Welcome everyone to another episode of Train Like You Listen, a podcast about all
things learning and development and bite size chunks. I'm Brian Washburn, I'm your
host. I'm also the co founder of a little instructional design company called Endurance
Learning, and the conference season is descending upon us. I wanted to spend
a little time today talking about the similarities and the differences between keynote speeches and
skill building training workshops. I also wanted to take a little time to think
about what training designers can learn from someone who actually develops keynote speeches for a
living. So it's today. I am very excited to be joined by Jessica
Kriegel. Hi. Thanks for having me. You are highly sought after keynote
speaker and chief scientist of Workplace Culture Culture Partners. Can you have us in
six words? What is your story? How would you introduce yourself in six
words? Researcher, author, keynote speaker and mother all important aspects and thank
you so much for joining. I'm excited to have this conversation. I've done
some research in terms of who you are, but for those who are listening
who would like to know a little bit more about how you got started speaking
to all sorts of organizations and audiences near and far. You know you're a
big deal when it comes to how organizations think about their people. How did
you get started in this in the first place. Well, thank you for
calling me a big deal. That's going to my head really quickly. But
I started. I worked at Oracle for ten years in their organizational development department,
so I was doing culture transformation work internally with Oracle executives as my clients,
which was just a dream job because the people there were really smart and
working on interesting projects, and I got to help them in their talent development,
in their organizational design, and ultimately creating culture that led to results.
While I was there, I also got to go to school where I was
doing my doctoral research on generational dynamics. Specifically, I had this idea that
I was going to crack the code on millennials and then become some famous consultant
that would tell you how to handle millennials because I was a millennial, so
I thought i'd get credibility pretty quickly. And as it turns out, my
research found that all of most of at least the data quote unquote data that
we have on generational dynamics is lazy research, it's bad, it's generalizations,
and it's all just labels that are an excuse to stereotype people. So I
started by feeling like I had discovered something in my research that people needed to
know. I wanted people to stop using the label millennial and baby or and
now gen Z to create distance between each other, and I needed to show
them the evidence that it was a faulty narrative. Anyway, So I wrote
a book based on my dissertation, which I thought was going to be a
lot easier than it was. And before the book was even published, people
started asking me to speak because everyone was interested in that. It was kind
of a right time, right place kind of dynamic. Talking about millennials seven
years ago was all the rage. So that's where my keynote career sort of
took off. Yeah, and I think it's such a fascinating yet cringey type
of topic to say, well, why are millennials lazy and why can't they
be more like as somebody who's in Generation X, I appreciate kind of being
left out of the disc so a lot you're not that left out. You
guys are apparently very cynical according to all of the fake news. You know,
that's a whole other topic that I'm sure we could talk about for a
long long time, but for here. You know, lots of people listening
have been to conferences. They attend breakout workshops, and they also attend the
general sessions and the keynotes. What would you say are some of the major
differences when it comes to what the audience can be taken away from a keynote
session versus you know, a sixty or seventy five minute breakout session or even
like a training session in their own organizations. It seems like that sometimes people
go in and think they're going to take the same thing away. But do
you have some thoughts in terms of what you're hoping an audience will take away
from like a keynote session versus like a training session. Yeah, there are
some generalizations I'll have to make here because every conference is different and organized by
people with different views about what each should hold. I will tell you that
ideally, a breakout session would get into more application about the concepts that you're
learning about, whereas a keynote session doesn't have that. And now here's how
you can apply it in your life moment. It should have those thoughts,
It should have that contemplation that you offer to the audience to take outside of
the keynote to go do on their own time, or even giveaways that encourage
them. Sometimes you see the little cards that people have to fill out in
a keynote where they can apply the lessons to their own situation. But a
breakout session really should offer time within that session. If it's seventy five minutes
or ninety minutes, there's a little bit of lecture, then there's a little
bit of now here, do this exercise and do this breakout conversation with someone
that you're sitting next to to actually apply. That's theoretically the difference. Most
of the time. In reality, what you're getting is a difference in caliber
of speaker, because breakout sessions are you know, there's a ton of breakout
sessions at a conference and there's only let's say two or three key keynote slots.
So that's where the conference organizers are spending a lot of money, and
so you're getting really high caliber talent on the keynote stage, and it's the
draw right to the conference when people see the keynote lineup that's kind of what
they're looking at and sometimes deciding should I go to this conference or this conference
that's focused on learning, for example. And so I'm going to get back
to that in just a second, but before I get to that, I
want to talk a little bit about this idea of organizational culture and how you
weave it in to places. So organization culture, it's your area of expertise.
