How to build a high-performing L&D team

How to build a high-performing L&D team with Lucretia Hall from SoftwareONE

Building rapport, trust, and psychological safety within the teams in your organization

I am grateful that you are joining me for an interview with Lucretia Hall. Lucretia is the Director of Learning & Development for North America at SoftwareONE, a $7 billion platform services and technology company, helping businesses achieve their dreams through technology solutions and migration to the cloud. Lucretia lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and son. I am excited to have her on to talk about some things she's been working on and some of her passions and focus especially around coaching and building high-performing L&D teams through strategy. Lucretia, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thank you, Andy.

We met through our mutual connection, Jill Coln, who was on here. You were saying that the two of you are friends and you keep in touch. That's great because one of the things that I've learned in doing this for my own success over time, interviewing a lot of L&D talent development leaders is that having a network and other people within the industry to call on when you have questions, issues, goals, whatever it is, can be so valuable. Have you found that to be really useful for you as well?

Absolutely. My former colleagues from Intuit and the other places that I've worked at is invaluable to build a relationship with them and keep it going, keep checking in with them, asking for advice and mentorship. We trade and we help each other. It helps us go so much faster when we work together in that way.

That's what this show is all about too, creating a platform for people to be able to share knowledge and learn from each other. I'd love to go back and share some of your background and maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how you got to where you are now.

I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. I come from a family of social workers, teachers, professors and builders. Even as a little kid I said, “I don't think I can teach fourth graders.” It wasn't until I was working that I discovered L&D. I started out as a salesperson and I was doing catering sales, and worked in this beautiful facility. I would work closely with businesses and they would bring their events to me. They had L&D departments, and they were doing this teaching and facilitation. That's how I discovered it.

I started out at Micron Technology, which is in Boise, Idaho, and worked my way up through experience. I had some amazing mentors at that company. I began facilitation and doing a leader teacher network, setting that up at Micron. I went to the State University for a very short time. I had some good experiences there and then I jumped to Intuit. That’s where I started to learn the craft deeply. They provided amazing training to the L&D department. I had some incredible mentors there, Jill, Brooks Fisher, and many people that were willing to teach me and to help me grow.

After that, I played in the consulting space for a moment to when I had my son and then I took my position at SoftwareONE. I often joke with my Vice President that I went to medical school at Intuit, but now I get to actually practice the trade. Even going from a Manager to Director role grew me so much. People love working at SoftwareONE because they hire smart people and they let you do your job. They push you to think of yourself as a business owner and to own your role, your department or whatever you're working in. I've had much more experiential at SoftwareONE. The cultural thing that we're well-known for is that people genuinely help each other, love each other and take care of each other. It's a great place to be at this point.

We all operate at our best when we're offering up our strengths. Click To Tweet

You’re selling the culture right if you're hiring. First of all, you don't want to teach fourth graders, and I can relate to that. We both have kids around the same age. I love teaching my children. I have no problem getting up in front of a room of adults and facilitating a workshop, but for whatever reason, the few times I've done it in front of kids when I volunteer for Junior Achievement or something like that, I get nervous. I feel like they look right through you. There's no hiding anything in front of them, not that I'm trying to hide anything. I like being myself. It's just a different experience. It’s intimidating. I have much respect and admiration for all of my friends who are teachers out there who do get up in front of those kids every day. I wanted to ask you about your sales experience. We've had quite a few people on who's got their start in sales before moving to Learning and Development. What have you drawn from that experience? What was valuable that you still might use now?

Easy answer. It's the focus on the customer and the customer saying what they want and need, connecting to a thought and feeling. To their past experiences, beliefs and network. Mining all of that, you can figure out how to make an experience that's truly grateful for them.

When you say focus on the customer, I 100% agree with you. How does that translate to what you're doing now?

