Christopher Pappas (00:15) Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Scaling Leadership, where we discuss with business leaders how to build the successful businesses of tomorrow. Today we are talking about something very important for every company, investing in its people. But how do you know whether that investment is actually making a difference to the business? Joining me today is Christopher Allen, President of Allen Interactions. Christopher has spent decades helping organizations rethink how they develop their people and connect learning to real performance. Christopher, welcome to Scaling Leadership. It's great to have you here. Christopher Allen (00:53) Thank you very much. Yeah, very excited to be with you, Christopher, and joining your podcast. Christopher Pappas (00:59) Thank you. So, Christopher, let's get into it. When a company tells you, we invest in our people, what's the first question you want to ask its leadership team? Christopher Allen (01:12) Well, that's a great leading question. Most organizations do invest in their people, for sure, top to bottom. Very few don't. I think the question is, do the employees know that they're being invested in? In the world of training, there's a lot of stuff that's done to employees rather than done for employees. We talk about compliance training, the beginnings of what is the proprietary training, how is a job done inside an organization, and the time to learn and grow and develop and create new skills in yourself takes a lot of time. And so, the first question ends up being, do they even know that they're being invested in? And I think one of the ways that you could test that is, what do they tell their friends and family? In a great organization, they're pretty willing to say, hey, I got the opportunity to try. I got the opportunity to practice. My organization is looking out for me in the future, giving me an opportunity to try stuff we're not even using yet and that I'm excited about. In the world of training, especially eLearning, there's a fantastic stat that says, how long does it take an employee to get through one hour of eLearning? About seven minutes. They click through the content as fast as they possibly can to get to the quiz at the end so that they can be done. The business spent money to build the course. It said we want to block an hour of all of our employees time. So if you've got 10,000 people in your organization, we're going to block 10,000 hours to go take this course. And everybody has learned that it isn't a value for them because they're clicking through to try to figure out how can they get past it as quickly as possible. So I think one of the tests that you have to ask yourself is, do they realize that this is an investment and do they find that it's aligned with their personal motivations? If it's something that's just being done to them, it's probably a pretty wasted investment because you haven't aligned what does that person value? What does that person see in their future in terms of skills and career? Do they see themselves growing? And if you can't align those two things together, it's a wasted investment for sure. Christopher Pappas (03:52) I think that we have a term about this kind of eLearning training or online training. It's the boring eLearning, right? Something that Allen Interactions is not famous for. Christopher, after working with organizations for so many years, has your view of what actually drives business performance changed? Christopher Allen (04:19) I don't think so. I think, you know, the way that people organize inside an organization, it has so much to do with individual motivations as it does with organizational motivations. Υour team, your boss, who they are and what they're motivated by and what they are pushing towards is kind of the biggest key. And so as, as a leader, we have to make sure that, we're designing our organizations around the right types of motivations and when we've got those clearly outlined and clearly defined, then we can build support systems that go with it. If you've got a misalignment of motivations, you'd end up having a whole lot of problems just in general. So even when it comes to managing our own teams and our own studios, understanding what gets our employees excited, what they like to see and do, makes a big difference for how our whole organization performs. At Allen Interactions, you know, for the last 30-35 years, we have hired and nurtured people who are extraordinarily passionate about seeing individuals succeed. You know, when we create a training program, it isn't a training program for the masses, it's a program to help somebody have a better career, have more confidence in their own skills, see a path for them to earn more money, to be more effective, to be more liked, to have less worry. And it's those things in collection that I think really drive overall business performance. A lot of us have been in an environment where the leader has been ineffective. And we spend so much of our time in consternation about how bad I feel that my input isn't valued, that the organization is taking the wrong turn, the wrong direction, has the wrong priorities. And I think it continues to come back to that over and over and over again. If you don't have your motivations well aligned and well visible for your employees, you just don't get the performance that was set out at the beginning. Christopher Pappas (06:50) And that leads me to training metrics and business impact. So, companies track learning metrics. But how can leaders tell whether developing their people is actually improving business performance? Christopher Allen (07:07) This is a challenge worldwide. I think, and one of the places where Allen interactions has really excelled, a lot of learning starts from an assumption that if our employees knew something, about the expectations of our clients, of our internal teams, of