Nick Davies: All right, Cheryl, Welcome to this podcast.
I'm so excited to have you here.
Yeah.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing
Cheryl Johnson: great.
How
Nick Davies: are you?
I am doing well.
As listeners know, this is always a pretty short thing, so we just get into it right away.
So if you're ready, I got my first question for you.
Good.
Let's go.
All right.
So tell me a little bit about your career progression and maybe some habits or strategies that have helped you.
We've talked in the past and I know that you have a kind of a different path for educators since you started in the business world, but tell us just a little bit about that progression and some things that have helped you move along in your career.
Cheryl Johnson: I took a rather non traditional, I started off when my kids were really young.
I started a business training people with disabilities to use computer technology in the days before it was a thing.
Okay, early 1990s, let's go back that far.
And during that time, I was really, there was no, not a lot of formal training materials out there.
So I ended up writing a lot of my own training materials.
And in the course of writing a lot of my own training materials, I, my audiences, because that's when voice recognition first entered the market, it was, okay, I have people who have.
I physical disabilities.
I have people who have mental disabilities.
I have people who are doctors and lawyers who want to use voice recognition technology, and I'm trying to write a training for all of them.
And so I was like, okay, we get into everybody in the learning space always talks about learning styles, auditory, visual, kinesthetic, I was like, that's not going to help me.
So I started looking into what motivates people to learn.
And what how do you address different people with different learning styles without having to reinvent the wheel every time you come to a different audience, right?
So I spent many years doing that, about 10 years.
And then due to some life circumstances I ended up partnering with a guy who was really fun.
And this was in the days when the internet was brand new.
And we started writing online tutorials.
So that was really cool because there wasn't technology for online stuff back then and I decided I really liked that and I wanted to go back to school because at this point I have no education Okay, I'm just a person who knew nothing about computers who wanted to start a computer business Go figure that right?
Nick Davies: Yeah
Cheryl Johnson: Anyway, from there I, this, like I said, we're still in the early 2000s, and there was no formal curriculum or degree program in the college space for e learning or, online learning.
So I learned that the things that I needed to learn were IT, computer tech, technology.
I needed to learn visual, not visual, um, how to create graphics, graphic design, that's the word I'm looking for.
And I also needed to understand how people learned.
We'll talk about three completely, totally different disciplines, right?
So I went to college, and instead of trying to get a degree, I was like, I'm gonna learn about this, I'm gonna learn about this, I'm gonna learn about this, right?
And I eventually went on and, through rather unconventional methods, got a degree.
And then I got my master's degree in action learning.
Which I don't know how many people know about action learning, but I was working for a company so many people might have heard of it, especially if you're in the education space, because they do a lot of cafeterias and colleges, but anyway, working for them, they put me through a action learning program, which is very project based 18 months.
You have a, project that you work on, and I won't go into all of the details about it, but it was, here's where the project started.
Here was the evolution of the project throughout the time, the 18 months.
And here's what I learned.
And here's the real kicker for all you education people out there.
Okay.
At the very end, my job.
Based on my project was to convince Sodexo that they needed to have a formal online learning program because they had a whole bunch of technical writers that were not instructional designers and they needed to convert them from technical writers to instructional designers, which was, once again, a whole different discipline.
My project failed.
Sodexo said, Nope, we're not doing it.
Blah, blah, blah.
Nick Davies: Yeah.
And
Cheryl Johnson: I was like.
Oh, my gosh, I just spent 18 months devoting my life to, doing all of these project plans and trainings and all this stuff, right?
And I went to my counselor, academic counselor for this program, this educational program that I was Engaged in to get my master's and I was like, Oh, does this mean I'm not going to get it?
I'm all like, Oh, she said, No, that's not the purpose of the program.
The purpose of the program was not to see whether or not you could sell Sodexo on a program.
That's that will put you in sales and marketing for that.
And so it was all about my learning journey and what I had learned and, what kinds of.
takeaways I had that I could apply in my own career and different things.
