42. Organizing L&D for Results with Guus van Deelen

[MUSIC] Welcome to the L&D Must Change Podcast, a conversation dedicated to uncovering the changes that learning and development professionals must make to truly solve our modern talent challenges. My name is Jess Omley. I've been searching throughout my 25 plus year people development career for the ways we can improve our profession, both big and small. I've discovered there's no single person who can shift how we work. It must be a collective effort. So let's learn from each other and raise the bar and our profession together. This is L&D Must Change. Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the L&D Must Change Podcast. Before we get into the content and the interview in today's episode, I wanted to share just a little bit more news about my book, "L&D Order Takeer No More," become a strategic business partner. Because now it's been available for a couple of months and learning and talent development pros are reporting that they're using it to make a difference in their organizations. This is so exciting. I mean, just listen to this five-star review from Damon. Damon titled his review "The Blueprint" and it then reads, "L&D Order Takeer No More is the playbook our profession has been waiting for." Jess Omley doesn't just describe the shift from reactive training provider to strategic business partner. She gives us the tools, frameworks, and mindset to make it real. Clear, practical, actionable. This book helps L&D leaders elevate their influence, strengthen business partnerships, and drive measurable impact. It is not a one-time read. It's a resource you'll return to as you refine strategy and grow your team's role as true business drivers. Yes, Damon, thank you. I am so glad you found practical value in the book. This, this is the reason I wrote the book. I wrote it to be the playbook I never had when making that shift with my own team. I wrote it most importantly to be a practical playbook because I believe most of us know why we want to shift to work more strategically. We can even envision what that would look like, but we get stuck. We lack tools and ideas on how exactly to make that shift and that is what this book is designed to be. Clear, practical, empowering. If you don't yet have a copy, you can get it in print wherever books are sold. You can also listen to it in audio, on audible, and that can be found on Amazon. If you do have a copy, I would love to hear some of your takeaways. It just delights me to know end that together we're going to be shifting this profession that we know for the better. I love it if you consider leaving an Amazon review, just like Damon, if you have a minute. I honestly didn't realize how important these are until I became an author. They really boost the book's credibility and they also get it out there in the algorithms. So reviews help others find the book and use it as their resource too. And you know how passionate I am about shifting this profession. And the only way this is going to happen is if we're all working on it together. So the best ways for others to be able to find and use this information as well, do it all in our own corners of the world. So collectively we can create a new standard for learning and talent development work. All right, we can do this and let's do it together. Okay, on to today's episode. Today's episode is an interview with Rosvan Dalen. Rosan, I met several months ago and found that we align on many of our outlooks for LND overall, especially when it comes to LND working strategically instead of reactively, focusing on performance and results, ensuring we find the root cause before creating training, understanding the business where we work to name a few. And we are going to touch on all of these topics to some degree in our conversation. But in these introductory comments, I wanted to focus on something that I believe is foundational to doing the rest of the work, to doing that strategic performance focused, root cause analysis type work, and give you some practical steps as to how to do that. So what I believe we need to focus on first is, quote, "getting our own house in order." And what I mean by that, I mean running the learning and talent development function effectively and efficiently. I mean running it in the way that every other team is expected to operate in the organization. Now some of you might be listening to this and thinking, well, yeah, of course we do that. That's great. And if you do, fantastic. But I have also seen plenty of learning and talent development teams who somehow sidestep this part of existing as a team in an organization. We become so focused on creating and delivering what it is that we do our products and doing our work that we sort of miss that inner working piece and how important that is. It's interesting to me because we include development opportunities for leaders in our work. That's part of what we often do. We often are asking leaders to complete certain leadership tasks, like performance reviews and one-on-ones. We ask leaders to share their performance metrics with us, so we can help to understand how we can impact those. But yet we don't do those things ourselves, or we don't do them well. When I was leading learning and talent development teams, it was really important to me that our video and our audio matched, which meant if we were expecting others in the organization to do their work in a certain way, if we were even sending the message that said, this is how you should do this, this is how you lead well, this is the performance metrics we would like to see, then we need to do that too. I believe that we should be the models for what great leadership looks like in an organization, and we should be the models for what it