Moving the L&D Needle by Listening to Your Audience with Curt Archambault

(03:10) The value of professional networks like CHART and the importance of actively engaging for personal and business growth.
(08:18) DiSC assessments and self-awareness help teams understand individual strengths and improve collaboration.
(11:15) Managing up is just as critical as managing teams, especially working in leadership roles.
(12:19) Tools and training must be designed with the end user in mind to ensure adoption and long-term success.
(18:14) Behind every data point is a story; it's essential to understand the context behind numbers to drive meaningful change.
(22:48) Proactive learning and development strategies are key to staying ahead and ensuring credibility within organizations.
(26:07) Partnering with other departments can help lighten the workload for learning and development professionals.
(28:14) AI can significantly reduce development time for learning materials.

• People and Performance Strategies website
• Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers website
• "The Five Love Languages" 
• Jay Hartwig's Wise Tales episode
• Jason Berkowitz's Wise Tales episode 

Evan Melick: [00:00:00] Well, hello! Today we are privileged and honored to be joined by Curt Archambault, who is a Partner Consultant at People and Performance Strategies, PPStrat, with over 40 years experience in the hospitality and performance consulting field. Starting his career as a maintenance boy at Jack in the Box, Curt worked his way up to Regional Training and Operations Partner, overseeing training and development teams across multiple locations.

At PPStrat, Curt helps emerging and mid size organizations achieve growth by focusing on talent selection, training, and HR strategies that drive performance improvement. Curt is also a prominent figure in the hospitality training world. He's a past president and current education strategist for the [00:01:00] Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers, where he's helped shape the industry's training standards.

Curt is a certified facilitator for everything DISC Suite and an accredited facilitator for the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, bringing deep expertise to building teams and leadership development. He has a proven track record of helping companies like Alaska Airlines, Benbridge Jewelers, and First Watch Restaurants improve their operations.

Curt has been married to his wife Karla, who is the prep girl at Jack in the Box, for over 42 years and is the father of two adult children, Andrea and Eric, and has one fantastic grandchild, who he adores.

That was quite [00:02:00] the introduction, Curt. Do you have anything to add to that entire CV I just read for you?

Curt Archambault: No, I'm just going to replay this over and over again if I need a little boost to my ego, but, great job. You know, I've been blessed to be surrounded with a lot of great folks. So, from family to friends to colleagues, and I love what I do because I get to work with a lot of amazing individuals. So thanks for the nice intro.

Evan Melick: So, we have a few questions for you, because of course we do. Here at Wise Tales, we love to hear stories. So recently, we had another chart member on our podcast, Jay Hartwig, and we got to learn more about his organization at Fox Restaurant [00:03:00] Concepts. We know that's a great way to connect with some of the top minds in hospitality. How did building relationships with CHART shape your career and what advice do you have for today's leaders to build connections that can drive their teams and businesses forward?

Curt Arachambault: Yeah, great question. I mean, as I move through these years of my career, you know, I find myself looking back and what were those pivotal moments? What were those things that had a true impact? And, joining CHART ... now, I will be perfectly honest with you. When I first joined CHART, I didn't take it quite as serious as I should have.

I was there with coworkers and maybe attended some of the sessions, maybe didn't attend some of the sessions because they were in great cities that we could go to, but where it really changed dramatically was when I started getting actively engaged and that's with participating on conference teams and then I started getting more actively engaged with other folks, and that really helped me [00:04:00] recognize the importance of connections and learning from others, sharing with others, and it allowed me to then take information back to my organization that had a little bit more credibility because I was able to kind of take a deeper dive.

And, even there's so many nuggets that I get from going to CHART. I was at a conference and one of the speakers said, "hey, you want to try something new?" Build connections outside of your industry and I took that away from that CHART conference and started doing things like getting involved with local community chambers of commerce, other associations that weren't necessarily in my lane, but I could learn some things from the amount of connections that I made as a result of my CHART experience has grown exponentially on to this point. When people are looking for advice, I'm like, I may know somebody, you never know. So I try to help others as well through those connections.