It's everything. It's the foundation of the work itself. When I started at SoftwareONE, they had a lot of data. We built L&D at SoftwareONE in North America. The one thing that they were able to provide in droves, and I think that a lot of companies have, is a lot of data. We had survey results from years and years of surveys. We had tons of notes from our executive team getting together and talking about what they wanted to see for all of our people. The very first thing we did was we went and interviewed customers. We went out and interviewed our obvious stakeholders. Our Vice President of North America interviewed a bunch of market leaders. In our business, we are a sales first company. The Market Leaders and Market Directors across the region have teams of people that report to them and then they have these wide functional teams. They're inside salespeople, Technical BDMs, technical solutions team, they have all this huge span of people. We found individuals throughout all those different groups, interviewed them and talked to them about, “What are your problems today? What are you experiencing? What would you like to see happen? What would be really meaningful for you?”

When we brought all that data together, coded and found the themes, then we went back to them again and said, “Does this sound right? For our VPs, this is what people are saying. Here's how it's the same or different than what you're thinking and seeing.” We built this coalition of opinion about what we wanted to create for the organization, at least for the next few years. It's always changing. We not only we connected with the customer. We made sure that our key stakeholders were getting what they wanted. It was the beginning of the change. It was the first step in our change management process that we built this agreed upon opinion about where people were now and where they needed to be in the future.

I'm thinking that a lot of companies are sitting on a lot of data. Companies have been using employee surveys and even customer surveys for years. I feel like a lot of companies send those out, but then they don't do anything with the data and they don't quite know how to leverage that. You're saying you actually took action on that by looking at, “What exactly do our customers want?” “How can we change our programs or change what we're offering?” I want to dig into this. It's something that a lot of people can get value from. What's an example of something where you went and made a change based on that survey data?

We built our whole strategy based on the data that we had, both qualitative and quantitative. What we said was, “Based on all of this, we think we have five competencies.” Of course, Center for Creative Leadership publishes something like 27 leadership competencies. We can't teach 27 different builds then create and manage 27 workshops. We had to narrow and we narrowed to five. We said, “These five competencies are what people need to grow into the most right now.” An example is we said, “We need our people to be able to build high performing teams, whether people report to them or it's a functional relationship,” and a lot of them were a flat organization. We built a workshop around building high-performing teams and we used a lot of Patrick Lencioni’s, Goldman's and Marshall Rosenberg’s work. We used all these different people to inform the workshop that we built. We also used it to inform a lot of the coaching and the intact teamwork that we do. We have this foundation of belief and content that we try and spread out through everything that we touch.

Building High-Performing L&D Teams

You're responding to what people are actually asking for. What they need, what the customers want, and then building programs based on that. You mentioned high performing teams, and we were planning on getting into this idea of building a high performing L&D team, connecting it to the company's strategy and of course, your HR or talent strategy. Tell me a little bit more about your approach to building a high performing L&D team.

Building High-Performing Teams: You can figure out how to make an experience that is truly great for your customers by focusing on what they are saying and really connecting with their thoughts and feelings.

The first part of the approach was creating and testing the strategy that we came up with. Our strategy is that we have in-person workshops. We have those five and we believe that blended learning, or really learning certain types of it needs to be in person. Doing deep work with somebody about their mindsets and having them be vulnerable and get into groups with another person or bring their own former bad conversations and be able to talk about those. That’s in-person work. We built those five workshops, then we said, “We also need to get into people's teams. You can come to us at our corporate headquarters and have this experience, but we need to come to you.” The leader maybe comes to us but then we want to go to his or her team and bring that content according to what they feel like they need right now, what would be most beneficial to them. We cater it according to where the team’s at.

After that, we said, “We also need a coaching practice.” A couple of us in L&D are certified coaches. We created the targeted coaching practice. We went after some people and then we got quite a few volunteers that wanted to receive coaching. We offer coaching based on our foundation of content. We offer coaching to all of our Market Directors, all of our leaders really, and then our high-performing and driven individual contributors as well. The final part of that strategy is we work hand-in-hand with HR. We're completely aligned with HR, and we consult each other on organizational development. We have a different skillset and we help each other furthering the organization.

A simple and good example of that is in workshops and coaching intact teams, I get so much exposure to people. I can help our business and HR understand what's going on to people, where they need to develop, how we can push them into the next position, and what they're looking for. All of those personal things that I can discover through being around people. With, of course, the caveat of coaching is confidential. There's a line in the sand, but just providing that to the org. Of course, we in L&D, have a lot of organizational development expertise. When we partner with HR and sit at the table with HR and the business, we can help a lot in that space. There's a four-part strategy: workshops, intact team development, coaching and organizational development.

