Beyond Orders: The Transformation to a Trusted Learning Advisor
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Keith Keating, Dr. Keith Keating, Chief Learning & Development Officer at BDO and luminary in the field of Learning and Development.
During the episode, Keith underscored the transformative journey of L&D from being reactive order-takers to becoming strategic business partners. This shift, he explained, is crucial for the L&D industry to gain credibility and align more closely with overarching business goals. He emphasized the importance of L&D professionals understanding stakeholder expectations and building trust through effective communication and empathy.
With the rapid advancement of AI and technology, Keith highlighted the necessity for L&D and HR professionals to stay on top of these changes. Embracing technology is not just about staying relevant; it's about leveraging these tools to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in the field.
A key piece of advice from Keith was the importance of being proactive in discussions about workforce development. In an era where AI and automation are reshaping job roles, L&D leaders need to be at the forefront, anticipating changes and shaping the future workforce.
Keith also shares his perspectives on the future of L&D and HR, focusing on the need for continuous adaptation and evolution in response to technological and business changes.
For those in the L&D and HR space, this podcast episode is a must-listen. Keith Keating's insights offer a roadmap for navigating the complexities of the corporate world and making a lasting impact in the field of learning and development.
Episode Highlights
Transforming L&D into strategic business partners, emphasizing the need for credibility and building trust with stakeholders
The role of AI and technology in reshaping L&D and HR practices, urging professionals to adapt and utilize these advancements
Proactive strategies for L&D leaders to anticipate and shape the future workforce in response to AI and automation
Recommended Resources
Follow Keith on LinkedIn
Grab a copy of his book ‘The Trusted Learning Advisor’
Learn more about his services
Fuel skills-based organizations with Design Thinking for HR
Traditionally, the role of HR has focused on administrative tasks and policy enforcement — all of it essential, but none of it transformative. But today, that's no longer the case.
🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Keith 0:00
AI VR AR what's, what's the difference between degreed and Ed cast? Who are the players in the LMS? Space? What is an LMS? When do you use it? When don't you use it? It can get overwhelming with all of those tools. But that's what our credibility is based on. That's what a stakeholder expects from us if we want them to see us as a strategic business partner.
Chris Rainey 0:28
Keith, welcome to the show. How are you?
Unknown Speaker 0:29
I'm good, I'm good. Good to be here.
Chris Rainey 0:32
How are you? It's been a while
Speaker 1 0:33
I'm good. I'm good. Life is good. You know, the books out, it's doing well. Careers. Good. Health is good. Everything's good.
Chris Rainey 0:41
Amazing. How's it feel that the books out now you have kids, so
Keith 0:45
I don't want this to be interpreted the wrong way. But this is the closest I'll have to giving birth to creating something that lives in the world that I'm having to take care of, and nurture and grow. Yeah, it feels it feels really good to just be able to share my knowledge. I mean, I don't know if many people know this. I'm gonna say it's controversial. You don't write a book to make money? You don't write a book to retire? Not anymore
Chris Rainey 1:11
anyway.
Speaker 1 1:12
No, I get 10 10% Is my cut of the book. So for me, it was never about making money. It was about sharing knowledge. That's, that's why our industry exists. So to answer your question, I'm thrilled that I can be able to share this knowledge with anyone and everyone who can
Chris Rainey 1:29
afford the book. Yeah, no, no, I love your honesty, and and even any, any of the offers I speak to right, you know, back in the day, you could you could, you know, make money on books, but now 99% of time, it's really a passion project. Because you want to give something to the world. How many months pregnant? Well, you before the book.
Speaker 1 1:48
Oh, my gosh, many like 16 months.
