Leading L&D: Building Business Relationships for Results with Adele Cook of the Arizona Department of Economic Security – AXIOM Insights Podcast

Scott Rutherford
Hello and welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development Podcast. I’m Scott Rutherford. This podcast series is about the people, processes, content and techniques to drive organizational performance through learning. This is the second episode in a special three part series focused on leadership and training and development. And today we’re speaking with Adele Cook, the Chief Learning Officer with the State of Arizona Department of Economic Security.

Adele Cook
My name is Adele Cook, and I am the Chief Learning Officer for the Arizona Department of Economic Security. We’re an 8,900 person social services agency in the state of Arizona, we serve about 4 million vulnerable children, adults and families in the state and administer more than 45 different state and federal programs to do that.

Scott Rutherford
So help me understand a little bit more about the organization you serve. I have very limited public sector experience myself, only in higher ed., so for those who have never worked in a government agency, who are your learner audiences, exactly? And how does your department relate to the rest of the state government?

Adele Cook
Absolutely. So I’m actually going to start backwards. Our department is one of the cabinet level departments, it’s the second largest agency in the state of Arizona. And our remit is to help ensure that all Arizonans are safe and economically secure. So where we fit in is we administer the social safety net programs for the state. So we have things like unemployment, insurance, and, and help for people with developmental disabilities. We do eligibility for supplemental nutrition assistance, things of that nature. My learner audiences are aligned with those different programs that we that we provide as an agency. So we have a team of people within the agency that do that eligibility for SNAP, and for Medicaid, and so on, we have another team of people, another division worth of people who do work around Child Support Services and enforcement and that sort of thing. So my team is aligned to those different business units, those we call them divisions.

So within my team, I have a team that is specifically dedicated to the division that does the SNAP and benefits eligibility. We have another one for DVD, we have another one for child support, etc, etc, etc.

Our learner audiences are people who are new to the agency, who are just learning how to do their jobs. We have multiple multi week programs, these are very complex programs that we are administering on the behalf of the State and the Feds. And so our programs tend to be a little bit long.

We also support existing employees, when policies and procedures change, we do sort of just one, you know, one and done just-in-time training for those folks. We also provide some training for external business partners. So for example, although my agency is responsible for all the social services, we work through community agencies to administer some of those things, and we provide training on that.

In addition, we have leadership development training programs, we have several of those at the moment. We do general professional development, we provide LinkedIn learning. So ultimately, the answer of who’s the learner audiences, everybody, everybody in the agency winds up getting something from us. And in fact, out of the 8,900 employees that we have at the agency at the moment. We touched the lives of 7,600. Last year 7,600 people in some way, shape or form engaged with our training last year.

Scott Rutherford
So that’s 90% of the staff.

Adele Cook
Yes.

Scott Rutherford
So you’re the Chief Learning Officer for the agency. But you’ve been with the agency for longer than you’ve been in this role, because you’ve worked your way up through the ranks, it looks like. Tell me about that process.

Adele Cook
Sure. So I started in 2005, as a training manager, so I had five instructors that were that were assigned to me at the time. The unit that I was in was just doing management development. So it was a it was a small component. We still had what we call divisional training units, but they were completely separate. When I first started, we didn’t even know who those people were.

So over the years we have centralized and consolidated into one unit that that supports the entire agency doing all of those things. So I started off as a Training Manager, ultimately took over some of the instructional design as well as the training delivery, became the deputy, my boss left, I became what was called, at the time the training and development administrator, which was basically a CLO in everything but name. I did a stint of about 20 months at another state agency and then was asked to come back to DES, and I’ve been back for almost six years. And it was at that point that the title was changed to CLO, and I became officially the Chief Learning Officer.

Scott Rutherford
Well, congratulations. And, and, and having that experience, I always, I always believe that having a manager of any, any manager, any managerial role, is made stronger by understanding the jobs of your team. And it sounds like because you’ve been there and done that, do you find that gives you additional credibility as well as understanding?

Adele Cook
I think it does. You know, I’ve, I’ve done every job in our shop, at some point, at some point in my career, you know, now I’m leading leaders. And so I’m a little bit far afield from the day to day, but at least I do understand the thought process, behind the jobs, even if I, you know, my, my CBT skills are old, at this point. In terms of credibility, I think it does help. I think knowing and having that experience does help. It enables me to speak the language of anybody in my, in my team, and at least be able to understand what they’re what they’re telling me and make connections to the other things that are going on within the within the unit. You know, it’s kind of kind of funny story. And, you know, I heard somebody say, one day a Dell doesn’t even know what I you know what I do? And, and I was like, You know what, I’ve done your job. I know what you do.

Scott Rutherford
If you run across someone who wasn’t there, and you mentioned, that’s probably more than more than not people who have come into the organization since you’ve, since you’ve been there and done that.

Adele Cook
Right, exactly. Well, and of course, that highlighted to me that that I needed to spend more, more time helping people feel that I knew what they were going through.

