Creating learning experiences that align with the business

Creating learning experiences that align with the business with Daniel Gandarilla

Transforming the learning culture and tearing down silos

I am joined by Daniel Gandarilla. Daniel is the Chief Learning Officer at Texas Health Resources, the largest faith-based nonprofit health system in the United States with a team of more than 25,000 employees. Texas Health has won numerous awards for being a great place to work. As CLO, Daniel is the strategic oversight of leadership and management development programs and initiatives, clinical and business education programs and initiatives, continuing medical education, medical libraries, and other system education and training initiatives provided by Texas Health Resources University. Daniel was featured on the cover of Chief Learning Officer magazine for transforming the learning culture, tearing down silos, and saving millions of dollars in the process. He has a BA and a master's from Stanford and an MBA from Texas Christian’s M.J. Neeley School of Business. Daniel, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thank you. That is such a wonderful introduction. I appreciate this.

You're welcome. You have an impressive background. One of the things that I was most impressed with beyond education and some of the different things you've done is how you seem to move up fast at such a large organization in Texas Health. I was reading a little bit of your background and saw that at some point in time, you were teaching Spanish to executives in Mexico.

That was my first gig out of school having graduated. I was like, “I’ve been through all this stuff and I have an adventurous streak I want to tap into. Let me go down there. I’ve got to pick a large city. I want to live in a big urban environment.” I went down there with no friends and anything like that. I found a place, got a job, found the gig and spent a year down there. It was such a worthwhile experience making friends but also learning a lot about myself.

That was in Mexico. Did you already speak Spanish going down there?

Yes, I had some fluency. I could hang out with people and chat with them, but it was a whole other experience when you’ve got to live it 24/7 and you're not sure what certain things are called in slang or whatever. It becomes quite an adventure. You learn a lot about yourself, which is probably more important than anything else.

I can relate a little bit. What you did is even more adventurous. After college, my then-girlfriend, my wife and I moved from Florida out to Los Angeles with no connections, no jobs and no money. We were extremely overwhelmed. We moved from this small town in Florida to the city of eight million or how many people are in LA with the crazy traffic and all the stuff going on. It’s a different culture and a huge learning curve, but it was quite an adventure and you learn a lot in those moments. That worked out for both of us. How did you go from there to getting into doing what you're doing, getting into learning at Texas Health?

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After being an English teacher in Mexico, I came back to the US and taught high school. I also ran the student leadership program in South San Francisco, so I was there and spent a lot of time with these kids finding out that what I enjoyed more so than anything was helping people to develop. Not necessarily the subject matter because I didn't teach history and psychology. I had a government-econ, but the thing that was most important to me was the human being, how they were progressing and what they wanted to do. At that time, my wife and I had been engaged and we decided we were ready to make a career change. We moved to DFW, where I’m at the moment and in that process, I started pursuing my MBA and my Doctorate in Educational Leadership. I'm on ABD on that, so after this, I will continue to try to crunch some of that document out there so I can finish my dissertation.

In school, I started pursuing some business administration, education and all that stuff and learned about chief learning officers at that point since I had some exposure to management and education. People started talking to me about it. I realized there was an opportunity to synergize my background with my interest, the degree and all that, so I started looking into it. Lo and behold, I found out more about it. I was able to get the chief learning officer from Coca-Cola at the time on the phone to chat with me about expressing this interest. I then ended up at Procter & Gamble doing my internship for my MBA. When I came back, I gave a presentation about some of the activities I had done to the chief learning officer at Texas Health. He told me to come to join, and I did. I worked my way up and the rest is history.

It reinforces the advice that I give people all the time, which is that networking is important, reach out to people and ask questions. Most people want to help. I did the same thing when I was in business school. The only problem for me was I wasn't as focused on what I wanted to do, so I would reach out to a lot of alumni to do informational interviews and everybody would say yes. I would get all of this great information, but they didn't know how to help me because I didn't know where I wanted to go with my career. Things worked out in the end and it sounds like it worked out well for you. The interesting thing is you got hired by the chief learning officer, you joined Texas Health and now, you are the chief learning officer. It happened fast. Tell me that story.