leadership, they would do something different. Probably the best example, and I use it all the time, is there are lots of things in our personal lives that we know to be true, that we don't always act on. I you can ask every smoker on the planet, is smoking good for them? No, right? And so that's well established. And that kind of gets back to, well, if they knew better, they'd do something different. Well, all smokers know better. But they continue to smoke, right? And so the challenge there for an organization is it's not just about knowing, it's about doing. And so when we look at traditional learning metrics, like how many people completed the course, how many people got an 80 % or better on the test, that's all looking at what do you know versus what is it that you do? And so we got to work on helping organizations align their performance goals. What is it that they're expecting people to do with the type of support that they're receiving? And until we've got a direct alignment of doing and practice kind of across the board, most learning metrics are not valuable at all. Artificial Intelligence is going to make that easier. When my dad created Authorware many decades ago, he worked with his software engineering team on learning analysis and measurement. And inside Authorware, what was so great about that product was absolutely everything that you could measure was always being measured. And you didn't have to go through the process of creating hooks or programming or special code to measure something. You just simply had to ask Authorware at the end, I want to see what the student did. How much time did they take? What is it that they looked at? How often did they click on it? How often did they go back? The types of things that get us to, are they not only confident, but competent? And putting those two things in alignment. Today with AI, we can measure everything. As professionals, we don't have to think about, I need to make sure that I've got to hook in to measure this, or I've got to hook in to measure that. We don't need to rely on multiple choice questions anymore to get the data that we're looking for. And so that gives us really fantastic opportunities. The learning metrics that are available in a SCORM package on your LMS, if they're not directly aligned to doing, let's not measure those and let's figure out how we get right to the heart of performance. Christopher Pappas (10:23) Christopher, which learning metrics do organizations tend to overvalue? Christopher Allen (10:30) I think it's around accuracy of answering questions. Because that goes back to what I said earlier around the assumption of knowing versus doing. Christopher Pappas (10:40) Exactly. Christopher Allen (10:41) And there are a lot of things that prevent us in our lives, not just in our corporate lives, in our lives from doing and doing consistently. I'll give an example. We did a project for the FAA a very long time ago around helping flight attendants go through safety checks and procedures. And the FAA requirement at the time was that they carried around a big thick manual, a physical book, and it weighed, you know, a couple pounds. And inside it, as you opened up, was the checklist of everything that you were supposed to do for that aircraft at your station. And part of the problem that the FAA was recognizing was flight attendants weren't carrying their book around. And it was a set of things that, you know, behavior had changed over time and everybody knew that they needed to open the book to follow the checklist. In fact, the in it was, you see, flight attendants use their mobile phone to do this now, so they got rid of the book and you're just carrying around a phone, but read word for word the safety instructions. This is how to make sure your seatbelt is fastened, that your tray table's up. All of those things, word for word, read it verbatim. Well, older flight attendants who were seasoned and had experience didn't want to carry around the book because it was heavy. You know, it added to their luggage. They had to tow it around. They had read the script, you know, a hundred times. So as new flight attendants started working with more seasoned flight attendants, they saw the seasoned flight attendants aren't carrying the book around. So I don't want to look like I'm a novice. So I'm not going to carry the book around either. And you know, there are important stuff in there about how do you check whether or not the door is pressurized and is the fire extinguisher up to date and in the right place? And in each plane, you know, those indicators and that piece of equipment might be in a different place. So there's a really good example of behavior that you know that you've mastered that on a test you could get 100 % right. And you might carry that book around once or twice, but there is competing influence that's preventing you from keeping that behavior up. And it's social. You don't want to look like a novice. You're seeing other people who are more senior than you perform in a different way. And you want to match and mirror them. So that's one of the things that I think organizations need to be on the lookout for is how do we support people at scale for the right behaviors socially? So that not only have we aligned it to pay, but we've aligned it to, this is what our culture does and supports. And these are the procedures that we're training on. And if you have that vertical alignment, if you will, of all of those things together, then you get the performance that you're looking for. Christopher Pappas (13:59) Right. So what does it take to draw a meaningful line between an investment in people and outcomes like productivity, customer satisfaction, sales or retention? Christopher Allen (14:16) Yeah, I continue to bring it back to motivation. In fact, we often tell our customers, if you don't have a budget to do what you think the right