So I think that's another [00:05:00] valid experience that I got from connections. It's not always just about me, but I might be able to help somebody else in a situation that they need. We're connecting to, you know, amazing human beings to talk about an issue that I have no expertise in, but I know them and I know them. How can I connect them together? So those are kind of the takeaways. So I would say get out of your four walls. Learn, experience things inside and outside of your industry, whatever association or whatever group works for you. Start small, maybe, and then branch out into larger organizations when you have a little bit more confidence and your networking skills are easier.

To be perfectly honest with you, I like to keep things kind of small in my world, but this networking has allowed me to open up my perspective a little bit. So that's kind of what I would offer up.

Evan Melick: So I think those are fantastic key takeaways for sure. I'm curious because I know a lot of your background is in building teams and navigating team dynamics. [00:06:00] How does that connection piece sort of follow through into teams that you work with on a regular basis in your day job now?

Curt Archambault: Yeah, I mean, the alignment is actually quite amazing. I wish I could say that I did it purposely, it just happened that way. So, as you mentioned in the intro, we work a lot with teams on the five behaviors but also on the DiSC assessment. And there's a lot of personality and behavioral assessments out there, but what that helped me recognize is what gives me energy and what takes away my energy.

So once I have that self awareness, when I go into these situations, I think the term is an ambivert. I'm an outgoing extrovert and so I don't necessarily seek out group activities, but I recognize that that's so important. So I have to work through that. So when I tie my DiSC style to how I connect with others, I can see that there's gonna be times where I'm gonna be anxious and how can I maneuver through that knowing who I am and how I can stay true to [00:07:00] myself, but also put myself out there a little bit more in the deliberate way. Another CHART takeaway that I got, a woman was presenting a breakout and it just hit me right in the smack in the face.

She's like, "we don't want to get you out of your comfort zone. That's too much stress for some people. Don't get out of your comfort zone. Just expand it a little bit." I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a genius because that's what I need to do. I need to take what gives me anxiety, go towards it, and then expand my comfort zone a little bit to the point where it's no longer annoying or scary.

It's part of what I do now. So I think learning those things and that's what I help teams to do is recognize that, you know, not everybody on the team is going to approach these situations exactly the same and it's okay. Matter of fact, it's great. A little side tidbit. We do this with the CHART board.

We do DiSC with them and we have four different styles: Dominance, Influence, Consciousness, and Steadiness. The board [00:08:00] has D, I, and C. We have no S styles represented. So we use that to say, how do we make sure that that style is represented? Because we are an association for our members, which seems to be something that we should be focused in on about people.

We're so heavily designed to doing it the right way, getting it done efficiently, that we may forget about the people part. So we deliberately ask ourselves those questions. So that's kind of how I connect the two together because it's important to get solid in who you are, because if you're not, it's hard for you to adapt and move towards other people.

Evan Melick: So, a quick question about that. My guess is a lot of our listeners either don't have the budget, or the time, or the capacity, right, to do personality or any other kind of working assessment. Is there a way that you can recommend they evaluate and honor those individual preferences on their teams? 

Curt Archambault: That's a great question, and these [00:09:00] concepts are out there in the ether. They can do some research, they can look up DiSC or, you know, any other behavioral assessment. There's some free ones. They're not as robust. They're not as in depth, but it can give you a general and just to have the conversations like, hey, everybody, let's talk about how we all don't approach things the exact same way. And how does that benefit us? For years in our industry, we kept hiring people like us and that proves to be a bit of a challenge for us when everybody's looking at the world through the same lens, but to open up your awareness to say, we need to bring in a different perspective and then pay attention because you can get little subtle hints there.

If I walked in and I said, Evan, I need this today and you're like giving me some nonverbal cues that like I'm making you uncomfortable with this speedy response, that may be an indication that I need to give even a little bit more leeway before I ask her some questions. So there's little subtle things like that you can do. There's a plethora of information out there on on the World Wide [00:10:00] Web that you can start that conversation. But, you know, just embracing the concept that we all are different is a good conversation. You could do some icebreakers around it. You know, how would you approach this situation?