Chris Rainey 1:55
What you mentioned, obviously, a little bit around the inspiration behind the book. But who is this for? Tell us a little bit more? Mostly tell him? What was the name of the book? And obviously, who was it for? Yeah,
Speaker 1 2:03
it's a good place to start. So it's called the trusted learning advisor it is, although the name is a little bit of a misnomer because you could replace learning with talent or HR. It's not specific to one area. But the answer is it's it's for Talent Development. It's for HR, it's for learning. It's a manifesto. It's a guide, it's toolkit, it's a motivational mentor, that helps you helps all of us to evolve from this place that we've been stuck in, which is predominantly being order takers, you know, somebody else in the business makes the decision on who, what, where, when, why how a learning intervention takes place. They throw that over the wall, we catch it, and they just expect us to execute it. We're at this point where we have to evolve, or our industry really is at risk. And so this book, my intention is to help our industry evolve from being order takers to be in strategic business partners, otherwise known as trusted learning advisors. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 3:05
I've heard you say this before, and I wanted to ask you a question. Do you think l&d or and HR in the same trajectory like obviously, we spoke at literally started doing this when I was 17, which is like 18 years ago, and we're still talking about the seat at the table. But back then I never ever, I do think HR has made huge strides. Would you say the same thing for l&d? I also am I speak to less l&d leaders than I do HR. So what do you think about the evolution of l&d? There's been
Speaker 1 3:33
some progress for l&d, but not enough, absolutely not enough. And part of it. If you look at other parts of the organisation, let's say technology marketing, when I go to my technology team, and I asked for something, they're very quick to say no, they're very quick to say, it's not our process, or you know, has to be approved, or there's all these channels, you have to go through. And I listen, and we inherently listen. And the same if I'm putting a marketing request, or even an HR requests, they have processes and procedures in place that we somehow inherently follow. But we're not treated with that same respect. I can say to my stakeholder, I have a process in place, I need to do a needs analysis. I need to do this. And they'll come back and say no, get it done. And we've inherently listen to that. You know, if you think back to how l&d started in organisations, it was in the manufacturing industry revolution, industrial revolution, managers were determining what the worker needed to do. So the manager would go to, you know, l&d and say, train the worker to move this widget here. And we would go and we'd execute that order. That mindset has continued. And I think part of it is that everybody believes they can do l&d. Everybody believes they can be a trainer, because they've had some experience with education. You know, they've been to schools. They know how this works. But there is truly a science behind what we do. There is a science of learning. So to answer your question is I don't think that we've evolved nearly as left as we need to. And that's what this book is advocating
Chris Rainey 5:03
for. Yeah. You mentioned a little bit there. But why is that the case? A couple
Speaker 1 5:07
of reasons. One, we are an inclusive industry. And what I mean by that is anybody can take a course or not take a course and suddenly say, I'm in learning and development. I'm an instructional designer, I'm a trainer, I'm a coach. It's a low barrier threshold to entry. And I say that and I call myself out because I wouldn't have this career if it wasn't low barrier to entry. You know, if I said to you, Hey, Chris, I want to join, you know, I want to be an HR generalist. There's typically a lot of education that comes along with that, you have to understand the legality behind it in the States or the countries, you have to understand benefits, you have to understand all these different nuances. And it takes training and learning to be able to do that. If I said, Hey, you know, I want to be a coach, or I want to be an instructional designer, because I can go take a quick course on Coursera. And then label myself this when we do that we're doing a disservice to our industry and to the roles, because we're not able to deliver in the manner that our stakeholders need or our learners need, because we're not truly experienced yet. We haven't built that credibility. And that's one of the big things that I think is missing within the l&d industry is taking the time to establish your credibility. So one answer to your question is that low barrier entry, I don't think we've established enough credibility, anybody can transition in, which is a value proposition, but you have to back it up with building the skills that you need.
Chris Rainey 6:33
How have you done this in your own career? For example, you when you joined this organisation? What are the steps that you took to establish your credibility?
Speaker 1 6:41
That's a great question. Let me take a step back. So I would say my first 510 years in the industry, in general, I was an order taker, I did exactly what was needed. And then I built up some experience, I built up some credibility by understanding and having been through certain scenarios before and establishing a point of view, based on my experience, then I tried to speak up, but my stakeholders didn't necessarily want to listen. So I had to refine my skills. And the trusted learning advisor is really built on this idea of consulting skills. You know, I'm not presenting anything that's new or revolutionary, I'm almost encouraging people to take a step back from all these shiny objects in front of us. And think about how do you build relationships? How do you build trust? How do you build credibility? Because we often want our stakeholders to trust us and respect us. But my question back to that practitioners, what have you done to deserve it? Rather than just saying, Yeah, I deserve this, like, good, you should be treated me this way. But why? What have you done? So it kind of to answer your question in my current organisation, or in any organisation, the first thing I do is I go in and build a relationship with the stakeholders. I understand from their perspective, there's a tool in the book I call commitment, partner expectation charter. And that's where we sat down and we established what does this relationship look like? What is it that you expected me? What do I expect of you? How are you going to show up to this relationship? You know, I think about it this way. Imagine if we all had warning labels that we came with, you're like, Chris is allergic to peanuts, or Keith hates chocolate.
