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Lead The People is your guide to unlocking your true potential as an authentic leader. Hosted by Dr. Matt Poepsel—The Godfather of Talent Optimization—this podcast dives deep into the art and science of what it takes to lead at the next level. With insightful conversations and practical strategies, each episode equips executives, strategic HR pros, and aspiring leaders with the tools it takes to boost performance, inspire teams, and drive meaningful impact. Whether exploring the latest workplace trends or tackling real-world leadership challenges, Lead The People offers an enlightened approach to leadership. Embark on a rewarding journey to become the leader your people deserve—the leader you were meant to be.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (00:00):
Any kind of opportunity where people can say, "I'm struggling with something. I know where I can go to learn about this. " That is huge. But building that habit for people who will actually take the time because it doesn't feel like learning is always part of the job. Sometimes it feels like I really would love to do this thing better, but I don't have time to go figure it out. We haven't created that culture where learning is part of your job. It is not something that you do to just get better at your job. It is actually something that is required of you in your job during work hours.
Matt Poepsel (00:38):
Most leadership development programs follow the same playbook, send people to a two-day offsite, run them through a curriculum, collect the feedback forms, and then wait to see if anything changes. And here's the spoiler alert. Not much does, but maybe Canfor Stewart has spent years studying why that model fails and she's built something better. She's the founder of Meteor and host of the Modern Manager Podcast, which ranks in the top 1% of podcasts globally. She wrote the book Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings. And she's developed what she calls a microworkshop approach, which is a learning model that is designed for distributed teams that can't afford to disappear for a day whenever somebody needs to grow as a leader. So she and I are going to dig into why most training fails and what it takes for behavior change to stick. Her micro workshop format challenges some deeply held assumptions that we have about how adults learn at work.
(01:24):
So we're going to get into all of that. Maybe welcome to the show.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (01:27):
Thank you so much for having me today, Matt. I am so excited to talk with you.
Matt Poepsel (01:30):
I am too, because I tell you what, things are changing fast out there. We know it and that means that learning itself is going to be really critical. And that makes me think about learning and development and I still see a lot of outdated models, but I think that's the question I have for you to get us started is talk is a little bit cheap. A lot of companies say that they value continuous learning, et cetera, but saying it and then making it hapen, that's different. So what is it that explains that gap between what we say we want versus what we actually do in practice?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (01:58):
I think there's really two things going on. So on is ongoing learning from the work that you're actually doing. Taking the time to look back and say, "What worked in this project? What didn't work? What should we do differently?" And building that into your culture of learning on a regular basis. But that is a particular type of learning. That is, how do we improve what we're already doing so that we can do it better going forward? Then there's a different type of learning. And this is the one that often gets pushed into these condensed time periods, whether it's a two-day offsite where you bring in a workshop leader or maybe you have somebody in a cohort program that's running and they're going for three hours every month to go learn something and then they're supposed to do homework in between. But in that sense, learning really gets relegated into the silo that happens on the side when we have time to bring people together or when we find a program and we send somebody off into it, it's not integrated into our daily work and that to me is the biggest loss because it's not part of how we do things.
(02:58):
It's this extra thing we do on the side.
Matt Poepsel (03:01):
It seems to me that it's almost the double whammy. One, you never get around to it. And even if you do it, like you said, it's over off to the side and you go through that and you say, "That was nice." And then that first email comes in or that first client call or whatever and then it's right out the window and it's almost like you didn't learn anything at all. It wears off so fast.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (03:16):
Exactly. And the sad part is it's actually really fun. If you've been to a good workshop, a good training session, you walk out of there and you're like, "I learned so much. This was so fun. I loved those activities. The facilitator was great." But then you sit down at your desk and 15 things have piled up and everything you learned you've completely forgotten or you have all the best of intentions and you want to do all those things, but you can't remember exactly how or you just don't have time to do them and then so much time goes by that it's suddenly out of sight, out of mind.
Matt Poepsel (03:43):
Yeah. You're like, "It changed my life." And then you get back and you're like, "How am I supposed to apply that stuff?" And you're right, that out of sight out of mind is a real killer. And then all of a sudden we wonder, I don't know if it's that we do the math on it and we say, "You know what? We're just not getting a return on the training investment or if we've just convinced ourselves now that we're so busy that we just don't have time to do it. " You have a sense of what prevents us from training? Is it really that rational or is it really something else?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (04:06):
Honestly, I think it's just that we don't have a better model for the most part. And so we do the things that we think we're supposed to do because they're supposed to help. And then when they don't work well, we think, "Well, we just need a better facilitator. We just need a more on point topic. We need to hit something that people will care about that will make it stick." So we come up with all these excuses without looking at actually the format as being the real problem.