So there was a whole other list of criteria that determined whether or not I got my degree, which I did.
And it's rare to get a, I didn't get a traditional, once again, a master's degree because I wanted, I specifically wanted this action learning program through the same, and it was through the UK, through the same school.
It fell under Oxford, but it was not Oxford.
I don't want to mislead anybody there, but, it was a thing there.
So anyway, I had a very unconventional way of going about my own personal education and all the things I learned through education, which I think will lead us into this.
Discussion a little bit more.
Nick Davies: Yeah, and I think that's a great segue.
Because you've written a book.
The Ambition Quotient.
The Missing Link, right?
It sounds like your journey might have been leading you to that point.
But talk about where did this book come from?
Who's that intended audience?
What are some key takeaways from The Ambition Quotient?
Cheryl Johnson: Okay, it's a very short book.
So guess what?
You'll get a very short.
What I found after I finally, I was an independent consultant, I quit working for Sodex.
So I ended up as an independent consultant.
And I worked for a lot of government contractors, but I also worked for a lot of small business, big business, you name it.
I've worked for everybody under the sun, right?
But consistently across the board, in around 2010, 2011, I started recognizing that a lot of the training programs that I was writing as a corporate instructional designer were onboarding programs.
Go figure, right?
And this is about the time when all of the Millennials and, all these Gen Z and, and in the corporate world, it's oh, we've got all these baby boomers and all these Millennials.
How do they, how do we mesh those two and get them to there was a whole lot about that, but there was also just a lot about onboarding in general.
And I noticed that there was this huge gap from people from young people who graduated from school, an academic university or, K through 12, whatever, when they came into the workplace, they were missing five key attributes.
Creativity, problem solving team building, communication and resilience.
And it was funny because that was just my own observations.
I had no data to back that up.
It was just, it was interesting.
But in the corporate learning space, there's ATD, the Association of Talent Development, which is what used to be ASTD, one of the biggest.
Membership organization out there for corporate learners learning about and a year or two later, they came out with a study and they were studying the same thing.
I was observing.
And guess what?
I nailed all 5 of them.
And so I decided I was going to write this book and just share my own personal anecdotes and experiences with.
All of these people that, all these students that I was onboarding into the corp, bringing them, trying to bridge that gap between their academic careers and their new, newfound careers and helping them to build these attributes, because I found that they were really struggling to come from the academic world into the corporate world.
It was you may know your subject matter, When you come, in some cases, because not all people will get a job in the discipline in which they went to school.
I found that a lot of the types of activities that I had engaged in throughout all my unconventional journey through my academic career helped me develop those types of things.
And I also learned from my own experience working with these young people.
how to help them develop those.
So that was, that's the short synopsis of the book.
Nick Davies: That's great.
Now, can you name those five again?
Those are awesome things that we can all be working on.
Cheryl Johnson: Yes.
Creativity, problem solving, team building, communication, and resilience.
Not in that order.
Nick Davies: So it sounds like we have a lot of schools now that are pushing towards project based learning.
And those are some of the the tenants that I don't want to quote them, but those are some of the things that they focus on, right?
Yes.
And that's becoming bigger and bigger.
I know in my district, we have two schools specifically that is their main method of teaching.
And it's becoming more and more common for teachers, just like individual classroom teachers, to work that into a unit or two or three throughout the school year.
Cheryl Johnson: Yes, and I'm so excited to hear that because I felt like even we're in 2024.
I'm like, I've been preaching this for how long now?
And they're finally starting to catch on, which I'm super, super excited about, because I think that and, I was on a podcast with another person the other day from, the academic disciplines.
And we were talking about A. I. Yeah.
Everybody's favorite subject, right?
And how it's going to change the whole dynamic of the workplace, which I believe it's going to be very disruptive and it's going to cause a lot of problems.
And what's going to happen is all these kids that are graduating from these schools and universities or whatever, and entering the workforce, what the discipline that they come in with.
In a year's time might not exist.
And so what do we do?
