0:00
Eric, welcome to episode 58 of the achieve workplace culture podcast, where we help you find actionable ways to strengthen your leadership and your workplace culture. I'm Eric Stutzman, and today I'm here with my co host, Wendy Loewen for a very special episode. Normally we have three co hosts. We normally have Chris Downey with us. He's on vacation. Lucky him, hopefully getting a nice suntan somewhere. And we thought we'd do something a bit different today, where I'm actually going to treat Wendy as my guest, and I'm going to interview Wendy about something that I've watched her do over the years, and that is develop as a leader, and not just developing accidentally. I've watched you, Wendy, over the years, develop very intentionally, and you've spent, from my perspective, as somebody that's you know, not at your desk every moment of the day, but watching and talking with you. You spent a lot of time thinking about learning and thinking about how you're going to develop, and you've done so with a lot of intention, correct?

1:07
Yes, and I mean, my background is in education, so facilitating learning others and for myself now is is something that's just really it's a passion area of mine.

1:20
You've placed a high value on it in your life in general, and yet you, when I first met you, which is now going on, I don't know, 17 years ago, something like that. It's been a while your specialty as a trainer for achieve at that time was communication skills. You had come out of working as a teacher, specifically in doing some curriculum development. Is that correct? Yes, yes, yeah. And now you're our chief education or Chief Content Officer here. You're a part of the executive committee. You're a part of our ownership group. You lead a team of people. You've led a lot of people here at the organization over the last number of years, you are still a teacher, and yet you've become a very significant leadership presence in this organization as we've developed and grown. And I want to ask you about that. I want to ask you about the journey from being a teacher and starting with communication skills and how you thought about developing yourself as a leader, and how you pursued education. That I'm really curious about that, and I'm wondering if you could take us back to near the beginning of that.

2:34
Let's dive in. I think you actually touched on something that's really important. I found a place, an organization, where there was a recognition of a particular skill set that could be used, and over time, was allowed to grow. There was an interest in my own interests. And so I think the right context is also important, working with the right people, having a mindset, a philosophy around a growth mindset, that you believe that people develop and learn and can grow, and that skills are transferable to other areas. So I would say I feel very fortunate to have you know, met yourself, or a founder, the group of people, to work currently with the people that we do, because that's been really important for me.

3:23
Were there any pivotal moments or just moments early on in your work here that stretched you and made you want to pursue learning?

3:35
Oh gosh, so many, so many. I distinctly remember, I mean, I had been a trainer. I developed material. I had worked as a training and development specialist for a period of time, and then I moved into director of training, the role in office, and I distinctly remember learning our SharePoint system and all the little boxes you had to check off. And I live an hour and a half outside of the city, and I drove about I made it through rush hour traffic, and I got to the highway, that was the stretch to get home. And it was this moment of, Did I did I do that? Right? I need to double check and I turned around and I went back to the office, let myself in. It was now dark outside. I went through everything, and it was just fine, but I realized there's so many new things to learn here, and it was very daunting and intimidating, and it's kind of like you second guess yourself, did I? Did I lock the door? Did I turn the oven off? There were many of those kinds of moments and great like, thankfully, I was in an environment that if I had forgotten to check that box, it would have been okay, it would have been okay. But there was just so much to learn. Yeah, and I realized that I had to put myself intentionally on a path to learn. Otherwise, I would find it just, I don't like chaos. I like to be organized. And I would find it overwhelming. And it felt like, you know, the analogy I used to my husband was like, it's like, I've been dumped into a pool and I have, I'm going down, and I I'm going down, and I've got this straw that's coming up, and I'm just trying to suck water, and it's like, I need to find a way to get up, right? I need to get some oxygen. And for me, learning is that

5:33
learning oxygen? So it gives you. What does it give you? What does learning give you?

5:39
As an organization, as a leader, you have to be learning. There are just I regularly go to a local bookstore to pick up leadership books because I love to read. That's my own personal way of learning. But there's such a variety of philosophies around leadership. There's so much to learn in terms of the operational pieces. There's so much to learn in terms of what you believe about what your role is, that it becomes it can become daunting. And so I think it's really important that we don't just follow the crowd. We don't just do the same things that have been done, that we learn what our role is, what our expectations are, and then we figure out, how do I do that better, right? How do we do that better?