We're pivoting and adding a fifth, which is going into the learning experience platform space. We are, to your point, going to start offering blended learning. Especially in sales enablement training because it moves so fast that we have to find a way to do this online and have it be really effective. Getting the whole L&D team lined up behind that strategy and understanding their impact and their focus was key to that team buying in and becoming engaged. It was easy. We're doing it together, but them feeling how much they could serve their peers and the organization, the impact that they could have every day. It's wonderful to work in that kind of environment.

I have many questions about all the things you mentioned, but I want to get back to the core of this, which is on building that high-performing L&D team. Everyone is coming together to take this blended approach and the different steps. The workshops, intact team, coaching, etc. They're all aligned on this. Were there steps you took within the team to make sure that everybody got aligned in the beginning? Because it's easy for the boss to come and say, “This is our mission. Let's go do it.” That doesn't always work if you don't sit down and take the time to understand everybody's perspectives. Where are people coming from? What are their values? What are their motives? How do you get them all working together as a team? Is there anything else you did there as an L&D team to make sure everybody was performing and going in the same direction?

There's a lot there. First of all, it's a deep respect for people and their strengths. One of our philosophies in our L&D work is that people have a set of strengths. We all operate at our best when we're offering up our strengths. Using the Gallup Strengths Finder and discovering what everyone's strengths are and then finding every single possible way to give them the work that they're already strong in. I always use this example. I love strategy. It's my top strength. One of the people on my team, Courtney Reynolds, she has a strength in communication. I don't have any strengths and communication. I might write the strategy, but she is absolutely going to be the one who markets it and figures out what people will connect with, what's going on in the organization and how to communicate effectively. That's one thing.

The other is building trust. This is the foundation of building a high performing team. It's something that all of our leaders are learning and doing. How do you build trust from the get-go with your team? When I say it, it's so obvious and everyone knows the stuff, but it's connecting with people and learning about them. Harvard Business Review came out with an article talking about how a lot of trust is remembering and asking about, “How’s Steve? How’s your baby? What's going on? You wrecked your car last week. What are you doing with that?” It sounds trite, but when we slow down enough to know people and to build a work friendship, it builds trust. There's being open and inclusive. Being non-prejudiced, non-biased and making that evident. Doing what you say you're going to do. Having that high ratio there and knowing what you're doing or saying when you don't like, “I don't have the answer here and I'm nervous about it. I have some anxiety about this because I'm not sure what's going to happen. What do you all think? What are your opinions?”

Finally, holding space for people. I worked with someone else from our team who’s brand new and I said, “You can tell me what you're thinking that you're nervous to say, and it won't go anywhere. You can say it to me and I'm going to help you process it. I'm not going to judge you for it. I'm not going to tell anybody else.” It's important at work that people can feel safe. I always joke and tell people, “If you're embezzling from the company or you’re a risk to yourself, I'm going to say something, but we have this container and this conversation is never leaving this container.” That's how L&D has built a lot of trust in the organization. People know that they can talk to us. In L&D, we know that we can talk to each other about what we're scared of or have anxiety around and that's okay. We can say we're scared and have anxiety and it's safe to do that.

Connecting with the customer is a key to change. Click To Tweet

The other thing that we all know about is change management. Building buy-in from the beginning. Bringing people together to talk about, “What's the future state? Where are we today? What are we trying to create?” Bringing out everyone's opinions. They're easy when you talk about them, but you actually have to structure each one of your staff on the offsite. You have to have the end game or at least six months out in mind, and then build back from there. There's time and structure that as the leader, you put in place. You do build that batch, but then the conversation that happened within that agenda is completely open.

That's a lot of stuff. You said that you don't have a strength of communication and you laid out an entire plan for building rapport, trust and psychological safety on your team. It's pretty impressive. I'd say you're pretty good at communication. Those things are important. You talked about the communication and the trust. You said safety. I'm adding psychological safety because that’s popular. Also, giving people space to feel comfortable in talking about whatever they need to talk about.