Matt Poepsel (04:28):
Yeah. Tell me more about that. So you're talking about the format itself of the training, but are there also some structural issues inside the company about how we think about anything from time or even who gets training? Let's talk a litle bit just more about what's preventing us from getting the training to the people who really need it. Let's be honest. Again, with everything changing so fast, I don't think we can afford to just be like, "Yeah, what worked yesterday will probably work tomorrow." It's like, no, not so much.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (04:51):
Yes. Well, I like to think of training as kind of three components or learning in general as having three different components. First is the information. Do you have the information to be able to do your job? Do you know how to do something? Have you read a book on this or have you attended a lecture on it or a keynote or something where you now have the, okay, I know how I'm supposed to do this thing. That's step one. Then there's step two, which is, do I have the skill to do it? I might know how, but then when I sit down and try to put pen to paper, it's a completely different thing. And I'm like, I know I'm supposed to write a desired outcome for my meeting. I should really clarify what the meeting's supposed to do, but I'm not totally sure how to structure this sentence.
(05:31):
I'm not sure if I got it right. So then there's the skill piece. And then the third piece is the behavior change. In the moment when I am supposed to write a desired outcome for my upcoming meeting, I need to clarify what is this meeting going to accomplish? Do I take the time to do it? Do I remember to do it and then am I capable of doing it and then do I actually do it? And that is where I think the training starts to fall down. And in terms of why organizations are struggling with this and who is getting training and who's not, I think too often we reserve training for either high impact, high potential leaders, people who are at the top who you are saying, "I'm going to spend a lot of budget and get you a coach or get you into a program." Or you think it has to be for everyone in this very baseline level.
(06:14):
We're going to do all company offsites. We're going to bring every bit together and pick one thing that we all can benefit from. There's a lot in between that can happen that I think we haven't yet figured out how to both have really good personal learning for individuals on their individual growth path and good collective learning so that there's shared reinforcement across a team or across the department or across the whole company.
Matt Poepsel (06:38):
Yeah. I get this vision almost of this really tall staircase with these three steps and you've said information and then skills and then behavior change. And we're like, oh my gosh, even the first one can be pretty monumental. But I think a lot of leaders feel like, well, we know we have to do something. So hey, guess what? We just signed up for LinkedIn Library. Now everybody has access LinkedIn, so we can just check that box, right? And you're like, no. So it's almost like, okay, now even once you provide the information, even if you do it more thoughtfully than that, skills is now one level even more to say like, okay, actually taking advantage of it, using it, knowing what to do with it, it's an even higher bar really.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (07:13):
Absolutely. And it's wonderful to have all of those resources available for your people. I love when there are good LMS systems or LinkedIn learning or any kind of opportunity where people can say, "I'm struggling with something. I know where I can go to learn about this. " That is huge. But building that habit for people who will actually take the time because it doesn't feel like learning is always part of the job. Sometimes it feels like I really would love to do this thing better, but I don't have time to go figure it out. I don't have time to go watch the 20 minute video to learn because we haven't created that culture where learning is part of your job. It is not something that you do to just get better at your job. It is actually something that is required of you in your job during work hours.
Matt Poepsel (07:53):
And it seems like that's the tension to me is saying that I chalk it up to the same advice that we give to leaders sometimes saying, "You need to make time to think and to be strategic and to just be high level and think about your business five years from now." And you're like, "Yeah, right. When is that supposed to happen? I'm fighting fires all day." And I've had guests on the show before and we've talked about sometimes we're our own worst enemy perhaps when it comes to that, but just talk to me about the tension to give people work time to be able to learn and make it an expectation as you said. Why isn't it happening?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (08:24):
I think it's just like everything else, exactly what you were just saying about you need to have time to do strategic thinking, you need to have time to do visioning. If it's not on the calendar, it doesn't get protected. If there's no fire urgency deadline coming up, it gets pushed to the bottom of the list. So we have to over index towards reminding people that learning is part of their job and create accountability opportunities for people to share what they've learned so that they'll actually prioritize the learning time over the 15 other things that are on their to - do list. And we need to rightsize people's roles so that they have the time and it's not just compressing everything else and making them more stressed and more likely to burn out.