6:28
What's my role, what's my expectations? Who am I in this, in this? And then create a learning path based on that. Yes, so you mentioned books. You love books. Yes, you read a lot of books. You've written a couple of books,

6:41
yes, and I read a lot. I read varied, even leadership books. I will not name the titles that I picked up and I brought home over the holidays. And my kids, children who are all in their 20s, were like, Why are you reading that book? Really? Do you know his philosophy of leadership and how he treats his staff, and it's like, Yes, I do, but I want to know what the mindset is, what are the processes, the systems, that are working against creating a great, healthy workplace culture? So yes, I love to read, and I love to read widely, and I want to know how are successful organizations. How are they being run? How do they define success? Because what we define success here, maybe it's going to look different, sure. And so for me, that learning component is is really important.

7:34
Okay, you you read. Are there other ways that you've gone about making yourself into the leader you are today. From an education perspective, what are the things you What are just name some of the tools you've used for learning?

7:47
Well, I am. I like habits. I'm very systematized in how I learn. First of all, I block off in my calendar. I currently have an hour every Monday and an hour every Thursday at the start of my day blocked off for learning. And I've thought about, what are my responsibilities, and one is in terms of content development. So I spend one hour thinking about best practices, learning, pedagogy, adult learning. That's one and in the other hour I allocate to strategic thinking, reading about strategic thinking, business ownership, because those are the two big hats that I wear. So I divide

8:36
you right now have two hours every week blocked into your calendar for specific learning that you want to be yes. Yes. So are you googling stuff? Are you listening to podcasts? Is it back to the books? Is it courses you're taking?

8:52
And it's all of that, yeah. And in addition to those two hour and sometimes I mess them up, like, sometimes I'll spend both times about, you know, working on content, sometimes it's more I get caught up with a course on strategic thinking or leadership development, and I'll allocate that across the week, but that's my, my sort of threshold that I try and maintain. But I on a weekly basis, my mornings are pretty scripted as well. I wake up in the morning and do a little bit of exercise, because I know my brain has to be alert in order to learn. I have a Blinkist subscription. What's Blinkist? Blinkist? They do summaries of books. And so for me, it's a really quick way to learn about the variety of books that are out there, and I listen to the blankets, and some of them are just like, I know I'm not ever going to buy that book, but it's good to know that that's out there. That's an idea. And then there are others that catch my interest. And it's like, oh, I need to pick that book up, and I need to read it. But it's literally like, anywhere from 12 to 23 minutes a. Summary that I can audio, and it's audio while I'm brushing my teeth, doing my hair, getting dressed, I can put it on, and I can listen, as I said, I drive back and forth to work, and so I listen to a wide variety of podcasts, and I only leadership podcasts all over the place learning comes in different ways. You can learn for knowledge, right and interest, but there's also that application piece. What do I do with this? And so I do also, for me, it's my learning style. I like to journal. I like to note things down. If I've read this, and this is a real one of our podcasts. We talked about delegating, if this is an important leadership competency, and I've read, or I've been studying or trying to get my head around what it means I write notes for myself. Okay, here's my actionable items that I need to take away from this.

11:00
So part of it is reflecting too. It's the input, but then it's a bit of, I don't know if you call that output specifically, but integration, how? What do I think about this? What do I want to do with this? Where am I going to go with this? Yeah, journal to do that. Yeah.

11:14
So that's kind of the the independent learning. There's a variety of ways that people learn. You know, we learn independently, and we have to figure out what, what is our preferred way of learning, whether that's listening to audio books, reading, taking. But there's other ways to learn. We learn through dialog, right, right? Things come up, and so I like to surround myself with people who like to talk about ideas. That's just another important piece for me. I have a very good friend we meet every Monday. We go for a walk after work. She's taking a master's and she's constantly sending me podcasts and articles to read that are outside of my scope of expertise, right? But I like that. It's like the people we surround ourselves with spur us on as well. So there's there's dialog, there's there's lectures, there's e courses, there's going back to school. There. You did that a few years ago, and I did that intentionally, because I felt like I was learning by jumping in the pool, so to speak. And I wanted to be able to have some frame, some frames of reference to anchor my my knowledge on.

