From Order Taker to Strategic Partner with Tracie Cantu

Fall in love with governance. It is not the bureaucratic beast you think it is. It is the bowling alley bumper guards. So no matter how wishy washy your decision is, you're always going to hit a pin.

You always go in the right direction. That's what it does for you and that's what it does for your team. It enables you to make independent decisions at a rate that is much faster than trying to get approval and it makes sure everybody's moving, aligned in the right decision. So I know it's contrarian, but fall in love with governance.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Wherever you are and wherever you're watching, I am so excited for today because one of the things I think is true, if you're in a learning development role and you're aspiring to be in leadership, one of the things we often hear about, you know, seats at the table, we don't have them, or how do we lead? How do we really get integrated into the business? Well, we might have some answers and you know, it might be, we might be light on video topics today, but, you know, I bet you it comes in there.

So our guest today is Tracy Cantu. So we're just going to dive in because Tracy was here not too long ago. Tracy, welcome to the Visual Lounge. So glad that you're here.

So we got to start off. You have a book that by, I think when this airs will have just come out. So why don't you dive in, tell us a little bit about it. I had the great honor of being asked by ATD Press to write a book about running L and D like a business.

And that's actually what the title is and it comes out on April 14th. So those of you listening, you can already go to Amazon or bookshop.org and order. But one of the things I realized when I became a senior learning leader who started to be accountable on that raci chart for impact and ROI is there wasn't a lot of practical how to's.

There weren't any place where I could go to just kickstart my brain and be like, okay, this is a good starting point. I can move on, or oh, I'll cut and paste this and move forward. So that's really what I did when we started talking with ATD and fleshing out this idea of how do we operationalize a lot of the systems and processes in L and D. So that way we're doing more rinse and repeat of the tactical work and making larger strategic moves across the board.

It just, we have to Free ourselves up. We. We reinvent the wheel too much. So I'm really hoping for those new, new or even struggling senior learning leaders who are leading a function or getting these questions right now, especially right now.

It's a place that helps them kickstart and actually drive that conversation and make L and D a business function versus a cost center. Well, I love that as a topic and now I'm going to just kind of be transparent here. I don't think there are probably, there's not a million L and D kind of senior leaders right there. It's a pretty small audience.

But I think a lot of us have aspirations, whether to be in a CLO position or director role or VP role, whatever that might be. But I think you're right that we don't know. I don't know that I could say anyone has ever given me business foundations that would prepare me directly for that. Right.

A lot of it's intuitive, A lot of it's kind of picked up over interactions. So what were the what for? You are the kind of big areas of blind spots that you saw as you started thinking about this one area for me, and I started my career in operations, frontline operations. So I, I kind of developed that mindset to begin with and brought it with me into L and D.

So the idea of customer versus consumer, we are so focused on the learner that we forget the business is actually our customer. The learner is our consumer. It's very similar. Like when you go to a grocery store, you think you're the customer, but somebody bought all those items in a grocery store.

You're the consumer of that grocery store. You didn't get to pick what cereal would be on the shelf. The grocery store did. They have a customer and that is their business.

And that's why I really like. It's a blind spot we have because we need to learn how our business makes money, why that's important, what the actual corporate goals are, and to realize that if we align with the customer in meeting their needs and helping them achieve goals, KPIs, OKRs, whatever you use. There's so many acronyms for annual goals. That's where the funding and the investment come in.

That's where you can prove your value. And I want to say for every everybody who listens, I am not saying put trash out for the learner just because the business demanded it. I am saying we always design with the learner in mind. We want them to have the best experience possible for that moment.

But the learner, the Consumer doesn't get to dictate what training is being offered by the business. The business is the customer. So they are the ones who help us set priorities. We are the ones who partner with them to do that.

And then we design the best possible learning experience for what the business needs. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask, I mean, thinking about that cereal analogy, right? I think it's a, it's an interesting analogy. I've never thought about that in terms of like a grocery store, that I'm actually not the customer.

And I, but I like, I like it. But it also makes me think that if you're, you have to, you have to have good product on the shelves, right? Cause someone has to have bought it so the, the consumer still has to want to consume it. So if I'm getting, you know, if the cheap knockoff of Frosted Flakes and they're not good, we're not going to sell that.

You know, they're not going to move the needle, right? I mean, I, I used to like pre Amazon acquisition at Whole Foods Market, I would have to shop at two grocery stores because I needed my, my Coke, I needed my Diet Coke to go into the cart and they did not sell that there. Now I can get that through the Amazon page along with my groceries. Things are there.