means to run an effective and efficient department and team. And that meant for me that we needed to make sure our own house was in order. We needed to not only measure our programs and the results of them, but we also needed to measure our own and my own team's performance. We needed to have regular reviews, one-on-ones, crucial conversations, for example. We needed to get our own operational processes and how we operated in check. That's things like standard operating procedures, clearly defining our typical products, clearly defining their results, so that we all knew how to do the work and how to talk about it with the rest of the organization in the same way. But to me, that also included very clear team standards and expectations. Standards to me are what good looks like. And these are the things that are measurable in terms of performance. So these standards became our team performance metrics, or at least a good chunk of them. So I'll give you a few examples of what the standards looked like. They had to be things that were within the control of the person that was doing the work. So for example, for the facilitators on my team, some of their standards were engage the class at minimum once every six minutes with some type of interaction or activity. That was a standard that we set. Another one was make sure that you answer all participant questions during the class or in a follow up afterwards. And a third one was ensure each class is prepared for a backup facilitator if needed. So that meant they had to have defined learning outcomes, a script or talking points and instructions to lead the activities throughout the course. So those were some of the standards that we had for facilitators, for an example. For the designers on the team, the standards were a little bit different. They were things like this. I'll give you three examples. Set realistic deadlines that allow the project to be completed on time. So timely completion, that means realistic deadlines. Complete all projects without grammatical errors. Complete all projects in adherence to company branding guidelines. Those were a few of them. There were several more, but those were a few of them. So that gave everyone an idea of what good looks like. Now those are standards and those are measurable. Expectations, on the other hand, expectations are how we show up and how we treat each other. We actually arrived at these expectations, the expectations for our team collectively. And this was a very intentional. Because first of all, I know team members are more easily going to contribute to and buy into what they create than what they're simply told to do. But the other thing, and this is part of my own leadership philosophy, is that this team is not only, or it isn't my team. This team is their team. We are a team who needs to work collaboratively and together. And so if you're going to be part of this team, you should have a say in what that environment is like and how we agree to treat each other and how we agree to show up. That's what I believe. So every couple of years, we did an activity on the team at our team retreat. And I asked three very specific questions. And I'm going to give you what those questions are. The questions were number one. What does it mean to you to be a good team member on our team? So what does it look like or mean to be a good team member? Number two, what does it mean to be a good, whatever your role is on the team? So a good designer, a good facilitator, a good project manager, a good LMS administrator. What does good look like to you, for you and your colleagues who also have that role? And number three, what does it mean to be a good leader on our team? So I asked those three questions and then we broke the team into small groups. The team leaders formed their own group, myself and the other managers and directors. And we all brainstormed our answers to all three questions. Then we compiled the information, we identified trends, and then we put them out to the team. The trends, the information that came back, we put all of that out to the team to prioritize what was most important to them via a survey. And the highest prioritized items were then put in a team expectations statement or document. In addition, one of every team members goals for the year was to adhere to the team expectations. So there was some accountability there as well. And that meant it was included in one-on-ones and regular reviews, expectations as well as the measurable standards. Now we talked about them, especially progress needed to be made. And we were all encouraged to hold each other accountable to the expectations because they were clearly written. They were clearly transparent and we revisited them often. So let me give you a few examples of what some of the expectations were that the team came up with. Because this will give you an idea as to what I'm talking about when I talk about expectations. So for the team members, so what a good team member looks like. They wrote these things and selected these things. Number one, communicate openly, transparently and respectfully with team members leadership and other departments. So communicate openly, transparently and respectfully. And for us, that meant we have the tough conversations when we need to have them and we work to find common ground. That's what that meant. Another expectation of team members was to practice continuous learning. To be adamant about increasing our knowledge and skills in the learning profession. And it also meant to provide and accept forward focused feedback as an opportunity to learn. And third one was to take ownership of your work. And that meant keeping materials updated, accurate and accessible. So others could confidently and easily use them if needed. To