I believe that understanding the way we learn is a vital pursuit. Not only is evolving our understanding important at a personal and organizational level, but it’s also the key to unlocking humanity’s full potential. Through my own relentless curiosity and a deep history of discovering and imparting knowledge using custom-made content and classroom engagement, I know that everyone, regardless of age and experience, is capable of mastery. With this in mind each time I design or facilitate a course my main objective is to do everything possible to make the learner curious. Much like a great story, a great lesson plants a question in the mind of the learner, a question they want to have answered. Because when we truly want to find an answer, humans are capable of brilliance both individually and collectively. Of course, it takes more than web trainings and cohort sessions to master a skill. True competence is driven in large part not by the data, but rather by the doing. In taking the next step towards mastery, learners must be placed into both low and high stakes environments while using a newly acquired skill. Those environments play a key role in not only development but they also make up a large part of an employee’s overall experience within an organization. View a few of my courses here.

If you’re curious to know which members on a team are engaged, don’t start by pulling up a report. Are there highly engaged top performers? Yes. But we often confuse correlation and causation here. I’ve learned through countless personal failures and observations that increasing the number of highly engaged employees and keeping them engaged isn’t simple and there isn’t a formula for getting it right either. We can get closer to the ideal by understanding that there are many layers to the employee’s experience and many factors that need to be uncovered. Factors like trust, autonomy, recognition, a sense of belonging, fairness, psychological safety, a clear individual purpose, understanding and belief in their company’s cause, providing and receiving compassion all play a part to varying degrees based on the individual. The way we experience these factors isn’t through reading our employers’ mission statement or by completing annual surveys. These feelings are experienced largely due to the interactions we have with the people we work with and the organizational content we consume. Our peers, partners, immediate managers, inter-department collaboration, enterprise/C-suite communication, marketing materials, social media presence, and the chain of command all provide the framework for engagement. For me, this is why it is impossible to feel passionate about the employee experience without also feeling passionate about the way we communicate. So whether I’m leading a sales team, creating a recognition campaign, writing training material, or managing a project, I take effective, memorable communication very seriously. See some of the ways I have shaped the employee experience through communication here.

Many people believe that we live in the age where human attention span is at it’s lowest point. I don’t buy it. If we can still sit on the couch for hours at a time binge-watching reality television, we must still possess a healthy attention span, right? The problem isn’t our ability to focus. We live in an age where more content is created than we can possibly consume. In 2020, there were 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Add this to social media posts, emails, and yes, the last meeting invite you sent, and we end up with not an attention deficit but rather a communication surplus. The way we end up navigating that surplus is we bounce from email to IM to meeting like a never-ending game of notification-whack-a-mole. So what is the solution? Well we can’t stop communicating, and I don’t believe more communication is the answer either. The solution that I take pride in is making content that is easy to consume, saves the recipient time, and is something they would be willing to share with others. If a presentation is needed during a meeting, take the additional time up front to ensure it’s practiced, polished, and engages the recipients. If a concept or process needs to be shared and the traditional method is to gather 200 people in a virtual meeting and place them on mute, I'd recommend holding off on sending those invites and turn that content into a video. Video is the preferred method for information consumption globally, but we aren’t utilizing it to it’s fullest potential in the corporate world. Many companies, if they are lucky, employ a small video staff, and they utilize video for a fraction of a percent of their internal communications. Why not allow the 200 people invited to your meeting to consume your information in about one-third the time at a time that works best for them? Well, quite frankly, the answer most of the time is that your content isn’t important enough to have the dedicated video team work on it and no one else in your department has the expertise required. Does that sound about right? In an age where attention is a commodity and capturing it is a battleground, we need far more of our workforce capable of crafting high impact communications like video, graphic design, and delivering information in a compelling way. Now is the time to time to ensure your team includes a creator. It’s more important than it’s ever been, and it will only become more important in the future. View some content I've created here.

Servant leadership has become a bit of an over-used buzz word, and that in turn has led to many people attributing themselves as a servant leader without actually behaving like one. Serving others is at the core of what I do, and honestly can become a problem especially when it comes to marketing one’s self. But serving others is what brings me personal fulfillment, and I wouldn’t be effective any other way so I use this cliche when describing myself not for my benefit, but to better explain my style to others. I hope you’ll browse my projects page to review some of the ways I’ve been able to dedicate my time and energy in the service of others, and I hope my thoughts in the previous categories shed some light on my experiences and psychological framework. If you'd like to reach out, please use my contact information at the bottom of this page.