Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
On this episode, Amy Parker, the Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Learning Officer, is joined by Ms. Megan Turner, the Director of Professional Growth at the Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy (VAAA) to talk about how developing skills like systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and problem solving can help you strengthen relationships and achieve positive outcomes at work and at home. Ms. Turner highlights her own commitment as a leader to using these skills to support employee development in a way that takes into account the “whole person”.
Ms. Parker and Ms. Turner also talk about how VAAA adapted to the changes of a virtual work environment and get a sneak peak of adaptive learning – a revolutionary technology that uses artificial intelligence to make virtual training easier, faster, and more interesting. VAAA is a pioneer in the future of e-learning, piloting the first adaptive learning course in the federal government.
The Department of Veterans Affairs Human Capital Services Center proudly presents Are You Future Ready: AdVAncing Your Professional Development, a podcast about the skills you need to thrive at work and in life.
In each episode Amy Parker, VA’s Chief Learning Officer, and learning leaders from across VA will share strategies you can use to develop essential skills like emotional intelligence, problem solving, and critical thinking. Listen in as podcast guests share insights gained from leading their organizations through one of the most challenging eras in modern memory. While we cannot predict what the future holds, we can all become more future-ready by developing durable skills that empower us to confront complex problems with confidence.
Amy Parker
This is our you future ready advancing your professional development, a podcast series for anyone who wants to grow and excel in their career or in life. I'm your host, Amy Parker, the Department of Veterans Affairs chief learning officer. All right, well, this week we are joined by Meghan Turner, Meghan began her federal career as an army intern in 2003, and joined VA in 2009 as a contracting officer. Over the last decade, she has advanced at VA, and is now the director of professional growth. At the Veterans Affairs acquisition Academy, known as V A or fondly we refer to it as V AAA. The triple A's mission is to provide VA acquisition professionals with best in class education, training, professional development, and certifications. Megan's role at V AAA is to ensure all employees have the skills and processes needed to adapt their work to be more efficient and effective. Today, I'll be talking with Megan about how the challenges of 20 impacted her team. We'll talk a little about a bit about emotional intelligence, and exciting innovations and how we learn to problem solve. Let's dive right in. So Megan, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Yeah. Thanks for coming, the acquisition process seems to occur behind the scenes, most of us don't know that the supply chain contracting and programmatic management professionals do a lot of work to keep VA running smoothly. And after 2020, I think we were also much more aware of the importance of the acquisition process, purchase of the personal protective equipment was so important other essential goods and services became an national priority. Can you tell us about what kinds of support v AAA provides to the folks at VA to ensure things are running smoothly?
Megan Turner
As you mentioned, Amy, we provide like the basic classes that our supply chain professionals, program management and contracting professionals need to be certified. And that really is just the basic level of technical expertise. As you mentioned, professional development is important as well. So once our folks have the acquisition workforce have their basic certification, we want them to continue to develop and grow as professionals and as leaders, even if they're not leadership positions, because anyone can lead from where they are. And this has been really important, especially in 2020. So we really focus on skills like emotional intelligence, systems, thinking, resilience, all these things kind of go together, and help people perform their jobs better work better as a team, especially in times like 2020, when we were in something that we'd never encountered before. If you take a look into your crystal ball, please, for a moment and tell us Do you anticipate a shift in the way you're you're delivering learning once the pandemic is behind us, we are planning on continuing to have some traditional classroom, courses, face to face in person. But we are going to shift to continuing to offer virtual instructor led training because folks are enjoying it. It's easier. It's also extremely cost effective for the government,
Amy Parker
I think you're going to tell us a little bit about systems thinking. And for those that are listening, that aren't familiar, it sounds like it's a process. Can you walk me through some of the steps?
