Training Frontline Operational Leaders to Manage Crisis & Disruption: A Conversation with Paul Falcone

CommLab Podcast with Paul Falcone

Sherna Varayath 10:23
Hello there and welcome back to the eLearning Champion Podcast where we dive deep into the strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of learning and development. Today's episode is really unique, as we'll be talking about how L&D teams can help frontline operational leaders manage effectively through crisis and disruption. I'm delighted to introduce you to our speaker for today, Paul Falcone.
Hi, Paul.

Paul Falcone 11:07
Hi Sherna. Nice to see you.

Sherna Varayath 11:10
Thank you. We're thrilled to have you join us today. Paul is the Principal of Paul Falcone Workplace Leadership Consulting LLC, a renowned HR expert, executive coach, and keynote speaker. With extensive experience as former ChRO at Nickelodeon Animation and Head of International HR for Paramount Pictures, he advises on leadership and management across various industries.

Paul is a bestselling author of multiple books on workplace leadership and talent management translated into 6 languages with over 7,50,000 copies sold worldwide. He's also a contributor to Society for Human Resource Management and an adjunct faculty member at UCLA Extension. Thank you so much for joining us today, Paul.

Paul Falcone 12:05
It's my pleasure Sherna. That was a beautiful intro. Thank you for that.

Sherna Varayath 12:08
Thank you. Glad that it's good. So before we dive into your listeners, make sure you never miss an episode packed with valuable tips and inspiring stories by hitting that Follow button from wherever you're listening to us from. OK, now to get started. Paul, what are the biggest challenges facing so many people globally right now in their workplaces? And why do fear, panic, and depression inflict so many members of our youngest generation of workers?

Paul Falcone 12:41
It's a big question and it does impact everyone who's in the L&D space.

One of my books, not the last one that I wrote, but the one before that, was part of the First Time Manager series for Harper Collins. And it was called the first time manager leading through crisis and coming out of COVID, coming out of this once in a century pandemic. We're still in this post COVID reintegration phase. It's very difficult out there. And people are feeling it in the workplace. We talk about burnout. We talk about people who are exhausted at work, the desire to leave the company where you work to go somewhere else.

But there's so much noise, Sherna. You know when you think about the politics that have got the world, the wars that are going on across the globe, the global warming. This isn't stuff that they just leave at home, and when they come to work, they're just happy. This is all part of our world experience right now, and workers bring that into the office. And so when I was excited to do this presentation, it was because to me, the idea is in the L&D space, we have to be coaches, we have to be able to do that too. And we have to recognize that this crisis and disruption that is going on is part of our role now, regardless of whether we're management trainers or sales trainers or technical trainers. We have to understand where our audience is coming from.

Sherna Varayath 14:08
Right. How can an L&D team address many of the key concerns facing today's workers, including the ones you just mentioned? Global walls, political destabilization, or even fear of AI?

Paul Falcone 14:28
Fear of AI too, that's a good one. I should have thought of that. Good for you.

When you think of an executive coach, they do two things. When they work with someone, they raise their level of self-awareness for the client and they raise their level of self-confidence. Those two things are ultimately what executive coaching is all about.

I came from the training space where I was doing sales training earlier in my career and nowadays I do management leadership training, and that's what my books are all about. But the reality is for the trainers themselves, even if you're a deep dive technical trainer, you have to know your audience and you have to understand that they're coming to the table sometimes without peace of mind. They're so worried about other things that are going on that they can't concentrate on the training, so I think each trainer needs to be a bit of a coach. I mean, you're not an executive coach, don't get me wrong. But you do have to have a higher level of self-awareness for where your audience is coming from, and if there's one piece of advice that I can give trainers no matter what part of the L&D world you're in, build people’s self-confidence. Help them feel better. Make it concrete. When I talk to people in the training, it's like what can you use immediately afterwards. Not everything is meant for that. Sometimes we're talking to them and it's more about career introspection, and I tell people we're going to spend an hour together and that's great. The most important part of this training is on your drive home tonight, because when you drive home tonight, you can think about this and figure out what is it that you want to adopt and what is it that you want to change? But at the same time my expression is give people back to themselves. People are kind of lost a little bit, the Gen Z generation, the 27 and under generation is testing as the most isolated, loneliest, and most depressed generation on the planet, even more so than retirees in retirement homes. And that's because they're the first truly digital generation, and the social connections that people like me (I'm a baby boomer), have had this generation, doesn't have as trainers as good teachers in general. You have to be able to connect with your audience. And you have to make sure that you can be that solution for them, you can help them find their way back to themselves. So that's the bigger picture for me in the training space. But I think it's such an important piece of awareness that trainers need to be connected to.