hold ourselves, hold yourself accountable to responsibilities and deadlines. Own up to your mistakes and take responsibility for fixing them. Now again, these are not things that I as the team leader at the time came up with. These are things the team came up with themselves saying, "This is what we want out of each other." We also ask them, "Everyone, what does it mean to be a good leader?" So that we would know, I knew what was the expectation and hope of those who were on the team of me as a leader. And as the other managers and directors on the team as well. And here's a few examples of what they came up with for that. Number one, and this was really important, especially during COVID. That's when this one bubbled up. It says, "Be understanding and supportive of team members." And to them, what that meant was connect with team members as people. Have compassion for team members professionally and personally provide recognition for a job well done. And regularly check in on how we're doing. That's what they were looking for from leaders. So we put that in the expectations for leaders. Another leader expectation was for leaders to be accessible, accountable, and reliable. And what that meant was be available for team member questions, admit mistakes, work to correct them, follow through. If you say you're going to do something, do it, and be ready to jump in and help if needed. That was what they wanted. And then finally, communicate clearly, openly, honestly, and transparently. And I shouldn't say, "Finally, like this was all of them. There were more expectations than this. But I'm just sharing a few from each category so you have an idea." So this final one I'm sharing is communicate clearly, openly, honestly, and transparently. This is what the team was looking for from leaders. As much as possible, they wanted us to share information about team and company changes, because there were a lot of changes going on. Strategy, goals, and vision. They wanted us to set and communicate clear expectations, have tough conversations, deliver feedback in a timely manner. And we aimed for no surprises in our performance reviews. So those were a few of the expectations that we set as a team. And we would, again, revisit, revisit quite often. So doing this work to get our own operations in order, you know, our, as I said before, our processes, procedures, that kind of thing, that was one thing. But these also these standards and expectations, that is what allowed us to up level and succeed as a team. Because now we had clarity on everything, on processes, standards, and expectations, so that we could work together even better. And it did a couple of things. Number one, it made our team members successful, because everyone knew what was expected of them. I mean, isn't the worst thing to be held to expectations that you don't know exist? Now the expectations were very clearly laid out. And it was the expectations that the team members had of each other and of the leaders. Wouldn't it be great to work somewhere where that's the case, where the expectations are very clear? We were also all aligned with the same language. So it didn't matter whether we were talking to each other or others on the organization. We all kind of knew what was happening and what we were striving towards. So those are a few of the things I did with my own team to ensure we had our own house in order. I wanted to share those with you as practical ideas, because once we were all clear on these things and enabled us to be more effective, more efficient in the work we were doing across the organization, which then allowed us to work more strategically. And it allowed us to work more often in lockstep with the rest of the organization. And our video and our audio matched. So having a solid operational framework on our team paved the way and provided a solid foundation for the rest of the work. In the interview that I have with Khush, he and I are going to talk about even more topics and ideas when it comes to organizing L&D. In fact, that is the title of his book. It's called organizing L&D for results. And once I read his book, I knew we needed to talk and he needed to share his thoughts with the L&D must change community. At least I hoped he would, which he did and he did very well. So let me give you a little bit more information as an introduction to Khush Van Dalen. Khush has held multiple roles in the L&D field from L&D manager and global multinationals to strategic consultant, helping organizations reposition and optimize their L&D departments. He's on a mission to make L&D more quote street wise, designing L&D that truly drives results, not just more training, but measurable impact on people performance and business outcomes. He helps L&D teams create learning strategies, governance models and talent development frameworks. As I mentioned, he's also the author of the book organizing L&D for results. And you're probably getting a sense, even just from this introduction and the few things I've said as to why Khush and I connected. I'd love that he is another voice working to elevate L&D into this role of strategic business partner and helping us work through the challenges that we need to overcome in order to get there. Because it's going to take all of us. So the more voices, the better. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation that I have with Khush. We covered several spicy L&D topics. And that means there's probably a nugget in here for just about everyone. Oh, and speaking of nuggets, if you find one in the conversation, please share it. Share it with Khush and I. We'd love to hear it or with someone else. Again, the only way our profession is going to change for the better is if we're all learning and implementing our new ideas together. Let's help each other. With that here is my conversation with Khush Van Dalen. Well, hello, welcome to the L&D Must Change podcast. Who happy to be here. I love that. So if you could start off by telling us a little bit about who are you in this world of L&D? What do you do? Where do you fit? Well, I won't bother you with my whole track record, but I've been an L&D manager for a couple of years in large more than nationals and I worked as an independent consultant for about seven years now. And my main deal is I'm a troubleshoot of L&D departments. So not so much to design a learning program, but much more. How do you make an L&D department work? Because they tend to be very complex in terms of processes. Responsibilities, budgets, all these kind of things before you know it, the older and the bigger L&D department becomes the more messy it will become eventually at least that's my experience. And yeah, I try to help these departments out. Obviously it's always large organizations with numerous people working in L&D. And to wrap it off, besides like fixing departments, I also try to enable L&D professionals to be a little bit more business minded, be a little bit more street wise and to put some spice on our L&D profession. That is why you and I enjoy chatting together for sure. So tell me why L&D why why are you passionate about L&D? Why do you keep working in this particular field? I accidentally bumped into this profession to be quite honest and I like learning. Of course, let's do that. like most people do, but I believe it's never about learning and that's the whole paradox of our profession because when you work in an organization learning is always a means to an end and we need to be more business minded like what is the company that we work for? What is the problems or the challenges that we encounter and how can we as a staff department add value to our organizations? So yes, I like learning, but we should be very careful with our learning mindset because before we know it, well, you probably get my point. So I believe that my natural tendency all the time is to go back like, but what is the problem? Who are we doing this for? What are we actually solving? And is learning then the most appropriate solution or is there anything else we need to do? I mean, if you and I were in person right now, we would be high-fiving because I am 100% aligned with everything you just said. And in fact, you talk a lot about this topic over and over again, specifically organizing L&D for results. You have the book of the same name, so you're focused on these results within the organization. So when it comes to this topic, this organizing L&D for results, how do you believe that learning and development? How do we need to shift? How do we need to change our approach? How do we need to think about this differently? Yeah, this is a very big question that you're answering. I think. But like I already said, I think it all starts with the context. So the organization that you work for is fundamental to understand. Being an L&D manager at McDonald's is something totally different than being an L&D manager in a big hospital, for instance. So you first need to gain some business acumen to understand like what KPIs are working, how does processes work, what language they use. So that's our starting point. And from there, we need to start thinking like, okay, who are our key customers? Not only end users, because of course we also need to do something for the employee, but they're also senior leaders in the organization that have certain challenges for the months. And what we need to move away from is to not think too much in terms of an L&D offering, a content library. In other podcasts I heard about the L&D shiny Think Syndrome. We're all excited about 70, 2010 and a gamification. And by now it's AI, of course. And all these things are great, but that's not really where values created. The value of L&D isn't in what we create, but in what we help others to understand what's really going on. Because 99% of the times they knock on a door with a symptom and another root cause. And if we help to understand what's really going on and what's needed in a lot of situations that turn out that it's not a learning solution or not only a learning solution. And that requires a whole mind shift and our profession is my opinion. Mm-hmm. I would agree. So I love what you said, how the value of L&D isn't in what we create. And I do think that we fall in love with our own work and our own product sometimes too soon, whereas to your point, the reason people come to us is because they've got some pain point. And they think that maybe training will solve it or learning will solve it, but it oftentimes in my experience hasn't been the case. So how did you how did you come upon this? How did you come to realize that this topic of organizing L&D for results or the focus on what it is we really need to solve for? How did you get to this point where you realized that was really important? I think most things start with pure frustration because if we work and there's not many bullshit projects, like guys, what's really going on over here? Secondly, I'm quite good in like abstract reasoning, like what is really going on over here? So I tend to see between the lines like what are the actual challenges over here? And it's also pure coincidence. When I started working as a self-employed, my first gig was on a big technical organization that had six academies that didn't understand from each other what they do, and my assignments was make it work. Here's a blank canvas. Make sure everybody will understand it. And once you did this once or twice, it becomes like your niche accidentally, and I like it, but yeah, a lot of things are happening by