Matt Poepsel (09:02):
Yeah. And training itself is something that sometimes we turn to it and we apply it in places where it probably doesn't belong. Do you see any commonalities or anything where people say the answer's training, but really the problem was something that required something different?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (09:15):
Good question. I don't know if that's how I would frame it exactly. I would say more that we think training can do more than it does. So when we talk about real behavior change, to me, training is not at least the way that it's often structured, not the thing that is going to lead to true behavior change unless you have structured in certain ways and built an accountability and support. Because if what we want is behavior change, then a training is not going to get us there. If what we want is knowledge, we want people to have information, training is pretty good at that. It's going to give you information. If you want people to practice something and start to develop a little bit of a skill, training can support that in a lot of ways. But when you want to make that jump to behavior, that's where current models of training really fall down.
Matt Poepsel (09:59):
Yeah. It's like it's saying, "Oh, we've got massive turnover, got a real problem here." Okay, you can have a 60 minute lunch and learn, but that's it. And you're like, "I don't think we're going to fix this problem in 60 minutes with the training." It's one of those things where training is really, really good at those pieces. But like you said, I do think you have to compliment it with the reality of saying, especially if the training is to do something new and scary, like so much right now that we're transforming things and whether it's AI or it's being more innovative or trying to take on and disrupt yourself before someone else does or launch a new market segment or something for your sales programs, that's so scary. You're not just going to run a quick training and especially Zoom-based training and say, "Okay, we're done.
(10:40):
Let's move on. Let's watch all the success role." And no.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (10:42):
And let's add on to this too, right? That even if you have a great one hour or two hour or three hour training where you're giving people all this information on what to do and how to use AI and how to set up your workspace and all of that stuff, that's great. But the reality is with human brains, especially with adults, we are no longer sponges. We cannot remember everything. So a couple of days later, and there's so much research to back this up, we've lost 50% of what we learned and within two weeks we've lost like 90% of what we've learned because it goes in one ear and we think we're going to remember it, but we don't because our brains are so busy because work is moving so fast and there's so much going on, just can't retain it all. If you're lucky you were taking notes, if you were thoughtful about it, you were taking notes during the session, maybe you'll go back and look at them and that'll help, but even that isn't enough to make it stick.
(11:33):
We're just overwhelmed with the amount of information we are asked to take in every single day at work that even a great training is not going to be able to compete with all of the other things you have going on.
Matt Poepsel (11:44):
Yeah. And I've had the benefit of going through a lot of different types of training and some of them have been pretty intensive and taken quite a bit of time, everything from a week of residency to a couple days during a workshop or something like that. I just don't know that that's always practical. So when you and I were chatting and you told me about your micro workshops format, I was like, "What is that? Can you tell us about what led you to come up with this notion, what is it and why did you shift toward it? Why did you design it? What do you love about it? " I'm fascinated by this.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (12:12):
Yeah, it's a little bit of a sad story because I used to do trainings in the typical way. I'm mostly around effective meetings because that's my core passion is helping teams run effective meetings and I would go to companies for three hours or four hours and we'd leave this really interactive workshop. It was super fun. Everyone would practice all the meeting skills and we would clarify what all the next steps are and everyone feel really good. And I did this at my very last workshop and I left and I was like, "I just don't think anything is going to change." I've done this so many times and I've walked out of so many rooms feeling so good about how we just spent our time and so excited for what was going to happen and the feedback from folks was always really positive. I'd get emails after the next couple of days and then the emails would stop coming and six months later nobody was writing to me to say, "Oh my gosh, our meetings are still amazing." And it just got me wondering, am I really making a difference?
(13:07):
So then after this last workshop, I was like, "I just think there's got to be a better way. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to go into a company, spend multiple hours from them and leave feeling like this isn't going to move the needle." So I went and did a huge deep dive into adult learning and adult learning principles to really understand what does it take for people to really retain the information that they need to be able to make behavior change. I also did a deep dive into behavior change and I got certified as a behavior designer with BJ Fog and really got interested and drove so deep sometimes into crazy things around what it takes to actually take action on something and not just know you should do it but overcome your natural instincts to not to avoid something, how to rewire your brain to take an action that feels unfamiliar or scary.