Scott Rutherford
Oh, for sure, for sure. So within your organization, how do you make decisions about the types of learning programs you build? I imagine there are some which are is miss you sort of alluded to, you’re training your staff based on a federal program, and those federal programs are handed to you, you have to respond that would imagine but how do you make the decisions about where you invest your time?

Adele Cook
Great question. I’m actually lucky in that the way our team that my OPD direct team is organized, allows us to have teams that are specifically dedicated to the different business units that are administering the different Federal and State programs. Within those divisions, the division leader gets to make the decision as to what training programs they want. And we consult with them on how to best make that best make that happen.

So I have an administrator who oversees multiple training managers, and those training managers, as well as their partners in design work directly with the leadership of the division to determine what programs we’re actually going to do for that particular program. It’s their investment, they decide how much they want to staff up what kind of software tools they want to use, if they want things, you know, fast, they can up their investment, if they are more comfortable with going a little bit slower, they can you know, level, it’s entirely up to them to determine what level of investment and what programs we do.

At the Agency level, so our leadership development and so on, we frequently will pilot with one particular division, and then we’ll scale up to the rest of the organization. That way we can shake out all of the, you know, the rattles and squeaks and stuff, and then and then scale that up for the rest of the for the agency. Anything that happens at the Agency level, we have to gain agreement with our the agencies, executive senior leadership, our deputy directors and our and our director. But again, if we, if we test it in small, we can figure out how to make it cost effective and then and then scale it out. So I’m not sure I answered your question, but I hope I did.

Scott Rutherford
I think you did. And I like to dig in a little bit further because I am this is I think from someone who was in private in public in the I’m in the private sector, looking into the public sector in this conversation, with the lens of lots of folks in learning, and I’ve had this conversation many people over the years, one of the biggest challenges is demonstrating value. And when we’re talking about demonstrating value, a lot of the time that conversation comes back to well, how are you demonstrating return on investment? Which is a language of a for-profit company for sure. How do you translate that in in a in a public sector? I know that when you’re talking about the, your department and their training programs, they’re deciding what investment to make. How are they measuring return? And how do you look at that, within the context of a public agency?

Adele Cook
That’s a fantastic question. So I’ll answer broadly and then give an example of something that we’re working on right now. So we use Philips return on investment methodology, we are getting better at it. So I’ve, I’ve only got a couple of programs that I can that I can refer to. But we do do return on investment on things like our leadership program, and we’re going to be doing it on our largest sort of flagship job skills training program coming up.

In the public sector, we’re not talking about profits and losses, we’re not talking about a monetary bottom line. But we are talking about cost avoidance, we’re talking about cost avoidance in terms of, of employee retention, cost avoidance in terms of, you know, potential for fines, cost avoidance in having to do additional work, doing rework. Anything that we can do to avoid a cost is helps our helps our bottom line because that gets recirculated back out to the people that we that we serve. So that’s really what we’re looking at in terms of, of ROI. Generally, we’re looking for a zero or above, it might just be 1%. Because, you know, how do you how do you measure the avoidance of a fine, you know, you it’s, it’s hard, we didn’t get this fine. But as long as we’re, you know, breaking even so that, you know, additional money isn’t going out the door. That’s pretty much our return on investment.

Scott Rutherford
Sure, and I think that would be familiar language to anybody who’s doing compliance training, you’re avoiding, you’re avoiding the punitive measure, whatever that is, risk avoidance, risk mitigation. I think that applies pretty broadly for sure.

Adele Cook
Yep. And we’re looking at intangibles. So for example, we launched our leadership development program a couple of years ago. And over the time that we have been running that program, we’ve seen our employee engagement scores relating to supervision, tick up a little bit. Now, there are lots of levers that are going into that. But we know that the leadership program is having an impact, because we are evaluating at all five levels for that for that program. And we are seeing that people are – more than 70% say that they are more than 70% more likely to stay with the agency as a result of their leaders, new behaviors. So that’s, that’s huge. That’s a huge return on investment for us.

Scott Rutherford
I also asked Adele, how she approaches gaining Agency level alignment or buy in, in other words, how she approaches positioning the learning function as a partner to other areas of the organization, as a leader alongside other leaders?

Adele Cook
Well, it’s kind of interesting. When I first started, we were on the executive leadership team. And that’s changed over the years. But I’m actually finding that working directly with the executive leaders. We’re gaining more traction than we ever did when I sat at that big table every Thursday, every Thursday. So we’re not at that table anymore, where we’re at different tables, where it’s where it multiple tables, and that’s actually working really, really well with us, for us.

So what that means is, when an assistant director has a big initiative going on, they now no as a matter, of course, that there’s going to be some sort of learning component to it. And they are engaging us early in the process, so that we can do the foundational work so that like when the policies and the procedures are finally getting to the place where they’re close enough, then we can actually come in and move quite rapidly on the actual development of it. I would say one of the one of the biggest accomplishments that we’ve had over my time at DES is that is that fact that we’re getting in the room early in the process.