occasion. And apparently I'm successful with this because now I'm yeah, fully booked for all these kind of things. It's fun. And at the same time, sometimes I feel like becoming a one-trick pony at the same time. So maybe I need to, yeah, we'll see it towards the future. Well, it's an important message to get out, and it's important to think about differently the system that we're part of as opposed to just the one piece and live in our own little corner. One of the things you talked about in the book was the five chessboards, I believe you called them. That L&D needs to balance, which to me struck me because it was a very good, it was a very clear way of talking about all the things that L&D does and categorizing them. So I'm wondering if you can outline what those five chessboards are. Yeah, maybe if you allow me, I can tell a little bit like how this is eventually because when working with L&D departments or bigger in HR departments or even with stakeholders, I learned that we ended up in a lot of confusing conversations. Like we thought we meant the same with an academy, but further down the line, everybody had a different explanation. So a lot of confusing conversations. And in my circle of running in the morning, I thought like they're actually five boxes that you can put most of the L&D working. And if I make this in sort of something understandable in a sort of wheel, then we can have a more precise conversation about this. And I created sort of L&D quick scan that's also what my book is about. And it's just a very practical tool to have a more precise conversation about L&D like always, which of the boxes or chessboards are we putting most of our focus and where do we want to improve more of our focus. And the boxes are the first one is more compliance related learning requests, stuff that's just mandatory because of rules and regulations. Secondly, it's like really practical functional skills that people need for their current job here and now to be successful in their role. The third one is professional development. So beyond the day-to-day task, but growing professionals towards potential new roles, leadership, talent development, all these kind of things. The fourth one is performance improvement, not so much thinking from a learning angle, not much more from organizational challenges and KPI. Where are we struggling? Where do we see things going wrong? And how can we contribute from that angle into learning perspectives? And the final one is change in strategy. What are our big strategic goals as an organization? And how can we as L&D contribute in a meaningful way to that? So these are like sort of five chessboards and you need to play all these five games, but they're not all equally important. So to have a conversation like what game do we need to win? What is a must-win battle and which one are we okay? It doesn't get top priority. I think that is a very important, conscious decision you need to make as an L&D leader and as an L&D team. So we can't do them all equally is what I hear you saying. We can't, there are these five areas, compliance, functional, professional development, performance improvement, change in strategy, but that we all maybe have our hands in in some way shape or form. We can't do them all equally. I guess first of all, why not? And then secondly, how do we, how do we prioritize? How do we know which ones to work on? So I ask you two questions. So I can handle that. I can handle that. Most of the L&D departments that I work in have constantly more work on their plate than they can solve. So we need to make decisions about what is important, what is urgent and what do we do and what do we don't need? I had to put it in very simple words. We have one bucket of peanut butter and we can swear it along every sandwich, but some sandwiches are more. So we need to make both decisions on in the context that we work in, in the situation and the moment of the year that we are, what are the things that we can really add both value to our organization? And that means that other things are less important. And that's a constant changing gear. So that's not a, that's not, you don't need to define that once. It's like constant re-evaluation, like where are we heading, what does it need it? Your second question is, help the outside. Yeah, help the outside, which ones to focus on? Yeah, let me turn it around. Like if we don't decide, you all know the metaphor, like the most annoying kid in class, get the most attention from the teacher, right? If we don't decide the most assertive or the most vocal customers claim most of our attention, but that can also be a line manager that wants a training time management for six people in their team that can keep you very busy for a month, for instance. Well, you can really debate like, come on guys, this is something we can buy externally. So in most situations, your most important customer, the senior leadership team, are not naturally the people that come proactively knocking on your door. So you need to actually build relations, invite yourself, compare it, know these kind of things. Because if you're reactive and just sit down and wait just like an IT service desk, you'll end up with all this operational stuff that can keep you busy all day, but won't allow you to add a lot of value to your organization is my opinion. Mm-hmm. So we're constantly thinking about where and how do we add the most value at this point in time. And we're, you know, one of the things I think about is we're mapping that out strategically in alignment with the organization. So where can we add the most value at any given time in the organization with any of these five different chessboards per say? Because, and I really like what you said, if we don't, the loudest voice