting at a Crucial Learning employee retreat at Sundance Resort.

Although these could have been bittersweet misses, Katrina shared the stories with a laugh and a smile, calling them “so fun” and saying she enjoyed learning how to ski as a birthday present from Crucial Learning.

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When it came time to test Crucial Influence, we invited Jeremy King at the City of Tempe to test the new content. King, who works as deputy director of employee development, has spent the last four years building a learning and development program for the City of Tempe from scratch.

“The city has jobs in almost every sector, from residential services such as water services and trash pickup to after-school programs to accountants and EMTs,” he said.

On the hunt for quality and meaningful training, King got certified in Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue and Crucial Conversations for Accountability in 2021. He added Influencer to his toolbelt in December 2022, but within weeks of completing the course, his senior client advisor, Melody Oertle, invited Jeremy to participate in the beta test. He held off on teaching Influencer to employees, knowing the new course would soon be launched.

Although King never trained Influencer, he said he spent a lot of time and effort honing his delivery, finding personal connections to the material so it would feel like he’d been training it for years by the time he reached the classroom.

“I just really love the connection to the six-source model that’s in Crucial Accountability,” he said. “It’s easily digestible for staff who are trying to take in all this information, [and] there are connections there that they can use to understand Accountability and Influencer.”

While testing a new course, Crucial Learning’s product team works closely with trainers to get feedback. Before facilitating the course, King met with course designer Justin Hale to talk through the content and format.

Then, during the beta test on June 16, Crucial Learning sent Kelly Forrister, product director of content and courses, to Tempe to observe. Given the course was still in development by the Crucial Learning team, King was able to share his feedback in real time, and many of those changes were incorporated into the final course.

“It was nice to be able to bounce ideas off Kelly on how we might train this content in the future, especially the newer content and how it might connect and resonate with employees,” King said. “We saw issues like a video that just felt too long in the room—it’s one of those things where, yes, it’s a great video, we’ve developed it for a purpose, but it feels too long in the moment, so what does that mean? Do we trim it? Do we explore opportunities for alternatives?”

King said Crucial Influence complements his belief that training should impact culture, with the course content extending beyond the classroom experience.

“As I took Influencer, I was still designing and building the employee development philosophy, and it really influenced how we are going to get employees to show up and engage in training,” he said. “We really wanted to answer the question, ‘How is it going to make an impact on their role?’ The skills that are developed in the training room should make it into our daily thought processes, our daily actions, and our daily communications.”

King said he’ll encourage leaders to prioritize attending Crucial Influence because of how it will help them to solve some of the very challenges that might prevent them from carving out time to attend the course.

“We’re constantly working on change, but are we working on the right things to actually enact that change?” King asked. “That’s the key when it comes to influencers… We really believe you can lead from any level in the organization and start to build those skills. I’m all about layering and scaffolding skills so that employees start to naturally feel them and see them, and they become part of the work they do.”

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Laura Larsen describes her job as “administrative assistant turned global trainer.” When hired by Juniper Systems in 2019, Laura was tasked with getting certified to facilitate Crucial Conversations and then training every full-time employee in the course. Since then, the scope of her role has expanded on two fronts.

She’s added Fast Track certifications in Crucial Conversations for Accountability and Influencer—but also, Larsen’s learner audience expanded from 170 Juniper employees to 500-plus employees worldwide when Juniper Systems was acquired by Campbell Scientific in 2021.

Since the acquisition, Larsen has facilitated courses for learners in North America, Canada, and Austria, and she is now part of the global team planning trainings for Campbell and its subsidiaries Juniper Systems and METER Group throughout the world. Although the learners represent a broad spectrum of cultures and experiences, Larsen’s helping to create a unified company culture through Crucial Conversations for Accountability and Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue.

Working with a multicultural audience feels like home for Larsen. Her family encompasses seven different countries and 14 different cultures thanks to people who’ve married in, and she said she loves seeing a united love for family and one another despite cultural differences.

“It kind of conquers all those other differences of belief or religion,” she said. “None of that is as important as whether or not we love and care about each other and support one another in the good things that we do.”

This value translates to Larsen’s classroom.

“I always wanted to be able to help people to see that they were more alike than they were different,” she said. “And I feel like Crucial Conversations has given me the skills to be able to do that better.”

Working with a global audience presents some logistical challenges, with employees spanning continents and time zones. Larsen recently experimented with a blended learning cohort from the Rocky Mountains and the midwestern United States, Canada, and Europe, with learners starting the course in person at Juniper’s Logan, Utah, headquarters for the first four lessons of Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue.

Larsen facilitated the rest of the course virtually, setting up online sessions for a group that spanned seven time zones. Completing the course posed a challenge, with the time difference and traveling participants requiring makeup sessions, but Larsen said she learned a lot from the experience.

“In the future I will try to stick to one region at a time,” she said. “I might have trainings where it’s 8 p.m. for me, but that’s fine… I highly recommend if training a global group to make sure learners are within two hours of each other.”

Next up, Larsen said she’s planning to pilot a blended learning model this fall, leveraging a self-paced on-demand course and discussion sessions for one learner who couldn’t make the transatlantic cohort.

“He’s my guinea pig,” she said. “I’m one who likes to practice, not one who likes to figure it out in the moment, so it’ll be a better experience of seeing how to work with him [before rolling it out to a group].”

Larsen said she sees the blended model of self-paced learning and discussions as a better model for working with a global audience, since it requires less meeting time. She said keeping online meetings under one hour is best to hold learners’ attention.

Having discussion sessions are critical for the personal impact of storytelling, though. Larsen said she appreciates how Crucial Learning courses lend themselves to trainers integrating their own experiences into the curriculum.

“As good as the videos are, when you watch a video produced by someone you don’t know, you’re always thinking ‘yeah, but—’” she said. “There’s always that objection. But when someone standing in front of you tells a story of using this skill in their own life, it’s way more impactful.”

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