Chris Rainey 8:18
I'm actually allergic to peanuts as well, by the way.
Speaker 1 8:22
I guess. So I mean, these are all kind of, you know, basic ideas. But for me, I'll give you an example. I hate the phone. My phone ringer is never ever turned on. But if you text me or you email me, I'll respond in three to five minutes. You should know that as my stakeholder because if you don't you may be calling me. I had an example with a stakeholder once who called me for three or four days. I didn't pick up because I didn't hear it ring. And he didn't leave a voicemail. And so I saw the missed calls. But I saw no voicemail. I was like, Oh, he didn't need to reach me. Meanwhile, when I did see him in the office a couple days later, he went off on me. Now, am I not important enough for you to pick up the phone? I was like, whoa, I'm sorry. You know, you didn't leave voicemail. I don't leave voicemails? Well, neither one of us knew this about each other. So if we had spent the time to develop the understanding of each other at the beginning, we would have a stronger relationship. So building trust, building relationships, and building credibility. I
Chris Rainey 9:16
love that. And I love the fact you said the simple tool in the book was did you choose to share some questions in there as well, too? Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1 9:23
There's a whole appendix of questions on when you're first starting with your relationship with your stakeholder, but also when that order comes in, because in the book I talk about, there's a difference between being an order taker and taking the order. Okay, we should always take the order. I'm not advocating that when your stakeholder comes to you, you don't you push back and you don't take the order. Absolutely not. We take the order. We have to be in the game. We have to be in the discussion. But once you take the order, your next step is what determines whether you're an order taker or a trusted learning advisor. For example, I hear a lot in the industry people say Same. Well, we should push back. If we think that what they're telling us to do is not the right thing we should say, No, I don't agree with that. I think there's a couple of things you have to think about one. Have you just established a relationship? Is this brand new with your stakeholder?
Speaker 2 10:14
Because if you? Yeah, absolutely. If you come out of the gate like Nintendo,
Speaker 1 10:19
that's it, you've shut that door, they now see you as an order taker, not a business partner. So question one, is this a brand new relationship? Question two, is there a fire? When there's a fire, you know, if your house was on fire, you're not going to stand back and say, Well, I wonder what that problem was, I wonder, did I leave the stove on? Is it arson is electrical, no, you get buckets, you get everything you can and you put the fire out, then you do your analysis afterwards. And so we often forget that, and I think we want to push back immediately. But we've got to figure out is there a fire that we've got to react to, and maybe this time, yet we do the thing that we don't maybe agree with, but it helps our stakeholder at that moment, we can coach them and guide them afterwards. At the end of the day, our job, and not just me, you as well, in HR talent development, is to make our stakeholders the hero of their own story. And what I mean by that is sometimes our stakeholders are also order takers. So we're trying to push back on this person that's given us this order, but somebody told somebody told somebody, and they're not telling us, and we're responding, oh, we got to do a needs analysis, we need 18 weeks to be able to do this, I need more money, more resources, like, Hey, I'm just the middle person here, the order was given to me or you got to think about is this a brand new relationship? Is there a fire? And is your stakeholder also in the position of being an order taker? And when you think about those three things that will help you from being an order taker to taking the order? How do
Chris Rainey 11:47
you then take that conversation from there? What steps needs to take place up to
Speaker 1 11:51
be transparent first of all takes time, this is not something that happens overnight. And this is something that I consider a continuum. It is a journey. It's not a destination to be cliche bumper sticker, but it's true. Because you don't get to qualify yourself as being a trusted learning advisor, just like a leader. I can't call myself a leader, the question of whether or not I'm a leader, is anyone willing to be led by me? And the same thing for being a trusted learning advisor? Does my business partner treat me like and acknowledge me as a trusted learning advisor as a strategic business partner? Because if they don't, no matter how great I think I am, I'm not a trusted learning advisor yet, because I need them to see me that way. So you need to understand from their perspective, what does that look like? What does success look like? What are those goals look like for them? Additionally, ask them, ask them point blank, where do they see you on the trajectory of order taker to strategic partner? He
Chris Rainey 12:50
was he was reaction was he was reactions when you've asked him that question. A
Speaker 1 12:54
lot of times it starts off with no, you're more down here as an order taker, and that's fine. If that's how they view me, then that tells me okay, I've got a very high trajectory here. You know, right?
