Amplifying Subject Matter Expert Voices with Maria Taylor

“We want to amplify your voice across the organization so that instead of you having to train 200 people [one on one] on this particular process, we can amplify your voice, get it out to all 200, and then maybe it's just the five or ten that need that extra support or have deeper questions.”
-Maria Taylor

Have you ever met a brilliant frontline employee who was great at what they did, but no one could replicate it and there was risk if the person ever left the company?   Listen in for some tips on how to extract their knowledge for everyone’s benefit, including theirs.

My guest is Maria Taylor. Maria is a Chief People Officer with over 15 years' experience in the people space. Her specialty is transforming HR departments into strategic People Operations powerhouses, and has had the opportunity to do this across various industries including retail, service, CPG, and most recently in horticulture. With a keen eye for efficiency, systems, and analytics, Maria has a proven record of identifying and nurturing top talent, and helping others amplify their superpowers through others. 

In this episode of Talent Management Truths, you’ll discover:

• What is “dip” training and why you should avoid it
• Insight into what drove the 100% adoption rate of a new online learning system at launch 
• Tips for helping long-term employees feel comfortable sharing their knowledge without them feeling at risk

Links

• Maria Taylor on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-taylor-people-ops/

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Transcript

Have you ever met a brilliant frontline employee who was great at what they did, but no one could replicate it and there was a risk if the person ever left the company? Okay, listen in for some tips on how to extract their knowledge for everyone's benefit, including theirs. My guest is Maria Taylor.

Maria is the Chief People Officer at Metrolina Greenhouses. Her specialty is transforming HR departments into strategic people operations powerhouses, and she's had the opportunity to do this across various industries. In this episode of Talent Management Truths, you'll discover what is DIP training and why you wanna avoid it.

Insight into what drove the 100% adoption rate of a new online learn learning system at launch, and tips for helping long-term employees feel comfortable sharing their knowledge without them feeling at risk. Enjoy the episode. 

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Hello and welcome back to Talent Management Truth. I'm your host, Lisa Mitchell, and today I am joined by Maria Taylor. Maria is the Chief People Officer at Metrolina Greenhouses. Thank you for coming on the show, Maria. It's good to have you.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Thanks, Lisa. I'm happy to be here.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: So let's kick off and, dig in a little bit to who you are and what's your background.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Yeah, my journey started up in New York City about 15, 20 years ago, we'll call it somewhere in that, that timeframe. I started in big box retail. I started as everyone does in big box retail as a sales manager, and found my home in human resources. And then we relocated to the Carolinas where I stayed in big box retail in the HR space, but had an amazing mentor who encouraged me to branch out and look for more strategic roles.

And that was the start of my strategic people ops journey. I started joining companies across various different industries. And from there I did everything from real estate to adult beverage space. And ultimately here as the chief people officer in a horticulture space, which was not even in my, my thinking when I started my career path.

But the, the strategic opportunities have been. Amazing for me. I, I love seeing that whole picture. I love being able to pull in best practice from a process standpoint as well as employee experience and translating that to leadership so that they can see how that impacts their team and ultimately the results that they're looking for.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Beautiful. Okay. So, so that's, it really grounds us. So it sounds like HR has been a part of your career pretty much most of the time. Any. Anyways. So at Metrolina, what does the company do? What's your team look like in terms of its, its structure? If you don't mind sharing, how do you support the, the company?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Absolutely. Metrolina is, it's a regional B2B organization, so we are technically a greenhouse, but picture a golf course. Actually two golf courses and we are entire greenhouse, so one of our facilities is almost entirely under greenhouse roof. And our second facility is almost all outdoor farm. And we have specialties in annuals and perennials in the southeast and, and our regional distribution is all up and down the east coast.

My team supports the entire people operations, so everything from recruiting to onboarding to that employee experience, employee safety. Benefits, wellness, compensation, you name it. Our team manages it and have a dynamic, amazing team across the two facilities and now a huge remote staff now that we've merged organizations with our service company.

And we're about 17 deep. And again, spread across most of those functions, most heavily involved in the employee relations and the learning team.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Got it. Okay. And I remember you, you sharing that. Well, you, you told me actually just in the, in the, in the green room before we started recording that. I guess most of the revenue for the year is driven in the summer months. It's, it's highly seasonal, and I remember when we first met, you were talking about you've got, you know, a, a fairly big cohort of permanent employees and then you ramp up a lot of seasonal or temporary employees.