Have people share their perspectives and do that, that baseline level. Then if somehow that budget opens up, there are providers out there that can kind of walk you through in an in more in depth process and give you tools that you can use after the learning, because that's where it really is important.

Josh Kurtz: Curt, it sounds like you're using the DiSC profile as a reflection tool. Is that something you also prescribe in your consulting as well to organizations?

Curt Archambault: Oh, yeah, definitely and it's funny, oftentimes in my session, I talk about building self awareness. A lot of this came from an event you mentioned earlier, Evan, that I've been married 42 plus years. It hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns and I don't say that because of my lovely wife. 

Most of it was me that [00:11:00] made it rougher, but at one point we read a book, a very popular book, "Five Love Languages" and I reference a concept out of there all the time in my training and that is, we project what we want. So you gotta understand clearly what it is that you want because then you are able to adapt to what that other person might want versus always pushing your own agenda, pushing your own way of things, because also what I've learned over the years is opposites do attract. So it's great that we have opposite perspectives, but if I don't recognize that, It's hard for me to interact with individuals in a very productive way.

Evan Melick: I think that is so interesting because I think it not only applies to our leadership models, right? So how we interact with our colleagues and our peers, but also how we manage up or how we manage down and so [00:12:00] recognizing humans are humans at our core. Key takeaway for me.

Curt Archambault: Yes. It's interesting you said about the managing up, because in my career that was one of my learnings. I don't, and I haven't, and I still struggle with this, managing up effectively. It is critical to my career to recognize, yeah, I can be the greatest. I use the sports analogy of, you know, a player's coach versus a front office coach. I was much more a player's coach. But what I missed in my career was, guess who pays the bills? Guess who gives me the team? It's that front office. So I have to be balanced in both. I have to recognize who I'm dealing with because what I might do for my players may need to look significantly different for what I do for my front office staff.

So that's one thing that I often reflect back on in my career is like I could have done some things differently had I had this knowledge when I was coming up through the ranks. But yes, you're spot on.

Josh Kurtz: Yeah, and taking this to the restaurant world, I work [00:13:00] with a lot of learning professionals in the restaurant world, and I see them struggle with that same thing, kind of juggling the up and down. I see a lot of them very passionate about what they're doing as far as building the training and everything, but they're struggling getting the adoption and the buy in at the individual location level. Is there any tips or tricks or how do you tackle that?

Curt Archambault: Yeah, for me, it's about never losing sight of the end user, that individual on the front line. When you're developing things, that's the lens that you have to have it going through predominantly because if you miss the mark, you're going to reduce their willingness to use the tools. They can be fantastic tools, but if nobody ever wants to pick them up, they just sit there.

The cost of developing those tools, the time it takes to develop those tools is tremendous and in the long run, if you develop tools that your end [00:14:00] users aren't going to use, and then you go for the next project and talk to your leaders, they're going to be like, well, the last thing you did didn't get the mark where we wanted it to be, so why should I give you funds for this time.

I think for me, and this is probably my players coach coming out, I really want to make sure that whatever we do is easy for the end user to assimilate and with the way that technology is changing, it's phenomenal. I'll give you a little story. During COVID, my grandchild was homeschooled. So I got to be the substitute teacher sometimes, so I'm like, okay, this is going to be great. I'm going to help you through this. So, where it really connected for me is how I have to adapt the way I do things. I'm like, okay, here's the lesson and I pulled it up on my computer, and we're sitting next to each other on bar stools, looking at the counter and the first thing she says, "Poppy, that's way too many words" and I'm like, what are you talking about? When I'm like, oh, okay, hey, you're younger, [00:15:00] you need things and more sound bites that are smaller. I'm like, okay, video, that's what I'm going to do. So I pull up a video. The very first thing they looked at was how long the video, "Poppy, that's two minutes. I'm never going to watch a two minute video," and in my brain, that really sunk into me. It's like. If I'm designing something, they're the client. I mean, they're 16 now, she's working now, so they're truly the client. Back then, she was only 11ish, um, so, uh, she still had some room, but that's what's entering our workforce, um, and that's what we have to be cognizant of. So, you know, helping that, perspective and meeting them where they are is critical.