thing is in terms of supporting training and practice, spend every dollar that you possibly can on motivation. An unmotivated student will probably never learn, regardless of how good the learning experience was, right? If I think to myself, I don't care about this, I don't really wanna do it, I don't see the benefit, when I go into whatever that learning experience is, I'm already thinking, I don't wanna do this. Right? And if you're thinking, I don't wanna do this, you're probably never gonna do it. If you go into a learning experience, no matter how good or how poor, in fact, let's imagine a really poor learning experience, but you're highly motivated. This is something I wanna master. This is something I wanna do. Highly motivated folks find a way through. They figure out how to do it. You look at Ivy League schools in the United States, your students at Harvard likely are running around with a high degree of motivation. It's what helped them succeed in the past. An institution like that, doesn't actually need to be very good at supporting instruction and student growth, right? You've got a whole population of really intelligent, highly motivated people. They'll succeed no matter how poor the learning structure is. But the folks that really need the most help need really good instruction and they need support so that they get their motivations aligned with doing it and you look at test scores in K-12 in the United States and you'd certainly say there is a motivation problem as much as there is an instruction problem. We're spending a lot of money on instruction. In fact, during COVID we spent millions and millions of extra dollars, right? So it isn't, in that case, it's not a case of not having enough funds. it's making sure that you've got students who are highly motivated. And if they're stressed, if they're uncomfortable, you don't have a shot. And so you have to address those things first. And that's the business's goal for its employees is to make sure that we've got a straight line towards these are the outcomes we're looking for. This is how it's going to impact you. Here's the support that we can bring to make sure that your performance is on par. And we're going to celebrate it. If we can celebrate your successes as an individual, we will celebrate together as a successful organization. Christopher Pappas (17:07) I need a lot of help because I hear that question for a very long time and very often. The question is, CFOs can be skeptical of ROI claims around training and development. What would make those investments credible enough to earn the CFO's trust? Christopher Allen (17:30) Well, CFOs should be very skeptical of ROI claims and training. I mean, they just, they just should be. I mean, there's, there's more examples, I think that we can all point to in our lives of bad training experiences. You know, something that really wasn't worth it. And if you as a employee or as a student can point to those bad experiences, you know, you don't need to look very hard to get a measure that says there's not a whole lot of ROI there. We tend to ask the wrong questions of our employees after training. I was talking to an organization about a month ago and we were looking at their measures and employee satisfaction scores and then aligned to usage. And here was a case where an organization was creating a lot of continuing education, extra professional development, job aids and performance support, all in direct support of doing the job that they do every day. When they ask their employees, what do you think of this material? Is it valuable? Almost straight across the board, 100%. Yeah, it's really valuable. It's great. We wish we had more of it. Okay, how often are employees using it? And it was less than 10 % of their employee base was ever accessing the material. So, when we ask employees directly, Do you see relevance to your job? You often get the answer that they think the business wants to hear. And so we gotta find a way to cut through that. I think the second thing that CFOs should be very, very skeptical of is the speed at which content is being created and why is it being created in the first place? When a new product or a new service is rolled out by an organization, training usually comes on the back end of that. It wasn't at the beginning of planning. How are we gonna train our people? Are we gonna have them ready? You know, if it's a new software system, we're waiting until the software system is complete before we create training, because we need the software system done so we can show folks how to use it. And because of that, we're always kind of late and we're a little bit rushed and we miss the opportunity to do kind of change management training at the beginning. Here's why we're investing in a new system. Here's what the new system will help you personally do better. Here are the challenges that the organization is trying to solve with this new system. And because things come late and they're kind of rushed and they're not at the beginning of the thought process strategically, you know, they're often missing the key parts that make training effective. Cause we're marching towards the deadline really fast. We didn't save enough budget to do it right. We didn't align our motivations, you know, at the beginning. And so they'll figure it out. And I think this cycle over decades has created a situation where L&D doesn't really wanna measure the effectiveness of their work frequently because they know they were late to the party. They didn't have the opportunity to do all the things that they know that was effective. so they're judged personally, how quickly did we create the content? Did the content come out on budget? And are people using it? Rather than the strategic alignment of We're looking for a different performance. Here's why we're looking for a different performance. And do we see that in business KPIs? And