From Truck Driver to VP of L&D: Joshua Remerowski on Frontline Credibility and Measuring Impact

Speaker A: Welcome to the talent development hot seat. I am your host, Andy Storch and I'm excited that you're joining me today for another great episode and conversation to help you up your game and improve your capabilities in the world of talent development. And today we're talking about a few different topics around talent development including measuring impact and the death of critical thinking. My guest today is Joshua Romarowski who started his career as a temp truck driver at FedEx and is now the vice president of learning and development at AH SRS Distribution and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Home Depot where his team has built award winning training for sales, performance and innovation. We've had the pleasure of working together and I love everything that Joshua is doing there and I'm excited to dig in. Joshua, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Happy to be here.

Speaker A: I'm excited to have you here. I think we connected through our mutual friend JP Elliott, who's been a guest on this show a couple times, one of our earliest guests and has a very popular podcast in the HR space, the Future of HR that I think you've been on as well. So Joshua, I always like to start with a little bit of background. How did you get into, you mentioned, uh, we mentioned in your intro starting as a temp truck driver. But how did you get into the talent development world?

Speaker B: Yeah, I tell people all the time I don't know how I ended up where I am. I thought I was going to work with my hands and be a blue collar worker forever, but former athlete, washed up athlete at this juncture. And so being in athletics there's always that focus on continuous improvement, self improvement, figuring out how to get better in the big areas, the small areas, just anything that's going to give you that competitive edge. And when I started working in a, ah, corporation and seeing that they had these different training departments and I'd never really experienced that, I was like, wow, that could be a really interesting way to use what I've learned through the history of being trained and coached and trying to be the best at what I do as a high performer and bringing that into my skill set and get paid for it as a job. And so I worked towards that at Verizon and eventually got the opportunity to become a trainer for them. And my, my time there, there was a world class learning and development organization. So that was really my first entry into the true talent development space was back in 2014 with Verizon. And I've been hanging out ever since and really trying to figure out what's the best way to do this thing, as the environment changes, people change, technology changes, and just make it the best experience possible for our associates. Yeah.

Speaker A: You mentioned Verizon as a world class learning and development organization. I've heard that as well. I haven't had anyone on the podcast directly from Verizon, but I'm curious, what are some lessons you took away or what did they do well when you were there that made it so successful or world class?

Speaker B: Yeah. So Lou Tedrick was our chief learning officer when I was there and she really built from top down just an excellent learning and development organization. And I would say they focused and the reason it was so great is they focused on how to become excellent in the space. So certifying people on how to train. So like having standards to be held accountable to, where you can't just be the person that shows up and talks about the good old days like you see in some companies, or leveraging adult learning methodology, but then also making sure that people in the company that are fundamentally training adults understand learning methodology and how to practically apply it in the context of a, uh, corporation. And so we just had this just level of rigor that I think most companies don't have because they move so fast. And a lot of the folks that I came up with in learning and development in that organization because of the level of rigor around how to be excellent in the space have all gone on to have some pretty big jobs. And then I'd uh, say the other thing that they did really was measure the impact of learning to show the value to the business. Every year I had to do some type of measurement impact study. So I had to work back and show, hey, I'm doing this program. Whether it was on the Kirkpatrick Level 1 to 5, we were all required to do at least a level 3. So how did we impact behavior change? And that just become like a regular. Once you get through all the ebbs and flows and the learning curve of uh, it, it just became like a natural part of how I've operated. And so I do the same thing for my team. My team right now I have multiple people that are going to write their first ever submissions into Brandon hall. And they've had to learn how to measure their, the programs that they own and what those look so that they can develop the same skills and learn the same level of rigor that has really provided me the ability to grow my career, but also to build really cool things for our associates and our people. So they're really fantastic. And I'D say probably the third thing with Verizon is just they were always on the cutting edge of technology. When I was there, we did a lot of amazing things with technology. We were really first to market with a lot of those things. Just highly innovative, very interesting.

Speaker A: I love hearing about the standards and especially the emphasis on training and on measuring impact. And I want to talk about measuring impact. But first, last time we talked, you mentioned something about being a people first organization being an emphasis for you. And can you talk about what that means to you and how do you create a people first organization?