It was a matter of me getting in and starting to do work. One of the things that I always emphasize is you’ve got to build those relationships when you're in the organization. Right away, I started talking to different people, finding out what their needs were and trying to figure out resources that currently exist in or serving as a vehicle to connect people. Through that capacity, I always try to do the job that's above me. I was a manager and I was trying to do my director's job, so he could free up. You can get everyone up to work at a higher level. As I did that, I continued to own the role above me to the point that I was doing the work. When that director left, it was a no-brainer that I was the person who put into that position.

There was another chief learning officer at the time. She came in and I worked to try to help her to do her role as best as possible. I was doing some of the activities that might have normally been done by the chief learning officer, but I was the director at the time and I kept working at it. When she left, it was a no-brainer that I would be in that position. My philosophy has always been to try to help the person above by saying, “What can I do that would help you?” Even if it's a part of their role, so it can free them up to do other things, that's what you do. If that's the work you do, it becomes natural that you're the next person to fill in any given duty.

I like that advice. It sounds like it works well for you to always be thinking about how you do the job above you so that you're essentially prepared. It becomes almost a no-brainer when that job opens up. Are you doing the CHRO job so that you're ready to go when that role opens?

I am trying my best to help out as much as possible. This is the point at which it becomes a little bit more difficult because there's some expertise that's needed sometimes, but I still offer whatever I can. Whatever it is that needs to be done, I will do. Although in this role, we've been through centralization in the past several years and then we've been continuing to add different functions. We added in our continuing medical education and medical library. I've been doing more work at this level than I usually will because I do try to free myself up to do some work above. There's a lot of work going on at Texas Health, so I would like to continue to work on freeing up some time to support our chief people officer., I've been through a lot of process improvement. I focus on integrating a few teams together. It’s not as much as I like to, but there's a lot of work going on.

Creating Learning Experiences: Networking, reaching out to people, and asking questions are important in business.

Transforming the learning culture

Speaking of that work, I want to dig into some of the work that you have been doing there as the chief learning officer. You were featured in Chief Learning Officer Magazine, which is on the cover. It’s awesome to see that. It was all about how you transform the learning culture and tore down silos. Tell me more about what you did there and how have you gone about transforming the learning culture.

The entire time I've been here, I’ve been trying to bring people together. I know that you probably have people reading your show that are from outside of healthcare, but for those that are within healthcare or want to learn more about it, when you go into a healthcare organization or when you walk into a hospital, think about how many specialties and subspecialties exist. Within nursing, you've got med-surg nursing, critical care, emergency, OR, labor and delivery. Within there, there are some specialties as well and then you start going out. There's a pharmacy, lab and physical therapy. It involves having to bring a lot of people together in order to understand how to best serve the patient or the consumer.

Having to bring those people together, it often takes a lot longer than you want in order to do something quickly, but it gets you to a better outcome. That's been the work in saying, “If we're going to do this for pharmacy, do nurses need to be involved? Do physicians need to be involved?” That's been breaking down a lot of silos. It's a different way of thinking that we've been pushing this tremendously. When we centralized, we had to go through this process and that had to bring everyone together and coalesce around a vision. We put in a new leadership team with a vision of trying to support these hospitals collectively as opposed to just nursing and reaching out to different disciplines beyond that.

It hasn't been easy, but the thing that we've had to do more than anything is to either work and put ourselves into a workgroup that exists like an emergency department cabinet. It has an interprofessional team and gets someone on that team, or to create a workgroup for something like diabetes that would involve different disciplines in there. Put ourselves at the table or create the table where we could then have a conversation about what's needed? What is learning and what might be in communication? What is the process issue versus this is a point of need tip sheet that needs to be there? We think through all of that, so we don't continue to use an outdated model of instructor-led training that may be relevant at certain points, but not for everything.

That goes back to centralization and treating it more as a central business, overseeing things from a business perspective versus all of these different specialties managing themselves. Hopefully, sometimes in working together, you're bringing everyone together as a business and getting people out of silos. Also, centralizing sounds like a lot of learning and connecting that to learning, training and development to the overall strategy versus reacting to what those different specialties are asking for.

One of the other things my sister and I did is we created the table. At the time, we crafted what was the most appropriate, which is this learning and education cabinet. I formed that with our chief operating officer, chief clinical officer, chief people officer, VP of quality and president of the physicians group. It’s a collective group together to look at what was needed for the organization, help them define the strategy they wanted for us to take and also, point us in the direction of where we should go. When I mentioned those teams that we were putting on hold, they were identified through that group as a place that we should go to. We used them to help guide us and point us.