so we gotta jump that hump in order to get CFOs the right sort of experience and data that's worth it. Christopher Pappas (21:46) The beloved CFOs. Christopher Allen (21:49) Right, right, right. That's right. Christopher Pappas (21:54) Christopher, who should actually own the business outcome of a learning investment? The provider, the L&D team, the business leadership, all three? And to to add on that question, where should accountability, begin and end? Christopher Allen (22:13) That's a great question. At Allen Interactions, we've worked with internal L&D teams to support them and help create content and learning experiences that they couldn't for a lot of reasons, and we've created successful projects in, in that space. For business leaders or division heads, they, often come with a slightly different set of problems and challenges. They aren't as generally focused on how do we make marginal improvement? How do we use different technology? All that sort of other stuff. They are laser focused on, "I need my folks to be able to do X, Y, and Z." And I think it's the responsibility of all three teams from an accountability perspective to define what does success look like? In the case of an overburdened L&D team, success could be "We got all of our content created and published," right? And so at the end of the year, our L&D budget is gonna be renewed at the same amount for next year, but that's a metric that doesn't help the individual employee. The individual employee needs to know how to do their job better, have the confidence that they're doing the right thing. And so all three need to own what does success look like and define it discreetly. And if we can define success in a way that is in support of a very specific business outcome... we might design and create things very differently. And, you know, that's the position I want to be in. Because in some cases it isn't more training is the right answer. It's removing some barrier that's preventing the business outcome from happening. Or it's not the frontline employee that needs more training. They might already know how to do it, but it's managers that need training to support, to make sure that that outcome continues to happen. So when we start a project that that accountability in and around what does success look like is the most important phase of the project. Cause it, really does start to determine what needs to happen next. if I was saying, you know, at the beginning, it's just, did we get enough content created and published and isn't on the learning management system? We can be people pleasers for sure. And do that and make sure that whoever owns the budget gets the metric that they're looking for. But if we're thinking about a business outcome, it's gotta be something different. Christopher Pappas (24:56) Great, great. Christopher, what commitment should the L&D team ask from business leaders before accepting a project? Because we saw top bottom, let's see right now the L&D team, what they should do. Christopher Allen (25:11) Right. I think one of the biggest internal challenges that L&D teams have isn't around understanding what the business problem is. You know, when you work with a subject matter expert to try to grab all of their knowledge and skills so that you can put it inside a course, often an expert can't tell you what are the shortest steps or the fewest skills that you need to be successful. We stack our experience up. And so, if you ask a doctor, why do they quickly know that this is probably the right diagnosis? They might not be able to tell you, well, I checked for this and I checked for this and I checked for this. But the process that they're going through is stacked up based on experience and pretty quickly they can come to a judgment where I think it's probably this. So let's go test for this one thing. When you try to tell a novice how to stack all that experience together so that they can make a really quick judgment to let's just go do this one test because that'll be the definitive answer. An expert can't tell you how they got there, right? They haven't been in the role of a novice for such a long time that they can't discreetly tell you how they got the skill or what skills they're using in order to make that diagnosis. And so as an L&D professional, you're often challenged with trying to get just the information that's important. And when an expert kind of can't answer, they give you everything. And everything isn't valuable. One of the things in sales training that's the most important is how quickly can you go from having a new sales role to making your first sale? And we don't want to teach everybody all the skills of sales, you know, until they're an expert, we want them to go get a taste of what it feels like to have a successful sale. Once they've done that, they're motivated to go get their second sale and they've got confidence that they can do it. So then you've got, as I was saying before, you've got somebody who isn't right in that sweet spot. They're hungry for more information. They want to make sure that they continue on this path, and they're attentive because they saw a little bit of something that you gave them turn into a real world outcome that was pretty impactful. So the L&D team needs to be focused in asking their questions in and around what's the shortest predictable set of things that this person needs to do in order to have a successful outcome. And then once you've got that developed, then you can ask all the students who just went through training, what additional things would be helpful? And it's more important, I think at that point, to ask a recently completed student, what more would you like, rather than go ask the subject matter expert, what's all the things that they need to know? Because they're at the beginning of moving forward, they're gonna have insightful questions about, what is it that I need to