Sherna Varayath 16:58
Correct. Generally speaking, L&D helps upskill workforces to meet the needs of tomorrow. So should helping people find peace of mind truly be an element of focus for an L&D team’s training curriculum?

Paul Falcone 17:22
Yes, I think so. Think of the peace of mind concept Sherna. The question I would always ask my employees on my team, either individually and/ or as a group is this: Are you able to do your very best work every day with peace of mind? And somehow when you ask that question, the peace of mind thing gets people to talk. And they'll say sometimes, well, you know Paul, I wasn't going to say anything and wasn't going to complain. But since you're asking, well, no, I can't do all my best work every day with peace of mind. And that opens up a conversation. And then we can talk about, well, why is that? And share that with me. Now again, as a trainer, these people don't report to you. So it's different. You're not the employee relations person and you're not the HR generalist.

I'm not saying try and tease out reasons why they're not happy, that's not the point. The point is to say when you can tell the people that you're training new content, whatever that content is, whatever that format is, everybody, I want you to be able to master this with peace of mind. I want your self-confidence in this particular area to be higher than ever, I want you to be able to sleep well at night knowing that not only are you good at this, but you like it.

And I think when you say it, you smile as a trainer. They smile when they hear it because people, the expression we always use in the United States is, I've got your back, right?

‘I've got your back’ basically means that I'm there for you and you're not doing this alone. It's the same concept with training. To the degree that you can incorporate that kind of language as you're imparting the training and the new knowledge, you'll find that their heads nod and their eyes are locked in, and they're engaged.
And they're learning. And again, it's that idea, build their self-awareness, build their self-confidence. Let them walk out with something concrete that they can use immediately and not be afraid of, so that they can play with it. Whatever it happens to be, you'll be a great trainer as long as you can make that human connection.

Sherna Varayath 19:29
Human connection is really valuable, right? So what are some of the most common drivers of crisis and disruption that L&D teams should listen for and potentially address in their training?

Paul Falcone 19:45
Yeah, Sherna, very good question. When I had written the book, I wrote it in three sections. Part 1 was individual crises, Part 2 was departmental and team crises, and Part 3 was company and global crises or community crises, things outside the organization. Any of those three could impact a person's ability to concentrate in the classroom, or master the material, or go back to their office and say, I didn't get anything out of that training, it was a waste of time. That's no fault of the trainer.

They just weren't in the mind space to be able to learn new things at that moment. So again, what I would say is, of course, if we see someone in the training who doesn't appear to be listening, I wouldn't call them out in public. But when we take a break, I would ask to speak to the person on the side, and ask that question about everything going OK with you individually or with your team and your department or with the company as a whole? Is there anything that you want me to be aware of? And see where they go, because you never know. Someone may be suffering from something, and you need to put them in different hands. You can say, well, are you OK to finish the training? Yes, I am.

OK now as far as that's concerned, I may not be your best resource. But I'd be happy to stay with you afterwards and we can connect you to human resources or to employee relations or whatever. It's just the idea that we're not rubber stamping training. It's not a checkbox. It’s not: OK, he's been trained on that, check, next, bring the next one in.

It isn't meant to be that, and I think as long as trainers, just like good managers, good leaders, there's a connection that they're making. I've always said great leadership is an emotional connection. When people describe the best boss they've ever had, it's not their technical skills that they're describing. It's who they were, it's their character, it's their caring, the respect, the trust. Trainers have a great opportunity to do the same thing. You can create trust and respect in the first 5 minutes of a meeting or as a matter of fact, you can even set your rules. What I would do as a trainer is, I'd say, OK everyone, let's talk about the top three things that are important to me in this workshop. And before we go any further, I want to hear what your top priorities are.