One of the cool exercises that we did was we used some Deloitte literature. If you know the modern learner, I'm sure you've seen that graphic, Meet the Modern Learner. It says, “You can dedicate about 1% of your time to learning in a given work week,” which we extrapolate out and that's about 21 hours a year. I gave them 21 poker chips and I asked them to sort these poker chips around 4 categories of drivers for education, whether it was related to strategy, performance improvement, regulatory requirements or an individual's interest. They were able to provide back to me a framework for where they thought collectively or individuals should be spending their time.

True customization is in the conversation between the individual and the manager about the collective data. Click To Tweet

When you look at it in healthcare because we're highly regulated, where we're spending our time on this regulatory compliance isn't where executives want our time focused. We've been on a mission to reduce time spent and require learning where we can. There's not a regulation that says, “You must have 8 hours,” we are trying to get it down to what's most important. That way, we can spend more time on things like performance improvement or our strategic initiatives. We're trying to balance that out without increasing cost and time, and knowing that there are only so many hours in a day that someone can learn.

There are only so many hours in a day for us to do anything, including learning. People might say they want to learn, but it's always hard to get around to that. It'll get put off. Although we do see that the data shows that more people want that learning and development more than maybe previous generations said that they did. It’s scoring higher in those surveys. You’ve got to be able to find a way to provide those opportunities, but you're also trying to streamline that process. I saw in that article I read that you refer to yourself as the chief time officer. Why is that?

That's a reference to exactly what we did there. I am allocating a share of mind. There are 21 hours that anyone can dedicate in a given year to their development. I say dedicate, but we know we go above that. If we want people dedicated to that, then we need to know how much time is being spent on all of these regulatory types that are eating up our ability to move into performance improvement or strategic learning. That becomes a conversation where we say, “We know that people click through something. Why do we create an experience that eats up their time with them clicking?” Let them read it at their own pace. They've read it probably ten times depending on what it is. Let's change that experience. We want them focused on how they can improve on their unit.

The other thing we can look at is when in a regulatory requirement, can we focus on the things that we're going to do for improvement and count it for that?” We're trying all different things. We're like the time enforcement police a lot of times. It's like, “We're already in the buckets overflowing on time we're asking for people to be trained. You need to think about a different way of doing this,” or we need to say sometimes with quality, and I've told them this before, “Let's swap in and out. You don't need to do this training every year. Take that one out for this year and next year, we can put it back in and in a couple of years, we put something else in that place.” We can keep in front of these people the impact on the frontline learner.

Connecting learning programs to the company strategy

It sounds like you're highly aware of where people are spending their time, whether it's a good use of their time or it's a waste of their time. You want to make sure that if you put training in front of them, it's a good use of their time, especially knowing they only have a certain number of hours to give. I like the metaphor of using the Poker chip. The number of hours that are available is tangible. I also gather from looking at your background and your profile that you are a strategic thinker. That's another reason probably why you got to this role quickly. One of the challenges or problems out there is that a lot of people in learning roles get reactive and say, “Someone requested this kind of training or this kind of learning, so let's put it together,” when it may not necessarily fit with the overall company's strategies. Tell me about your philosophy on making sure that your learning programs are connected to that company strategy.

We value strategy, specifically, the strategic insight that needs to be brought to learning. We know that our customers are the people that we say are going to buy our services, and that's our cabinet. We want everyone else to have a good learning experience to make sure that it's aligned with the needs of the business. We do this all the time. I'll give you an example, we had centralized the organization and our PBX, that's the call operator system. They uncovered quite a few things in there that weren't standardized and they wanted to come back with a training issue. The team was handling and they came to me and I said, “That's not a training issue,” but there was some significant concern. We sat down and talked to them, “What's the concern?” “We don't know if people are going to know who to call.” I said, “Is there a single number to call?” “Yes.” “What's the number?” “9999.” “Do we need to train people on how to use a phone?” “No.” “What is it we need to have people do?” “We need them to know the number to call.” “Do we have stickers that we could put on the phone?”