be successful? Christopher Pappas (28:36) Christopher, extremely valuable points. Let's make that even more difficult. Let's talk about developing your people while also scaling your business. So the thing is that as companies scale, developing people becomes harder and individual needs become more diverse. How do you build development around the individuals without making it impossible to scale? Christopher Allen (29:05) I like this question a lot because in my career, leadership training has never not been a corporate need. in fact, some of our clients come back every three or four years and redesign their leadership training. There are two important lessons to that. The first as you were saying, people have different needs. And so what puts one person on the right path is very different than what is going to put another person on the right path. And you need to be able to adjust to who they are. A good mentor knows a lot about you and would do things differently as a mentor for you specifically than for someone else. And the big training programs that get put together, don't take an individualized approach. They take a mass communication Christopher Pappas (29:59) Mass. Christopher Allen (30:00) approach, know, like broadcast television. Everybody gets the same show, right? And so the places that I think organizations have struggled with in terms of how do we continue to scale leadership and competency over time. There have been all sorts of trends that we've been a part of. Five or six years ago, we were part of a leadership program where an organization had spent so much time building soft skills in their leaders that somebody who ended up in a management position had spent years on soft skills and had been very far removed from technical skills. So when the people that they were managing came with a technical question, they couldn't answer it. And so that created the friction of, well, if my manager doesn't know how to do it, I should be the leader of this department. Not them, right? I don't need more soft skills. I don't need more coaching. I need somebody who can help support me in my job and figure out what the right answer is. And I think you go the other way where you can develop someone with such great technical skills, they don't have the ability to relate to others. I think the thing that's now providing even more challenge in the field of leadership development is employees don't stay at their organization for long periods of time anymore. We often have just four or five years with somebody if we're lucky, to develop them and move them on. And if they're not finding success or they're not finding enjoyment, they're going to jump to another organization or they're going to jump to a completely different industry and try something else. that's kind of the crux of the current problem is we've tried in mass to do technical training, to do soft skills training, to do coaching, when we really need to be more focused on individual mentorship and what does one person need. And so that's where I'm pretty excited about Artificial Intelligence because we can use those types of systems to understand each individual and provide individual support, you know, kind of as quickly as, as needed. And that's going to be a design challenge, I think for really big organizations for a while is how do you make that feel personal? How do you make that feel like the type of environment that an employee wants to really be in? Because I think the cycle of how long you stay at an organization being shorter and shorter, means you're less invested in that organization. And so we got to build business trust in the systems that we're creating in order to have real impact and real success. Christopher Pappas (32:56) And speaking of AI, I will ask you, because we see that AI is everywhere right now, but I think that much of the conversation is about doing things faster. What is the more interesting opportunity for AI when it comes to developing people and improving business performance? Christopher Allen (33:16) I wanna start by answering with what are people doing with their reading skills? So, before the mobile phone, or the smartphone in particular, reading proficiency was at a much higher level than it is today. It was more common that people would pick up books for all sorts of reasons, you know, for fun and for leisure, as well as for learning. And we built strong skills in deep reading that unlocks emotion, unlocks critical thinking. And in fact, deep reading is one of the only known activities that unlocks all four quadrants of your brain. You know, it requires the motor skills of using your eyes. It requires skills to decode things that are on the page What's the letter A? What's the letter B? There's words that are formed together and they have meaning. And then there's the interpretation and the emotion that goes with it, especially if you're reading fiction. Reading fiction is one of the only known ways to experience the emotions of others. know, if you write, right. Christopher Pappas (34:25) Sorry, Christopher, maybe this is the reason why I love fiction. Christopher Allen (34:33) Right. Right. You know, when, when, you know, if you read a spy novel, if it's really tense, your body responds that way, your muscles tense up, right. And, and, and Christopher Pappas (34:41) That's true. That's true. Christopher Allen (34:42) You feel what other people feel. And so, you know, I bring that up in the context of AI, which is there is a set of skills where doing it yourself has really great value. If you offload synthesis and reading a whole bunch of other documents and kind of pulling together or building a presentation, you miss out on the stacking cognitively and forming your own thoughts that are really valuable. You know, when you, when you sit, or at least when I do, when I sit and I create a presentation that I'm going to give to an