Being vulnerable, which is something that I hear a lot in the personal development space, but not so much yet in the corporate world that, “We provide space and allow people to be vulnerable.” Recognizing that is how we build rapport and how we build trust is when people feel comfortable talking about whatever is bothering them. They're nervous in a situation or worried about failing with something and they're able to ask for help. You also said that this is obvious and everyone knows this stuff. I wrote it down. I don't think that's true. You might take it for granted being in the world you're living in or being in the culture you're in where it seems very pervasive, but not a lot of people are aware of this or doing this. I'm really glad that you're talking about it.

Development Programs

You mentioned the trust, and I want to go back to having those conversations, getting the team aligned and making space for that. You've done all those things. You've set that strategy. You also talked about making sure that you are working with the HR team, which I appreciate. You have information coming to you that you can help them with succession planning other than what they're doing. Are you purposely setting up workshops where you have some type of assessment vehicle? Perhaps coaching where people can observe participants and be able to go back and communicate what they're seeing to help with all of those things on the backend?

We do 360s and 180s. We also do interview-based 360s. We built a 360 and 180 tool that we do in our intact teams. We don't just let it fly because we feel like people need to have a place to talk through it once they receive it back and get good coaching. We also do interview-based 360s where people send us ten names or so and we conduct in-person interviews and actually write up pretty lengthy reports for them. Lots and lots of quotes and then some interpretation, but mostly just straight quotes. It's amazing what people see and how much they’re usually in agreement when they're not talking to each other. They're only talking to us, but we can find all these themes for people and help them build a development plan.

A lot of the assessment that happens is going on more at the leadership team levels. Whichever team it is, our access to those people are helping us and vice versa. They have access to us. They can be telling us, “This is where I'm at. This is where I want to go. I want to help with L&D. I want to grow myself in this way in this year.” Being able to take that back to their leader and our management team in NORAM can be helpful as we do our strategic planning. As we look at the organization and figure out, “Here's our strategy and here's the work. Who do we have in place?” I'd be like, “Megan wants to work on change management. Let's give her this change management process, because I know that she's interested in that practice. We've talked about it. Megan Momenee, by the way, has fourteen projects in addition to her job, but she wants to get into that.” That's an example of how we help bring people together with their strengths and what the organization needs, with the work, serve people and help them get further into what they enjoy or love.

Empowering people to leverage their strengths and do more of what they enjoy and help them get into flow and really add value to the organization. One more question on all the things that you've been building there. These different development programs, the power of bringing people together in-person and why that's important, especially at the higher levels, when you want real learning to take place. I appreciate you saying that as someone who feels passionate about that and who runs a lot of in-person workshops. I know there's a lot of value to digital and virtual learning as well and you being a software company, I'm sure you find ways to incorporate that. As you're building those things out, are you using any partners for those are you building everything in-house? Everybody does it differently and a lot of people are always curious what others are doing.

We’ve built in-house so far. During those years, we’ve built the five workshops, and then a lot of intact team content that's based on those. We share everything. SoftwareONE is a special place. We have a culture of helping. Every time I build something, I send it to my team, I get their feedback and their health. We're creating a Microsoft team database of these workshops and this content that we deliver to teams and it always changes a little bit, but it's been impactful for us to home grow it. Of course, we use all the research and all of our experiences from the past. There's so much good stuff available now.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

I read Thanks for the Feedback. It’s the same authors from Difficult Conversations. I read it and I built an intact team workshop, teaching people how to get good at receiving feedback, and now all the leaders on that team are doing a 360. We're going to have an offsite about the 360. There's a lot of content and identifying the good content is maybe the hardest part, but it's there. Once you have it, you can pretty quickly turn it into something that's valuable.

You're reading these books and then turning them into programs. That's pretty impressive. The coaching, is that all being done in-house as well or do you use any partners for that?

Yes. I was a certified coach. Thanks to Intuit for the training that I received there. I was a certified coach and I've been practicing for quite a few years when I started at SoftwareONE. My colleague, Courtney, went to Harvard and got her coaching. We have a couple of us that are practicing coaching throughout North America.

Proudest Accomplishment And Biggest Failure

Let me switch gears here and ask you a few of my more standard questions. What has been your proudest moment or your proudest accomplishment in talent development so far?