12:33
It's kind of like you can learn to swim by jumping in a pool, or you can have an instructor teach you a few things about what you need to know when you get in the water, and they can give you some ideas, and then you can get in the water. Oh, I should jump into the shallow end first. Yes. Oh, the first thing, the next thing I can do is this. And then, so school is a bit of a way of you can sink or swim, or you can get some basic ideas and some knowledge and some theory, and that'll give you something to work with when you jump in the pool.

13:00
Yes, and I'm having a thought, you use jump in the water schools. I read a book years ago to the kids called fish. Is fish by Leone, okay? And it's about this fish who lives in a pond, and he really wants to know about life on the land, okay? And he meets a tadpole, and they develop this friendship, and the tadpole grows up, and then gets to go out on the land, and the tadpole comes back and is telling the fish about what it's like to be on the land. And he describes humans. And then they show the fish. He's got this image of fish with legs. And then he describes cows, and you see the fish's bubble, what he's envisioning, and it's a cow with with scales on it, or a fish with udder. That's what it is in that one. It's a fish with udder and a bird. It's like a fish with wings. And I realize I'm like that fish, right? I've got my own mental models, my own way of perceiving the world, and I need that tadpole to go out there, and that's the learning. And I need to realize that my picture of how I lead and what I do, and how we're going to as a team, as an organization, as myself, how we're going to move forward. I need to continually be shifting that mental model so I'm not just seeing a person with, you know, a fish with legs or the bird with wings. I need my mental models as a leader to not be constrained to what I already know, and I've already experienced

14:44
in some ways, you need somebody to show you the pictures of what things actually look like so that you can enhance, change and grow your own mental models. Yeah, become a better leader

14:53
as a result. And I also think, I mean, for me, books are very powerful, because I think I know how much time and energy. It takes to write a book. And if somebody peels passionately about passionately enough about a topic to write a book, right, they've poured thought and experience and knowledge into that book that I can take a couple of hours, and I actually get to glean from that. It seems like a wasted opportunity to not do that if you're not doing that, yeah, but you need time. So hence the blocks, exactly.

15:27
Any any surprises to you about the learning journey?

15:32
Yeah, your belief system, what you thought was the best way to do something, evolves over time, and that's a good thing. It's not that one was wrong. It's that, it's like, it's a scaffold to what is next.

15:46
Learning is growth, and what you thought now and what you think now may change and grow over the time, and probably will, especially if you're taking time to learn.

15:58
Yeah, when it comes to our workplace culture, I think it's really important that as leaders, we model that growth mindset, not just that we believe in others' growth, but that we demonstrate that in ourselves as well.

16:13
So Wendy, it's about time for us to wrap up this podcast, and I want to thank you very much for indulging my curiosity about your learning process and growth. If you had one piece of advice for our listeners about how they can craft their own learning journey, what would that one thing be?

16:32
Figure out what you're interested in, what your unique skill set is, what your aptitude is, and map out, give yourself the time, let yourself go on some bunny trails of learning. And I think learning is a very personal thing. I've shared my learning journey and the things that help me learn. We all have to find what our own unique way of learning is, and it's usually not just one thing. It's usually a combination of things, and we need to figure out. Each of us has to find out what is that combination that engages us, motivates us, and allows us to apply our learning.

17:15
Thank you. I appreciate that. So for for our listeners, in summary, I want to thank Wendy for her contributions to this show on learning. And one of the things that I've taken away, and I'm going to think about more, is the personal nature of the learning journey and how I need to be very aware as a leader, what my interests are, and maybe what's being asked of me, and then be intentional about making space in my calendar to pursue learning. It's not just good enough to have intention or to know what I'm interested in, but to actually make a plan to learn to block space in my calendar and then to find ways to integrate that. As Wendy said, she journals about it. She talks about it with friends. Whatever that is, I need to find a way to learn, gain input, put it in my calendar and find ways to integrate it. In the end with that, we're going to end this special episode on learning as a leader, and I hope you've enjoyed it, and we'll see you next time you.