will be the one that we are going to answer to. Because that's what we're coming. I mean, I've had that experience as well in my past. And I used to call it the flavor of the month development. Like every, every month there's something new, but there's no really defined strategy that shows that we're moving towards, we're moving the needle overall, we're working towards the largest goals and initiatives in the organization. We're just responding to whoever's loudest that comes to our door first. Actually, exactly. Yeah. So you and I talk a lot about this. L&D can end up as an order taker. And this has become almost somewhat of a buzzword now, I think, in our industry. But one of the ways you talk about it, which I found interesting was how it relates to unclear roles and decision rights. So roles and decision rights talk a little bit about that and how it shows up in our work. Yeah, we could talk about this for a whole afternoon. And this is the topic that I'm very nervous, passionate about, because I think if you drill down most of the challenges that we encounter as L&D professionals, the root cause is on governance. It is unclear for ourselves, but even more for our customers, who should be covering which responsibility? And to keep it very simple, there ideally is an initiator in the business that has a demand, a problem, an ambition, whatever that needs support from the L&D department. And we help them to solve their problem. But what happens a lot is we take over a problem or we even call it an intake conversation, like we take in your request and we are going to make something for you. And before you know, the ownership in the business is gone. And we end up as being the initiator, the supporter. We also need a subject matter expert that can actually provide the best answer for the e-learning or the training or whatever. That also cannot be a role from learning and development. So this triangle somebody that initiate somebody that is the actor that orchestrates the whole project, for instance. But also somebody that supports in terms of providing the right content, reviewing the e-learning, etc. These three roles needs to be divided because if they'll, if that they'll, they'll mix up. And eventually L&D ends up with a sort of orphanage offering with all kind of outdated irrelevant e-learnings, which nobody actually can explain like, why are we offering this? Is this still our standard way of working? And is anybody using this? Again, this is a very quick and dirty explanation, but it's fundamental for us to understand, but also to explain the business and to put them in the driver's seat of their own project because they don't understand how much responsibilities they should have in a project. So how do you do that? And maybe even if you have an example, either in described or a story of how do you, how do you put the business in the driver's seat? Let me give a very practical other example. I just rebuilt my house over here and had a contractor or an undertakeer. Yes, yes, contractor. So, yeah, before we actually start any work here in the house, he set me down on the table with a cup of coffee and he said, "Who's this? Listen up." We're going to have a quite intense couple of weeks. And in my experience, it's going to be messy around week two or three. And what is important for us is to have a daily check-in so we can discuss progress and issues. It's important for you to know that I'm not going to vacuum clean every day because it's going to be messy and going to be dirty. I'm not going to be doing it every day. So that's a very practical example how somebody that I hire takes the lead in the collaboration. He knows what we're going to do. He takes me by the hand and he managed me to understand what's going on. What can I expect from him? What we need from each other, etc. And we need to do something similar with our internal clients because we tend to jump into the question itself immediately and almost forget that they don't have a clue how complex and time consuming. And this to actually build an e-learning and who should be paying for this and who should be reviewing this. So we do the assumption that the other person will understand, but they don't. So it's easy to talk about the victim game. It's easy to complain about our clients, but we need to do something different to put them in the driver's seat of a project because, well, point. Yeah, I mean, I had a very wise boss at one point in my career. And I was doing exactly what you just described where I was complaining that they don't know how to work with us. They don't understand how long it takes us to create these things. And she looked at me and said, well, just we need to train them to do business with us. And I thought, oh, yeah, here I am complaining, but I've never actually told them. And so we're just allowing them, you know, if you don't explain things clearly, you just fill in the blanks. So back to your example, if your contractor had not explained that maybe it's going to be messy some days, you might have been walking around all angry in your house. I don't know if you would really think, but maybe, you know, like, why doesn't this guy clean up? But instead he set his expectations very clearly from the beginning. And we need to know that we can do that too. I think sometimes we think we're trying to be so nice. We don't need to or we assume people understand. And they don't really. So I love that example of getting really clear on the expectations and the roles when we work together, what does that look like? What does that mean? What can you expect? Yeah, that's being you don't need to be bitchy. No, so you can do this in a very friendly way, but they don't know. So we need to help them understand. Friendly and clear. All we're