Speaker B: I can speak from the context of our approach and where specifically we try to drive that message with what we do. And I think me starting my career, I didn't have some internship, my dad didn't have some connection to get me some job. I didn't go into some consulting firm. Uh, I spent the beginning of my career doing blue collar frontline work, working in the field, doing jobs other people I would say typically don't want to do nor desire to do, and seeing what level of care, of development, of communication, uh, go down the line that we did not get. It really made me say, okay, if I had any power or any responsibility in the future, which I didn't know what that was going to look like, that I would always listen to the people that are actually doing the job that make the company go to make sure that we're serving them the best that we can for us. Uh, in my space, we build a lot of things for our associates, whether it's executive level, all the way down the front line level. And I don't just build. We don't just build things that are just what we want to do or what we think or what even just one of our executive stakeholders think we should do. We go talk to the people in the company. And I know it's a novel thought, but to me, the voice of the customer is the most important voice. And our m job as leaders, servant leaders, is the leadership mantra of this company. We believe in being servant leaders and we want to not work above, but work alongside our people. Every day that requires you to go talk to people. And so I think it's been a larger area. I think for me, as I talk to even other companies and they're like, how have you able to do this or do that? It's just, I go talk to our people. Um, I don't just send them a survey and say, give me your thoughts. And then me try to contextually guess what do they mean by what they say and then give some half baked solution back to the company. We pick up the phone and we talk to people. We have a lot of people that come to our field support center, our corporate office. I talk to them, I ask them questions. I don't just sit in my office while these people are here, like we go talk to them. And so for me that's the. What's worked well is we listen to what our people are asking for, what they want, what the roadblocks are, what the challenges are, and we move quickly to solution a lot of those things. And it looks different at different times of the year. And because of the cyclical nature of our business, like we're very busy in the summertime when weather's good and a lot of the work that happens outside for the people we serve, it looks different in the winter. So there's different challenges with that when you're servicing professional contractors. But it's really just listening to your people. And I think we do a great job of that. Our team specifically does a best in class job of that. And I just, I'm not a big fan of the ivory tower, um, leadership and not talking to the people in your organization. Right.

Speaker A: So I've heard that before as advice, especially when you're working in an organization with a lot of frontline workers. So important. And I'm, uh, sure it's very valuable that you have come from that background, you've been in that experience. You can relate to people that are on the front line. I'm sure they appreciate that as well. I was going to ask you for advice. I know we have a lot of people who work in talent development who came up from a more, we'll say academic traditional path, went to school for that and then started in the corporate space or maybe academia and moved in the corporate space. But it's still important of course for them to have those conversations as well. So what advice would you give for them to get more familiar with what's going on in the front lines? It sounds like go have the conversation, but how do you even break that ice to make sure that you're asking the right things?

Speaker B: Go do the work. Go work with your people. Go spend a day, a week in the field, do the work. And if you think you're above doing the work, then you're never going to serve the people in your company. Well, I'm not above doing the work. I will do the work. I do not care. I've done it before, I'll do it again. It's something that is not outside of my comfort zone. And so I think for some people it is because everyone's worried that they'll look bad or someone's going to make fun of them or there's some insecurity in it. And I do think some people think in certain organizations maybe they're above it. But nothing replaces doing the work. So go do the work. And you'll see even companies like ours where our folks go into the field regularly and work in the store or in the branch and try to make sure they stay close to the work. And so I think that's one thing and I'd say the other thing for folks that are coming from this academia, uh, background is really no one cares about your models and no one cares. I don't know what to tell folks. No one cares. I've never met a president that I tell about something, they're like, oh my gosh, like they put their hands up, they're like, oh, this is just, uh, thank you, thank you for telling me this model. And what if you can't make it simple, relatable and somewhat entertaining to the broader audience, but no one cares about your complex models and research. Yes, they want data and things like that, but it needs to be data that's relevant to the company you work for. And I think that's where a lot of people coming that don't have frontline context and then they lack business acumen or business insights and then they're just pouting all the time of no one wants to do my thing, no one wants to do this program or no one wants the, they're begging to get work in their own work. And it's really, I, uh, think it's pretty simple. It's just most people don't want to go do the work and most people care so much about all these academia based processes that again, I just, I've not found anyone that could give two craps.