Evan Melick: We had a podcast episode with the founder of a content developer, Arrow Up, Jason Berkowitz and he shared with us his main takeaway and piece of advice for the audience was really test out that language you're using, whether you're creating a checklist, whether you're creating a training, because to your [00:16:00] point, I'm very fond of using multi syllable words for sure but oftentimes they're just way too long to fit in a checklist. So I'm not the target audience there. I think that's really important is knowing your audience, knowing what those expectations are, and how they want to engage with the media.

Curt Archambault: That's so true. I will take you back earlier to my career when I worked at Jack in the Box restaurants, and we were embarking on computer based training and this was a long time ago. So we were cutting edge on that but the thought process is like, well, our average education level ... I think we wrote it at a third grade level. We had multiple languages and things like that, so we wrote it at a third grade level. What we learned is, and so they slowed everything down. So for folks that needed that slowness, that was great and we couldn't fast forward because they didn't want people skipping over things.

I'm like, well, why [00:17:00] don't we do it at regular pace and then offer a slowdown feature? And I think you see that on YouTube now, right? I can watch a video and speed it up and have them talking really fast. We needed to do that, but we weren't listening to the audience at the time. We were taking it to what's the lowest common denominator? That's what we're going to present and then we left out 80% of our other learners because of that.  But, uh, it was a learning lesson to say, you really have to look at the audience and you're not going to hit the mark for everybody, but you got to look at how can you do it for the products.

And maybe there's alternative ways of accessing, like, is this going to be weird, and you may cut this out. I'm not a podcast guy. I can't sit and listen to a podcast but if I can print up the PDF, I can read it and I can kind of stream through it because everything moves a little slower for my own personal liking, but if I have an option, that's what I, I need. So as we're designing things, maybe building in some options that could give [00:18:00] people some selection on how people like choice. Basically, bottom line, if I told you this is the way to do it, your first response is, why? It's like, well, that's because that's how we do it but if I say, here's what I need you to do, and here's some options, you choose what's best for you, that changes the dynamic of that learning opportunity for that particular individual. They may be more apt to it, or you may find out neither one of them works, and you have to put in a special accommodation for a particular individual to help them absorb that information.

Evan Melick: I think that ties together really, really well with what you said earlier about just knowing the humans with whom you work, right? Understanding those preferences, understanding who they are personality wise, but also those learning preferences so you can meet them where they are.

Curt Archambault: Exactly.

Josh Kurtz: Curt, I'm a big data guy, so I am always trying to look at the data, having that prove out different strategies. When you're talking [00:19:00] about putting things in different formats, and I mean, you said at Jack in the Box, you're, you're meeting 20% of the employees and kind of leaving the 80% behind.

How are you measuring that? Like, what data are you looking at? What stats are you looking at? KPIs to measure and make changes off of that?

Curt Archambault: Yeah, that's a pretty big question because there's a lot of variables and a lot of things that we have to take into consideration. As I came up through the trainers ranks, you know, our metric was butts in seats, right? We were very excited. We had a full class. This is great and I did 22 full classes. Then I started to realize, like, I don't want to work that hard. So really, what is the metric that I need to be addressing? It's like, if I'm doing a class on customer service, I should be looking at the impact on customer service from these classes. If I'm doing, you know, e learning modules, I know we look at adoption.

How many people are actually using it? That's a great metric, but we don't know how they're using [00:20:00] it. I mean, I've seen people, they hit the go button, and then they're scrolling on their, their phone. So, it's really about how are they activating the information, where I see is the benefit of what we do.

So, if I see that, we're not moving the needle on whatever particular topic we are talking about, then that causes me to go back and say, what's at the core of that? What's the data telling us? And we got to make sure we're looking at the right data that's telling us what we want to know.
The other thing is, I personally believe there's stories behind numbers. Numbers in and of themselves are aren't going to be helpful until you start to peel back what's the story behind that number, and that's going to require a little bit more energy and effort. Maybe on the front end, but it may save you a lot of time on, on the back end.

I try to tie it in to anything that's going to help me get funded for future things. So how are we growing sales? How is this activity helping us grow sales? How are we [00:21:00] improving food costs? If we're doing a workshop on food costs, there should be some impact and I can slice and dice it by location.