What do we, these kids are?
After all these years of being put through what I consider conveyor belt education Yeah.
Are all of a sudden going, I don't know.
Like I said, I encountered that through all the, through all my years.
But it's just gonna become on an ex expedited schedule.
And because of that, it is coming so important that they develop these skills.
Nick Davies: Yeah.
We talk about when I was at the high school, we talked about making sure that our kids were college, career and life ready, right?
Because you don't know what you're going to face.
Yeah, we'd love everyone to make it to college, but they don't.
And so are they career ready?
But then even that are the kids just ready to go out there and live, right?
And those five keys that you mentioned are not just going to be helpful out in the business world, right?
They're just to help you just move through life.
Cheryl Johnson: I totally agree.
100%.
Nick Davies: Yeah.
Thank you for sharing those.
Now, you've done a lot of different things in your career.
You've written a book, right?
You've consulted, worked for businesses.
How do you feel like you get the best return on your time?
Like, how do you make sure that you have time to get the most important stuff done?
Cheryl Johnson: Oddly enough, goes back to what we're just talking about a little bit.
Early on, and I'm, keep in mind, I'm on the tail end.
I'm on the retirement end.
I'm like, oh.
I have more time than I do, it's but most people don't have that, right?
And early on, I hired a lot of contractors to help me, and guess who those contractors were?
They were my kids, because they were in college, and they needed money.
But then their kids, or their friends found out, Ooh, I can work for, at this time in 2010, 20 an hour, which they thought they were getting rich.
And I can work remotely.
On my own hours, they thought they were in seventh heaven, right?
But that's where I really started going, Okay, I'm dealing with a ton of these college kids who come to, don't know how to manage their time, don't know how to deal with a project plan, don't know how to deal with any of those types of things.
And so I spent a lot of time training them how to do that, at the behest of my daughter, no less, who was actually pretty good at it.
Thank goodness.
And she was a great inspiration and a help to me.
And that's.
They say you learn the most by teaching and by teaching them, that's how I learned how to do that.
Nick Davies: That's awesome.
Yeah.
I, so I asked that question to so many different people and you're the first one to say hire a contractor, like find, essentially find someone.
If there's something you can outsource, then outsource it.
Really interesting idea.
I would, I've all, I've thought a little bit about that of working in public schools that, if I had my own like virtual assistant, that would, that'd be wrong for a bunch of reasons.
Especially with like public records requests or whatever, but just, are there other things that could be done like that to help ease a school leader's job?
Not like your day to day operations, but other things, and I'm sure there are.
I just need to sit down and think that one through for longer.
Cheryl Johnson: Interestingly enough, and this is an anecdote from my book, I will tell you, going back to the idea that we teach, we learn most, we learn best when we teach, right?
And teachers, I find, I'm guilty, number one, are the worst people, that's, see?
I graduated, I have really good grammar.
Are the worst at how would you say allowing our students to teach because we live in a world where we're the expert.
We know everything.
We're going to share the knowledge.
Then we're going to test you to see.
My son became an electrician and my brother hired him and especially in the vocational space.
You're going to find a lot of.
People coming into that space, employees who, for whatever reason, they probably didn't do well in school or, and they don't have a lot of good work habits and blah, blah, blah, whole story, right?
Anyway.
They were really struggling at 7am on Fridays to get their, 17, 18, 19 year old kids to stay awake for safety training.
Can you imagine that?
Go figure, right?
Safety training is so exciting.
And so my brother was complaining to me one day and I said why don't you just let them teach safety?
He's I'm not letting them teach safety training.
Are you kidding?
He said, that'd be the worst thing we could do.
These guys know nothing.
And I'm like, That's the point.
I said, you don't just say here.
I want you to teach this.
You say next Friday.
You are going to be teaching this safety protocol.
Now we're going to spend the next week working together.
On your presentation and during that time, you're going to learn all of this information and by them, not only learning all that information, they're also whenever you have to teach something, you have to break it down.
You have to, there's so much you have to do.