Speaker A: Tell me how you really feel, Joshua. That's. I totally understand what you're saying because at the end of the day people want to know what's this going to do for me? What's in it for me? What are the results? Right. The theory is nice, but what are the results? I'm curious. Uh, you mentioned being out there talking with lots of people, having lots of conversations. How do you then decide what is the most valuable or important thing to work on? Because a lot of people get into reaction mode. It's easy to react to. You hear someone complaining about something and oh, it Sounds like they need training in this space, but you want to make sure that it's not isolated to just one or two people or that training is what they need versus maybe it's something else. So how do you think about evaluating what the needs are and investing in the right places?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you have to have some other data point, not just obviously, um, the voice of the customer. The voice of the customer matters a lot, but it's still opinion. It's. And those opinions can vary and differ. And so it's okay. They say X, Y and Z is impacting their ability to perform. Let's go see if we have any data that proves performance is different in these branches, these locations, these regions, these managers are their cultural score implications. What other leaders can I talk to? Are the leaders saying the same things that the frontline associates are? And the more things that you like from a data point standpoint can get that allow you to connect the dots to build trustworthiness and not have some anecdotal thing? Uh, I think is great. And often I've worked for many organizations that it's usually the minority voices, the small voices, or one loud voice that says this thing's a problem, and everyone panics. They adjust the sales and they just head straight into the waves. And you're like, this is crazy. Like, things were going really good and now one person is complaining. And now we're, uh, like, we're just gonna rock the entire boat and probably lose some people along the way. When it was smooth sailing, if we kept doing what we were doing, it was smooth sailing. We were gonna arrive at our destination. It was gonna be pretty awesome. And so I think you have to navigate through that. But I also think that's why critical thinking is so important. Like, you have to then critically think and say, okay, is there really credibility to what these folks are saying and then how they're saying it? Are they just want whining? Are they just complaining? Because people complain. It doesn't matter if it's an executive or a frontline person. And you just have to see through that. And I think, uh, that is a just a critical, learned skill over time to really evaluate what's being said between the words and what's the culture of that place. And I think just the longer I've done it, the more people I talk to, it's easier to navigate naturally, but it is a learned skill.

Speaker A: Um, you mentioned data points in there. You talked a little bit earlier about the importance of measuring impact. And Kirkpatrick, how do you think about measuring impact where you are today for the programs and initiatives you're putting together. And why do you think most L and D teams fail in this regard?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think most of them say the same things all the time. We don't have the data, and I just have not found that to be true. It's just hard to get the data. And, uh, most people don't want to do hard things, so they make excuses or they're not willing to push a little bit harder to get what they need. That's going to allow them to break the dam free to get more things to happen. And we don't just have free access to all the data and all the numbers aren't perfectly sliced up to share what learning and development does. I don't know many organizations that do. My job is to just get the data and then do the work. Like, if I want to be able to prove these things out, go get the data. It exists. Your company's measuring these things. You have to be thoughtful about it. But you're going to probably have to do the work and it's going to be hard. And if you've never had to look at data in that, in that manner, or maybe you don't have a strategic approach to a control group versus not a non control group, then yeah, it's going to be challenging. And I think a lot of learning and development, you see this still in atd and people come out with research. That's always their number one thing. It's just we, we don't have the data. It's just like you, okay, that's not going to change. I would say the second thing that we do specifically to make it is as we go into scoping programs and projects, which is, I've learned a long time ago from being in a great organization like a Verizon, is when you talk to stakeholders like, how are we going to measure that this thing's going to be successful in the first place? Like, why are we doing this? And if they can't tell you, then it's, should we even be doing this? Should we even be building a training? Because if there's no behavioral change, if there's no metric, uh, from a level four to where we can eventually look at ROI in level five, between Kirkpatrick's and the Phillips model, then who cares? It's just a thing that you want to do. And it's probably an email or it's probably a short video, but it's certainly not a training m. And so for Us, we start at the beginning, and we have different metrics for, uh, the different buckets of programs that, that I have that are important to the company. And if you don't know what the most important metrics are to your company, start there. Start there from having good business insight and good business acumen so that you know what matters most. And then you can measure what matters most because they're already measuring it because it matters most. You just need to now do the work that says, who got this thing? What was their performance based on the data provided by the company? Who didn't get this thing? What was their performance based on the data that provided by the company? And we always look pre and post, and we get a good window of time. We try to get at least 90 days on each side, but usually if there's more data than that, we can go a year each way and we continue to measure out what that success looks like. And then, hey, did performance fall off? Did behavior change fall off? Did something fall off? And why was there a cultural change in the company that we should be aware of? Was there a market change? Because some of those things have nothing to do with learning and development in general. It's some broader thing that's just happening in the economy or your company or whatever. But that's what we do. We always look to say, what do we want to measure up front? So as we go into we're the programs we want to submit for a Brandon hall, again, as my team learns this valuable skill set, they've already measured these things. They've been measuring them for those programs for the last two years. And anytime a new program comes in, they're measuring those things. And we share them in different ways, back to the company and our leadership. But that, to me, that is what's been successful. We don't wait until someone's, why are we doing this? And say, what should we be measuring? No, you should be picking that before you ever start building anything. And then doing a good job of being a business partner and questioning, why are we doing this if no one can tell you what to measure?

