1879 – Fractional Learning with Jake Stahl

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0:59with us right now it's jake stall jake you're a fractional chief learning officer i believe that is the first i don't think i've had a lot of fractional dots uh fractional chief learning officer i think you're the first one i've ever had you are also the founder of jake stall consulting you are found on the web at jake stall consulting.com jake thanks so much for joining us. Josh, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. Well, so first question is, what does a free fractional chief learning officer do? Right. So Josh, basically a fractional chief learning officer is a fractional head of training and development.

1:34So I will do onboarding for the sales team, help people get used to the culture, help people understand their job, plus sales train them in the process. The number one reason people leave within the first six months is that their onboarding went very poorly. And I can't tell you how many companies I talked to that they understand they don't have it mastered, but they're hesitant to hire somebody to do it because they're so expensive. And that's why the fractional part of it comes into play. It's a less expensive option, but you're getting world-class talent. Yeah. Well, so for someone that, let's say that they have a full-time learning officer, what does that typically look like?

2:14You know, what's their day-to-day operations. And if you don't mind talking maybe about, maybe we could kind of lay out some stages of how to work with a learning professional. Maybe you could talk about that. Yeah, sure. So when I first start with a company, we do an hour consult. So we kind of get a lay of the land as to where they are. And I've worked with companies that have nothing. And I've worked with companies that have training departments that just want to refine the way they bring people on board. So once we do the consult, then we will talk about their current processes in place. What are they doing?

2:48How are they doing it? What's the current employee response from the onboarding? And we kind of take it from there. But the nice thing, Josh, is any program we develop is going to be proprietary. So it will be developed by them with my consult. It will be kept by them and they can use it in perpetuity. And I always guarantee it will be scalable. So if your company grows, the program will be easily growable as well. But I work with a lot of training and development departments that just need that tweak. And that's okay. That's what we're here for. What is, Jake, in your experience, the general ROI from investing in better learning and better resources, better onboarding?

3:33How can that affect our operations and impact? Well, let's take a look at it this way. Let's say you're bringing on a sales rep who has a quota of, let's say,$500 ,000 for the year. You've already budgeted on that$500 ,000. So that's a huge investment you're making when you bring somebody on board. To bring somebody on board is usually around$20 ,000 just to get them to walk through the door. That's all your headhunting, recruiting efforts. It's everything like that. So by the time you add in the hardware, the software time and the licensing, adding in their benefits package, their salary, you're talking$180 ,000 just to get somebody to walk through the door.

4:12So let's say that with their$500 ,000 quotient, they're not trained well and they only bring in$250 ,000. You add that$250 ,000 to the$150 ,000 to bring them in or$180 ,000 to bring them in, you're talking an over$400 ,000 investment. So take that and then you multiply in, let's say a training program costs you 20 ,000. You're getting a huge return on your investment because Josh, if you let that person go, you're re-spending that money and you're still dealing with the loss of revenue you already have budgeted. So the training is a fraction of the cost it would take to have a poor person in the job or somebody who's not well-adjusted.

4:55And then even worse, if that person winds up leaving. And so I'm sure, you know, especially if we think about an early stage business and they're starting to put these things together, maybe they're documenting all their processes. I mean, they're trying their best to create the resources available for new team members that may be coming on board. Where might how they document these processes not be as effective as bringing in a true learning professional? What do you know that we don't know? Well, part of it, Josh, is how to put it together. If I had to put out a bumper sticker, I'd say I solve random acts of training.

5:37We all do the best we can and we put together these acts of training. But what we don't do is set up employees for success. So I can teach you how to sell and I can teach you how to, you know, work with a manager or mentor. But then to really put together, you put it into a program that's reproducible and scalable. You have one central place for all of your resources and your collateral that you're going to use. You have a steady mentor program built up. So the benefit to this, Josh, is having a turnkey operation. Once it's all built out and once it's organized and put together into a strong semblance or a strong order to reproduce, it takes minutes.

