This blog is excerpted from the Performance Matters Podcast. In this episode Bob Mosher and Meghan Castillo, principal learning experience designer at HubSpot, discuss how she is shifting her team to be more focused on developing solutions and training by those experiencing and performing the roles, rather than taking orders from a higher level, who may not know the true challenges.
Bob Mosher (BM): I am extremely honored to be joined by a
dear colleague and friend, Meghan Castillo of HubSpot. I am so impressed with Meghan’s
work, her dedication to the craft, and the way she has taken on 5 Moments and
workflow learning in such a remarkable way. Meghan, please give us a little bit
on your background in L&D, your team, and a little bit about how you got
started with The 5 Moments of Need.
Meghan Castillo (MC): I’m thrilled to be here with you today. Like
you, I started off as a teacher, upon graduating from Michigan State
University, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do and thankfully, I had a few
friends that worked in our Migrant Student Services Program, which had a
facilitation role open at the time.
I taught the high school equivalency program for the subjects of math,
reading, and writing both in English and Spanish to a diverse set of adult
learners and am really thankful to have started off the foundation of my career
in that role.
From there, I packed up all my belongings into my Volkswagen Jetta, drove
down to Houston, Texas, and got into global international consulting from a
Learning and Development perspective. I built out a lot of training programs,
design, development, and got into the facilitation as well so embedding
accelerative learning and experiential learning into a lot of those programs.
It also helped to open my eyes to many different industries, different
cultures, and different business drivers across the board.
From there, I went to PepsiCo for about a year and a half where I got much
more into the e-learning design and development side of things.
All of these experiences have led me to where I am today, the Principle
Learning Experience Designer at HubSpot. Here, I primarily focus on building
out remote inclusive experiences across the board. The 5 Moments of Need has
truly changed the way I look at things, the way I approach the business, and
the way I’m able to do my job in a much more efficient and effective manner.
BM: Wow! You’ve had a remarkable career. Can
you talk a bit about the mind shift you mention? Everyone believes in
performance, everyone got into this to do that. That’s the ultimate goal. It
always has been, but boy, I’ll tell you to truly design from that perspective—it’s
really different. Can you walk us through this journey of performance versus
knowledge?
MC: Absolutely, Bob and it has been a huge mindset
shift for me that I’ve been going through over the past few months and
truly—truth be told—over the past few years. So, the lightbulb moment for me
was while attending one of your conference sessions; I knew that we were taking
orders, designing as quickly as we could, and really only responding to those
requests and not truly partnering with the business to get to the bottom of
those business objectives and really understanding the learner’s perspective.
So, from the traditional way of doing things, I knew that it just wasn’t
hitting the mark. I started to chase performance support and really try to
understand conceptually what The 5 Moments of Need looked like in practice and
what “great” looked like from that moment. And it’s really been a journey ever since.
BM: I love your “What great
looks like.” I really love that quote and the challenge you went through in
getting what I think are also fairly straight-forward concepts. But making that
cognitive shift to doing it? The “Aha’s” that come along with that? You
mentioned having some struggles or some challenges as you came in and out of
that. What were some of the more fundamental or pivotal “Aha’s” that you got as
you started to make that journey.
MC: It’s a typical trap that we all fall into—building
for the content and the knowledge and the understanding that we want to infuse
into our learners. But it’s really the shift around aligning and focusing on
that performance. There are so many mindset shifts around that.
But one really major one
that was so helpful not only for myself, but for our stakeholders, was that of Train
Transfer and Sustain—the methodology and the visual around this to really
truly make it clear that all of our content that was existing, everything that
we were focusing on really fell within this Train area, and was only “covering”
the knowledge, the information, focusing on the classroom, focusing on those
“one hit wonder” or those experiences that had a beginning and an end and
didn’t truly move into this space of where learners were having to apply this
knowledge, which inevitably, as we know from going through the content,
learners were having to unlearn and then relearn once they left our programs—to
really put that into the perspective of the actions that they were going to actually
take in role.
So it really helped for me to understand that the majority of what we had
currently and still have to this day—it’s definitely a journey—was so much
around higher-level, bigger ideas rather than the actual actions they would be
taking day in and day out on their role. So a huge shift there to more focus on
the Transfer and Sustain within their role.
BM: And it’s interesting.
That’s what we have to do. Right? When you have the bell curve in the room—we were
taught in education—you have to teach to the middle, kind of. I’ve always had
an issue with—and struggled terribly--with words like “individualized
instruction,” “personalized instruction,” “tailored”—because my whole thing is,
those are great things to throw out, but when 26 people, 15 or whatever, walk
in my room, how do you do that? You have to kind of stay right at that level of
abstraction just so everyone can participate and engage and you can reach as
many as you possibly can. The individualization comes when they leave! Like you did when you left the class and tried
to individualize it for yourself right away so you could also do it for your
colleagues. That’s where individual instruction occurs. And for so long, I know
my work didn’t go into that. I didn’t intentionally participate in supporting
or helping that. Now with the EPSS, or digital coach, we can truly be a part of
that without being there or feeling we must own that part of the journey as
well.
MC: Exactly. And we can really allow learners to
take that responsibility within their roles and their workflow. In our EPSS
instance that we’ve built out at HubSpot, it covers the sales process, which is
a huge initiative, and there are so many pieces to that. So, for the sake of
this example, let’s say there are seven pieces. Some roles that go through our
sales onboarding process, which is a significant
amount of time investment in terms of those different roles—they may only be
covering that first piece of that sales process.
They’re
spending so many weeks out of the workflow and it’s really around implementing
that performance support, designing and enabling it for them to be able to use
some of these aspects in role instead of expecting them, for example, to go
back and review a long eLearning or a lengthy slide deck when they are actually
needing to apply that.
We’ve
been embarking on, of course, the mission of taking a lot of that content
that’s already been developed and putting that into those bite-sized
performance support pieces in a way within our EPSS that’s easy for them to navigate
to within two clicks, ten seconds, to ensure that they’re able to get access to
that at their moment of need. But it’s been a change as you alluded to earlier
within our L&D team to wrap our minds around this change of mindset, this
change of how we’re designing, how we’re re-utilizing and repurposing our
content.
It's
been a journey! But it’s been helpful to take it in baby steps and not come into
it and say, “We’re going to wipe out absolutely all of our training we’ve
done.” That’s not the case. We’re just going to repurpose a lot of that and
pull from it and redesign so it’s more action oriented.
BM:
I’m so impressed with your diligence, your passion, and your receptivity to
being a true learner yourself. I think those that adopt that mindset are then
able to bestow an effective level of guidance to others. You‘ve just been so
remarkable. Thank you Meghan.
For more on Meghan’s work at
HubSpot, listen to the
full episode.
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