Speaker A: Yeah. And how has the measurement aspect allowed you or enabled you to be more effective in not only your role as head of talent development or learning and development, but also making a business case, maybe to executives or the business. This is what we always hear about or talk about. If you want to become a partner in the business, you need to be able to understand what's going on in the business, speak the language, and be able to measure the impact of what you're doing, maybe beyond Brandon Awards, what would be the argument for making sure that you are measuring impact?

Speaker B: Yeah, it builds trust with your leaders. Most leaders don't value learning and development. That's just like most you're going to find and our organization does, thankfully. But there's a lot of organizations that you hear from people that they don't care about learning and development or they don't. They think HR is this thing or that thing and a waste of time. And for us being able to measure things and be a good stakeholder to our executive leaders, our frontline leaders and to show what value is being created based on these programs. And it's not just a compliance activity alone. And there is that like it protects the company from organizational risk. That's important. But it just allows to build broader trust in. Oh, okay. Like there is value because they look at numbers, they're P and L owners and leaders, they care about that. And then honestly it helps us evaluate when we should stop doing something. Because if it's not providing value, then we need to determine do we want to do this because it's like a cultural nice to have like people enjoy having this as uh, maybe a benefit or something that makes them feel the company cares about them. And I think that's important too. But we also need to make sure that we're like clear, hey, this doesn't help us make any more money, at least not fundamentally or provably. But maybe it makes people feel like good that it's available. Um, so we use it as an evaluation criteria too. And just like anyone else, whether the economy's up or down, you can evaluate that as a business leader, what programs are the most sensible to maybe pause or cut or move further down the line in the year and deprioritize. And that just makes you a better business partner. And I think m in my experience working with a lot of different people in learning and development, they struggle at being a good business partner. They're very good at being this IO psychologist person that wants to talk about statistics and things like that and the psychology of why we need to do something. And it's like awesome. But yet again, I've just, I've not met a single president or CEO that's been like, thank God this person is sharing just these details. It doesn't mean some of them don't care about it. But what are the numbers that are going to stick out to them to be good from a decision making standpoint?

Speaker A: Yeah, the academics behind it, the Theories, the studies, these things are really important. It's how we get started. At the end of the day, you've got to be able to connect it back to the business and answer the question, what are we trying to change? What results are we getting? Is it actually effective? Is it working? Or do we need to make changes. Yeah.

Speaker B: In a relatable way, like common sense. Relatable way. Yeah. That they're not the experts. You might be the expert, but they're certainly not. So you need to bring that expert speak in a manner that's super simple.

Speaker A: Yeah. You mentioned working, partnering with executives. I know you work with frontline workers all the way up to executives. Last time you and I talked, you mentioned something about pushing executive teams outside of their comfort zone. Um, wonder if you could share more about that as lots of talent development professionals are thinking about executive executive development all the way down to frontline.