doing is clarifying and aligning on expectations. Yeah, I love that. So another thing that you talk about is the back office mess, like the mess that can eat up Ellen D's times. What do you think is usually included in the mess? You know, booking rooms, lunches, getting, getting an actor for a workshop, somebody calls that they want to read schedule their dates because they they the giddy pick this diet all this kind of. Yeah, back. It's like washing the place in a restaurant. Nobody will ever give you an extra tip because they receive the clean plate, but it still needs to be done. You need to minimize this kind of work as much as possible because I like I said I did a lot of sort of strategy session with Ellen D teams with the quick scan and it all turns out we all want to be the strategic business partner sitting with the blah blah blah blah blah. But at the other side, we are all stuck on the other side of the quick scan, the operational stuff, compliance training, booking rooms and it draws us like a magnet to all these kind of manual labor stuff, which which again doesn't add a lot of value to the organization. So we can talk about being the strategic business partner all day, but if we don't fix the back end where we're still working with Excel documents and sticky notes and bandaid and all this kind of things. Yeah, it will never fly and typically you see two different roles in an Ellen D department. You have the folks that have an advising role. They earn a little bit more and you have the coordinators or the support people that earn a little bit less. And they do the whole back end stuff and they don't talk with each other typically. So there's a sort of missing role in this whole thing is somebody that continuously improve the processes within an Ellen D department like why is this happening every day. And can we use AI or robotized process automation to make things simpler smarter because I think that is a topic that deserves more attention because it draws so many negative energy and resources that are not adding a lot of value. So more focus on process optimization within Ellen D department is my opinion. You can really get buried in all that administrative detail work that needs done. And if you never step back and say how we can approve it. It's interesting because I think other departments, other areas in organizations are doing that on a regular basis. But Ellen D, we give ourselves a pass on that or we don't take the time to do it or for whatever reason, we're not working on continuously streamlining our operations for the most part. I know some exceptions. Have you ever seen an Ellen D team that's done it really well? Absolutely. Sorry to say, but one of my teams, I think we put a lot of focus on this specific topic because I think a lot of Ellen D folks are trained in the field of psychology or in that fields. fields we are need used of thinking in terms of processes. and organizations are full with processes and to understand like, hey, there's a chain of events that help to make something or create value for our customers. So we, with, with my team, when I worked at Friesland Compina, we had a team of about 25 LND professionals. We all went to Greenbelt Lean training to really start thinking and talking together in terms of process process automation. And I think a lot of the way how I look at the profession and also what I call in my book all comes down to the whole Lean philosophy. Like, how can we constantly improve things, see what's working, where to adjust, etc. etc. Yeah, so we need to continuously be doing that. I like that, that focus of the LND team went to lean training. I don't hear that very often. You know, we send other parts of the company to do that, but we don't focus in on ourselves. We need don't turn the mirror around and say, maybe we need to learn this too. So even after we clarify this, we fix these operations, that poll, though, to that reactive work, that can still be really strong over and over again. So what do you recommend we put in place so we can sustain a more strategic approach over time? It's like an airline. We need to come up with a sort of service level model, like not everybody receives a glass of champagne when they enter an airplane. So we need to segment our customers. And I love HR. Well, they have to put it simple for small, relatively operational request. You ideally want to have a sort of learning management system where people can find their own answer or maybe even a chatbot or whatever. They have the medium sized request where somebody wants something for a group of 20 and maybe you just have a couple of preferred suppliers and you have a first check in conversation to see what's going on. And what kind of solutions are we thinking about like, OK, this makes sense. And I'm going to connect you to one of our suppliers. And then you have the real juicy business class or royal class customers that you want to receive with a red carpet and a class of champagne. You ideally want to sit down on the quarterly or at least annually with the management team to not start with question like what do we need to learn and what trainings do we need. But what are your objectives? Where are we heading with this division? What are your key challenges? What does it mean for people for processes and with our limited amount of time? Like how can we add value? What are the key KPIs that we can influence together based on partnership? How can we sort of set up a project contract together in terms of what are we going to partner on for the next year. So you need to break all these customers down into segments because if you all treat the meekery, you're going to be sold out within a week and that's not going to help anybody. I like this idea of customer segmentation