(13:58):
I mean, there's so much around behavior change that we can learn from. And I took all these learnings and I mashed it all together and I said, "So what does this mean then for how we can do professional development in the workplace?" And then I added some layers on that, which is the reality of work is so busy, people don't have time to take eight hours. So even if there was a solution, trying to do it all in an eight hour day where you bring everyone together is just extremely limiting for most companies and most people. Second and related, we are all over the world now. People do not have co-located teams as a norm, which means if you're waiting for folks to be together, you are missing opportunities for that ongoing learning. And thirdly, you have new people coming into your organization all the time.
(14:42):
So if learning is only happening live in a room, you're missing the opportunity for your new people to be caught up in their onboarding with how things are done around here, with the way that we run meetings or the way that we make decisions or the way that we give feedback. So if I could figure out a solution that took the best of adult learning principles, the best of behavior change and what we know about these two things, combine them into a format that works for the modern workplace realities, I thought that's what I want to do. There's got to be way to do this. And so micro workshops were born as an experiment based on all of that.
Matt Poepsel (15:17):
Wow. It's incredible. And it's so true that everything has changed when it comes to like trying to get eight hours, your clients are going to be like, "Yeah, that's not possible for us." But I love what you said, which is that you didn't just say, "Well, okay, let me see what you'll give me and I'll just map to that. " It's like, no, these are actual techniques that you found that are preferable to allow people to have just kind of this ongoing exposure, lighter weight, but it keeps it alive and it gives you a better shot at having that behavior change take place. So I give you a ton of credit for saying like, you got a successful approach and a successful business, but say, "You know what? It doesn't feel like it's doing what I wanted to do. " And having the courage to be able to go back and reinvent that, I think that's exemplary and something that not just anybody would've done, Mamie.
(15:59):
So goodness to you. And the chance to get to work with BJ Fog, holy cow, come on. What are you
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (16:03):
Talking about? I know he's the best. He's really the best. I'm so glad that I took that time because not only is it a significantly better model that I now work with, but it's also something that I enjoy more because now I don't have to uproot my life and travel across the country to go spend a couple of hours with the team. We do it all on Zoom, which is better for my life and also better for my clients because of all the wonderful factors that come with being able to do things virtually. And there's a whole world we can talk about with that. But the other thing I want to say here though is that it was really scary the first time that a company called me up and said, "We want to bring you in to do a workshop." And I said, "No, I am not going to do that for you, but let me tell you what I can do for you.
(16:46):
And you tell me if that sounds up your alley." It was so scary because I was turning people down, but the good news is that every single one of those companies opted to try this micro workshop experiment and had so much more success, which is exactly what I wanted for them. I'm glad that they took that risk with me.
Matt Poepsel (17:05):
And I think a lot of what you're teaching in workshops too is telling people to do the scary things, help them through it, find the techniques so it only makes sense that you tried it, but then when you're the one doing it, it is, it gets your attention a little bit. You're like, "It just doesn't feel right." But it's fabulous that you did that. And I want to geek out for just a second too, because you've got an apply is the name of a learning design framework. I want you to tell us a little bit more about that, how you're structuring sessions and you've got such good frameworks since the bones, what you discovered and how you wired it into your approach. I just wanted to touch on that real quick.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (17:35):
Thank you for asking that, because this is how I kind of pulled all of that information together. So there's the apply learning framework, which is the pieces that I think about putting into every single session so that it is meeting adult learners where they are and helping them learn and practice and leave with clear action items. So it starts with anchoring everything to the real work. So that's the A, right? If you're talking about something that people feel like is not relevant for them, it goes in one or not the other. They're not going to pay attention. It has to feel like I understand how this is going to be immediately applicable to what I am doing in a given day or a given week or given month. The second part is that we always start with a purpose. So P is purpose first, because if you don't know why something matters, you're much less likely to want to participate and learn and then do the thing.
(18:29):
And we see this with kids, right? They're sitting in a classroom, at least my teenage daughter is like, "Why do I need to know this? " Adults think the same way. Why do I need to know this? If you can't connect it both to that real work and share that deep why, it's much harder for folks to retain and then want to make those behavior change because that's the hard part. Then we get to the P, which is practice in the room. So again, information is great, but you need the skill to be able to act on that information. So we always practice in the room, which gets rid of that initial scary thing of, I don't know how to do this, because you get a safe space to try it out in private, at your own desk while you're on Zoom, you're not having to do it with a pair.