6:17It's just that upfront investment that takes a little bit more time. So what do I know that you don't? I would argue probably nothing. I just know how to organize it better, make it flow better, and to use instructional design so it's retained and you get a level of proficiency. Yeah. Would you kind of share some of the tenets of good instructional design, especially in light of bad, which maybe in your professional life, yeah, I see this all the time. Let me go through a couple of very high level, please stop doing this. You're just wasting time, wasting everyone's effort, and no wonder you have bad results.

6:55Any kind of major red flags that you'll see out there? Yeah, there's a couple. One of them is people use PowerPoint as a book. So what they'll do is they'll set up a training program, and they'll put a PowerPoint with hundreds of words on them that just, they may be organized well, but the human brain isn't designed to process anything more than bits and chunks of information at a time. So the first is we work on the PowerPoint slides and we make sure that they're where they need to be. The second is we introduce other points of learning. The worst thing a company can do is take all of their PowerPoint, put into a learning management system, assign it to somebody.

7:34And when they're done, say you've been trained. You need to manage how it's going. You need to manage the expectations. And in the end, you need to measure for proficiency, not just knowledge. package there's a lot of times i'll see somebody pass a multiple choice quiz but then when they get in the situation they were just trained for they don't know how to do it because there's been no practice or proficiency and then i think the third big piece josh is you get a lot of companies that will put together a training and they'll say okay do it quick we've got two weeks we want to get them up and running and out there so it's the old you know 10 pounds into a five pound bag scenario So what I do then is I show them how to create information and how to create knowledge that's easily accessible, easily retainable.

8:23And then I show them how to measure proficiency. So a lot of it is all good intention. It's just when you try to teach that way, it doesn't always translate well to an end product. Wow. What types of companies do you work with? So I work in any industry. I've worked through 10 different industries. My sweet spot is typically the smaller companies because they're the ones that just don't have the money to put into a training department. You know, a good head of training and development, you're gonna spend$220,$240 a year on salary. There's no need to do that. For the amount of work I need to do with the experience I have, I like to work with the smaller companies to give them an affordable option and to give them the edge they need against the larger companies by training everybody effectively.

9:14Yeah. And do you typically like when you're, well, I guess it can vary wildly based on, you know, what the needs of the client is. But let me ask you just a little bit more about, because you had mentioned something about managing the journey for, let's say, a new hire. What would be some of those maybe interactive ways where we can kind of hit the pause button, kind of check in on each other, make sure that this is jiving, this is making sense? Like, how do we, what would be some examples of ways that we could structure that? Some of the ways to structure it. And first, let me say what isn't the way to do it.

9:53As companies, we typically do smile sheets. And those are the sheets that rate things on a one to five stars. So we say, you know, give me a smile. I'm nervously shifting my eyes back and forth because that's exactly what we do. But that only measures a certain point in time. And frankly, Josh, it measures a mood. So I'm going to rate you based on the mood I'm in. And if I'm in the honeymoon period of just working with you, my rating may be much different than after I've had a chance to evaluate you after a while. So the smile sheet is great, but it should only be one part of the journey. Another part can be in a company 360 degree feedback.

10:33So how did the other instructors feel that instructor did? And how did the classmates feel about the other classmates? Because training is two people, right? It's the trainer and the willingness of the student to be trained. So a lot of times when you involve other students to say, hey, Josh did great in class and Jake really clammed up, he didn't do much of anything. It gives the trainer a different perspective. Another thing I do is I encourage journaling during the training journey. So when somebody gets into training, jot notes, journal how you felt, even if it's great, even if it's lousy, but journal it out.

11:08There's ways to do anonymous feedback and polling during classes. But the process of teaching a class, then just getting a one to five star review at the end, although it can give you a decent view, it's not gonna give you the whole view. Yeah. And so your website, Jake, is jakestallconsulting.com. And by the way, I would also encourage folks to come find you on LinkedIn because you share a lot of valuable content there. Um, would you mind maybe just sharing some of your, like, what is it that you are contributing to the world in terms of thought leadership today? Like what are some of the things maybe you're excited about or passionate about, uh, that maybe deserve to be talked more about in kind of the learning development world?