It's like this. I have a colleague who put a number together and say, we just did this workshop and in this particular location, 80% of the participants participated in the learning, followed through on the learning, and this is where they rank in their guest service scores versus those that were only 20% participation, and this is the rank in their score. So I can make a pretty, is it rock solid? No, but it sounds pretty good, and it feels pretty good, and we can kind of move forward from that point.

Evan Melick: So it sounds like contextualizing the data, right, in a way that is in a storytelling fashion helps give flavor and texture and all of the things, at the end of the day, I think we're all on the same page. We want to be able to do more of the things that work, right? [00:22:00] and less of the things that don't work.

So in order to get the buy in, to get the funding, whatever that looks like for your organization, you need to have some proof points that the things you're doing are actually making a difference.

Curt Archambault: Yeah, and we'd like to reach out to the end users, you know, tell me about your experience. What worked? What didn't work? And using that anytime I go into a restaurant and I observe that there's a new system in place, I always ask, hey, how's it going? It's like, oh, my gosh, this thing is horrible. I tell you, who decided this?

They go down this path and you know, this is just, the person working that counter, but nobody asked them if this was a viable way to do things and they are not shy about voicing their thoughts on it. And guess who they're voicing it to? The customer. So if we can give them a proactive way to give us some information about this, so we're making best decisions, or at least we can present it in a way that they will find it more palatable? I think that's the word I'm trying to use. They can assimilate it. [00:23:00] Or they feel like you just aren't imposing this on them. You are hearing and listening and then adapting to how they are best able to execute because that ultimately is what we want. We want them to be happy. We want the customer to be happy.

Evan Melick: Alright, I guess we'll move on to another question.

Curt Archambault: All right. Yeah. I had nothing else there.

Evan Melick: So one of the curious things to me is, oftentimes we see L&D programs get cut when times are tough. It's hard to prove that ROI. We've talked about some of the contextualizing we can do around the data and the storytelling. I am a firm believer in the core of my being, L&D is at the [00:24:00] heart of everything we do in organizations but if we're thinking about just generally ROI, what can L&D leaders do in a really quick fashion to highlight the viability of the programs they're delivering, the initiatives that they are contemplating, all of those sorts of things? Do you have any advice?

Curt Archambault: Yeah. Having spent a lot of time in that space, my biggest advice is, go from reactive to proactive, you know, be on the forefront, get out there, identify areas of opportunity, pinch points and present this as an area of focus that we can then build some good learning around because when you just wait for the senior leaders to tell you, this is what I need you to build, you don't have the robustness of why, where did that come from? Why did it happen? Then we spend a lot of time, energy and resources building something that misses the mark and that reduces our credibility. This is an age [00:25:00] old conversation at CHART and I hate to use this concept that we talk a lot about is, you know, getting a seat at the table.

We're still, as L&D professionals, I believe, from where I sit, struggling with that component. And L&D and HR, are two entirely different things and so we talk about who you report to sometimes organizations support the operations you get a little bit better sense of what might need to be worked on from an L&D if you report to operations from my vantage point if you report to HR you just have to make sure you have a strong connection to that HR or operation folks because they're your client. I mean, I know HR is a partner, your senior leadership is a partner, other departments are partners, but ultimately what's going on out there in operations, they're your clients. They're your end users. So making sure you have a full awareness and understanding. What I love about CHART is many of our L& D professionals, as I'm sure you both know, came up through the ranks.

So they [00:26:00] do have that perspective. If you're an L&D professional that came to a hospitality organization and don't have hospitality experience, you need to get out there and see what goes on in operations and not just in the best restaurants. You'd need that because you want to see what it looks like, but you also need to go to those restaurants that are struggling and find out what's at the root of that.

We as L&D folks sometimes spend too much time in symptom land working on symptoms and don't drill deep enough. How to use right now, or correct your way? Equally important, and they both have equal challenges as well, but it's important that we are representing and delivering items that the end user [00:27:00] can use.