How does that, how do you manage all of that?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Well, luckily we have great partners to help us with that, but, but you're right. Our business is almost entirely seasonal. So within a four month span, we'll do 75% of our revenue for the entire year. And it's even closer to a three month span depending on how Mother Nature treats us that year. And, and then, yes, the seasonal staff.

So year round we're, we're about 800 across our facilities and our remote year round staff. Then on site we bring on another 500 seasonal workers, and we have outsourced that to an amazing partner. And they help us staff that with people that enjoy coming back. It's about a 60 to 70% return rate year over year, the last three years.

And then for our services team out in the field we do ramp that up ourselves. So there's a great team that helps us source and, and I think that return rate is closer to 50, which is still great. But that's even upwards of 4,000 people. Out in the field helping service our plants. So because we are B2B, we actually produce most of the, the goods ourselves at our facilities.

And then when we ship them to our customer, who ultimately sells it to our consumer, that's where that field services team really comes into play. And they make sure that the product stays beautiful and, and in great shape for that end user or that that customer at the end.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Well, as somebody who loves visiting my local greenhouse and can spend far too much time there, I, I can appreciate that, that desire, you know, the, the what goes behind keeping the product. Beautiful. Right. So interesting to, to, to get a little bit of sneak peek into that industry. Thank you. Alright, so, you know, you've been there for all, I think it just, you just hit about three years at

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: That's right. Mm-Hmm.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: and when you came in, you know, here's this brand new landscape and, and you know, previously we talked about how you even figured out where to start and, and what the needs were.

Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: No, I honestly, I, I was so fortunate when I joined I actually, I joined and there was this new training manager in position. They had hired her three or four months before I got there, and she was entire energy. She, she did some needs analysis before I got there. And really met with the leadership team and identified where some of the gaps were and where the energy was coming from.

Was for a couple years, I think it was two or three years back to back. They had invited consultants to come on site and do some leadership training and, and what my owner proudly calls DIP training where, you know, we, we bring someone in, they're an expert, we dip everyone through the same training and then send them on their way and say, good luck.

And the idea was that was helpful, but we really wanted to have a sustainable long-term learning plan. And that's where the, the learning department started developing. And I got to come in and ride the wave and help them identify, okay, now that we know what people want, and, and you've done some great work on what the team needs today, how do we build our three to five year plan?

To come up with programming and tools and resources that, that meet the business' needs. The first thing that we went after was some more leadership training. So it wasn't DIP training. We created a, a, what we call a how to series. And our training manager did a fabulous job building out almost like frontline leadership.

And, and we pulled in some things like situational leadership, just early

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: I love sit

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: leader.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yeah, that's,

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: yeah. A little bit self management, a little bit, you know, almost covey type concepts of managing self before managing others. How to do training on the job versus what needs to be taught in a classroom.

Very, very high level, good starting point for our leadership. Because we were doing it in-house, it was no longer dip training. We were able to track who went through it. We were able to offer ongoing training once a quarter, so all new and upcoming managers, high potentials, who were going to get offered a management position in the next six months.

Were able to get that training ahead of time. But in order to expand training, we couldn't rely on ILT only instructor-led training only. So we also started looking into systems. What systems could we put in place? And, and at that point we did an RFP. We went to market.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Okay, so, so I wanna, I wanna just put a pin in that one for a sec 'cause I want to come and explore that specifically. 'cause I think that you've done some great stuff around the platform and the, and the online learning just around the. Dip training. 'cause it, you know, I've probably talked about it on the show a few times.

I've often called it flavor of the Month or like, you know. Throw it at the wall and hope it sticks or you know, it's that kind of of approach, which I remember in my last organization I came in, that's really what it was, right? Like somebody would read a book, get a great idea, bring someone in, do it, but then there was absolutely nothing done, no strategy around how do we into great this, into our systems and into the, into the culture.

So I'm curious 'cause you used the word sustainable, which is really what I'm talking about as well. How did you. Go about, you know, you talked about the three year strategy ensuring that the training you did offer and that people partook of you know, how did you make sure that it, it, it, it kind of had an afterlife, right?