Chris Rainey 13:05
Like, is that would you rather not know and just wander in the dark? Right? Well,
Speaker 1 13:11
and there's some basic ways that you can know without asking to, do they shut you out? Do they bring you into the conversation before the order? Or do they just send you that order? Like how soon in the process of the problem being identified? Do they talk to you? Because if they're talking to you, not at all, and they just given you that order, you're not a trusted learning adviser. The other question you have to ask yourself is, Are you truly embedded in the business order takers tend to think of themselves as a separate entity. You know, l&d is everywhere HR is over here, I see us as being successful when we are so embedded in the organisation holistically. And there's so many value propositions that come from that. It's like systems thinking, we can identify this business unit has a problem similar to this one, and we can connect them even if it's not a learning and development problem. So you've got to be embedded in the business and using their language. We often use our own lnd speak our own acronyms, you know, LMS, LSP, and Moog Kirkpatrick level three, our stakeholders don't care about.
Chris Rainey 14:17
It's not aligned to anything that goes, Oh, yeah. And it's
Speaker 1 14:21
not their responsibility, but it is our responsibility to understand their language. And so here's something that many people don't do or think about, ask for an acronyms guide, asked for a definitions guide. If those don't exist, then get a hold of maybe the last three or five PowerPoint decks that they've put together that talk about their mission, their vision, their values, their strategies, that becomes your language, pull the key words from there and start using it in your discussions with them. That starts to change their mindset of seeing you as an order taker versus their equal or their business partner.
Chris Rainey 14:58
So I'm interested in speaking to a CHR Recently who who joined the business and she was about a year in and I was like, how you getting on with the transformation, etc? And it should like haven't even started. And I was like, what was that? Yeah, I spent the first year getting to know, all of the stakeholders and everything you just mentioned, right? Really understanding what drives them, what motivates them, she flew all over the world to meet them more one to one, sit down, have a similar conversation point blank, ask them exactly how she would like the best to work with together. And then and only and, and also, obviously, of course, still delivering on day to day, objectives, etc. And delivering, and that's something that she did, she said to me, that was one of the things that did really badly early in her career, they should come into organisations immediately try and make change, without built without building those relationships. And it was a disaster. Basically, it was like, wow, so you spent a whole year talking about time, right? before you've even made it like, you know, not made a decision, but you know, really tried to bring around huge train change. And transformation. I was like, wow, you have to Yeah, because if when you come out of
Speaker 1 16:05
the gate hot like that, you're burning those bridges, you know, you're you're the new person that's there. So establishing your credibility is based on those relationships as well. Because, you know, like a doctor, you walk into a doctor's office and you look on the wall, and you're like looking for their credentials, or you go to Google and you're looking at how many reviews do they have? We don't necessarily have that same luxury, I guess unless I want to print out my, my degree. Although I do recommend though l&d practitioners share your credentials with your stakeholders so that they know, you know, but the other thing too, I would say yes, I love what she did in terms of spending a year on building those relationships. Qualitative research is also a fantastic tool, you know, whether you call it empathy research for design, thinking, understanding or qualitative research, but I like to spend time to with frontline workers, not just my stakeholders and leaders, because that's where the real rich data is. Okay, excellent. Yeah. Cuz
Chris Rainey 17:04
you mentioned like, like she was me, you know, also take an opportunity to get to know the business to frontline workers, also the different cultures that existed across the world, in different segments, right. So it's just kind of top down all the way through, really get to spending the day with people on the front line. To your point and understanding from both sides. Yeah, great, great advice. You mentioned, I'm surprised you mentioned showed him your qualifications that I didn't really think that would be itself something of interest or value
Speaker 1 17:32
I send my CV for to a new stakeholder, I'll send them I'll
Chris Rainey 17:36
see if you gotta be.