Access in a way that's easy for them in a hectic environment that they already work in, whether it's hotels or restaurants. It's, there's a lot of stress going on there, and I don't think it's gotten any less over the last five to ten years, to be honest with you.

Josh Kurtz: Yeah, and I love that idea of going from reactive to proactive. One, I think that helps reduce the stress. I think anything reactive is just by definition going to be more stressful on you. When I'm working with learning and development managers, they've got a lot on their plate. A lot of them feel underwater. They're wearing multiple hats. What are some concrete steps? I know you mentioned going into restaurants and observing, but what are some other actionable steps that they can make? Like a first step to be a little bit more scalable.

Curt Archambault: Yeah, I think it's about partnerships. Find those like minded departments in your organization. Engage them in the process that you're working on. Help them be part of the process to spread [00:28:00] out that workload, which is always interesting to me, is we're overwhelmed Which says we have value, but then the first time we hit a financial hiccup.
Oh, you got to go and I'm like, who's going to do all those things. Somebody's going to have to do those things. But if we can spread our, our influence to other departments, help them be successful, help them partner with us to be successful. You know, the accounting people are always frustrated because managers can't process invoices correctly.

Well, let's partner together and see how we can build a program that's going to work well, and I'm going to need you to give me what I need, and I'll give you what I, I can provide, and then we can blend this together to make it easy for, uh, again, I, I'm probably going to pound this drum over and over.

What is going to impact it? the end user How are we going to get them to be excited about what they do? That, that, for me, is the primary place. But, uh, and you're right. A lot of our, uh, uh, associations and organizations that we work with and member companies, uh, there's some people where it's the only trainer on staff.

The only L&D [00:29:00] person. They're a person of one. If you're in some of the bigger brands, then you get the multiplication of more people. So, you know, the one plus one does actually equal three when it comes to product output. But one only, you can only do so much. And I think the other thing that people are struggling with now is, uh, this focus on just balance for themselves personally.

Am I going to put 90 hours in? I don't want to put 90 hours in. So you're facing that pressure from the L& D folks. It's like, this is hard and to start over is even harder. If somebody leaves in the middle of a project, I don't know if you ever experienced that. It kind of catch up. Oh, my goodness gracious.

That's horrible. So we want to retain those folks as well, but help balance their, their time spent. So I think you got to leverage the other people on the team. I think that's probably the first and foremost place I'd start.

Josh Kurtz: Yeah, that's a great point. And any tools or anything? I know A.I. is the big talking point [00:30:00] for the last couple of years, but any tools that you've seen help manage that?

Curt Archambault: Well, certainly. I'll give you a little story. I work with a client who wanted to introduce an LMS system. This was a while back, and they had a fairly robust I.T. program, and I was going to come in and help project manage it, and my first thing was like, why do you want to build this yourself?

There's a lot of great organizations out there, and I know what it is. It's the cost. You know, they see that upfront cost, um, but the amount of time and everybody thinks it's easy. And it's not easy. It's a lot of resources. And these are resources that you have in your company that are designed to focus in on the things that only your resources can focus in on.

So when you get them doing these other projects, it dilutes your skill set. So I would say again, back to partnerships. What's out there? There's a, we mentioned earlier, content developers. You know, they are able to move through stuff and give you things that are going to fit and does it have to be exactly branded?

You know, [00:31:00] have all your colors. They can make that work if you need to, but at the end of the day, the person sitting at the, the other side of the computer or whatever isn't gonna go, oh my gosh, they're using the wrong color palette in this video. They're not. They're not focused in on that. Now the marketing people are, but the end user isn't really.

So I would start there. I am a big fan of A.I. I know just enough to be dangerous at this point in time, but I will say the impact on just my personal time and energy has been beneficial. I heard somebody say this to me not too long ago because there's some shame around. A.I. for some reason, it's like, h, you're using A.I.? You're not smart. You have to use A.I. I'm like, okay, when I grew up, we all had to have a calculator and that calculator was to help me do math and I see A.I., and somebody coined this before me, A.I. is just a calculator for words to help you take what's going on in your head and get it out in a way that's consumable by others, that you don't have to spend five days trying to tweak [00:32:00] it.