You have a short and simple culture equation, right, you say,
strategy powered by culture equals performance. What role does learning, whether that means
formal training or e learning courses, or if it simply means being able to
reflect on mistakes and receive some coaching to continue to grow. What role does
learning play in a strong, healthy organizational culture. Great question. So let
me start by defining culture, because oftentimes when you talk to people about culture,
I mean I talk to CEOs all year long and I asked them about
culture, and you get a thousand different answers for what even the CEO of
organizations think. It's not about the ping pong tables, it's not about happy
hours, it's not about Hawaiian shirt Fridays, as the movie office space would
have you think. We define culture as the experiences we co create which shape
our beliefs. Those beliefs determine our actions, and that is what's going to
get you results, the actions that all of your employees take. So we
believe there's a direct tie from the experiences to the beliefs. Two actions,
two results. Culture drives results, period. So the role that learning plays
in culture is it is an experience, and you're going to have multiple experiences
within one training session or within your career at one organization that you see numerous
trainings within you are exposed to many L and D opportunities or you're not,
or you're exposed to a great as learning versus a facilitator learning, or you're
facilitated to this plethora of options to choose from where you're not given options,
right, I mean all of those decisions in an employee's L and D journey
creates an experience for the employee that shapes their belief about how important learning is
to the organization, how important they are as an employee to the organization,
and the extent to which the organization is willing to invest in them, and
the belief that you foster in that employee based on the L and D experiences
they have is going to develop actions not just about what they're learning in the
training, but actions about I mean, this is really the difference between an
employee who really gives a rip about the work you're doing and who doesn't.
If I feel like you don't care about me, I'm not going to care
about this. And so if you want people to care passionately about the work
they're doing, and then that's going to drive results because they're more proactive,
you need to make them feel like you care, and L and D is
a great way to do that. NET warms my art as somebody who's in
learning and development, and I just want to take this idea and bring it
back to what you're talking about earlier in terms of the caliber of speaker that
you get when it comes to keynote speeches. I've spoken with several people who
have had to put keynote sessions together. It's definitely an art form. You
know, these are usually the showcase elements at a conference, and the speakers
generally strike me as incredibly polished, right and confident and with slick visuals and
well we're her stage blocking and stage presence. A lot of people who are
listening to this podcast aren't and won't be keynote speakers, but they do design
training and need to capture their audience's attention. And I think that's something that
really good keynote speakers do. They capture the attention of the audience. What
presentation design advice might you offer to someone listening and thinking, Look, I
just need to put together this compliance training safety in the workplace, and I
don't need to put together a keynote level talk, but I do need to
engage people and have them take this topic seriously. Yeah, I mean the
keynote speakers that are super polished developed that over years and years and years,
and they're constantly working on improving what they're doing. I mean I personally,
on any given year in my keynote career, which started ten years ago,
I am horrified and embarrassed about the keynote I was giving last year. I
mean, it's all right now, I'm embarrassed about the keynotes I was giving
last year, and next year I'll be embarrassed about the keynotes I'm giving now.
Because it's constant process improvement and there's so much to work on in a
keynote, and I would imagine it's the same. Well, I know it's
the same. I was doing training an L and D and my very first
job out of my MBA for to Lao, I was a training consultant and
it was the same thing. It was the practice of not just how to
command a room and facilitate, how to gauge when people are losing in,
but also how to land the jokes that you know land and practicing your timing
on things. The key, in my opinion, to any great learning is
storytelling and understanding how to present concepts in a framework that are simple to understand,
and then to tell that story that helps really land the framework and make
it memorable for someone Because we learn in stories. We are storytellers as people.
That's always how we've processed information, and so understanding the right story to
tell the message that you're trying to let the audience walk away with is probably
the number one tip I would give. I love that tip, and so
it's something that a lot of times people will come to me and say,
well, we have to deliver this training as it's written. Somebody else wrote
it. We have to deliver it as it's written. How do we make
it our own and storytelling is always the thing that I say is you know,
deliver it is written. If you have a story to help illustrate some
of the concepts or some of the topics, put it in there and that
will allow you to actually have some ownership over that as well. Jessica,
thank you so much for giving us some time. If people wanted to find
out more about you about your work with culture, or if they wanted to
reach out to you and say, hey, we'd love to have you come
speak at our organization, how can they find you? You can find me
on LinkedIn. I also have a weekly newsletter called This Weekend Culture, which
you can subscribe to to get any information that we're sharing at the time.
But Culture partners website is culture dot io and you can find out information about
me as a speaker, the other speakers that work with us, and anything
around organizational culture. Thank you so much for giving me some time. Thank
you everyone else for listening. If you know somebody who might find today's topic
about comparing keynotes of skill building sessions to be valuable, please do pass a
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interested in learning more about a broad range of learning and development strategies, you
can pick up a copy of my book What's Your Formula? Combined learning elements
from Factful Training at Amazon dot com. Until next time, happy training everyone.
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