Speaker 1 17:39
You know, I usually include five articles that I've published over the last year or two that I think would be relevant and valuable to them. So that they can see out of the gate, I have credibility, I have experience. Otherwise, if you don't do that, how are they going to know that? You're just assuming that people know your
Chris Rainey 17:56
use, oh, you spend a lot of your conversation having to do that. And when you you know, you don't want you don't have to spend half your time meeting someone, hey, this is why you should listen to me. This is, this is who I am. Because I was going to ask you all the questions I was gonna ask is how do you convince stakeholders of the value of l&d? Because, yes, there's research, there's articles, there's, you know, tonnes of data out there. But how do you specifically?
Speaker 1 18:20
So that's a really good question. And not a not an easy and quick one, I would say in short. First, it's about the stakeholder what's important to them? How are you meeting their needs, I use qualitative data as well as quantitative, although I'd say I'm a more of a fan of qualitative data, the stories about the impact that we've had and the value that we bring, because ultimately, that's what why we exist, we want to drive value for the organisation, which happens to be through our talent. I will share every six months, maybe sometimes three months, but at least every six months, a rapport with my stakeholder about our successes. However, here's the nuance between what I do and what I think other people do, they typically share it out, though, they'll email and just say, hey, here's our successes. For the last six months, I sit down with my stakeholder and have a discussion on whether or not they agree that these qualify as successes, because I don't want to be telling them what I think is a success for them to read it and not agree with me because ultimately, I'm supporting them. And so I found that when I switch that approach to discussing it, and having them give feedback and and giving their input to and maybe other things that they found to be successful,
Chris Rainey 19:35
is that from the beginning as well, so like kind of it's like you're almost setting by the way, this is where we are and when we have this conversation six months from now, we agree this is what success looks like, are you doing it after
Speaker 1 19:45
both? But so I do it at the beginning we talk about the business partner, expectation charter. So we talked about what are our success, right, exactly what our successes look like, and then reviewing that on a reoccurring basis but We're discussing it and agreeing to it not me reporting out. Yeah. Because I used to just email it out, I put it into a PowerPoint deck, like, Hey, here's our successes in the last six months, send it out, no one can ever gotten the feedback, right? When you sit down and discuss it, they can tell you whether or not they agree with that. The other thing we'll do is we'll then turn that into a white paper or an article and we'll publish that so that others can can learn from that as well. But the value proposition is is never easy. And I would say that it is contextualised to your organisation, because what worked or was valuable at GM is not the same way I would measure value at arch. Well, it's not the same way I've measured HSBC, and I think a lot of times l&d looks for this generalised solution like, you know, Phillips ROI model we should always be using or Kirkpatrick model we should be using, I completely disagree that it's a certain model. It's contextualised to the organisation, what do we consider valuable or success with my stakeholders, but don't just stop there, look at other stakeholders that you don't have a relationship with like the CFO, I'm a huge advocate of building a relationship with the CFO because their role is the same as ours, which is to create value for every business unit in the organisation. And what happens is, they're the ones that report out on revenue, value, etc. And so we run these ROI numbers or reports, we send it out, and then everyone looks at them. They say that's not ROI. Because you can't i can't report out on this, this is not truly a return on investment. Exactly. So what if we took a step back to figure out what would the CFO consider to be value? And how can we articulate that kind of in summary, it's less about what we think is l&d. And it's more about what do our stakeholders believe is valuable? And how do we help them achieve that value proposition?
Chris Rainey 21:50
Interesting. What would you say is the main reason that an indie hasn't evolved as quickly or innovated a
Speaker 1 21:58
couple of reasons, one, our stakeholders, our stakeholders want us to be order takers. And we can come back to this amendment with AI because AI is now the true order taker. And so to me, that's why we have to evolve fast now, because we've got a competitive threat. If they want an order taker, just go to chat DBT, it will create that sales training for you. And it won't ask any questions, it won't ask for more budget that
Chris Rainey 22:24
now you ought to strategic advisor, right, similar to HR, right, a lot of the the manual process of HR has now been automated with AI and technology. So now you have to become that strategic HR business partner. That's your value now that you're bringing to the organisation less or taking?