It’s lots of helping other people and serving. If you're asking about my proudest moment for me, it’s when I was awarded as the Most Influential Woman or The Woman in North America That's Helped Other Women the Most or had a positive impact on women at the company. We started Women in Technology Group years ago, and it's an inclusive network, men and women. We've been inviting in speakers. We've been having sessions with our leadership. Bringing research into the company to help people understand being inclusive in general and what that means for enabling people’s strengths. There's something about getting that award that touched my heart.

It's always great to be recognized for any of our hard work or anything we do, but that's an award that says, “You have been influencing and helping others. You are a great role model and other people look up to you.” That’s why you got it, which is obviously well-deserved. On the other side, what has been your biggest failure or mistake and what did you learn from it?

That's easy. The most difficult thing for me is I mentioned we are truly an international company, and I continue to work hard to understand other cultures and how different we are culturally. I always thought, “I'm American. We're everyone. Live here long enough and you'll find your people. You'll make your friends. Everyone's here.” However, on an international stage, it’s different. The management styles are different. People's mindsets and beliefs are different. How they operate at work is different. Telling a Swiss executive that you want him or her to be vulnerable, get down and expose your mindsets, they're like, “Why? I'm good.” You’re like, “Here's the strategy and here's how we're going to do it.” Deeply understanding that I'm not there yet, and I have to receive coaching on it. I have to try hard to understand the communication, language, culture, and all of these differences. I don't have that figured out yet. It is hugely challenging and important because we're trying to take L&D global. In order to do that, I have to figure out how to best help, influence and receive from all of these other countries and cultures that are out there.

Trends In Talent Development

Not making those assumptions, which we often might do about what will work and what the cultural differences might be or might not be. I can tell you from experience, I've been very lucky to have the opportunity to facilitate client workshops all over the world across Europe, Asia and Latin America. I'm always fascinated by the cultural differences and try to adapt and shift a little bit so I can make sure that I'm coming across and still be effective. Maybe use less references to American football wherever I go. I use that as an example and as a joke to remind people that there are a lot of colloquialisms that we have in our language. The terminology we use day-to-day within our own countries, that doesn't translate to other countries. People are like, “What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense,” even going from the US to UK. I work with a lot of people from the UK and they say tons of things that I'm like, “What are you talking about? You don’t make sense,” and we speak the same language. Lucretia, are there any trends that you're following in talent development that you're tracking or think would make a big impact soon on how we do our work?

There’s a lot of what's out there right now. First off is how do we get our arms around lending learning and do it well? I don't think a lot of people have it figured out yet. We're trying to find them since we're going into this place. Also in blended learning, how do we generate how do we enable people to create super high-quality useful user-generated content? How do we do stuff super-fast that's relevant and literally in hand, on the drive to your next client or whatever? It's truly just in time. It's hard. We have so much sales content and product content. A lot of it is extremely complex. Where all the lines get blurred between jobs and roles and the work that you do, and what's the scope of what you need to know, and what do you need to know now? It's just a bear.

Connecting with the customer is a key to change. Click To Tweet

How do we use technology effectively to teach all of that? I'm thinking about all of that and then I'm also thinking about, how do we manage this change? How do we make it not just another platform? The old learning platforms were basically libraries. You had your transcript there and you'd click to register. These new platforms are much more dynamic and they mirror social media. Also, how do we get the uptake? How do we brand it, market it and create such high-quality stuff that people can't imagine not using it? It's a big endeavor.

Book Recommendations And Other Advice

They don't roll their eyes and go, “It's this thing from HR they want us to use.” It's something they want to get into, leverage and be a part of their life. It makes sense. Blended learning is very popular. Many companies are doing it well. I work with clients on that as well bringing me in because I have many different in-person workshops, as well as a lot of digital solutions now that we're doing a lot more blended learning. The key I'm finding lately is making it more of a journey, creating a journey for people where they can go to the classroom. They have those things to reinforce the learning afterwards. You're doing some of that already. Having the reinforcement and the coaching, all the things that go into it. It sounds like you're already making some good progress there. Do you have any book recommendations for us? What's a book that has made a big impact on you or that you often recommend to others?