11:58I'm really glad you asked that, Josh. I think learning development has become unfortunately a process of let's put something on a video or in print, and then we put it on a learning management system and we sell it to people as subscribers. And what's lost, Josh, is the true basis of training development, which is the psychology of the learner. What are their perceptions? What's their conditioning? How do they make decisions? How do they learn? I have a degree in psychology with multiple certifications in neurolinguistic programming. And what that allows me to do is really help companies understand what their learners are going through and how to best create content that's going to work with them.

12:39Training has become a process and it shouldn't be. It should be a customized development based on a company, their demographic, their size, their people. And it's lost that somewhere along the line. So what I'm doing right now, Josh, is I'm creating sales programs that are unlike any of the others. We look at how to talk to the customer and build a relationship, not in the traditional aspect of talking back and forth, but in the aspect of understanding what they're going through right now and what their decision-making process is. Think about in the way of an email. I tell my clients, you never write your own email ever.

13:18You may send it, but you didn't write it. It's written in the mind of the person receiving it. They're going to view it how they want in the lens that they're in, in the mood that they're in, in the day that they're in, in the moment that they're in. So they write it. So if that's the case, wouldn't it benefit us to know more about them before we chose our communication method? And that's what I'm pushing for now. And Josh, I'm writing a book that comes out in the late summer, and that is based on valuing the cadence of a conversation more than the content. So how to establish a trust within the first couple of minutes.

13:57And we should be doing that with our trainees as well. What do you mean by cadence? So if you and I get on a call, Josh, and I just start talking about me exclusively, your attention span may be great in the beginning, but it's going to trail off as nice of a guy as you are, it's going to trail off. However, if I open the conversation by talking about you for two or three minutes, it's going to make a significant difference. Because what's our favorite thing to talk about? Ourselves. Exactly right. So, and what that does psychologically, Josh, is it changes your view of me because you don't say I had a great conversation.

14:38You say I had a great conversation with Jake. So you attribute those good feelings to me. So part of the cadence, Josh, is establishing a back and forth where you're actively listening, actively talking, and then you introduce the content once people are at their peak receptiveness. Because here's what happens, Josh. You'll get training programs all the time that say listen better and communicate better, but they never tell you exactly how. My theory called the 210 rule tells you exactly how to do that. I like that. I like that. I mean, certainly some Dale Carnegie going on in there, but no, you're absolutely right.

15:18Well, Jake, so your website, again, is jakestallconsulting.com. When somebody goes there, what would you recommend? I know you've got a resources tab. You've got some other content here. I would suggest you go to my blog. You're going to get a good idea about my philosophies on the blog because Josh, I'm not for everybody. Some people just want a sales process and a sales script. And that's not what you'll get from me. However, if you look at, even I have a list of media appearances of all the podcasts I've been on, webinars I've given. And so if you look at that, you'll get a better feel for who I am and what I have to offer.

15:55That being said, there's multiple places on my site where you can book a one hour free consult. It's not a sales consult. It's to see if we can work together. See if I can meet your needs. See if I meet your needs. But it's a one hour free consult. And I would suggest if anybody has any doubts or even inquisitive, book that consult and I'd be glad to talk to anybody. So look at me on my background, blogs, podcasts, media appearances, and then book a time and we can talk. Yeah, yeah. Some of your blog articles that may be interesting to folks. I like this one. Scientists say we make 35 ,000 decisions per day.

16:36Here's five ways to make them better. If you want to learn what those five ways are, you got to go to the blog. Jakestullconsulting.com. Man, I'm like digging all into your content and stuff like that. I'm looking at your LinkedIn articles as well. But you are a, again, fractional chief learning officer. And as well, you are the CEO and founder of Jake Stahl Consulting. Your website, jakestahlconsulting.com. Jake, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, thanks for having me.

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