(19:09):
You can if you want. Sometimes we design it that way, but you get a chance to really practice it and get some feedback if you'd like. Then we go into leverage experience. This is the L because I consider myself an expert in a lot of things, but I am not the only person in the room who has expertise on anything. I always want people to feel like they should be bringing their learnings, their experiences, their expertise into the room too. And we can learn from each other. It doesn't just have to be learning from me. And then lastly is your next action. This is the why. There's always on next action. Everyone in these sessions is learning the exact same thing so that everyone is going out and having the exact same next action. That creates consistency in the behaviors and reinforcement opportunities because I know what you're supposed to do in that moment and I can help support you to do it or I can help call you out gently and appropriately if you're not doing it and I can celebrate you when you are doing it because we actually share that same next action.
(20:12):
So that is the learning orientation around the apply
Matt Poepsel (20:15):
Model. It's super smart and it takes so many of the best practices that I can see where they would be valuable. I haven't studied learning and training the way that you have, but I can see specifically where you wouldn't want to go to a session that failed on any one of those elements, right The last one I think is one that is not all that common. A lot of times we walk away and say, "Go ahead and write down your own next action. Everybody's supposed to do their own thing." I don't want to say there's no accountability. There's no consistency as you pointed out. And it's like you can't help one another because everybody walked away with their own personalized thing. You're like, "For the very next thing we do after this training, we don't need all that personalization. We need to make sure we actually do the thing." So I feel like your why of apply is really an astute way of sending people off because like you said, that's where training dies in the hours and days following the end of the event, that's where the real risk is and I think you're heading off that risk so to speak.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (21:04):
It's one of the things I saw when I was running meeting trainings all the time is I would teach somewhere between seven and 15 different meeting practices all in one session and then we would tell everyone at the end, "Pick the top three that you're going to commit to doing." And there was no consistency then. And so it made it really, really hard for folks to support each other because we were all trying to do different things. But when it shifted to we are all going to do one thing, right? If we are all committed to using desired outcomes every time we have a meeting, now I as a meeting leader know my people are expecting me to write a goal statement of what we're going to accomplish in this meeting when I send out the agenda or when I send out the calendar invite or when I start the meeting, I'm going to say, "This is what we are here to accomplish today." And everyone on the team, even if they're never going to lead a meeting on their own, even if they came to this training but they're never actually going to write their own goal statement or desired outcome statement, they can expect that of their meeting leaders.
(22:00):
And at the start of the meeting, if a leader has not said, "This is what we're here to accomplish today," it is my job as a participant to raise my hand and say, "I want to check in first and ask, what is our desired outcome for today?" I now can help hold my meeting leader accountable to that because we've all agreed that this is a behavior that we have shared responsibility for. So that one shift has made so much bigger impact in organizations around behavior than teaching them a whole bunch of things and having people pick their favorite behaviors.
Matt Poepsel (22:31):
And as a meeting leader myself, I would appreciate that too, because it's easy for me to fall into my old habits or to not be fully prepped because I was running late from a call and I just want to talk it out because that's my personality and people are like, "Well, hold on, Matt. Remember, we went to the training. What are the goals for the meeting you're supposed to... Okay, I'm so glad you brought that up. Thanks. Let's absolutely do that. " I love that as a way of holding leaders accountable, yes, and also building in that reinforcement really over time.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (22:55):
That's where culture happens.That's where culture change happens.
Matt Poepsel (22:58):
Nice. I want to circle back to something you talked about earlier too. I know a lot of trainers that won't allow recordings. They feel like they're intellectual property, it's theirs. If you weren't live in the meeting, that's too bad, but you've already told us that you actually do use the recordings. I know in a previous conversation you referred to these as living assets, I don't know how this happened, but I almost felt happy for new employees because they're not left out the way that they normally feel. It makes assimilation harder when everybody's using lingo that you don't know because you weren't at the training because you happened to join two weeks after the workshop event and now you're like, "I don't know what they're talking about. I don't want to say anything," but you're taking a different approach here. How does that work and what specifically...