But I can talk about my rules in terms of respect, allowing people to finish their thoughts, making sure that you ask the question in the moment, don't save it for the end because you're going to forget it by then. But you know I'm here, you guys, I've got your back. I want to build yourself awareness. I want to build your self-confidence and when you go home, when this training is over in two hours, I want you to feel like you got this. That's my goal.

It's funny. Taking two minutes at the beginning of a training to just say something like that changes the whole engagement level because people feel more comfortable that human connection is automatically made.

Sherna Varayath 22:34
That's correct. How can L&D train managers to become mentors and coaches to their teams, especially during times of extreme change?

Paul Falcone 22:55
Yeah, I feel like the times of extreme change only keep going faster. It does feel that way. The term I use is during COVID we became adrenaline junkies. The changes came so fast. The other expression they use is you're building the plane while you're flying it. We're trying to figure this out in thin air. We have no idea. There's no precedent.

And that's what happened. OK. Now flash forward. That was figure 2020 to 2022-2023. But the global instability, the politics in the United States, at least in our experiences, we've never seen anything like this before. Everything seems to be under attack. I don't think if you're training someone in technical training, you should talk about these things. You don't open up and talk about it, that wouldn't be appropriate. That's not what the training is for. But at the same time, you have to be aware of the signs. There are little things that I think trainers can do. Like opening it up with the idea of respect and the idea of trust and the idea of I've got your back and the idea of I want to build your self-confidence and when you go home tonight, I want you to feel like you've got this.

That's on the opener. On the back end, you can say, anyone if there's anything that you felt you needed to share but didn't feel comfortable doing it publicly and you want to talk to me privately, please stay afterwards and I'm happy to talk with you. But you'll be surprised. And the reason I say this is.

Now going back to the individual crises when you've got people who are hurting, they could relate with a trainer in an hour or two, more so than they can relate with a manager or maybe their coworkers. That person could become a real resource for them. Or if they've got a team or departmental problem or problem with their boss, they'll come up to the trainer and say, listen, I'm having these problems. I know that's not what you do, but can you help me?

Look at these opportunities to put them in the right hands, right? Who's the best resource for them in that particular circumstance? And make sure you're getting those resources that they need, because it's hard. And I say that for everybody, the world is not easy for anybody right now. And I just think we have to be aware of that and it's like, OK, the world is going to go through these times. But boy, when you train, there's an ability to bond, when you go into a training and you just connect with that trainer. That's a really good feeling, and especially if you're in a big company and you're not getting along with other people, that person could become your go to person because you need someone to give you advice. Just be open to it.

I'm not saying manage other people's employees because that's not appropriate. But my expression is listen with your eyes and your heart in addition to your ears. If they've got someone who's kind of relatable, they'll talk to them and at that point you can say, well, let me introduce you to the HR person. Let me introduce you to whoever because I think they're going to be able to help you. You'll sleep better at night, but you have to realize that the training function is a unique function that touches a lot of people's lives and can expand beyond whatever the immediate training is that you're doing. So just to be aware of that.

Sherna Varayath 26:06
Wow. That's a very interesting perspective. Like training does reach out and expands in different aspects of our life.

Paul Falcone 26:19
And the same thing. Learning how to coach is different than learning how to manage. And so I spent so much time teaching managers how to coach. The logical connection was well, listen, I was in L&D for a good part of my career. I didn't really think about it. It's like I had a job to do, sales training or had a job to do X training whatever it was. But the times are more extreme right now. People are frightened, people are nervous. Now is the time to understand that there's a broader gift that you give in being their teacher. You can teach wisdom. It's more than teaching knowledge, right? Wisdom is knowledge applied. It's a higher level. You have to be prepared to switch from the ‘knowledge teaching’ to the ‘wisdom teaching’ because someone may need your help in that moment. And you may be the only resource that they have.

Sherna Varayath 27:12
Right, absolutely. CU service show that innovation, agility, and accountability are core concerns for growing organizations. So how can L&D teams prepare their workforces for matters relating to emotional intelligence or self-awareness and a healthy sense of otherness, and, let's say selflessness?