I mean, I can get something out of A.I. and I'm going to look at it, I'm like, well, that's not exactly how I would say it, but I at least have a foundation that I can start with. I am hearing a lot of L&D professionals are seeing how it's ramping up their developer, shortening their development time because they're leveraging the value of A.I. but there's a lot of really smart people putting a lot of great content out there and leverage that.

When I was first coming in, they were even talking, I don't know if this is a thing anymore, user generated content. You know, taking stuff from the frontline person that's videoing how they're making a shake. If they made the shake right, put that in your system, because then that gives them a little in to the training, and, um, you're getting it the way you want it done, uh, and it takes a lot less resources, so I think trying to find and leverage those things, because you're right earlier, Josh, we're just busy, so anything we can do to not shortcut it, but streamline it, make it easier, I think is, is where I would start on that as well.

Evan Melick: So I do have, [00:33:00] a final question for you, but before I get to that, I just wanted to try and connect the dots a little bit. We had a lot of conversation today about really, really interesting topics, but my key takeaways, please tell me if I'm off base here, is really that importance of connections, whether it's your teams, whether it's your community, whether it's your industry, whatever that looks like. Cultivate connections and build your network. That's the way to learn. That's the way to grow.

The second piece I heard a lot about was consideration of the end user. L&D is oftentimes responding to needs of an organization, whether it's a different department or the leadership team, whatever those might be, but making sure you're looking at things and developing things with the lens of that end user in mind. I think based on this last part of the conversation, is really focus [00:34:00] on core competencies. We know growth is important. We know expanding into new and interesting things is important, but if you have an option to build versus buy, sometimes buy is your best decision because it is someone else's core competency.

Curt Archambault: Yep, yep, exactly. I'm not going to be upset about that. You know, there's a lot of really more educated people out there, but somebody coined a phrase to me called "get go", and I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? And it's like, it's good enough to go because we get so caught up and where it really highlighted for me was when I was hearing stories during COVID where people were like, yeah, this project that we just launched would have taken us 18 months of meetings and this and that and the other, but because of the need and the urgency, we were able to get it out there.

Was it perfect? No, but it was good enough to go and we'll adjust down the road. I liken it to every time my phone says, you have new updates. They don't wait for the program [00:35:00] to be perfect. They just get it out there and then we tell them it's not working and then we make an update. So I think that is, is where you can leverage and sometimes it makes sense to go in, in house. Sometimes it makes sense to go outside and look to those subject matter experts that can deliver, because time is money. I can develop it, but it's going to take me a year and a half. Or I can buy it. Yes, it's a little bit more expensive, but I get the impact of it today and where it's going to make a difference is driving that revenue or lowering costs or any different metric that you want to attach it to.

Evan Melick: So I promised just one more question, and this is actually a little bit personal. We like to ask all of our guests the same question. Fascinating responses so far. If you were to design your own bumper sticker, what would it say and why?

Curt Archambault: A great question. I'll take you back to my DiSC style. I'm a [00:36:00] C. D. style, which is conscientious dominance, so I do want to respond right off the top of my head, but this is one that's making me want to take a pause because it might be too much of an insight into my personality.

Evan Melick: This is our own personality assessment, by the way.

Curt Archambault: I guess, yeah. Well, I would think my own bumper sticker, man. This is, this is going to be a lot tougher than I thought. My natural way of being is, maybe I would put my bumper sticker would say "less is more" because sometimes we do way too much and it doesn't get us the payoff that we're looking for. "Sometimes less is more." That'll be it.

Evan Melick: I like that and it was very succinct. Which fits with the saying. Curt, I want to thank you very, very much for joining us today. I think you have such an incredible wealth of information and knowledge and experience. I know our listeners are definitely going to be [00:37:00] impressed so I appreciate the time you've spent with us.

Curt Archambault: Awesome. I appreciate the time being here with y'all. It's been a learning experience for me. This is officially my first podcast ever as a guest. So thank you for your space and grace to allow me to kind of maneuver through this process. You both have been great.

Josh Kurtz: Thank you, Curt.

Curt: Thanks.