Speaker B: Yeah. Each company I've been at, it's a little bit different of what they're comfortable doing or not doing. And yet again it just goes back to I think what's my worldview on what do I care about or what do I like? And if I don't like that, I don't think we should be doing it. It's what if the rest of the people in the company like that or would enjoy that or need that. Right. Just at a different level, not only in their career but financially. I could say even just from a level of maturity like all those things can look different versus being a 50 plus year old executive in a company. Like it's just you're living a different life. And for me it's been helpful to bridge and push them out of their comfort zones of like how to game. We've gamified a lot of learning and got away from the traditional power PowerPoints and just info dumping on people. And one, that's not how people like to learn. And two, when you're doing a lot of things and you're involving movement and fun and challenge, like learning has to be challenging. So many people are so focused on, I don't know anyone that's that truly knows something deeply. That was like it was the easiest thing in the world and that's why I'm the best. That's why I've learned so much, that's why I'm so knowledgeable. It's hard, it's supposed to be challenging. So we focus on doing that, like making things interesting, challenging, but also that fit the audience that we're serving and so we've done HR escape rooms where we have wild west theme escape rooms on HR labor law. And I can tell you people are like not favorable about doing that. And we did it. And the people, our field leaders loved it that overwhelmingly we won an award for it. But like the overwhelming sentiment was never get rid of this M. And I can tell you there's people like it's not our company maybe doesn't like doing this or that. It's just like I never feel comfortable speaking for others without talking to them. I think that's a critical flaw in most leaders in any company or political sphere is you're good at one thing. So apparently you think you're all knowing, all seeing, all being, which is crazy. Most of them are bad at everything else other than the one thing that got them highly successful. And so we focus on that, like, let's push them out and do these more engaging experiences. And what we've seen is we've done a lot of that and we've done proof of concepts and now we've scaled to where we have a lot more simple, fun and relatable to the job traffic training that is hands on and challenging. And people, when they're in the field and our executive teams in the field, people come up to them without being prompted to say how amazing this thing was and talking to them about things they learned when they were here or learned when they were online or learned wherever. And that's been cool when they come back to me and say, hey, this has never happened before. No one's ever gone out of their way to tell me anything about training, let alone the things that they've learned and how it's helped them in their job. And so for me, that's really built a lot of trust to where we've been able to try a lot of different things over the last two to two and a half years of my time being here. And we'll try more and some of them are going to be uncomfortable for our executive team, but I just like to push back on them when they say something won't work. It's just what proof do you have that it won't work? And typically because they like data, they don't have any proof. And because we've never done it before, so why don't we find out if it'll work? Yeah. And that's typically what I found is like a nice way to move forward and to just be a good again, a good business partner, but someone that's able to push back a little bit on I understand you don't think it will work, but we don't have any proof. And yeah, that part's been really great and a lot of fun and I think has provided us the ability to do a lot more than we would typically be able to do in a company of our size. And so it's been awesome.

Speaker A: You've also revamped the sales and service methodology and onboarding there. I wonder if you could share a little bit about how you went through that process and what you did to make it more effective.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we've focused on everything we do is co created, co partnered with our leaders. What's made any process as we're building service and sales methodology. Like so when we, my first year we focused a lot on this first phase of professionalizing our salesforce. It's the co creation. Like I am not the expert in all things. We need people that are doing the blocking and tackling day to day with service, with sales that know the specific challenges, the behaviors, the customers, what works, what doesn't work. And then we build a bespoke solution that says, okay, let's work on these behaviors. These are the key behaviors that seem to be the most common after talking to a few hundred people. And now it can't just be some learning and development person talking about these behaviors. We have leaders in our company to deliver these trainings and we have regional sales leaders, sales people, operators, you name it. They all are highly invested in this being a great place to work in, uh, our people serving our customers really well and more importantly, understanding that where we're at today, it takes all of us. And so that part is from a, the path of installing from like really no sales programming to a highly built sales ecosystem for development and growing is because of that co creation, because you're building trust with tons of leaders because they can see it happen real time, they're a part of it and now they become multipliers and how they market the things that you're doing. And they're like this is a need, this is clear that it's working and helping and we want to do more of it. And that part is what has allowed us to accelerate in some of those areas so fast versus where in some organizations are like we need trainers to do this and they're going to do all these things and the leaders shouldn't be involved, they need to just focus on leading. And some of there's some truth to that, but you shouldn't start there. You need to start where everyone comes along. The journey. And that's been the most impactful thing for us. And we continue to evaluate based on uh, our people, our company market changes like how do we need to keep EVOL evolving, what we build, how we deliver it, what's the best way to serve the company? Is it less, is it more, is it just right? And it's just been a really great partnership like we've built just a really great partnership with our leaders in the company. And we do not talk about ourselves as like us and the business. It's just, just the comp. We all work for the company well

Speaker A: and you're co creating it together. So it's. I imagine I've been involved in that in the past. It's so important because there's not a point where you get there and say hey, this is what we're doing. And they're like, I don't agree with this because they were involved in the process. They're hopefully excited about it and want to be involved in the execution as well.