Lo and behold, we found out that one of the hospitals had already gone down that route and had stickers. We were able to circulate that and say, “Let's continue down this route and see if we can get those to everyone.” We didn't need to do anything because of the time and energy it would take. Even if it's creating a 3.3 slide PowerPoint, load into the system, push it out to everyone and then spend the time tracking and then sending reports to people who hadn't completed it. That amount of time, we could have put stickers on every phone and everyone has it in front of them all the time. That was one of those ways that we were able to deflect some of that, and we got people to buy into it. It was not easy and it can be painful. People don't like it because when you're either the chief learning officer, a trainer or an instructional designer, you have to say no or at least give them a different solution to say, “Let's get some stickers.” Your role isn't to pursue something, but to be a partner to the business at the time. That's hard.

Creating Learning Experiences: Focus more on things that will contribute to the organization’s improvement.

It's a challenge for a lot of people, that idea of moving from an order taker to a partner to the business. When you're a part of the business, you make sure that things fit in with that strategy, but that also means you have to say no to other people or maybe dig in and ask more questions to determine what is the actual need. How do you go about doing that? Is that something that you struggle with? How did you get better at doing that?

I struggle all the time. We try to give everyone an option to get to yes, but it's no in terms of what we need to provide. We always try to get to yes. An example could be one that came up one time. There was a request. One of these physicians is an expert in adult care and gerontology. We've dedicated all of our resources already to these other projects. She wanted to create these own things that she would write all the content and all that, so we gave her an option, “We have a tool that's fairly easy for you to use if you can write all that script.” We can make it a self-service option for this physician to say, “I want to craft this content and create the content. I will own it, build it and do all this stuff.”

We try to provide a way for people who are motivated to do that without needing 100% full support from us. We know that we've got resources dedicated to what we call our core products and services that we run day in and day out. We're responsible for orientation, our leadership development programs and our CME. There are conferences that are put on and we know we do these things every day. We've dedicated all of our resources to that. We have some additional bandwidth, but once that's tapped into by all these other projects, it becomes a matter of prioritization.

If someone wants to go about it on their own, we have a solution or we might need to go back and to reprioritize the work that's been done. In order to do that, we need to take that over to a group that can do that. We can't do that on our own. We then say, “Here are these things. What's the priority?” That difficult choice needs to be made by whoever's commissioned the work. One of the options could be, “We'll give you money to do that.” That's the way that whoever's in one of these roles has to think about, which is you've got a finite set of resources, you can always go ask for more but you have to be able to have that person to help you make the case. As it makes it, then you get the resource and if not, then you don't.

There has to be a strong business case for the thing they want to invest in and then it could be internal resources or money. Tell me about that. It sounds like you have several different training and development programs in place. Do you use outside partners to provide content for some of these things or do you build everything internally?

We have a lot of great vendor partners that we use for some of our continuing education, professional development and leadership development. We try to customize as much as possible and when I say customize, we tailor it to Texas Health. We call it the THR. We make a Texas Health Resources approval. We try to roll out situational leadership for our leaders, but we put a wrapper around it that makes it about Texas Health. We can buy the content out of the box and facilitate some of the content, but then we always want to connect it back to our Texas Health framework. It fits within the language and the way that we do things. On the clinical side, we tend to customize some content a little bit more, but we have different products that provide us specific processes they can use for nursing as well as CE. We customize some specific processes and workflow things for ourselves as well.

Education advancement program

It sounds like a healthy mix between custom, standard, working with vendor partners and creating things in-house depending on what you're trying to do, where it fits in, what skills and resources you have available versus what partners you have. I see the same thing with a lot of the clients I work with, and I provide custom solutions down to off the shelf standard type stuff and how much do you want to invest in customizing these things to work for you. There's one other thing I wanted to ask about, which is your education and management program that you had to streamline quality and access to training. What does that look like? How does that fit into everything we talked about?

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That was phase one of the centralization. This is a long project. The first thing we did is we went out and we made visits to all of our different facilities and looked at what resources they had. What we found is each facility had a little bit of a discrepancy in what was available to them while some of the smallest facilities had almost nothing. I'm sure that it's like this in other large organizations. We just happened to be large in one metroplex on an island. To the point that we found out in the process before we had centralized some of the design and development, and before we did the next phase of the people. Some of our smaller facilities had to go to our competitors to get resources and some of the training that they needed. That was disheartening.