But you're absolutely right. And it is one of those things where the consumer can go elsewhere and that's where we get shadow L and D departments where we're not doing that. And actually, I think right now the business for a lot of people is being treated as the consumer and they're growing. Shadow L and D departments, like sales is feeling neglected.

Nobody's paying any attention to them. They put out three product lines and their salespeople can't even speak to two of them because there's no training. They're having all of these issues. But yeah, I kind of joke that it's business first learner always.

Because yeah, your consumer can go elsewhere. They, they can go to LinkedIn learning, they can go to YouTube, they can do other things. But also, and I say this with the utmost love in my heart because I am not an instructional designer, but I know what the lift is and I know how heavy it is. When I want a recipe on the Internet, I don't want to read a life story.

I just need the recipe. So sometimes we have to realize they just need a job aid. They just need a short form video to teach them how to get through the point. They don't need a 30 minute eLearning with amazing interactions and just mind blowing features.

There is such a thing as overkill. Like so just just putting that out there. There is still balance with the consumer because sometimes the consumer does not want flashy and sparkly. They want functional and practical.

Yeah, you know, it makes me think of, you know, wasted my time this morning scrolling through some short videos and stuff like that and, and they, they start the video and they kind of hook you and then they hook you again. But then they never quite tell you the thing. It's like no, I just want to. What is the answer to your, the thing that you posed like, I just want to know.

So I mean that makes total sense. It does make me think. And obviously our world is shifting like rapidly around us in terms of technology with AI and obviously lots happening there. And I don't mean to have the.

I mean I think every conversation is an AI conversation at this point right now. So I'm curious from what you just said though, because of shadow kind of learning opportunities, what should a senior learning role be thinking about in terms of how AI is and should be being used to augment or to enhance or to replace in some cases what their learning teams are capable of or adding to. And again, I want to just say because I know this is a hot topic. I am very pro human.

I love humans. I want humans to be successful. I've got lots of opinions we techsmiths. I keep pushing internally about human conversations.

But I'm curious from your perspective because I think there is a real dollar and sense opportunities there and there's real impact there for better and for worse. So what are your thoughts? I have two thoughts and I think they're mostly parallel. I don't know.

We'll see as we go through one. We do a lot of tactical BS in L and D because of that red thread research. Just did a great research on L and D organizational structures and about how a lot of them are inherited. A lot of the systems are through there and it makes sense.

Centralized, decentralized, federated. Whatever you are, it's really your operating model that dictates how you move and how you play. So a lot of people are still kind of an elevated order taker. They're not just the straight short line cook, they're a little higher up in there.

So I can get rid of a lot of that. However, if you've built your team to maintain that business model, you're going to lose people if you don't upscale your people. Because an instructional designer who is maybe constantly focused on SOPs and workbooks and such. AI can do a good enough job that you could get a junior person in to clean it up, wrap it up and deliver it.

So there is job loss coming. Just plain and simple. There is. We live in a capitalistic world.

It's the way it goes. Like I would love to argue that. Find me at a conference and I will heartily agree that it's a crappy algorithm that we're living in right now. But there was some interesting research that came out and I'm going to send it to you, Matt, I promise.

And then maybe we can link it in the show notes afterwards. But they talked about, hey, how AI is really good at looking at current state and past and comparing them and building very rational, logical projects and products off of it. Humans are very good at postulating forward and being comfortable with only like 70% of the information and extrapolating based off of experience. The other 30% to roadmap and future think that's, that's a pretty stark difference.

And then Nvidia's CEO was like, companies who are letting people go because of AI are missing the mark because if you want to be innovative, you should be doing more and more. Keeps coming up in all of this. We have to push L and D teams to think more like orchestra conductors. Strategic partners.

I think, I don't think it'll be the end game, but I definitely think it's one of the transitional roles. How we saw HR move to HR business partners being embedded in divisions. I can see a rise of L and D business partners coming up, helping to orchestrate based off of needs because things are moving so quickly. Marketing tools today.

The CRM of today is not going to be the CRM of six months from now. I wish it was, but it's not going to be. Everything moves so quick that I think everybody only has confidence in a 12 month roadmap. At best they have a long range goal.

But like high fidelity is probably only 12 months right now. And I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me on that. They'll probably be like it's 90 days. Tracy.

Yes. What are you thinking? But I do think that we have to realize AI will replace a lot of tactical order based roles. But there are going to be new roles just like when automation came into manufacturing.

It's going to eliminate a lot of manual roles. It did and it opened up a lot of technical and more strategic roles and more systems based roles. And we're really at that crux and it's painful. It absolutely is painful.