or stakeholder segmentation. How do I know which customers go in which buckets? How do you generally decide that? And that's not one rule, but in that show I use the acronym. OK. I need to translate the risk size and importance. So these are three important buckets. Like is this something if we screw this? Are we getting major lawsuits? Is this for a huge audience or is this business critical for our success? I think these are three indicators that can define like OK, if it hits one or two of these boxes, it needs to be a royal class customer. Yes, that is an excellent way to describe a risk size and importance. We could almost we could do it in English. We could do RIS like RIS risk importance. I'm here now. I'm helping to make acronyms. Well, that is that is that will be very, very helpful. I think for a lot of people just to whenever we can simplify this down into a few buckets that helps us to think through it and get some clarity, that makes it more manageable always. So speaking of manageable, we talk about a lot of things and I know you and I could talk about many, many more, but what's maybe one thing if if an LND professional had to get started to begin incorporating some of these concepts you talk about, what do you recommend? Where do you recommend we start? What's a good first step? One thing. I tend to give you two. One and yeah, let me do. Let's be careful with using the word learning objectives and let's at least also incorporate the word performance objectives. So in every project, don't only talk about what they need to learn, but also what kind of performance indicators are we aiming to influence? How can we measure progress? So that's a small practical one. The second, maybe different one that but this applies for a whole LND department. I would introduce an annual cleanup day for all the reoccurring projects or programs, e learning trainings that you're offering as an LND department. Circle back at least once a year to the eventual initiator like are we still on board? Is this still a program that is relevant? Are you still willing and able to be the owner, the initiator, the sponsor of this? Are you able to look at the evaluations and can we see if this is still relevant? And it's very big chance that for maybe 30 or 40% of the programs that we keep on offering, it is going to be very hard to actually find a business sponsor for that in these kind of cases, kill it, stop it. Because before we know it, we get a whole window shop window with all kind of trainings, which somebody ever asked for because one day it was super relevant and we just based on routine, we keep on offering it. But if there's no sponsor in the business, is there's nobody anymore that wants to raise their hand like, hey, this is mine. I'm caring for this. Simply stop it. That sounds so fun to me. An LND cleanup day. Yeah, I wish it was something that I would have done when I was leading teams previously, but it's an idea I'm definitely going to carry forward into the future because why not? Why not we take time to clean our houses or are right all of the other things, but an LND cleanup day to is what we're doing, making a difference. If not, let's stop it. Are our processes as efficient as they could be? If not, let's look at how to make them more so. I love those two ideas. Thank you. One last thing. Yeah. Also look at what it being clicked in our LMS. If something not has been clicked in a year, kill it as well. I need to give credit for her address on this one because he ever invented this whole concept. I think it's even an official LND date. I think 12 of March. There is an official LND cleanup day. So we need to get more attention to this topic. I will send some more information. Yeah, I'm going to look this up and we're going to we're going to put it on the calendar. LND cleanup day. Even those of us who are consultants, we could use a cleanup day as well. So this is going to be it. I love this. Thank you for sharing. So in last, if people want to learn more about you or find out more about you or reach out, where can they find you? What's the best way to do that? I will start with LinkedIn. I'm quite busy over there. And of course, you can read my book and download. We refer to the Quick Scan. Everything is free. Everything is available. The explanation, the slide to dashboard. So you can play around with it on my website. Part downloads. You can find it. And obviously my book organizing LND for results. With his debts. It's a merrily American written. So English people struggle with finding it and on Amazon. But you can find it over there. Oh, yeah. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I'll put links to all that in the show notes too. So people can just click and get there. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the LND must change podcast. If this episode resonated with you, I've got a couple next steps. First, click subscribe on Apple podcasts. So wherever you listen to make sure you don't miss future episodes. And while you're there, post a quick review so others can find a benefit from this podcast as well. Next, share this episode and your key takeaways and action steps with others. You can do this in social media. I recommend LinkedIn or simply through conversation. It is amazing how powerful a personal share can be in order to both help you make sense of and solidify what you learned and inspire others with ideas on how they can make a change as well. Be sure to tag me and the guest of this episode if you do post on LinkedIn so we can participate in the conversation as well. There really isn't one single person who can improve this profession alone. So let's change LND together for the better. Here we go. See you next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]