My mom learned this to teaching piano and everything.
Yeah, there's so many little things that we don't think about.
And teachers can fully appreciate this.
And so they not only learn the subject matter, But they also learn how to communicate and, all these kind of things.
And then when they're teaching their peers, their peers are going to start asking questions and then they're like I don't know the answer to that, but they have somebody there who can help them.
But through that process, so I would really strongly encourage teachers to allow your students to do a lot more of the teaching.
And but prepare them don't just throw them into the deep end of the pool and say, I hope you learn how to swim here.
But, I just found that to be 1 of the most powerful ways of helping people learn in general is to get that opportunity.
Nick Davies: I think that's great.
And it gives students leadership opportunities as well.
Now the last thing I always like to ask people is about this idea of balance.
And I know you've, I've heard you use this phrase about harmonic leadership and how that relates to balance and that kind of stuff.
So can you talk about this idea?
What is harmonic leadership?
What does that mean to you?
How does it relate to like other parts of your life?
Cheryl Johnson: That's interesting because that's such a, whoo, we
Nick Davies: could
Cheryl Johnson: spend hours talking.
So I'll just, how about if I just give you one brief idea, okay.
Is harmonic leadership to me is really about helping people once again, understand that as a leader, a teacher, whatever you want to call it, that we are all leaders.
I had the hardest time understanding this in my life because I didn't ever feel I wasn't a CEO, I wasn't the head of some department, I wasn't anything.
I was just a contractor that went in and sure I hired a bunch of other contractors to help me.
And I didn't ever see myself as a leader.
If everybody sees themself as a leader and takes the time to really internalize what that means.
We behave differently.
If I were,
let's just say I was a CEO and I have a whole bunch of people who are really struggling to find work life balance or whatever.
If I put myself in their shoes and I start walking their walk, then all of a sudden I look at things differently.
And so when we talk about harmonic leadership, we talk a lot about quiet leadership, about servant leadership, and about walking in other people's shoes.
Because when you do that, and things through that different lens, it naturally creates harmony.
Because we're connecting with other people simply because we're understanding them and we're no longer focused on spreadsheets and bottom line and, teachers making sure we have all of these, when you're as a teacher, you might, you're a leader, but if you put yourself in your student's shoes and try to walk their walk and talk their talk, it creates, I would think, in my experience doing this, A harmonious environment, I know this is so woo out there, that's why I said it takes an hour to talk about it, but this harmonious environment just naturally reduces stress, obviously I talk a lot with my hands, and brings people closer together.
Nick Davies: So thank you for sharing that perspective.
And that's a, I think we can lose that at times of this idea of putting ourselves in Who are we leading putting ourselves in their shoes?
And I love the idea of as a teacher as a school leader what does it look like?
What does your school look like if you were to walk as a student not as a principal not as a teacher?
And I know like when I was in graduate school, we were we actually had to do that for a whole day We literally had to go shoulder to shoulder with a kid and follow them through their day, but when people don't force you to do that, I think we forget and that's a great reminder of go sit next to a kid in a classroom and view the teacher from their perspective, not just from an evaluation perspective or a coaching mindset or anything like that.
Thank you for that perspective, Cheryl.
Cheryl Johnson: And just on a brief note on the end here I'm heavily involved in you want to talk about the two most contentious topics in the world, religion and politics, right?
And I have a Sunday night group and we talk so much about harmony.
And just building unity and bridging divides and just the small number of people in the group and just, we've talked, I just went to lunch and just got home from lunch at 630 at night with somebody with a member of one of my groups.
And she says, I love coming to your group because I feel better.
And she says, even though we're all on zoom, I feel connected to people.
Nick Davies: That's cool.
Cheryl, this was super fun.
Thank you for sharing all your perspectives and letting us know about your book, The Ambition Quotient.
And so just want to say thank you so much.
Cheryl Johnson: Thank you so much for having me.
Nick Davies: Of course.
Take care.
Cheryl Johnson: Bye.