And we live in an era where we really have to self fund our own skill development because we don't have federal retraining and such like that. So like I get it, it's painful. Everybody has AI hate because it's nipping at our heels. But even a cruise ship turns.

Yeah, for sure. Well I appreciate that perspective because I do think and you know I have a lot of people on here who have talked about the practicality of AI using AI and video. Donald Taylor was on recently with his Global Sentiment Survey. If you've probably read that and you know it's interesting the even what he is saying is that look, we've got to stop maybe being focused so much just on the content as L and D and focus on the you know, much more on those greater outcomes.

And I do think that's what I'm hearing here as well is that as a business leader you should be worried about those outcomes already. But then when you look down your line of business operations saying how do we get past just saying we're going to create a PowerPoint or a course do should let me ask you this question because I really do want to know Senior leaders should they learning Senior leaders particularly should they do they care if it's a storyline, course, a video, do they care about the end outcome or do they just care about the results?

Hot take. I know I'm going to artfully dodge this by saying instead they need to let go let go of the wheel so tightly that you're white knuckled and saying this is the way we drive because we have competent teams across the business who with the right tools and yep, I'm going to plug y' all here. TechSmith can make somebody with no skill be confident and capable and a short Runway. The the SMEs can create their job aids.

They can do their own short form videos. They we don't need to do that. There are so many in the moment needs that we get focused and swamped because we're not managing our our team and our intake like a portfolio and being like I'm going to focus on the high investment pieces and I think maybe I am coming back around to it. It's the outcome and the means.

Yeah, we have to do both but we have to focus first and prioritize our focus because if everything is important, nothing is important and as things go down in importance we need to empower other people to self serve or automate. Like we've got to figure that out. We can't keep doing everything. So.

But honestly as a learner, I don't care what it is, I don't care the format. I just need my information and I need to get it. And sometimes I will read a 400 page book and other times I will put a 90 second video on 1.75 speed just to get to the point.

It's all about gaining the information when I need it and preparing myself to do my job the best way possible. So yeah, we have to be enablers and I think we have to let go to do that. Yeah, well, I appreciate the plug but also it makes me think in our, we have a research study and we haven't done that, we haven't updated it since 2024. But one of the things that was in there, it looked at why people selected link the videos that they prefer.

Like which was really fascinating because like bunch of people were like 10 to 19 minutes like these really long videos. When everything, everything in society has said videos should be shorter and shorter but people want like 30 seconds. And it was interesting when you dig into why they said that though because when people wanted to like really understand something, they wanted to go deep on something, they wanted depth. Right.

And I think that speaks to that 400 page book. If you're like I really want to understand a subject, you're going to read a 400 page book. But everything about compliance, everyone's like as short as possible, please just like, yeah, you need to know. But it's like is it going to change the outcome of what I do day to day?

Maybe not. Yeah, I, I absolutely agree. I'm, I'm, I'm just laughing of like that 19 minute video. But then I just discovered the British Museum has a YouTube channel and there's Curators Corner and they have the curators in those areas talking about like I sat through like a 24 minute video on garnet Cloisonn findings in the Sutton hoop date and I'm like who have I become?

What is this? But yeah, it was just one of those where like if it, if it piques your interest, if it's something you, it doesn't matter the length. But when you need to know the formula for a vlookup, I just need to know the formula for a vlookup. Don't give me a 30 second, don't even give me a 30 second video.

Literally just put it in the description so I can cut and paste and start getting on my way. Um, yeah, you're absolutely right. It's it's interesting and I think we take it for granted that everybody in the workplace wants to learn how to do the best and they all want to progress up the ladder where a lot of people are just like, I just need a, a job where I enjoy coming to work. I like the people I work with and it pays my bills.

And those folks don't want to go through a 90 day leadership pipeline program. They just want to be the best at what they're doing in their role because they enjoy that role. And yeah, it's a, it's a weird dichotomy. We're living at this moment when it comes to work.

Well, I, I think that goes back to, it feels like it goes back to the consumer conversation. Right. That the, the consumer has different needs and wants inside the grocery store than the customer. Right.

Like the consumer. I just, maybe I just want to go in and grab milk. And there's those studies from like, gosh, it's been a long time. I don't know if it was the Malcolm Gladwell book or I can't remember which book, but it talked about like the store studies where the reason you put the milk at the back of the store for the customer is so that everyone has, the consumer has to walk by all the cereal and all the other things so they're more likely to buy it.

That's good for the customer, bad for the consumer. Right. And so I think it's that it feels like it's a little bit of that balance that sometimes, yeah, maybe we just do want a candy rack up front because we know they just need a Snickers to and get out of there. That's, you know, the gas station model.