audience, going through and actually building each individual slide is a little bit of a rehearsal about what it is that I'm going to say. AI can create slides super fast. And, in some cases, that's a really great benefit to me. I don't have two hours to sit down and build a presentation. So I can send AI off to do it. But what I miss is the practice, the rehearsal, the opportunity to have the deep thought that doing it myself will unlock later different thoughts. Right? If I've gone through and started to structure and scaffold and form deeply my own thoughts and beliefs about something, when new information hits, I've already started to do that synthesis and now I can come across and perform differently. Whereas if I was just reading a script off a teleprompter, I don't have to do a whole lot of thought, right? And I'm not gonna have those aha moments later. So I think, you know, the interesting opportunity here is not creating more content. In fact, it's probably,creating less content. We talked to a big hotel chain last month and they had gone through their LMS and essentially deleted 80% of the courses that were on there. They were getting ready to move to a completely new LMS. And so they wanted to shed their catalog to make that happen. No one complained that the courses were gone. You know, there weren't any employees going, man, I was really hoping to go back and take that. And I think we need to take the same approach with Artificial Intelligence. It will create content forever, and do it really, really quickly. But no one has time to consume it. And in most cases, they don't want to consume it unless it has a direct benefit. So I think, you know, really to answer your question around AI, it's in and around supporting individual needs so that they can start to think scaffold, do the work themselves so that they'll be better prepared later, rather than just making everything super efficient. Because super efficiency for me right now probably has less benefit to me later when a new harder challenge comes in in front. And so it's about finding that balance. think Artificial Intelligence can do a great job with that. I really do. I'm pro AI in helping us do the right things later, and be really constructive and individualized. But I don't want more content. I don't have time for more content myself now. Give me less, but give me something that's super effective. Christopher Pappas (38:20) I could not agree more. Christopher, among the companies you have seen get real business results in developing their people, what do their leaders do differently? I mean, have you seen a pattern? Christopher Allen (38:35) Yeah, I see a resurgence now, I think, because of AI in trying to do the right sort of strategic thinking around succession planning. There's a couple of industries that I'm a part of. The space industry is one, and that one's fascinating. The US space industry has been primarily the domain of NASA for 50 plus years. And so the leaders in those organizations have been in their role for a very long time. And now with commercial space, they're all in demand for people with experience. And so we went from this very exclusive club that was just NASA to now a whole bunch of organizations that need a whole lot of people and expertise. I bring that up because it's in and around designing what are people going to be doing in the future that ends up being the most important set of experiences to go through now. We're going to do things differently. We're going to want different things from the people that we have. And as innovation happens, at a faster and faster pace, we need more experts sooner. And so that's one of the areas where we see leading organizations use AI to support decision-making of new folks. How do we take somebody we just hired and get the same performance that we would out of a leader, who's been in their role for seven to 10 years? And is that something we can actually do? You know, can we get somebody from first time on the job, day zero in 60 days, working at a high degree of proficiency and feeling successful about it? I think that's where there's gonna be a lot of innovation, in the next year or so is trying to elevate what you had as your entry level employee up the chain so that they're making decisions and feeling comfortable and confident that they can do it. Because AI is working hard to automate and do all this... Christopher Pappas (41:08) Yes. Christopher Allen (41:09) ...work that's below. And so can you insert somebody essentially seven years into the role on day one and feel confident that they can do it. And that's going to be a whole different set of skills, a whole different set of support than we've done in the last several decades. We've always thought that, well, we'll have the time to develop people, to scale them appropriately, until they're ready to be a leader. These new systems are going to demand that someone has the ability to make a decision like a leader really, really quickly. And so we need to be planning and educating business leaders on how to do that. And it isn't about giving people more knowledge. It's about giving them practice. Christopher Pappas (42:04) Correct. Christopher, that leads me to another thought. Where do you see leaders making the biggest mistakes when it comes to developing their people? Christopher Allen (42:17) There is an assumption that people want it. There's a couple folks in the L&D industry that have made a career out of supporting frontline workers, deskless workers, people in customer service. And I've been enlightened by them in which they say, know, there are people WHO don't want to progress on a career ladder. They don't ever want to be leaders of people. Christopher Pappas (42:51) Right. Christopher Allen (42:52) They just want to have a really good income and a good situation for them to work in and to just kind of be focused and dedicated in doing