And, and that the investment paid off.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Well, I think part of that, again, we were very fortunate because there was so much excitement around training. We were

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yes.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: to capture that excitement and continue the conversation with our leadership team. So it wasn't just, okay, we're gonna put together this how-to series and run with it. It was, Hey, we're gonna put together this how-to series who needs to be involved.

How can you be a part of this? Here's our report of the last quarter. Everyone that's gone through it, here's who we'd love to invite. Is there anyone missing that you wanna invite? We made it a dialogue so that it wasn't just training, pushing out training, it was a total company initiative and kept them involved from the beginning and, and across the whole journey.

And I think too, what, what I really have admired about the training managers, the ones that actually facilitate the training. They're so good at reading the room and modifying that to pulling in examples that are relevant to the folks that are coming in. So in our business we might have our horticulturists who are scientists and artists and really good at the details, but we might also have a very technical maintenance operator.

We might have an IT technician, we might have. A systems engineer or a marketing personnel who's totally other side of the brain, how do we modify our examples in those series to make sure that it's clicking and we're making it relevant to them? And, and, and our training managers have done an amazing job doing that in those live sessions.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yeah, that's, that's so, so important is to tailor for your audience. I love that. So, so after the training happens, how, like, how do you pull the thread, I guess is what I'm most curious about, right. Getting at that sustainment piece, what's worked for you?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: You know, it, it's all about the continuation. Right? So going back into other data points that you have available, where have we reduced turnover? Where have we increased internal mobility? Promotability, what's coming back on employee surveys is opportunities. We've actually had so much more communication from and with our employee population.

With this rollout of the online learning center, we also included new kiosks around our facilities where employees had access to pull information, which before there was always word of mouth, but they could also now submit ideas anonymously or, or by identifying themselves. And were getting feedback and dialogue All year long we're, we're getting great dialogue.

At our end of year surveys, Hey, I'm not getting all the training I need, I need these three things in my department. The executive gets that feedback. If it's available in the system, we can turn it on quickly. If not, we can build a project plan to build that training and get it out there. I think you and I were talking a little bit earlier too about specifically our horticulture department has done a really great job with this.

Once we got into the online learning center and showed them the relevancy of some of the classes and, and kept going with not just the how to series, but supplementing that training along the way, it really became a conversation and a dialogue with them that, Hey, we have this program that we do with our new hires, with our assistant growers, and it's helping them prepare for management level positions.

Awesome. Tell me more. What, what is it about? What does it entail? And the whole program was fully developed, Lisa, they, that you would've thought that they were building programs as training. It, it was fabulous. It wasn't quite worded in a way that everyone understood, but the content was there.

and it, and it really mapped out all of the task driven competencies that they needed to get ready for the next level.

So when we had that dialogue, we started talking about, okay, what types of leadership competencies need to be infused in here? And then let's talk about what can live in the online learning center to make it accessible to everybody. And so again, we just captured something they were doing, enhanced it, made it more accessible, and really kept that energy driving.

And then all of a sudden you have advocates across the organization just talking up, Hey, the training department is helping us with this. We were able to do this. Look at all the growth we've had within our department and, and really getting those people throughout the organization to really hype you up really has, has helped it.

As you talk about pulling that thread, keeping it excitable across the organization, so.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: That's awesome. And how do you make it stick, like to get that return on investment? What I mean by that is like from, how do you know people are actually applying it because they're super excited. You're, you're, you're jumping on that excitement bandwagon with them and giving them all this great stuff and they're happy.

How do you know that, that it's making a difference in your world?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Yeah, I don't think we have a perfect measure on that yet. I, I think our biggest, our biggest focus so far was making training accessible, making sure it was approachable, making sure people were actually able to use it, and then in the future work on, okay, now how are we measuring its efficacy? How are we making sure that we've got that in place?

And so those are plans for the next year and the next year more so than today.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yeah, you can't boil the ocean. Right? Yeah. So, so, but, so that's, that's totally reasonable. So let's talk about this online learning platform, because you have Okay. Listeners, it's like crazy. Stellar uptake and adoption rate. Tell us a bit about that.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: All right. I'm gonna brag for two minutes on my team and then

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: away baby. 'cause it's really cool.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: My team really went after. Full adoption and I was like, okay, let's do it. We had 100% adoption at the rollout of the actual online learning center.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: so that means just to break it down for listeners, that's every single person partook of at least one course or what does it

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: At least one course. Yes. They all logged in. They at least took one course. And then we'll talk about what we've been doing to sustain that usability since then. So what we did to get up to that though, Lisa, is we didn't start with the online learning center. We started with that training we talked about.