And that's why gas stations and convenience stores have such a market, because it is, you come in, you get a little beverage and you get excited. I remember my home back in Austin, an organic, like it's called the Bread Basket gas station and they had like organic products in there. Like I could literally just go and I was like, oh, you did your market demographics. Like, I don't have to go up to the two major grocery chains.

That's going to take me like 15 minutes to get to. I'm literally just walking to the front of my neighborhood going, and I've got, I've got the milk and the spaghetti sauce I needed to make dinner tonight. You're absolutely right. And sometimes like a learner just wants a job aid.

I mean, how many times have we seen the post it notes on monitors and somebody just all Of a sudden be like, hey, how do I do this? Oh, here, like this will, this is what you need to, to get it done. And Dave's post it notes are a gold mine. Like he's got all the stuff and that's learning.

And we might not like it because it wasn't instructionally designed, it didn't have learning theory behind it, but it developed the workforce and it enabled them to do their job better. That's what we do. So with that kind of coming back around to like running L and D as a business, those, those things feel very, I mean, very practical, right? Like, yeah, sticky note.

I've been that person who's. I've. I mean, I've. This is why I have a notepad still of, of notes of things that I'm like, oh my gosh, I gotta remember that, like I wrote down even while we were talking, like, okay, I got to look up that, that thing.

Here's that. But from a learning perspective, it's got to feel very daunting to be able to say like, yeah, we gave someone a sticky note or being maybe a little hyper here, but like I gave you a sticky note and all of a sudden that gets measured back up onto impact, right? Like, because as a learning leader, that sounds like that's kind of a key is I need to, I need to be able to show that you learners are doing better and the value investment time was worth it for, you know, see, you know, co or president of the company, CEO, whatever.

Someone, someone seems to have to care about or want to care about their. Maybe they don't even care about it. It's more like they're going to go down the line of their business organization, say, hey Tracy, what did you do? And you have to be accountable.

One of the things I think of, like we talk about in the book about intake prioritization, building out your governance and everybody thinks governance is bureaucracy. I promise y', all, it's not. It's beautiful. I love it.

And it is a living being. But going back to the thought of if everything's a priority, nothing is. And aligning with the business really kind of managing your portfolio of learning. If, if I'm investing, I don't keep tossing money into things that are losing money.

Like that's not a long term strategy for my, my retirement goals. I move money around to ensure that I'm optimizing. And we kind of have to treat learning like that so they want to know impact. You talk with the business, go to your stakeholders, and we talk about this in the book of just what are the business problems you're trying to solve?

Not the learning problems. What are the business problems you're trying to tell. It's taking too long for our salespeople to get up to speed on our product line. Okay.

And just go in and ask them those questions. Marketing, our interns cannot get a grasp on our go to market strategy. Like it's just, it's. They say it's too complicated.

Okay, keep going around asking, we're not going to be able to solve all of them. We don't want to solve all of them. But we can come in and go back to that sales leader and go, okay, out of the four things you told me, two of them I think we can help you with. And here's how the other two, Jeanette and HR was dealing with that exact same problem and she's working on an RFP to get a software solution in.

I'm going to connect the two of you being a connector even when you can't solve the problem, but you go in and you help with those sales especially ramp up. Like that's the biggest thing. Like we think of it as onboarding because we know the value of onboarding but the business of how quickly can they ramp up to productivity. Very different terminology of how we, how we phrase it, but if we solve that.

I once worked at a locate at a organization where they were rolling out a completely brand new onboarding. They partnered with finance because they were piloting it in three areas and they're like, we're going to do this for six months and we have a high 90 day turnover because it was a frontline organization. Like we want to see if there's a difference and where that difference starts. And this one was an aha moment for me early in my career as a senior leader because what they did was they looked at these three areas.

They saw that when people got to 72% completion, 90 day retention increased. So they didn't wait for oh any anybody who completed the training. They found the point, the pivot point. Because the data analytics team was able to help be like, oh, here's where.

And that's where they will show the impact of the onboarding training. Because a lot of times people will be like, well just because you complete a training doesn't mean we have that impact. Yeah, but if you get to a point where you're like, oh, it's 72%, 90 day retention went up 4% in all of these areas at minimum versus 71% or lower where there was no improvement in retention. That's the impact of learning.

And so what they were able to show is they improved ramp up speed, people were more proficient, were working through, and their main goal was retention because hiring was such a, a drain on the budget. But then they were able to compare that to people who didn't have that training. And that retention in those three areas was like, oh God, it was double digits higher in 90 days. But it, they did it with just one thing first, just to prove a theory.