Unknown Speaker
Sure. So systems thinking is basically just a way of thinking. We call it thinking about your thinking. So most of us just you know, unconsciously think we're thinking constantly, every day all the time, except when we're sleeping, unless you count dreams is thinking and then I guess you might be thinking that as well. But if we're going to consciously think about our thinking, we use the system's thinking method, that is basically four steps. And there's four parts to it. And the idea is that if you can break down a complex problem into these four parts, think about it asking specific questions. It makes it a lot simpler. So the four parts are distinctions, and that really is asking the question, what is the problem and what is not the problem. So oftentimes, we focus only on what the problem is and not what it isn't. And knowing what something isn't, can be extremely helpful. And then the next piece is systems and that's really the holes and the parts. So everything is a part of a system and also a system in itself. So if we were to say you know, the VA acquisition Academy is a part of the VA or a part of our organization Office of acquisition and logistics. But we're also our own system in that we are the acquisition, VA acquisition Academy doing our training ourselves.
Amy Parker
Now I get it. That's awesome. Thank you for saying it that way, you're welcome. The third
Unknown Speaker
part is relationships, which is really the cause and effect. So if I'm thinking about a problem, it's kind of a if then, so what happens like if this happens, then this happens kind of the chain reaction piece, to make sure that when you're thinking about a problem, or a challenge, that you don't just stop, you continue to go long term and be a little more strategic and see how things will continue to impact down the road. And then the final piece is perspective. And perspective is really point of view, and exactly what you would think perspective is, so a lot of times when we're thinking of a problem, we immediately think from our perspective only. But that's not going to be extremely helpful. So we also need to look at it from all of our stakeholders, different perspectives.
Amy Parker
So I love that that's so powerful. It is. It sounds like there's a core of collaboration here. And, and that probably requires some soft skills. And I think you're going to tell us a little bit about how emotional intelligence plays into this. System thinking
Unknown Speaker
actually can help with emotional intelligence, right, because of perspectives. That's taking other people into consideration, the cause and effect piece. One of the great things about emotional intelligence, or that excites us most about emotional intelligence, is that when you compare emotional intelligence to IQ, for example, I he was pretty static. It's really hard to improve your IQ, right? But it is, with some work, and some guidance and coaching, emotional intelligence can completely be increased. We have some great data around that from our leadership program we have we had our folks taken emotional intelligence assessment. About a month prior to entering the program. They completed an eight month leadership program that emotional intelligence was one of the main focuses throughout that eight months. And then about a year later, we had them take that same assessment again, every individual improved their emotional intelligence. Wow, what was really exciting was they went from as a group being an average emotional intelligence to moving to the leadership range of emotional intelligence. Amazing. Yeah. So it's so exciting.
Amy Parker
So Megan, can you define emotional intelligence for me, there can be some confusion and even misconceptions around that term.
Unknown Speaker
Emotional intelligence is taking the time to not stuffed emotions down or not react. So it's being self aware enough to recognize an emotion, know how it makes you feel, also how the situation might be making someone else feel emotionally, and then making the decision or taking an action based on that knowledge.
Amy Parker
And I think most people have experienced a difference between working with or for someone who lacks emotional intelligence versus someone who is strong in this area. So how do you bring emotional intelligence to your role as a leader,
Unknown Speaker
the goal is not to create, you know, 100 Mini versions of yourself. The goal is to help people to help people grow as their own person, right. So we just, you know, try to consider the whole person and know that each team member is different and brings their own talents, and we try to help them
Amy Parker
my sincere hope, coming out of this, one of them is that we've moved past that you leave your life at the door when you come to work, because you just can't do that. And that doesn't make for a productive person at work.
Unknown Speaker
No, it doesn't. And that's something else we've been teaching in our leadership program as well, is that the two selves thing is really hard. Some people can do it, but eventually, you know, it just gets too tough. So I know, the AAA has some exciting new programs supporting professional development. Could you tell us a little bit about what is in the pipeline, we're working on something right now that we're really excited about that isn't 100% related to emotional intelligence. It's related to problem solving and critical thinking, which emotional intelligence helps with that as well. And that is an adaptive learning course. For those that aren't familiar with adaptive learning style. It's a self paced study. So you know, kind of a click through on your own. You don't have an instructor assist you in the computer. But what's really cool about adaptive learning is it's almost like those Choose Your Own Adventure books you might have read as a kid Yeah. Neat. Each individual That clicks through on the computer on there may have a different path, you're all going to get to the same end goal, you're going to get through the same learning objectives. Learn the same thing, but it's in your own way in your own time. Yeah, it's great because it, you know, you're going to, I don't want to say test out of it. But there'll be a piece at different sections where you can test your knowledge. And if you're already professional in something, there's no need for us to make you sit through 20 slides about it.