We got people excited about. Learning again, right? They, they had some DIP training, but they didn't really understand what continuous learning was, how to series got us there. Then all of a sudden we started saying, okay, now that you've had that, look at all these other things we can offer, and the online learning classes that we were putting out there to get people in interested.

Weren't 30 minute online courses. They may have been one minute. Oh, how do you unplug when you get home? Right? How do you, how do you how do you calm down? How do you get ready mentally for the day? How do you turn off technology, things that people might need in their lives, but maybe not realize how that impacts them at work?

We all know how that impacts you at work. We're whole humans, right? We don't just show up and turn everything else off. And so we really did strategic. Courses based on the level of employee that we were rolling out to, to make sure it was relevant to what they were looking to do. Got people involved.

Again, kept it a dialogue. We, we, when we did our first levels of rollout, we started with our leadership team so that they could know and experience the system. Give us feedback so that we could then tailor our future rollout lessons to rollout classes to our employees and tailor it more towards what would be relevant for them.

And then kept that journey all the way through the organization. And by having that two-way conversation and not just having our great ideas in the sky and running with it it really, it helped us tweak, it helped us modify, we kept it real. We had realistic timelines. We weren't trying to do this in 30 days.

And, and made sure everyone had access. You ran into all sorts of opportunities. Maybe people weren't comfortable with technology, maybe people weren't comfortable with learning something in a non-classroom setting. Maybe people thought they had nothing to learn. And helping each of those individuals overcome objections, sometimes making it light and saying, Hey, you might not learn anything.

Maybe you can teach us something. And then, and, and then really just taking that journey for each individual.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yes. Beautiful. So I just wanna recap 'cause I think there's some important tips here for people because this topic comes up a lot with clients and then in, in previous shows, for instance, you know, we might have this great learning platform and nobody's using it, right? Like it's, it's this big dark secret out there, right?

I can't tell you how many people have told me. They, they, the organization, they bought LinkedIn learning and. Nobody touches it. And I'm not saying anything's bad with LinkedIn learning, they got all sorts of great stuff, but there's something around the curation and the, and the, the, the marketing, you know, internally, like how do we get people excited about it and, and get them invested and make sure that it's curated and tailored to their needs.

So, so what I'm hearing from you here, what you've done really well is. You've built in feedback loops. There's an ongoing iteration where you're tailoring, right, to make sure the content is appropriate. 'cause I know you've got some content that came with the platform and then you're adding other stuff on

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Right, right.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: you.

You set realistic timelines to put this out there and to do that ongoing iteration. And didn't rush it, right? 'cause that's always the, the recipe for, for things to go off the rails. And then thirdly, you made sure everybody had access and so that you, you broadened that feedback pool is what I'm taking from that too, right?

Like everybody gets to try it. So anything else you'd add to that list?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: I probably 15 other things that we did. But no, but I think that really is a good summation, Lisa, because it, it is all about having a great plan, but being flexible enough to adjust and meet. The team where they are and, and in our organization it's across all comfort levels with technology, it's across all comfort levels with knowledge learning, it's across all generations.

We have four of them in the workplace and, and very, very well represented as well. And so how do you help people who get nervous in front of technology and those that get offended if it's too easy of technology, right. You know, you really have to, to curate and, and go that way. I think we also talked previously about, you know, how do you overcome folks where English isn't their first language and, and they're really trying to to learn and maybe they understand it, but if it's a new concept, they really wanna dig in.

And so, finding ways and we're actually still on this journey now, finding ways to help help those folks understand the system working side by side with them and where we have resources and time. If we can translate, we'll translate. But, but that is obviously one of our bigger barriers now that we're trying to, to really dig in deep and, and not shy away from Right.

You know, how do we make sure everyone can understand the content?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: That's tricky. So, so where I am in, in Canada, we're extremely multicultural, right? So I have lived trying to figure out how do you help the folks where English is a second language, but also honor and meet the Quebec folks where they're at because they expect training and, and have a full right to it as a second official language here.