Speaker B: 100%. And they're highly opinionated too. That's the thing, they care. You want people that care, you want people that have opinions. That's how you're going to get the best. If you just get a bunch of agreeable people in the room, you're doing it wrong. Get some people that are going to push you and get it to the best solution. And it's awesome.

Speaker A: Talk to me about management and leadership development programs because this is an area where every company is investing, recognizing the importance of developing leaders. I think you have programs at each level but you start with the early career and those frontline managers as really a foundational, critical piece of building the culture and the strategy in the company.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think in a lot of organizations they tend to focus on like maybe the high, just the hypos in a lot of the leadership development programming and with that maybe it's director and above or executive development and they get a lot of focus. We have heavy focus on like frontline leaders, middle management development. They're often the most forgotten demographic but they have the most touch points and the most influence in your organization. So that is where we focus our time and energy working to build the best programming we can to serve them. We have early career talent development that you got to be a part of. For our frontline warehouse drivers, customer service reps that help fast track them into an assistant branch role. We have our early career programming that my team manages. If you're coming out of college and you are eventually going to Be a manager in a branch and we have programming developed on that and then we have just that you're going to come in and lead a branch. So you're getting promoted to lead a branch from. It could be from one of those programs or it could just be from you being awesome at your current job and getting promoted or coming from a competitor or maybe even from another industry and coming to lead one of our branches. And we have great programming for that. And it is highly geared towards the things that are most important to us as a company, like the top level kind of pillar behaviors that we believe a great leader should drive. And then it just embodies our company's mission, our culture, our values very clearly. And everything else is a distraction. And our leaders, we ruthlessly look at what's too much and we've removed stuff, we've increased stuff. We do not shy away from changing the programming and thinking that it's like, okay, we built this thing and it's done. And that's been the most important thing is we're just constantly iterating, constantly, um, improving the programs based on leaders feedback. And they're all hype people because it's co created and they're all highly involved. And yeah, we have other programs outside of that for all the other leadership level but really we've focused on uh, a lot of time and energy rebuilding and scaling those frontline and middle manager layer development programs.

Speaker A: I love how you invest a lot there because like you said, many organizations do not. They invest at the top and hope that trickles down, but don't invest as much in the front line and those middle layers that are so critical to driving business results, translating strategy and culture. And you invited me to speak in your talent from within program to frontline leaders who are out in the branches, in the stores. And I think you mentioned to me that they don't spend a lot of time on computers because they're out there doing stuff. But they do show up for this call every week. And I was really impressed with how engaged everybody was. You could tell they were focused, paying attention, taking notes. Like they take this opportunity very seriously to get development, to learn and to be able to improve.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. You're spending your day on a forklift, in a truck, with customers, people walking into the branch, obviously out in uh, our warehouse or yard. And now we're asking you to sit in front of a computer and we try to minimize the amount of time and make it as impactful as possible and what those experience look like. Look like for them, but they are, they love it. We find that our folks are highly engaged, they want development. And that just goes back to listening to what people are saying. They're not saying, don't bother me, don't show me how to be successful here, don't help me further my career. They're saying, show me I need help. And we're just trying to do the best we can to provide them things that will help accelerate that pathway.

Speaker A: Yeah. Last thing I want to talk about is a challenge that we're seeing growing in the working world. Something you call the death of critical thinking. You and I were chatting a little bit about it earlier. If you could talk about what that means and what can we do about it? Because I see with AI taking over everything, there is a more and more pervasiveness of people relying on it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think most people are just, and I see it every day. So most people are just asking ChatGPT or um, whatever.

Speaker A: Google's Gemini.