We said, “We need to take these functions and reposition what we're doing centrally.” That moved to some of the design and development of content and then the deployment through the learning management system. We took that on because there were thirteen different facilities doing thirteen different things. You had these thirteen catalogs and each one had a version of something and the content wasn't the same. We took that on as the first phase to make sure we ensured better access to higher quality content. We changed that and we've got it but the people are still scattered and doing things differently. That was the next phase of that event centralization. What we've found is we've been able to reduce a significant amount of rework or waste and create the same thing but for a different population. With the potential risks, they’re creating a whole different type of learning experience, module and content.

One of the things that you can talk about reframing some of the learning culture is that learning had primarily been used from a punitive standpoint. It still is to a certain extent rather than use performance management, feedback and coaching. A lot of times, it's easier to say, “Here, do this module.” We know that that happened more than anything. We're still trying to reframe that a bit because there's this lack of personal ownership of accountability. The manager’s accountability for their staff to know things that it's easier to say, “Do this. I've taken care of it and wiped my hands of it,” than to say, “As a professional, you should know this. Everybody else knows it because there haven't been any issues except in your performance. We're going to move this through the corrective action process or coaching process.” It's been punitive, so we're trying to reframe all that. That’s the next phase of what we're doing. We've got good partners with the rest of our people and culture team from HR, risk, and others to advance that.

I've seen it where organizations or someone's running a team, I see one person that needs to get better, get training on something or need that feedback. Since they're afraid to provide that direct feedback, I'd say, “Everybody has to go through this training program.” It's like, “No, you're wasting other people's time. They already know it. Give direct feedback to this one person. Put them on the learning program they need and tell them how they can improve because they're probably unaware.” Oftentimes, we don't improve unless we get the feedback we need from managers or peers, whether it's positive like, “Here's a strength you have that you didn't even know,” or it's areas for improvement, but we're not going to realize that until we get that feedback.

That's the thing. Until all of these systems that we have can talk through the future of what's going to happen in work in general and they can then say, “Here's what time you arrived and here's what you did. Based on that, here's what you need to learn and do.” Until that, the only way we can customize at the individual level what's needed is going to be through support from managers who can identify the skills of the employees and where they need to work, so that they can then do that. That's how we get to true customization in that conversation between the individual and the manager. With the data, collectively they can say, “Here's my plan for me.”

That's how we get unique and tailored without having all this big data quite yet, that in the future could tell us that but at this point, when people are like, “Why do we have to do all the same thing?” We have to do all the same things because our managers haven't said, “This is what you're good at and this is where you weren’t. This is where you're good at and this is where you weren't.” When individuals are saying, “I agree to this or I disagree. What I need to do is this.” When we get there, that's when we'll have this true customization that's got input from the individual and the manager and what they've seen perform. Without that, everyone does it. That’s not what we're trying to get to. It’s this, “At the individual level, what's my need?” That's going to be determined by the individual and the manager.

Accomplishments, failures, and the future

I mentioned that there's data that more people want the development opportunities. They want it to be personalized. They need managers to identify that stuff, but people also have to take ownership of their careers too and help identify where they have gaps, where they want to get better and what skills they want to acquire versus saying, “I want a promotion.” I have a partnership with a woman named Christine DiDonato, who's been on the show in the past, with a company called Career Revolution that works with companies to do that. It's eye-opening to see where those gaps are on those opportunities and how much of a difference it can make when people start taking ownership of their careers and getting specific about the skills they need versus saying broadly, “I want to get promoted. How do I do that?” The managers don't know what to tell them because they're not there yet. Daniel, what's been your biggest accomplishment or proudest moment so far in your career?

Creating Learning Experiences: Vendor partners can be helpful for continuing education or for professional and leadership development.

We've been talking about that centralization and that's probably one of the biggest things. That was such a massive change that we needed to work. I was working with this large group of people. The way we did it is we engaged people. We had them look at the work they were doing. While it was painful, it was also one of the proudest moments. The next one that will come is around introducing some tenants of change management into the organization and making that an important facet for our leaders. I have been approved to do that, so I've been working with our system transformation office to plug that into the way that we work, and then to roll that out in the future to our leader.