So, so, you know, a lot of platforms would say, we got, you know. 1500 courses and I'm like, and do you have them also in French? And they'd be like, no, we only have a hundred. Yeah. Moving on. Right? We have to look at other options because that will land as a big insult. So it is, it is a delicate thing, right?

It's part of that accessibility. So I'm glad you brought that up. Definitely something to consider when you're. Working through your strategy and doing vendor selection and so on is to think about that. Right. You know, what are you gonna need now and, and ongoing. Okay. So we're nearing the end of our time together and I really wanted to get into a particular topic that that it came up when we first met and, and I think it's so interesting, which was around, I.

You know, you've got some really long tenured folks and when you came, you recognized this need to start to extract, like pull out, you know, what's in their heads so that. Processes and know, excuse me, knowledge could be documented and other people could learn it, and you could build training. How did you overcome that very natural fear that people get, that they're gonna be replaced, that, that people want what's in my head, which means they're gonna get rid of me?

What, how did you approach that?

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Delicately and work in progress? No, I, I, I think it's, it, that is definitely one fear, right? I am going to be replaced if I share this knowledge, but going and assuming that is the only concern would be a mistake. Sometimes the, the other concerns we ran into were. I don't know how to tell you what I know.

I don't know how to communicate that. I don't know how to transfer that knowledge. So, so how we tackled the first one, right? How we tackled the concern of job replacement was really understanding, well, what are your career goals? Are you looking to retire in the next five, 10 years? Or are you looking to stay here until you can't work anymore?

And that's like, whatever your goal is, we're gonna set you up for success. Not transfer your knowledge to the next generation that's here today to replace you, but make sure you also can move on to that next phase of life, whatever that looks like for you. Second career, retirement, whatever. Whatever it looks like for you in a way that's meaningful for you.

To give you one example, even on my own team, I, I think you and I were, were talking about this in earlier conversations, but when I joined we had an employee who was running the people function, had been there for 41 years and had done a really great job building a department that supported the company.

Put out fires, answered everyone's questions but also had so much in his head. And when I started, you know, my, my supervisors, my bosses were like, Hey, I think he wants to retire. So we started very early in our relationship with that conversation. Do you want to retire? And if so, what is your timeline?

And, and then from there we learned. He, he was interested but nervous. A lot of people are nervous about retiring. He wasn't sure of his timeline, but he thought it was. We'll call it soon, less than five years. And I said, great. Well, what's important to you is you get ready for retirement. And he was so focused on making sure that his team was set up for success and would be cared for after he retired.

And I said, okay, great. Here's how we can do that. So first of all, you gotta get to know me and trust me I get that. But second of all, we need to make sure that all of your knowledge is passed on to them. And we came up with ways to do that. And we did it together. He helped us train his replacement.

He helped us get that ready over the course of a year, and then come nine months later, he was like, okay, I'm ready. I feel good. She's ready. And he entered retirement with Grace and on his own timeline. And then when you think about the other fear, the, I don't know how to translate this fear. I don't know how to communicate what I know it is breaking it down to, okay.

Walk me through it. Let's go through it. If I was going to work with you today, and you are gonna teach me this one thing that the company wants to know about, let's say it's a specific system. Pull it up on your computer, show me, walk me through it. And we just had a dialogue similar to how you and I are having today, and said, okay, great.

I have some questions. Walk me through this and this and this. And at the end of the conversation I was like, that's it. That's training. I was like, and then you can rely on us in the training department to make sense of that. I was like, even if you can't articulate it, we can take what you know, what you taught us, translate it, give it back to you, validate that it is actually correct and there's always.

Tweaking. Right? We never understand it perfectly the first time, giving them that opportunity to edit, giving them that opportunity to correct us, really empowered them. You know, we did that with a couple of very technical positions in our IT space. In our maintenance, we have a new system in our maintenance space, couple iterations where we said, Hey, is this right?

No, actually it's not. It should be this. Perfect. Thank you. And there's no pride, there's no issue. And, and just breaking it down to, I'm really curious, like bringing in that curiosity and you know, it's all about you are one person, you are an expert in this. If we wanna amplify your voice across the organization so that instead of you having to train 200 people on this particular process, we can then amplify your voice, get it out to all 200, and then maybe it's just the five or 10 that need that extra.