Speaker 1 22:40
Absolutely, now, but the problem is not all of us are there to be that strategic business partner. That's why they
Chris Rainey 22:49
need to, that's why they made so if on that, on that point, how do we move from being reactive to proactive,
Speaker 1 22:57
so it starts with recognising, taking the order is a way to get us in the room to have a conversation. One strategic strategy that I love is, I've heard for so many years, if I only had a seat at the table, if I can just get a seat at the table, I will have value in a voice. Stop trying to get a seat at the table and build your own table and invite people to come sit with you. So that's one of the best ways that we can move from being reactive to proactive is taking control of the conversation. So I know that that statement sounds ethereal, like a bumper sticker, build your own table,
Chris Rainey 23:36
not like you like proactively reach out to the CFO,
Speaker 1 23:40
but I'll give you another example. Like skills, you know, we're all talking about skills, or we should be take control over that conversation, branded, create a skills Advisory Council, a skills Advisory Committee, whatever the vocabulary is for your organisation, but you take control of that conversation, you invite the people to the discussion, you're the one creating the agenda, the guest list, you're the one doing the research, you know, McKinsey economic McKinsey, Global Institute, World Economic Forum, Deloitte and all this rich research is free and it's available on skills, you bring that to the conversation, you invite a third party practitioner to the conversation, so it becomes less about your voice. And that's one of the best practices that I can recommend is we often, you know, I'm the expert, so I want people to listen to me. Oftentimes I find that people don't want to hear my voice because they're quick to say you don't know my business, you're just l&d. So when I can bring in third party research, internal qualitative research, and a third party external practitioner who is repeating the same thing I'm hearing when our stakeholders hear it from somebody else, and they hear all that data, then it starts to truly sink in. And so it's a great workaround when you're getting that hitting that wall in terms of someone not wanting to listen to you. When I say build your roundtable skills Advisory Committee is one of those examples where you invite these groups of people, and you're curating, facilitating, you know, you're the orchestrator of that conversation. And that starts to help them see you differently, and also help you move from being reactive to proactive
Chris Rainey 25:16
as far as it also allows them to come to the realisation themselves of the value, if that makes sense. So rather than you having like, this is what I think and the way we should do it kind of like fruity education through to meetings through to research, all of those touch points that you're talking about. Their understanding, oh, this is what this means for me.
Speaker 1 25:36
You're not You're leading them. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Rather than trying to, you know, shout like, this is my idea of Mine, mine mine. And that goes back to the earlier point of our job is to make our stakeholders the hero of their story. Yeah, not to try and make l&d look good. And I think so many times we get frustrated, because it's like, I'm not getting any credit for this. You know, I our team did all of that. It's implicit. When when we make our stakeholders successful, it's implicit that we're the ones that are supporting them, because we're the ones that have helped them, it will come out eventually, we don't need to have the floor and be able to try and raise awareness that oh, you know, we're so great. We're so great. When we've made them look good. They remember that and they're going to keep engaging with
Chris Rainey 26:21
us. How do you look at like delivering on a day to day whilst being present and educating yourself around all these new shiny objects that are coming towards you.