The first one is that it's in the past and it's something that I'm proud of. There's also this other one on the horizon because I've been talking about change management for several years and it's finally with all the stuff coming to fruition. A lot of times, people think that time horizons are short like a training program, but when you're talking about trying to move an organization in a direction, sometimes it takes years to get that conversation to the place. It is that you can then go ahead and start advancing it. The next one that will be my proudest moment that might even eclipse the education centralization and that creation of THRU will be this change management approach because it's going to be critical.

This is something that will transcend industries. It's almost like if there's nothing else you can focus on, you can focus on how managers and leaders can move people through change and how individuals can move themselves through change. While it's cliché, it's the only thing that will continue to be constant if you can focus on that. Any chief learning officer, talent development or whatever it is will truly help to move the organization forward, so I'm excited about what's to come next. That's what's proudest in what's coming versus what we've already done.

The rate of change is faster than it's ever been before and it's also slower now than it will ever be in the future. Change is going to keep getting faster. Those needs are going to be there. Having those skills in the future is going to be valuable for your managers, for you, as you continue to advance your career. I like where you're going with that. What's been your biggest failure or mistake to this point? What did you learn from it?

There have been some things that we've tried to do. One of the things we originally tried to do bombed internally primarily, but we said, “We've got all these experts. They all are creating this training, but they're not experts.” We created a program that was called Teaching You to Fish, with the intent of making them better experts. I did that. I pulled the team together. They talked about it, crafted a curriculum, pulled people in, and it bombed. We had people show up to the first one and then there was a three-part series. By the second one, we only had 2 or 3 people coming and then no one finished it. It was painful because it was like, “We need this and it was an idea that we came up with in support of a need.”

If we had to shift the people’s mindset first and they weren't ready for it, a lot of them that were in there realize what they were saying was training, wasn't training, but they couldn't move away from that idea that what they started with was different. It was painful to bring up and sometimes people say, “Remember that time when we did the Teaching You to Fish?” It's always like pushing a wound that’s still healing and it hurts a little bit. My perspective on a lot of things is that you can only learn from experience. Whatever it is that you sit through a workshop, it's when you go to do it that you learn. That was one of those learnings that even though you may need it, there's still a huge barrier in terms of trying to push the change forward and what's required. It wasn't ready for and it was underprepared for it, so it died and we're bringing back the second version of it through this tool that we have and trying to help support our experts. We're working at a slower pace, but we're trying to put some infrastructure around it to provide the help that we didn't have last time.

We do learn best through experiences. That's why I'm a big fan of experiential learning. That's why you hear people say after they go through some type of tragedy or a big challenge or failure like that, “I learned so much from it. I wouldn't want to go through it again, but I'm glad I did because I gained so much insight and knowledge from it.” Are there any big trends that you're following or tracking in talent development that you think is changing how people might be working in the future?

Solving a problem is one thing, but solving the right problem is something else. Click To Tweet

The notion of augmented reality more so than virtual reality and these ideas of chatbots are two big things that could help for talent development. When we think about chatbots, first is we know that a common issue is search. “Where can I find this?” Imagine that you had a quick search bot that could pop up or chatbot and could say, “What do you need from Texas Health Resources University?” “I want to create a leadership development plan.” It can walk you through that in a way that could automate some of the services that are provided. Not some of the expertise because we still need to use that to create the chat and we still need people to be able to support that on the back end. In terms of how you deliver the service and how you can make it easier, those things are the way of the future and you could use it for anything.

“I'm trying to find my annual compliance training.” “What's your role? What do you need? Have you pulled through the data?” Those things are no-brainers. Those are ways to improve service. As it relates to augmented reality, the ability to have not only a simulated experience, but one in which it can overlay a real experience. If you want to practice having a conversation that you can do that, but then to have information through an augmented reality that could pop up at the time. There's a simple way of explaining this and I give you this as overly simplifying it. The Joint Commission comes through into Texas Health and that people want to know how to find their fire extinguishers and all that.

Wouldn't it be cool to have an augmented reality app that you could pull up, you could open it up and say, “Fire extinguishers,” and it can guide you from your location to where you needed to go? When you get there, put your phone over it, seize it and it pops up how to use it just in case. You don't have to spend all this time going through this training upfront, but through this experience in the moment, you're able to capture it. It's probably a little more difficult when it comes to management stuff, but you can see it at a time in the future where maybe every employee and every leader has Google Glass on. If you're in a conversation that's going south and reads people's facial expressions, they can provide that stuff to you.