Paul Falcone 27:40
It's a great question. To me, first of all, we're role models. If you're in the L&D space, you are the teacher. If you're the teacher, you're the subject matter expert. The behaviors that you model for everyone else sends a big message about who the organization is, right? So that's one thing to keep in mind. The next thing is when you think of CEOs, there's so many studies out there on CEO priorities and what they want. When I was growing up, when I was younger in my career, we called them soft skills. And when I would tell managers we're going to do soft skills training, they'd be like, no, we're not, get out of here, we don't need soft skills training. Now all of a sudden, we call it emotional intelligence. And it's one of the top five things that CEOs are looking for. It's the same thing, but they packaged it differently.

But understand in COVID, what managers or CEOs realized was our most important assets really do go home at night and they may not come back the next day. We have the great resignation. There were all these issues of people leaving companies and saying life is too short and they couldn't find anyone. And I'm not just talking about Fortune 500 companies. I'm talking about the local restaurants. They couldn't find waiters and cooks. I mean, where did the people go? All of a sudden, the C-Suite realized that the most important asset that we have is actually the people. So it really took a once in a century pandemic to make this realization happen. But what they said was if people are going to be working remotely because they weren't allowed to come to the office, how do we make sure that they feel engaged? And the bottom line is, they're engaged, they're giving discretionary effort, they're performing as well as they would be in the office if we could see them. And what they realized was it's the relationship they have with their boss. That's the most important thing.

Money is important, benefits are all, I get it. But the relationship with your boss is the most important thing. And if you'll remember, there's that book called First Break All the Rules where the Gallup organization studied thousands of companies and tens of thousands of workers. And they came up with that famous expression that says ‘People join companies but leave managers’, right? They join the company. They're excited to be part of the company, but two years later, they're like, I can't stand this person that I work for, I'm leaving. Once they realize, wait a second, it's the relationship that the managers have with their employees that even if they're out of sight, they still feel connected and they still feel like they can do their best work.

That's when they realized that, ah, this emotional intelligence stuff is about human connection. And that's something that in this country, at least in the United States, we've taken that for granted. We always thought that if someone leaves, you just run an ad on LinkedIn and all the fish jump in the boat and you just pick whatever fish you like. That's not the case. Talent scarcity will be the rule for all industrialized countries. It will be the rule of the land for the rest of the century. There's a great book out there called the Next 100 Years, and it's by George Friedman. It was a New York Times bestseller, but it basically talks about how all of the major economies in the world will suffer from talent scarcity, and you have to know how to grow your own. You can't just rely on talent acquisition. It's about talent development. You have to grow your own people.

So again, from a leadership standpoint, when you sit in the L&D suite, that perspective is important. You're not just teaching them particular skills. You're growing talent. You are building a bench of strength for your company, to take your company forward, because the retention is critical and your job is to help build out the high potentials, to build out the emerging leaders, to find the ones who really excel. And when you see those people in those training situations, make sure you reach out to their bosses and say, ‘I just want to let you know I had 17 people in that class and Paul Falcone really stood out. I was so impressed with him and I just wanted to pick up the phone and tell you that’. Because this awareness could be missed very easily. But again, you're part of talent retention. You're the key to talent development and that's where everything is going. So again, you're at the tip of the spear in terms of helping companies thrive and reinvent themselves. It's cool. It's a good time. It's a cool time in that sense.

Sherna Varayath 32:13
Yes. Coming to the Gen Z, Zoomers continue to test out as the loneliest and most isolated and most depressed generation on the planet as you mentioned a while ago. So how can L&D teams address their needs as well as the needs of the managers who oversee them?

Paul Falcone 32:39
You could almost do separate training for quote unquote ‘managing employees in their 20s’. It is different and every generation to me, Sherna, has a chance to reinvent itself, reinvent the workplace, and reinvent their life experiences. And every generation always has.

But that expression, ‘but it's different this time’ is true here. The reason why it is different is this is the first truly digital generation. This generation does not know a time without cell phones.

When I was young as a baby boomer, if I wanted to call you because you're my friend and I’d call you at your house. Each house had one phone with a rubber wire connected to it in the kitchen. And when I called your house, one of your parents answered the phone. And I would say Hello to your parents, and they would say, Hello, Paul, how's your family? Oh, we're fine. Thank you. Can I please speak to Sherna? That turned into one child has a phone, one child has a phone, and they call each other.

That turned into well, we both have phones, but we don't use them as phones. We just text and IM each other.