And I think that's one of the things like, and I know I'm going to get this feedback from this book is like, I can't do this. Don't do all of it. Pick one or two things. Or pick one partner to try a bunch of things on.

Like, who's willing? Like, experiment, try. The business, especially right now, needs to see L and D as being flexible, being willing to experiment, to innovate, to move forward, to transform how they're working. Because there are a lot of negative L and D conversations going on within, like the coo, CFO kind of world right now.

And if we just lock in our heels and say, like, I'm not willing, like, I can't do all of this. Just try. If it doesn't work, you're no worse off than you were when you started. But if it does work and you can make that business impact and you can tell that story, then you just rooted deeper into the business.

It's going to be harder to remove L and D as your roots keep going deeper and deeper into the organization because then you're seen as a workforce enabler. Like, Matt helps me get my problem solved. These sales folks didn't know crap about these other two product lines. He came in with some, some videos and like, did a two hour webinar with everybody.

We've had a 4% increase in sales close closing calls since then. Okay, Fabulous. Be damn right. I'm putting that on a QBR quarterly business review.

When I go into the session that month, I'll be like, here's what I did. Like. And also please y' all on this call. Humble brag.

LND is too modest. Modesty does not get you funding. Brag. Brag like the sales guy.

Brag like the marketing person. Brag. You're doing amazing work. Yeah, well, we could talk for Tracy.

I could talk to you for such a long time. But that's. I want to end on that because I think those are great words of advice and wisdom. And I will.

Can I, if I can add one thing to what you just said, brag about your colleagues. Do you see good things, say good things. You know, I just had the great opportunity to brag. I manage a small team and now we're technically in a marketing department.

I sent a message to my VP and like they're killing it right now. If you can't see that, we need to talk. And so I would just add brag about your colleagues, brag about your teammates because, yeah, people are out there doing great things and they we are modest people and that's good in many respects. This is not one of them.

Yeah, this is not one. If you're uncomfortable talking about yourself, talk about your peers. Yeah, that's a really good one. But yeah, always show up with some gold stars to discuss.

Yeah. Well, Tracy, you are killing it. By the way, excited to get my hands on the book. Excited to have you here.

Normally we do speed round questions, but I think we're going to end it where it is because I think what you said was so just profound and important. I do want to ask you, Traci, so if people want to connect with you, they want to get the book, where should they go? Absolutely. You can always find me on LinkedIn under Tracy Cantu.

You can also go and thank you JD for this idea. But tracyroteabook.com it will take you to that page. But also my consulting Firm is on YourClo.

net you can find me there and you can link out to it and you can buy the book or book time to talk. We can chat it up or you can see how we can help. We're always there. But also too, I'm going to be around at conferences.

We're about to hit up major conference season, so feel free. If you see me at ATD or Learning Technologies or Canadian Learning Elearning Conference, stop me. And I am always willing for a chat. Fantastic.

Well, I should have prepped you for this, but I, you know, we got talking earlier that I didn't. It's always the final take where we give asked our guests to give a, you know, either summary or hot take that something they didn't say that they wish they would have said. So Tracy, what is your final take? Fall in love with governance.

It is not the bureaucratic beast you think it is. It is the bowling alley bumper guards. So no matter how wishy washy your decision is, you're always going to hit a pin. You always go in the right direction.

That's what it does for you. And that's what it does for your team. It enables you to make independent decisions at a rate that is much faster than trying to get approval and it makes sure everybody's moving, aligned in the right decision. So I know it's contrarian, but fall in love with governance and we will try.

Well, Tracy, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me in the visual lounge. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.

You bet. All right, everybody go get Tracy's book. You can hear all the great things that she has to say about becoming running L and D like a business, being a senior leader. And even if you're not a senior leader, here's the thing I've learned in my a long career here is that sometimes you just have to manage up and so you might have a senior leader that who needs your guidance and insights and you don't have to be the senior leader to have good input and good advice and good opportunities to help the business because that's going to help everybody in your department.

It's going to help your organization and that's going to be something that you can hang your hat on and have, you know, good things to brag about. So with that said, of course, you know, we, we love talking about video and images around here. So go take techsmith.com check out some of the stuff.

We got a lot of new stuff. If you haven't checked out Snagit recently, haven't checked out Audiate, I also want to say if you're a Camtasia user, got Camtasia, you also get access to Audiate, you get text based editing, freak transcription and that just comes along with Camtasia trying to spread that word more. So hope, hope that helps you get some new access to some tools and whatever you're doing, we hope you take a little time to level up every single day. Thanks everybody.