I love Patrick Lencioni’s work, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I also follow the EQ stuff. I'm still a lover of Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, and I think that's the L&D bible. There's a facilitator’s guide that goes along with that book. I've used that throughout my career. I love Difficult Conversations and Masterful Communications. The Harvard Negotiation Project, all of the work that they put out. I'd recommend all of those. I also recommend Thanks for the Feedback, it's excellent. It's about shifting feedback from, “I'm good at taking it,” to, “I'm good at seeking it out. I can be a role model, provide great service leadership and I can improve myself and build trust along the way.”

I can tell you that as much as I talk to people about the importance of getting feedback, and that's how we improve. Seeking it out is the next level stuff because it is difficult sometimes, even if you know it's going to help you, to take that feedback. To be vulnerable, listen and not get defensive. Last question, Lucretia. For anyone reading who is looking for ways to accelerate their careers in talent development, what's one more piece of advice you would give to them?

Surround yourself with good people and learn from them. Build up your board of people. Find people that you admire and making connections with them. I was told many great anecdotes at Intuit that I always go back to. Jill actually told me, “I've never gone to anyone and said, ‘I admire you and I want to learn from you. Can I have an hour of your time a month?’ and have them say no.” Get good at building relationships.

The other thing is in L&D, we tend to serve others. We serve the organization. A big part of that is knowing the business. Becoming a better businessperson and the Brooks Fisher at Intuit helped me with this. He's like, “Just start reading business stuff.” I got Barron's, Fortune, The Economist and I started having a practice. Now, I can't do without them. I formed this practice of reading business journals and becoming a lot more savvy about business in general. We could all use taking a finance course. I still need to take mine, but understanding business in general, and then obviously, whichever field you're currently practicing in that particular business that you're working in. It’s important when you try and have the seat at the table that is effective for L&D to have.

I agree 100% with those. Knowing the business, I can tell you as a consultant who's worked with lots of people from HR and talent development, if you take the time to understand how business works, and get your business acumen down, understand the strategy, you will absolutely stand out. People who don't take the time to do that, frankly you’ll have a better chance of being seen as more of a partner in the business. As someone who is big on building a network and learning from others, I'm all about surrounding myself with people that I can learn from, and that can raise me up. I appreciate you mentioning that. That is a big reason why I am organizing my own conference for talent development because I want to give people an opportunity to come together to network and to learn from each other. You can find out about that at TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com. I'm excited that I got a chance to have you on, Lucretia. This was fantastic. A lot of great experience information and wisdom was shared. Thank you so much for coming on the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Building High-Performing Teams: Trust is the foundation.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Take care.

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One more note that I wanted to add to this interview with Lucretia. She sent me an email afterwards to let me know that she had completely forgotten to talk about metrics. She wanted me to mention that one of the things that they did with their VP first was to interview him on how he would measure success, then they did two studies. The first showed that people who employed L&D at over twenty hours per year exceeded their GP by up to 110%. The second showed they attributed half of their retention engagement and leadership capability to L&D. There's some proof there in the pudding. I love when L&D talent leaders are measuring success. They're proving ROI because it's going to make them more strategic. It's going to make them more of a partner in the business.

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Thank you so much for reading Talent Development Hot Seat. I am always grateful for everyone who tunes in, reads, subscribes and who have left reviews for our podcast on iTunes. By the way, if you haven't done that yet, that would mean the world to me. Head on over to iTunes, take one minute to write a quick review. It helps our podcast grow and I really appreciate your support. As my gift to you, I have created a report of the Top Five Trends Impacting Talent Development in 2019. If you haven't grabbed that report yet, you can head on over to AdvantagePerformance.com/trends. You can download my report of the Top Five Trends Impacting Talent Development in 2019, as well as sign up for our newsletter to get updates on everything that is going on. Thanks for reading.

• SoftwareONE
• Jill Coln – previous episode
• Micron Technology
• Brooks Fisher – LinkedIn
• Gallup Strengths Finder
• Thanks for the Feedback
• Difficult Conversations
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• The Fifth Discipline
• Masterful Communications
• The Harvard Negotiation Project
• TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com
• iTunes – Talent Development Hot Seat
• AdvantagePerformance.com/trends