In all that, though, there was a social isolation that happened, and the COVID pandemic did not help. Now these are younger high school students, college students, they had to do it remotely, they couldn't even go to their own graduations. When they come into the workforce. My son started a job in 2022 in Chicago for a company that was headquartered in Boston. In 2022, you weren't allowed to fly. He didn't meet his boss in person for over one year.

It was different. It's very, very different. So again, what I think L&D professionals need to understand is the socialization element is not necessarily natural. It's not necessarily comfortable to the younger generation, but I will also say this. As a society, we've lost our ability to pass wisdom from the elder generation to the younger generation. We don't sit around the campfire anymore and pass around the peace pipe and talk.

Managers have to do that with staff meetings, but L&D professionals have to do that too. You've got to get people almost into a discomfort zone so that they become more comfortable sharing and making themselves vulnerable in a healthy sense. But being able to talk about things, that's a key element. I don't care what you train.

When you think about the younger Gen, your job is to help them socialize more and to get more comfortable in that space. And again, your management training should focus on that too, because it is a different level of training for the younger generations that only knows digital. But the digital in many ways has replaced interpersonal relationships. And that's causing this sense of loneliness. And that's something that we need to overcome.

Sherna Varayath 35:38
Correct. So Gen Y millennials and Gen Z Zoomers are of course, the most studied generational cohorts of all time. They want career and professional development, a healthy sense of work life family control and the management team that cares about them personally. The return to onsite work movement does offer many benefits. Yet many members of these two generations specifically resist fully on site work schedules and insist on remote or hybrid work schedules. So where's the balance and what trends do you foresee?

Paul Falcone 36:23
That is an excellent question. I just wrote a blog on that on my website because I think it's so important. It's interesting. So here's what the research showed me when I did this. About 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are hybrid, and they're following a 3-2 model, meaning three days in the office, two days remote. That's about the average. The days in the office tend to be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The remote days tend to be Monday, Friday.

So if you think about that, about 80% of Fortune 500 companies are doing that. So are a lot of non-Fortune 500 companies. That seems to be the norm. I don't think we're ever going to go back to full onsite 5 days.

There's no reason to. We’ve got the digital technology, we’ve proved during the pandemic that we can still keep the wheels on the bus, we can still keep the businesses running without being 40 hours a week onsite.

The question now to me, and the reason I wrote this article was, some companies are starting to move from three days to four days. There's a change.

I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing, again, I don't think we're going to go to five days. I would be surprised to see that because companies know they will lose talent. They won't be able to recruit effectively, and they won't be able to retain if they don't have any remote. Because remember, one of the things the young generations want is, they want work, life, family balance. And because the level of angst is so high, anxiety, the pressure is really, really there. One of the natural release valves, one of the natural things that happened was OK, but you only have to go in three days a week, or possibly four days a week.

What I done in my blog is I wrote this article, and I said OK, if your company needs to move from three days to four days because I don't think it's ever going to go to five.

But you know, here's the script. And use the script from your heart. And this is important for trainers too. I understand where the younger Gen is automatically saying I don't want to go into the office at all, but if I have to go in, the less the better. The only problem is, truthfully, I've been talking to CEOs in my consulting practice and they're not coming from ‘productivity paranoia’, if we can't see them, we don't know what they're doing, they must come back. That's not what people are talking about. That's not the dialogue, the dialogue that I hear is, you know what, Paul? Some of the best friendships I've ever made, the best mentors I ever had, were in my early years in my career. I'm still friends with a lot of those people. And I feel so bad for these younger gens who have gone through COVID. They couldn't go to school, they couldn't walk down the aisle when they graduated. They're working remotely.

I read a statistic, I don't remember exactly what it was. It was like 20% of the Gen. Z Zoomers, the ones who have jobs, are still working from the bedroom that they grew up in, in their family homes. Things are too expensive. There's just too much stuff going on. But the bottom line is, again, you got to give people back to themselves. I think the idea to me Sherna is, as a coach, as a mentor, as a trainer, as a manager, you have to be sensitive to these things. And understand that while I get it, I know they say they don't want to have to work on site, you have to sell the benefits.