Amy Parker
Oh, that's great news.
Unknown Speaker
So you get to skip the lecture piece and go right into the case study and apply what you already know. And if for some reason you don't do so well, in the case study will point you back to those slides that you didn't take before or those other exercises to help you practice so that you can go back and, and have a better understanding the case study.
Amy Parker
So adaptive learning is kind of the future, it sounds like at the triple A, to our knowledge,
Unknown Speaker
this class will be the first adaptive learning class for the acquisition workforce. And so our target audience is anyone in the Federal acquisition workforce, no matter your job series or grade. So
Amy Parker
the future in VA is that we've combined our we're combining our financial management it with our acquisition it and connecting better those two workforces together and talk about where problem solving could make such a difference for us, and connected to our VA wide Leadership Development Framework. learning problem solving, that competency is in our emerging leader and our team leader roles. So right at the beginning, you know, as you're getting started in your career, we're advocating you, you learn these problem solving skills, because it'll serve you through your entire career to kind of a tagline for our podcast series is becoming future ready. And if this is where the future of, of learning is going, it's so exciting. Yeah, we're very excited about it. Anything else you think we should know about systems thinking emotional intelligence link, or even this exciting adaptive learning project,
Unknown Speaker
we want to train the whole person, we want to make sure that they're technically professionally developed, that they're not two different people, you know, one at work and one at home. And we try to help with that. And the professional development skills, especially around emotional intelligence, and systems thinking,
Amy Parker
I like to wrap up each episode by asking for an inspiring piece of advice or a quote. Do you have something you'd like to share with us today?
Unknown Speaker
Yes, I have a quote by Stephen Covey that kind of goes along with what we've been talking about today. And when I first started learning about systems thinking this quote, jumped out and stuck with me since then. And the quote is, we judge ourselves by our intentions, and others by their behavior, and thinking about systems thinking and emotional intelligence, and thinking of situations where maybe someone, you know, thought you were in the wrong. And you think, well, that's not what I intended. That's not, you know, that's not what I did. But to them, that's what your action showed, right? And so, as soon as I read this, quote, going back to part of your personal life first and then professional life, you know, I started doing that at home with my kids and my husband. And I thought, oh, they're mad at me because of this. But that's not really what I intended. But then the next time I thought, well, you know, why didn't you do this? I thought, well, maybe that's not what they intended. I need to actually ask them. Yes, we brought it into the office. And this is actually one of the quotes and things we talk about in our leadership training program, as well. It's we use, we like to use quotes to kind of start discussions, especially in the morning, get everybody going. I just think it's powerful to put yourself in someone else's shoes to get their perspective.
Amy Parker
Really, yes. So I want to take this training. We offer it almost every month, yay. For our listeners, if any of this training piques your interest, you can learn more at the acquisition Academy that va.gov will link to that. And we also have an amazing offer. You can feel free to email Meghan For more information or to continue a conversation or get her expertise on systems thinking emotional intelligence and adaptive learning. She's Meghan Turner five@va.gov and we'll also have that linked for our listeners. I want to give you the last word, man, I've really enjoyed learning about this. This has been a an amazing session.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, thanks, Amy. This has been so fun. I love talking about this stuff. You know I talk about all the time with our team and we get excited but it's it's also really To go outside of our group, and really just share the passion and the fun that we have in developing these courses and delivering them.
Amy Parker
Thanks for joining us on our you future ready advancing your professional development. To find the resources highlighted today. Check out the vantage point blog linked in this episode's show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share this episode with a colleague friend or on your LinkedIn network.