They can give you pointers in the moment of things you may want to say to defuse the conversation or things you may want to say like, “Check in on this. Are you feeling okay?” Those kinds of things. There's a good article that one of our presidents sent over. It was from The Wall Street Journal or maybe in New York. It’s something about the robots that manage the managers. It's about these notifications and things that pop up, but having an overlay real-time so that you know when you can augment your reality, it provides a better learning opportunity. Even though these things like you'll have notifications, a manager is still going to have to do something. They're still going to have to say, “I hope you're feeling okay after this tough conversation or this is a one-time thing,” or whatever it may be. It still has to be executed, even though we can provide all of these different things. That execution can't go away. It's supporting them in their execution that will be helpful.

Such future-looking stuff and all of that is coming. The robots that manage the managers, I like that and if you're a good manager and you connect with people, you have a better chance of robots not taking your job. If you're interested in finding out whether a robot will take your job, there's a website I've discovered and posted about on LinkedIn called WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com. You can put in your job title and it'll tell you the percentage chance that robots will take your job in the future. Many of those things are coming being tested. Google Glass, consumers have spoken and said, “It's creepy. We don't want that.” Different versions of it are still being developed that are being used in different professions. Healthcare is a big one, where it's useful, and we're going to see more of that stuff in the future. Going more old school, Daniel, is there a book that has made a big impact on you or that you often recommend to others?

One of my favorite authors is Malcolm Gladwell. Anything by Malcolm Gladwell, but I like it more of an anthology. What the Dog Saw is one. Some of his shorter pieces that he's written, but anything by him, David and Goliath is one and it was good. Even Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who wrote for Freakonomics, I appreciate their perspective in that they look at a topic and then they work through the topic in such a way that what you might think is conventional wisdom is not necessarily the truth. It forces you to put on your hat in terms of lateral thinking.

For example, you mentioned that I went to Stanford. It's a great piece in David and Goliath where he's questioning the value of going to Harvard versus a smaller university and going through the benefits of it. While there may be a brand benefit of going to a brand name school, there are other things that might not be such a benefit in terms of morale, self-esteem or things like that. Stanford was a great place. Don't get me wrong. There are some things that are counterintuitive that you need to think through and that lateral thinking helps you think through other types of processes. If you can only read and then listen to them on their podcast, most people would think differently.

Creating Learning Experiences: People need to take ownership of their careers.

I love Malcolm Gladwell. I've read most of his books. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner with Freakonomics. I've read their stuff and used to listen to their podcast all the time because it's always a different way of thinking about things. If you like Malcolm Gladwell, he also has a great podcast called Revisionist History, where he looks at the underside of things as well, which I've listened to and it's some fascinating stuff. Daniel, for anybody reading who is in talent development looking for ways to accelerate their careers and move up as you have, what's one more piece of advice you would give them?

I was telling my wife, “You’ve got to show up, work hard and figure out how to work with other people.” That's it. You show up, put in the work and then figure out the right people that you need to work with. If you're trying to solve a problem, you want to make sure that you're solving the right problem. Solving a problem is one thing, but solving the right problem is something else. That's key and thinking through, “Am I solving the right problem? Is my solution going to help advance the problem?” It involves asking a lot of questions and making sure you're understanding coming into any situation as a learner. She said, “Tell me more about that. I'm trying to understand. Is it because of this or this?” Through that process, you can provide a lot of value to people and in the end, you may not do anything but you become a valued partner. As soon as you do that, people come to you and probably the fastest way to grow your career is if people think of you as a person that can solve problems for you, whether or not you do anything.

When you solve the right problems, you become known for solving problems and adding value. You become more in demand as someone that can solve problems, add value, and bring people together if you're a connector or whatever it is. I like that and I'm trying to do the same thing in my career, so thank you for that advice. Thank you, Daniel, for coming on and sharing all of your experience, wisdom, advice and the things you've been doing at Texas Health. The things you've done so far are impressive. I know you have a lot more to go and I wish you the best of luck. I want to thank you again for coming to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. I look forward to chatting with you again in the future.

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• Texas Health Resources
• Christine DiDonato – past episode
• WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com
• What the Dog Saw
• David and Goliath
• Freakonomics
• Revisionist History
• iTunes - Talent Development Hot Seat
• AdvantagePerformance.com/trends