You have to talk about the importance of friendships, the importance of mentorships. You as a CEO, when you send your message as a business owner, send that message with a heart that says the most important connections I've made, I made in my first ten years in business and I'm just afraid that people aren't getting that experience and I want to make sure that everyone feels connected to our culture. I also know that we're going to get the best collaboration when people are working side by side. You can only do so much over a Zoom or Teams or Meets call. So sell those benefits and sell them from your heart. And Amazon, they just said you come back to work starting this day. They didn't give any transition time, or you're fired. And what happened is a lot of people left Amazon in Northern California and San Francisco. They left Amazon. They went straight to Microsoft, so Microsoft got all these people. Amazon shot itself in the foot. You have to have a heart.

People are used to a certain way of, we're only doing three days a week. If you're going to move it to four, you better give me 90 days’ notice at least. I've got to rearrange for childcare and everything else. And the final thing I said in the article was give them some kind of incentive. And I'm not saying pizza. I'm not saying give them food. That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is about creating a formal mentoring program on your campus, or developing some type of rotational leadership opportunity where people get to spend time in other departments to learn about different groups. Put something together that they would not be able to do remotely, but now that they're coming together more in person, I have an opportunity to sit in other departments to meet with people outside my original group, to collaborate with people that I don't normally work with.

Give them something that motivates them to come back. So again, as a trainer, be aware of where this stuff is going, be part of that solution, be part of that energy, be part of that movement. Because the CEOs are looking for agility, and flexibility and accountability, all that stuff. Even if you're not doing leadership and management training and talking about that per se, you can still weave that into your sales training or your technical training or whatever it happens to be. It becomes part of who you are. That's part of your brand as a leader or as a trainer and that will come out because you're linking what you're teaching them to those very core values. And that makes a big difference. That's how people see you and they'll say that's the best trainer I've ever had because he understood more than the training. When I sat in Paul's class, he connected me to a higher purpose within that organization, and he helped me see things about my career that I never even thought of. That's the greatest gift I think a trainer can give.

Sherna Varayath 42:48
Yes, absolutely. Now coming to a different question. What role should gratitude play in leading teams and how can L&D specialists discuss gratitude during their training sessions so that frontline operational leaders can make gratitude and recognition part of their personal brand?

Paul Falcone 43:12
Yeah. Now that'll fall more under the leadership and management training window.

But the funny thing is, I talk about it all the time. I've always talked about it with my teams when I was a manager myself. And again, my corporate career ended three years ago in 2022 because I launched my own consulting firm. But I did 3 decades in corporate talking to people about gratitude and what is it that we're thankful for?

And again, you guys, I'm just going to take two minutes, but just focus in on this for a minute. Anyone want to share what they’re grateful for? I'll go first, and I want to talk about this company because this company I've been with for seven years and what I was able to do here was blah blah, blah, blah blah. They've kept a roof over my head, they helped me put my kids through school. I'm grateful for a lot of things about being here. Is anyone comfortable sharing? And you can do that for three minutes. But the funny thing, it gets people in the right mindset, the opposite of gratitude is ‘not enoughness’.

And in this world, there's not enough of a lot of things, especially now. There's not enough peace of mind, there's not enough calm. There's too much anxiety. There's too much change. There was that famous book Who Moved my Cheese. If you've heard of that one about the little mice, it's a cute little parable. But the mice, when you move the cheese, some of them are OK with it. Some of them are not OK with it. Most human beings are the same way. You can't move my cheese. That cheese is supposed to be there. Well, if you're going to build agility, you have to help people understand that the cheese is going to be moving more often. And what does that actually mean, what does that look like in your world?

And the funny thing is, the anchor is gratitude. If you can keep coming back to this sense of gratitude, which automatically gives you peace of mind, it helps you realize you know what, doesn't matter what I'm learning, and it doesn't matter how quickly the business is changing, I'm going to be OK. And then the next gift that you have is OK and if you feel that sense of I'm going to be OK, I will tell him as a trainer. I'm only going to ask you one other thing. Give it away. Pay it forward. Give it to someone else, because the universe knows you cannot give away anything that you do not already have. So to the degree that you can give away peace of mind, you can give away self-confidence, you can give away self-awareness and whatever else, it just comes back to you. Karma is real, right? What emanates from you returns to you. Give that gift.

And trainers, especially in a world that's moving towards talent development, and talent retention and internal promotion, where do we have to look? We have to upskill, we have to reskill, we have new AI technology, blah blah blah.