that. You know, there are people who don't ever want to work in a big organization. They only want to be a part of a small organization so that they have the opportunity to try all of the things, right? There are folks that really want to be innovators and to try new things and to really push the envelope and learn as much as they possibly can. And I think there are, a lot of mistakes made in assuming everybody wants the same type of progression. And they're all motivated by the same type of achievement. You can achieve in lots of different ways and find great personal satisfaction out of it. And in some cases, you might say as a business, we only want to hire people that want to achieve and succeed in the same way. You look at the big accounting firms that are out there and they put you on a career progression path where if you're not making partner in five years, right? You don't have your own big account and your own big team. They're going to find a way to get you to exit the business. And I think that a good example of, you know what your business needs? Are you treating everybody the same because you think that's what everybody wants? Or are you treating everybody the same because that's the sort of business outcome that you're looking for? And really get that sharply aligned. Because if you can communicate, hey, in five years, if you're not making partner, you know, you don't fit inside this culture. That's a pretty good roadmap. You can manage a business towards that. But if you've got kind of mismatched alignment then a lot of the programs that you're going to put in place aren't going to work. Christopher Pappas (45:03) That's true. That's true. Christopher Allen (45:05) I think there's a lot of that. We just don't call it out directly. Christopher Pappas (45:10) Christopher last but not least, if a leader listens today who wants next year's investment in developing their people to move to a meaningful business metric, what is the first thing they should do? Christopher Allen (45:24) Well, that's a great question. I think, the metric is an important part, at least for the L&D world to be also directly aligned with. And if we're going to spend capital to develop individuals and trying to push the business forward, we have to be razor sharp on aligning these sorts of experiences are expected to have this sort of outcome. And we're doing this all in support of what our success metric is. And so all the way down the train, we know exactly what the expectations of success are. And that's apparently harder, harder to do for a lot of folks than it should be. I mean, it sounds really straightforward that the definition of success should be up and down the chain, but somewhere along the line, when we interpret it to different roles or different parts of the business or different sets of people, we lose a little clarity on what it is that we're marching towards. You know, some of the earlier questions, especially around AI and what can AI do quickly, more content, more experiences that create a whole lot of noise, they can't be a part of this solution. We just have to be really razor focused. And I think in a world where there is so many things coming at our employees all the time, there's more things to read, there's more things to watch, it's harder to get a hold of other people to have a conversation. All of that noise needs to be set aside. And we just, we all need to be aligned, directly through for what does success look like. If we can remove as much noise as possible, it will be a much more enjoyable experience for everybody. Christopher Pappas (47:20) Correct. Let's go to a quick one. Okay. Finish the sentence. Training is a waste of time when... Christopher Allen (47:32) It's a waste of time unless it is really designed to work. You know, the most expensive training an organization can invest in is something that doesn't work. You're wasting 30 minutes, 10 minutes of an employee basis time collectively that rounds up to a lot of money. Christopher Pappas (48:01) Christopher, and what about this sentence? Investing in people becomes valuable when... Christopher Allen (48:07) when? When it becomes valuable when they can do something with it. if you're investing in them to become more competent, but they can't do anything with that competency, it's a waste of time. When you invest in their confidence in order to apply it and they have an opportunity to do it really, really quickly, it's more money in their pocket. It is greater self-worth. It is a feeling of belonging. You know, those are things that everybody's looking for training can make major impact on your life. You know, if I discover I have the skill or the ability to do something that's going to give me great enjoyment, know, it's an awesome feeling. Honestly, the reason to be in Learning and Development is to give as many people that feeling of awesomeness as we can. Right. Oftentimes when we're designing a program, I'm thinking if I can just make one person feel awesome, my job has been satisfied, no matter how hard or how difficult it was to put together that program. Christopher Pappas (49:21) I'm sure you make a lot of people in organizations super happy. Christopher, thank you. Christopher Allen (49:25) Yeah, right. Christopher Pappas (49:29) I think that if there is one thing to take away from this conversation, it is that investing in people, it isn't just about providing more learning opportunities. It's about being much more intentional about what we're trying to change and whether that change is actually making a difference to the individual and to the business. It's been great hearing your perspective and hearing from your experience. And to everyone watching or listening, thanks for being with us. We will see you in the next conversation. Christopher, thank you very much. Christopher Allen (50:07) No, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.