Support or have deeper questions, how would that feel for you? And it really helped, like you could almost see it like, oh, that's so great. We just put out one of those trainings a couple weeks ago and the manager was offering additional one-on-one with the person who helped build the training. And the managers just said now that the training covered everything, we're good.

And he's sitting there and for. Six months before this training came out, it was issue after issue after issue, and people doing the wrong things within the system and not understanding how to communicate back and forth. And, and by just getting that that solid training out that his person had helped develop, answered all the questions to date, I'm sure there will be more, but, but really helped free up that time.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Oh yeah. Well that right there. I wanna underscore this is, is to me one of the greatest gifts that a good. Learning consultant, performance consultant can offer an organization is that ability to take what people know and they don't, you know, like you've got all these scientists and technical people.

I've worked with a lot of folks like that too, and they're brilliant. But trying to articulate in a way that somebody brand new and novice could understand is not always, it's not always a clear translation. So, so that's our role right? Is, is to help be that bridge. And you reminded me too, I was kind of smiling when you were talking there, right.

When I first started in my training journey, coming outta teaching, I remember it was all these people doing these very technical processes and, and we, I had to document it so that I could write training material and train a wack of people to do it. And so I would sit beside somebody and I'd say, show me what you do.

I'm just gonna watch. And I would take copious notes, and then I'd say, okay, shove over. I'm gonna do it, but I'm not gonna press go until you tell me I'm good. And I would go and they'd be like. Like usually amazed, gobsmacked that I could do it. But I'm like, but all I did was write down what you did. So you taught me by showing me.

Right. So I, I think you know, and then of course vetting it with other people. 'cause what I always found, and you alluded to it, is that I. You could have 10 incumbents doing the same job, and each one has slightly different little habits or things that they do efficiencies or things that are distractions.

And, and, and so training also brings in that, that quality assurance piece and that efficiency piece, which I think is really, really critical.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Totally, and you were talking about technical jobs, and a lot of technical brains do a lot of the work in their head, and so by vetting you, you're gonna get all of those little pieces out of people's heads and be like, no, no, no, you've, you've gotta do this too. Whereas the other individual may have just.

Been processing that piece in their head and didn't even think it needed to be written down. If my team ever hears this, they will laugh because they know the first draft they ever give me of any sort of job aid or training aid or process is never the one that I will publish. We, we are always gonna iterate three, four times.

You're always gonna have someone who knows nothing about the process. Go through and see if they understand it for that very reason.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the final thing I want to underline from what you were talking about was that this idea of amplification, how do you help people amplify their voice and help them understand that that's what we're doing, that it's, you know, back to you, how do you help overcome any resistance you might have?

Right. To people, you know, sitting with you and, and, and actually sharing what they know, whether it's because they're fearful, they can't explain it, or they're fearful that it means something, that their job is at risk kind of thing. This, I think that's a critical tip for listeners here too, is making sure people understand the benefits and the purpose and the back, and taking time, giving space for them to express concerns and be able to reassure them, right.

Kind of like you did with that individual who, who. Not thought he wanted to retire. Wasn't quite sure how to go about it, so

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Well, I, I think I've, I've shared in, in other forums, but psychologists do really well in this space because getting the most out of people is a lot of understanding that person. So to your point, I. How do you ask the question without coming out and saying, okay, now what's your problem? What are you worried about?

Right? How do you get that out of them so that you can understand their concern and, and, and really just have that light bulb moment for yourself? Oh, okay. You're worried about being able to communicate this, oh, you're worried about losing your job. Oh, you're worried about, you're not gonna understand it.

Or you're too smart to, to help me understand it. Like, you know, like, you know, some people are just so brilliant they can't break it down. I, I think that is part of the job. It is being able to communicate in a way that puts people at ease, but also you have to be able to qualify what their fear is.

'cause they may not be able to, most likely won't be able to articulate it for you, and then finding a way to overcome that with them. There is an art to that as well.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate1: Yes, absolutely. That's where the good coaching questions come in. That's another show. Thank you so much. This has been delightful. I really appreciate you pulling back the curtains on what you do there at Metrolina and what the great work your team is doing. Thank you very much for sharing.

Maria Taylor GMT20240905-174355_Recording_separate2: Thank you, Lisa.