(23:37):
I think I know what led you to it, but just tell us more about these living assets and your philosophy behind them.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (23:42):
Well, it starts exactly that same place, which is because trainings happen at a moment in time, so many people miss out on them. People who are out sick, people who are on vacation, employees who haven't yet joined your company and that means that you're not actually getting the most value out of that training session. I just think that there's a better way to keep culture alive and to keep people working and collaborating effectively by making those training assets available to everyone at any time. Every session that I run as a microworkshop is 30 to 45 minutes long, which means it fits into your workday. This is not something you have to carve out a whole big chunk of time for and feel overwhelmed that you're squeezing everything else down in your week. It's shorter than a typical meeting and they're all recorded. They're all on Zoom first, which means that at the end, your company gets the recording of your live session and now this is an asset that you can use in a lot of different ways.
(24:39):
So first, anyone who missed it because they were sick or they're on vacation or they had another meeting that they really had to be in that they couldn't miss, whatever it was, they can now catch up on it. And because it's short, they don't have to find three hours to, "Oh, am I ever going to watch that training? I don't want to watch a boring training." No, it's 30 minutes long. They can watch it and want to have speed. They're going to be able to watch it and catch up. Secondly, it now goes into your learning management system. So anytime somebody's like, "Oh, I remember maybe talked about how to capture notes at the end of a meeting, but I can't remember exactly what you said." They can now go and find it. And again, because they're short and they're only on one specific issue, one specific skill or behavior in every session, they're not having to scroll through a three hour session trying to find that five minutes where you talked about it.
(25:25):
And then thirdly, and this is really the best part, is they become part of your onboarding for new employees. Every new employee who comes in gets to learn how things are done around here. They don't just have to read about it or have somebody try to explain it to them. They can actually go through every single one of those sessions and learn for themselves so that they are up to speed with how work happens here. And that is where I think we get the most value because now your culture is being reinforced on a regular basis instead of dwindling because every new person who comes in who has their way of doing things, they are diluting this strong culture that you have built around how you work together. But if they're onboarded with the same trainings, they are now additive and supportive of that culture.
Matt Poepsel (26:11):
It's such a great term, that dilution effect where I didn't get exposure to it, so I'll just kind of slightly change it 1% and then all of a sudden over time it erodes it really fast. So I feel like I really love that. And the mentality too, you can tell you take such a client-centric view here of saying you're going to have people who aren't going to make it for whatever reason. Somebody got sick, somebody was on PTO, like you said, certainly new hires and you're saying like, "I want to make sure you get the value of the investment and of the time and you get the outcome that you want. So this is the way to make that possible." And I really see that coming from a very thoughtful place from you. But I want to shift this maybe because I got it out on the clock.
(26:47):
I could talk to you forever about this stuff. I just love it, but I know our audience has busy lives too and I think that we have to talk about the AI elephant in the room. See what I did there? AI is fricking everywhere, which is for better or for worse. And the reality is that my question, what is it changing about what we need to learn beyond learning AI itself in a technical sense, right? I think that's pretty obvious, but what else is it shaping in terms of leaders and what they need to learn? Some of the either topics or themes or some of the surround along with all this transformation that we're seeing around the tech?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (27:20):
So AI is changing a lot and I'm excited to see where it goes. My hope is that AI helps fill the gap for that individual learning path where there are certain things that I need to know how to do, certain skills I need to build, certain behaviors I need to have that AI can help support me as an individual to gain. My worry is that AI is going to replace the collective learning opportunities and that's where we're going to lose out on having that shared reinforced culture elements. So I don't know where it's all going to lead. I wish I did. I'd be making my bets, but I know it's changing how work happens. It's already changed how I work and I'm really excited for what it means for humans to be able to focus on the human skills rather than just the work skills.
(28:09):
I think there's things that only people can do and we can learn how to use AI to help us do those things better instead of we're trying to replace our human behaviors or human connections or our human capabilities with AI.
Matt Poepsel (28:23):
I think so much of what we've been talking about today when you think about what's the information, the skills, what's the nature of behavior change, all that's very much in play when it comes to AI too. And I'm very excited about what AI has in store for us. I think it is fundamentally going to change everything. And I think just like most other developments, there's going to be positives and negatives. It's going to come down to us as leaders. How do we actually embrace it? How do we take our people with us on this journey? How do we demonstrate empathy for people who are struggling or rightfully anxious or concerned? I saw a staggering percentage of Gen Z people are feeding their corporate AI bad information because that's their form of resistance. And at the one hand, you're like, "Er, don't do that. " But at the same time you're like, "Okay, let's talk about where this is coming from." And that's going to put us right into one of your micro workshops to talk about how do we actually go through and have a thoughtful approach here, something that builds culture that reinforces the learning that we all need to do and allows us to make those behavior changes.