Who's doing that? Who's training this stuff?

So I think that our role is getting much broader because it's just the way industry trends, and business trends, and economic trends are moving.

But boy, you have an opportunity to explode your profession right now, not just to be a great technical trainer, but to be a teacher of wisdom. And that's really where you're going to feel so much better about yourself because you're living your own values.

Sherna Varayath 46:21
So coming to values, how can a value based leadership minimize the effects of crisis and disruption in the workplace?

Paul Falcone 46:34
That's a good question. I should write about that in my book, and I'll tell you a quick example. Nickelodeon Animation was the best job I ever had, it was a fun place to work. The GM, the general manager who headed up the studio, was the best manager I ever worked for. And when new hires came in, he would sit with them on Day 1 and he would go around the room. Usually about 15 people or so, it wasn't a big studio, about 600 people. But every two weeks, with new productions coming, Mark would sit with them and say, tell me about yourself and tell me about your background real quickly we go around the room. Tell me why you came to Nickelodeon. And the truth of the matter is they were leaving Disney, they were leaving Warner Brothers Animation, they were leaving DreamWorks Animation to come to Nickelodeon because they wanted to work for Mark. He had that reputation in the industry. But at the end of the meeting, he would say I want to tell you about my Great 8 rules. And these rules, if you live them, are more important than what's in the employee handbook, or the policy and procedure manual, or the Code of Conduct. And he'd start to talk about his values. Now I don't use his values because he told me, Paul, these are mine. I said. That's fine Mark, I’ll use my own. But what I talk about is, always have others’ backs. Bring out the best in your coworkers. That's rule #1. OK, now we can proceed. You might have three, or you might have five, or you might have a dozen. Mark had his eight and it's fine. It's almost like how do you want to do this? What are those values, and how do you articulate them?

Because when you can share that with people, people know what's expected of them, and they automatically respond to it because they know what's expected of them. It's like a warm hug. You know, this isn't laissez-faire, do whatever you want in our company. He would tell people, look, I've worked here for 15 years, building this culture. And now I'm holding each of you accountable for perpetuating the culture that we've built. You are part of this family, but you are responsible for perpetuating this family and the culture that we have here, each of you. That message took away all the problems. We just didn't have many employee problems because everyone was happy. But what I realized is when your CEO is the one making that comment, everything aligns. Normally, in organizations, CEOs aren't like Mark, in my experience, he was the exception. But that doesn't mean that your leadership brand can't emanate, can't reflect that same idea.

So again, in the L&D space, to the degree that you're comfortable, share what those values are and it doesn't have to be part of every session. Just make it part of who you are so that when you're talking about things about having people's backs. And making sure people could do their best work every day with peace of mind and bringing out the best in your peers. That can be a little add on to one little thing we're saying and you guys and if you do this correctly, understand that doing this in the system is going to make it much easier down this end. And in a way you'll be giving people such a relief because they're going to say, ah, this is finally fixed and you're part of that solution. Make yourself part of that solution. It's encouraging to hear that. I want people to walk away from my training session not feeling like they learned necessarily something that's important. I want them to feel like they felt something, they experienced something, that can make them a better person, a better worker, a better coworker, a better leader, a better subordinate, whatever. I want them to be excited. And so peppering what you're doing with some of these coaching wisdoms really can make a big difference in the overall impact that you have as an L&D expert.

Sherna Varayath 50:19
Wow. Yes, absolutely. And this brings us to the end of another insightful episode of the eLearning Champion Podcast. We've covered a lot today, from learning how to balance disruption, gratitude, and even meeting the needs and value-based leadership.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us, Paul.

Paul Falcone 50:40
Oh, thank you, Sherna. It was my pleasure. Thank you for introducing me to your audience. I appreciate that.

Sherna Varayath 50:45
Thank you. So dear listeners, I hope you're walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to elevate your learning and development strategy with all the inputs we've received today. If you found value in today's conversation, please do drop us a message. We've got more fantastic episodes lined up featuring incredible guests like Paul and tackling the topics that matter the most to you. Find us on your favorite social media platforms. Thank you so much for tuning in to the eLearning Champion podcast. Until next time, happy learning.

Paul Falcone 51:16
Bye everybody.