Speaker 1 26:32
So a trusted learning advisor has the biggest toolkit possible. And it doesn't mean that we're experts and all of those tools, we're not know it alls. We're learning it alls. So we need to have an understanding of all of them. Ai, VR, AR what's what's the difference between degreed and Ed cast? Who are the players in the LMS? Space? What is an LMS? When do you use it? When don't you use it? It can get overwhelming with all those tools. But that's what our credibility is based on. That's what a stakeholder expects from us, if we want them to see us as a strategic business partner, to have all of this awareness and understanding. So to answer your question, I would say every day I am spending, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes, at least, if not also on the weekends and at nights to get experience in these other areas. Because they expect to you know, they come to us, to me all the time. Oh, I want VR. Well, why do you even know Judo know what that means? Right? Well, it's, you know, it's kind of cool, it's shiny. And for 10 years, VR was going to end and change the space that it was like MOOCs are going to disrupt college universities. And now we have a true disrupter, which is AI, we have to become subject matter experts, or at least deeply aware of AI. The difference between AI and VR is the accessibility of VR, it first of all, it's extremely cost prohibitive to build a VR course, then you have to have the equipment to go along with it. AI is now a part of our life, and there is no future. There's no version of the future that exists without AI. And the fact that it's available universally means that we've got to catch up and be more familiar with it and our stakeholders, because they're playing with it as well. And they're pretty quickly going to figure out if they said like, oh, you can do some really quick, easy things, you know, from an l&d perspective, so why do I need my l&d team, so we have to be that strategic business partner to help demonstrate to them why they do need us. And one of those reasons is understanding AI. Understanding how it's going to impact the roles in our organisation, because every leader right now is asking themselves the same question. How can I use AI to increase my revenue, increase my effectiveness and efficiency and decrease my costs? Which basically means my resources, how can I get rid of people to do what I can do better and faster and cheaper, and AI is going to absolutely disrupt a number of jobs, whether it destroys jobs, changes jobs, or creates new jobs. All three of those is the opportunity for l&d to rise up to the occasion and prepare the workforce prepare the talent that's going to be impacted. But we can't do that. If we're not credible and have the expertise to be able to do
Chris Rainey 29:23
that. Really, one of the things I've been taking away from this conversation is it's an incredible moment and opportunity in time for HR l&d. Would you agree?
Speaker 1 29:32
Absolutely. Not only an opportunity, in my opinion, it's a true precipice of what is the future look like for l&d? Well, again, I'm repeating the same thing, but chat. GPT is an order taker, and it makes training, okay, and maybe even good, it creates good training material doesn't follow the science of learning. It's not better than us. But sometimes good is good enough for our stakeholders. And once they figure all this out, they're going to be looking do I need lnd. And that is a real question that we should even be asking ourselves in terms of what's the value proposition that we bring, you should be able to answer that proposition. So yes, it's an opportunity for us to truly rise to the occasion, prepare our talent for the shift that's coming, because it's already happening. It's our opportunity, we've got to evolve from order takers to trusted learning advisors. I'm
Chris Rainey 30:24
seeing for example, the skills that needed to be an HR leader have just massively evolved almost unrecognisable. In terms of the skills that you need, what are the top skills that you feel that clo in this day and age needs to be successful?
Speaker 1 30:41
understanding concepts like strategic alignment concepts like learning needs analysis, stakeholder engagement, but I guess if I went to the just the skills perspective, strategic thinking, analytical thinking, our it's our human skills, empathy, listening, problem solving, relationship building, curiosity, continuous learning, it's less about that transactional tactical training, concept of training. It's the human side of it,
Chris Rainey 31:13
and storytelling. You mentioned earlier, how important that is. We did our people analytics Summit, a few months back, we had 4000 VPs of people analytics, and one of the insights that came out of asking all of those leaders questions around this, between success and failure is the ability to actually tell the story to the stakeholders. It wasn't even about the any of the technical things. And yet the number they need to scale was is that how do we translate the work and tell a story that captures, like you said earlier, in terms of how you measure ROI, the storytelling piece was the most important thing. And I was like, Oh, wow, as a people analytics person, I didn't think that would be the most important thing. What's
Speaker 1 31:48
interesting is my doctoral research was on chief financial officers. And I was studying them to understand what value do they find in learning and development in the organisation. And one of the biggest findings that I took away from that research is they want the qualitative data. They specifically were saying, Stop sending me these Excel spreadsheets with your mathematical equations. Yeah, because that's meaningless to me. Yeah, I can't actually use this. But one of the stories behind how you're impacting and by the way, don't come to me when it's budget season. You know, that's the obvious time to build a relationship with the CFO do not do that. Get them off season. Don't ask them just for the budget.
Chris Rainey 32:30
So everyone's going at the same time. It's terrible. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1 32:35
need a budget. Don't cut my budget. No build it offseason, when it's not about the budget. I mean, we know that that may be the your long term goal. But the other thing that I uncovered as well was there's there's been this fear that the CFO cuts the l&d budget first, and what I took away from my research is absolutely not any cost centre is up for grabs. And they don't, at least the ones I interviewed said I've never targeted l&d I target any caught in a cost centre. And so what I'll say is take 10% off of all the cost centres. And of course, we're in l&d, so we hit we feel that and we think, Oh, my gosh,
Chris Rainey 33:13
it's just us hate. I'll say the same thing. So marketing,
Speaker 1 33:15
yeah, it's marketing. It's HR. Sometimes it is not just us.