(29:22):
I think it's going to be lumpy for a few years at the minimum and everything's changing so fast, but I do feel like the new opportunities are going to be there. As you were describing, I was thinking, "Man, if we could take some of maybe these micro workshops and make them everything from indexable, more accessible, all that great value you have is just right on overdrive and we can't do it without you. We're not going to... " So I just think it's amazing to think about what's going to be possible when working with a thoughtful partner like yourself to say, "What are the outcomes on the other side of our learning that we're going to do together?" It's very cool. Well, I have something else that's very cool for us, which is I like to have a trivia segment with my guests, Mamie, and I was thinking about how Oh am I going to come up with a trivia question that's just specific for Mamie?
(30:03):
And I said, I'm going to go back and find out something about her that I don't know. And I found on a podcast interview that you did quite a ways back about piano playing, sing alongs. It was an amazing story. It was a little vignette. We don't have time to share it here, but I figured that I would give us a question about the piano. And so the question for us, Mamie, it's multiple choice here. How many keys are there on a standard modern piano? Is it A76, B88, or 92? What do
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (30:31):
You think? Well, there's 88 white keys. I'm pretty sure. Oh,
Matt Poepsel (30:36):
Interesting.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (30:37):
But I don't know if that counts the black keys or night.
Matt Poepsel (30:40):
If they're 88 or 92 then is what I'm hearing.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (30:41):
Well, it's definitely not 92, so it's
Matt Poepsel (30:44):
Got to be 88. It's got to be 88. So audience you for playing along at home. How many keys on a piano? Is it A, 76, B, 88, or C92? We are going with B, which is 88. And I have a feeling we're going to get this one right. Spot on, nailed it. First try, 52 white keys, which are called the naturals. I did not know that. And 36 black keys, which are called the accidentals. What in the world? Why would you call a black key an accidental? They seem pretty intentional to me. Maybe, I don't know. I can't explain it because we're just learning new things all the time, but I have a much better question for you. Where can my listeners go to learn more about you and all the great work you're doing?
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (31:17):
Well, you can find my podcast, The Modern Manager, wherever you listen to podcasts and YouTube. You can go to themodernmanager.com and find out more about the work that I do as well as mamieks.com, M-A-M-I-E K-S.com. And there you'll find all my workshops and my coaching and lots more.
Matt Poepsel (31:35):
I love it. Listeners, I'm going to have those links for you in the show notes. You're only one click away from getting connected with Mamie, learning about all the amazing stuff that she's doing. Mamie, thanks so much for being with us, spending time with us. Such an important topic. I love to geek out on it with you. I really appreciate you being here.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart (31:48):
Thank you so much, Matt. I always have fun talking with you.
Matt Poepsel (31:56):
Here are my top three takeaways from my conversation I just had with Mamie. The first is around gaps. We have these natural gaps in the way that we approach training. Some of it's based on the attitude we have about training. Oh, we don't have time for that. We can't take our people out of the field for that, whatever it might be. Some of it comes down to the nature of what we think training is, a litle bit outdated sometimes. We feel like we want to check the box on it and it really prevents us from being able to grow and to learn and to do all the things that we know we're going to need to do if we're going to move our organizations forward. The second is when we talk about courage, I want to highlight again that maybe demonstrating incredible courage to be able to revisit her business.
(32:32):
And I think for us, even if we're not in business for ourselves, being able to have that same kind of courage when approaching our jobs and what it is that we do and saying, "Have things changed? Do I need to change? Do I need to change the way that I conduct my sales or build my software or run this construction project or handle this banking situation, whatever it might be? " The question is, how do we respond with courage and give ourselves the support and the approach and the behavior change that we need to follow through on that? And then the last one is her apply framework. I think it was a very thoughtful thing she did to go out, take a fresh look at the market, what she was trying to accomplish and codify that down into a very handy framework that she then applied to every module that she's designing right now.
(33:15):
And I thought that was a really astute thing for her to do and we can all do that. I think the chance to take a blank sheet of paper, sit down with your AI brainstorm, talk to a thoughtful coworker, whatever it is, but just put some thought and a fresh thinking around the core of what you're doing and try to come up with something that's a renewed approach that'll provide you with that guidance and be that north star for you to do whatever it is that you do. So that's it for this week. Thanks again as always for listening. And remember, don't just manage the business when you can Lead the People.