Speaker B: Yeah, Gemini. Or Perplexity or whatever. They're, they're, they're asking their bot what to do and they haven't even took a breath or a beat to think through what should they do. And so then they get this half baked piece of information that could be riddled with inaccuracies or maybe things that contextually aren't going to work. And they're like, this is what I'm going to share with you, with everyone. And so I think, honestly, if you can't critically think, using it becomes just a wasteful tool and it becomes just like what we see throughout time where when one tool doesn't work, try this tool, here's a better tool. And then you have 10 tools that are half baked cakes that no one wants to eat that are laying around the bakery. And I think as leaders it's our job to investigate and not be lazy. Like, uh, when people send me things, I read them, I pay attention and I find out that you're giving me things that have books with incorrect author names or quotes from people that don't exist, or maybe quotes that aren't from that individual and those okay, well that thing's wrong. Which is a pretty big thing to be wrong. Because if AI can't get correct who wrote a book or who the publishing house is for that book, what else is incorrect in this thing that could be pages long or could be a one pager? Uh, but I think that's the challenge. The challenge is if you're going to be a lazy leader in the Age of AI, then it's just going to be AI slop all around. No one's going to have critical thinking or you have to realize you have to pay attention and, and make paying attention and reading and doing those things that are not fun but require discipline part of your, your vernacular. And from there you're going to help your be able to challenge your team to say have, have you thought this through? Is this. And then pressure test whatever the idea is. Because then you're going to put this in front of an executive team or a stakeholder or whoever and they're going to be like, what is this? And uh, well, of course they're going to say that because the first person didn't think about what it is, they just asked the question, you didn't review it and pay attention and ask any questions. And then poof, I'm putting in front of a team saying this is what we should do. Um, and so I think that's going to be a challenge for a while. I think a lot of people have just become lazy in their thinking, lazy in their creativity. And some people are using AI very well on the other end of the spectrum. And I think the people that continue to do the lazy thing are going to find themselves left behind pretty quickly, unfortunately. And I think just the better we can evaluate that honestly for ourselves. Everyone will win if we're good at the critical thinking nature of leveraging this technology.

Speaker A: Yeah, people are using and relying on AI more and more. And this is something that in a lot of organizations we want people to use AI more because they're hopefully going to find ways to be more, more effective, more productive, more efficient things like that. At least that's what a lot of executives would hope. And I'm using AI more and more in my work to save time in different areas, but we don't want to rely on it completely. And uh, one of my pet peeves around it is I don't mind if you're using AI to look something up, but don't send me an email and act like you wrote this without, without crediting, here's what I pulled up and I just act like, here's what I wrote. Do we, how do we encourage more critical thinking? Have you found a way to push back on this to encourage people to think more critically and not just rely completely or outsource all their thinking to AI?

Speaker B: Yeah, one thing I, I challenge my team to, to talk these things out loud. I need to find out how do you think about it not. And it's Very easy to go back and forth through email and get those things where they can write those things and hide behind AI. But I will say, okay, let's talk this out. I'll pr, I'll pressure test this live. Let's see if you can articulate it. Because now if you're going to get in front of an audience that's going to have questions, going to push back because you're asking them to do something that is different or is going to cost the organization money, you better be able to have some type of rationale for why we're going to do this and why this is the best way versus another way that's a more cost effective way or a simpler way or an easier way. And so for me, I like doing that. It's like debating more than anything. And so I just press back. I'll be like, hey, um, this is going to be uncomfortable. You're not going to like this, but we're going to. You can do the five whys is a big one. I like to do with them a lot. But I think you just have to ask really good questions and not be lazy and talk it out, not go back and forth, uh, through email. And if you have a remote team, call them on teams quickly and say, let's talk this through. Um, and you'll. My perspective, you'll get a good idea of do they know what they're talking about or not? And have they thought it through? Yeah.

Speaker A: Joshua, you have developed really impressive career. You've obviously grown a lot, accomplished a lot of things. For those out there listening who are looking to accelerate their own growth in their careers in talent development, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

Speaker B: I think everyone wants it now. They want whatever it is, the money, the house, the job, the title, whatever now. And it's just, that's not how it works. If you don't have the skills to get the job today, even though you feel competent enough, maybe in your brain and how you visualize it, go get the skills. Go actually get things that allow you to be credible to get the bigger job. And be patient. I think if you're patient and persistent, you will win long term. Most people are not patient and they're not persistent. As soon as they don't get what they want in a just like a New Year's resolution that ends after February or whatever because I didn't get results or it was hard for a, um, month and a half, they quit. I think it's just diligence, discipline and that patience and persistence will win more than anything, and most people won't do that. So most people just struggle growing their careers, but the ones that do will win in the long term.

Speaker A: I agree completely. I've accomplished many things in my career. I know a lot of people admire me for some of the things I've done, and I can tell you that almost all of them took longer than I wanted them to, but got there eventually. Joshua, this has been fantastic. Uh, there's so much more we could talk about, but we've already covered a lot of ground and we're out of time. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing so much of your experience and advice and some of the things that you've done. I know it's going to be helpful for others in talent development. I look forward to keeping in touch and talking with you more in the future.

Speaker B: Thanks, Andy.