Chris Rainey 33:19
Yeah, really random question. But like, what are some of the things that l&d leaders aren't talking about enough, but really should be?
Speaker 1 33:27
I mean, I would repeat everything we've talked about so far, you know, building relationships outside of the obvious ones. I don't hear anybody talking about I don't hear enough people talking about how to truly solve the skills crisis. And and in theory, everyone's talking about it. Oh, we have to have a Skills Organisation, the more skills based organisation, how are you actually doing that? What keeps me up at night? I'm going to answer this a different way, is the fact that l&d is not looking at what roles may truly be impacted in the next two to three years and the organization's and how can we be a part of the conversations? And how can we start planning for that now? So I'll tell you in my organisation today, I know right now, no one's told me this. I know right now that 30% of our workforce is at risk now that we have aI because we have a tonne of frontline workers that are doing the exact role that AI is going to be able to do for them. I know this right now. So it is my responsibility as a learning leader to be planning to help those individuals build the skills to either cross train transfer internally or prepare them for skills externally, when their jobs come to an end. I feel like too often we are reactive in this point where these decisions are made, you know, HR someplace else, and then all of a sudden we hear their layoffs, and we're laying off X percent of the company most likely you knew that that was coming in at some point. There were indicators there was a runway, so I'm not hearing enough. Come conversations about how do we drive the conversation to figure out which roles are potentially at risk, and how we help that talent prepare today, rather than just laying them off and let it be somebody else's responsibility.
Chris Rainey 35:12
I hate that when I see CEOs that those large companies dump on, you know, the news and the media being like, Oh, we had no idea that this was coming, you knew? And I'm like, wait a minute. Well, it was like a bug you you hired, you know, 100,000 people, or however many 50,000 people during this period. And you thought that, that that growth was just going to continue magically forever? Like, you knew you knew exactly what was happening that and then, yeah, I love that. I love the fact you own that as well. Right? You know, and that's something you carry yourself and just like my smile, opportunity to help risco and upskill our employees to make, it's not just
Unknown Speaker 35:47
me, though,
Speaker 1 35:48
I mean, every learning leader could take a step back and just look, now you have to understand AI a little bit. I mean, I'm not by far an AI expert, but I played with it to understand I'm curious about it. And so there are things that it's replaced. For me in my life. I personally had a copywriter, I had an editor, and I had a marketing team creating my graphics. I don't need any of those anymore. GPG does that by immediately, no, okay, if I can replace people in my life, that of course, in my company and elsewhere, you know, copy writers are potentially at risk marketing people are at risk, you know, where are these activities that AI does better than us? And then look in your organisation figure out how can our organisation use this, because every, as I said, every leader wants to figure that out. We don't need somebody else to tell us the roles that are potentially impacted. You can figure it out ourselves. So figure it out and start to create a plan so that you can build skills for those individuals to either transition transition internally or externally.
Chris Rainey 36:49
This is okay, I think we got to leave some for the book. To read the rest, don't give it all don't give it all away.
Unknown Speaker 36:57
I need my 10%
Chris Rainey 37:00
so far let you go where can people grab a copy of the book and also follow you if they want to reach out say hi, and connect with you? What's the best place? Yeah,
Speaker 1 37:08
so for the book, whatever your favourite book retailer is, you know, Amazon is always the easiest one, but for those non Amazonians, Barnes and Nobles, Walmart, whatever it is, it's available online. LinkedIn, I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. So please feel free to connect with me there are my website is Keith keating.com.
Chris Rainey 37:26
Amazing man. Well, I'm honestly super happy for you I'm and when we first spoke and this was in your mind's eye and you were thinking about the book and here we are. So really happy to see all the success you're having. And for everyone listening, as always, all of those links are gonna be below wherever you're listening or watching. The links will all be there to make your life very easy. Listen, I wish you all the best and I'll see you soon. All right, absolutely.
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