We also are part of the leadership teams for these different divisions. We go to business reviews, and so on so we know what kinds of things are strategically impact doing that particular division. And so we can get prepared. But we can also say, Hey, have you thought about maybe doing a training solution for this?

One of the reasons that my team is organized, the way that it is organized is that we can then have that intimate relationship with the business of that particular division, not just, ‘Hey, here’s this training, we’re going to throw this, you know, throw this request over the wall.’ No, we are intimately involved in all of it, we even help consult and sometimes even help write the policies and the procedures that we’re providing training on, because we have that writing expertise. And that that sort of that functional perspective of how this is going to translate into actual behaviors. So we’re able to consult at all sorts of different levels.

Scott Rutherford
That’s a really interesting sort of functional offer, because I It sounds like you’re, you’re toeing over a line, and that you’re sort of you’re helping your business partner, your colleague, prepare their business plan a little bit, which is not typically a training role. But in doing so you’re embedding in the goal, you’re embedding yourselves in the goal and in, you know, really putting yourselves out there. And I can’t imagine that would be anything but appreciated, if you can find the right partner, because the balance I would imagine is you need to find someone who is going to embrace it and not be threatened by it.

Adele Cook
That’s, that’s very true. We’re actually at a place where we’re, I feel incredibly blessed. Because the leaders of our organization are very invested in learning and development for their people. There’s a pull for learning now. In the past, it was a push, hey, I’m a learning department, here’s something that I can do for you. Now it’s hey, learning department, we’ve got this thing we really want you involved in it.

Scott Rutherford
That’s great. So what would you what would you say to someone who is out still on the on the push side? To try to change that dynamic? Are there are there perspectives or actions you could recommend to sort of to try to change that direction? Because I know that it can be very frustrating when you’re when you’re when you’re pushing and feeling like you’re getting nowhere? And I am sure lots of people have been in that in that boat.

Adele Cook
Absolutely. My number one recommendation would be to build the relationship with that executive leader for that business unit. Not start, don’t start off talking about, hey, I’ve got all this training I can provide to you, start off with Hey, what are the challenges that you’re trying to trying to address? Tell me about how you do your business.

Just humble inquiry about what’s on their minds, and how they run their business and what their what their people are going through, you’re going to gain a ton of insight into where you might be able to help. But you’re also going to be building a useful relationship where the leader feels comfortable coming to you.

Scott Rutherford
Well, and correct me if I’m wrong, but if it sounds like that, if that shift happened for you, at about the time where you kind of went from the big conference room and the table where it were. And I’m going to project my own experience, the larger the conference table, I generally see a lot more posturing and a lot less vulnerability, but to smaller rooms and smaller conversations where people can be a little bit more vulnerable and real

Adele Cook
Right. Yeah, absolutely. And it was interesting, that transition started happening. Real really about the time that I came back to DES, that the transition started happening. I was still sitting on executive leadership at that time. So we kind of had me come in at people couple different ways. So this, you know, this shift, although I miss being at that table, was a very nice table. It actually – we’re still getting it done. So and we have much better relationships, because there are foundational, professional working relationships, than if it were just me sitting at a table.

Scott Rutherford
The theme of the past few years has been if anything, unpredictability. And so as a leader, I asked Adele how she approaches leading her team through uncertainty in the past few months in the state of Arizona, that’s included adapting to a new governor and state administration, as well as adapting to ongoing economic uncertainty.

Adele Cook
DES is unique in that when the economy does worse, we ramp up because people need our economic safety net programs more than they would when the economy is going strong. So looking forward to an economic downturn for us means that most likely staffing will remain the same unless someone decides that learning and development isn’t important anymore.

I don’t think that will be the case, simply because we do so much in the realm of job skills training, and we can’t, as an agency, we, we can’t do it unless we have well-trained team members doing that work. So I’m thinking that as an agency will probably remain around the same size, I am not anticipating a lot of loss in the Learning and Development function, other than there won’t be funds available to add. And that’s okay. You know, we, we, bob and weave and adjust with whatever our circumstances are going to be

Scott Rutherford
Sure. A certain of agility has become has become just the normal way of doing business now.

Adele Cook
Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, we look at, you know, if we don’t want to add staff, can we do surge staffing, bring in somebody to help tide us over. There may be change, there’s always uncertainty, where I think we’re pretty well positioned to weather, whatever that is going to be. But honestly, you know, we run on a fiscal year cycle, there’s uncertainty every single year. And so we just, you know, we just stay as nimble as we can.

Scott Rutherford
Well, to sort of wrap up our conversation and building on this notion of sort of the unpredictability of the economy and the business cycle. One of the trends that we’re seeing in learning and development right now are people looking to move from maybe K-12 education into corporate learning and development or even from higher ed. So there are new entrants into our field in learning and development. And that may or may not continue, but it’s certainly been a trend that we’ve been watching over the past few months. So I wanted to ask you based on your career arc and trajectory now looking at the agency you lead and at the industry, from your perspective. What advice do you have to someone who’s new, who’s coming in short of green to L&D?

Adele Cook
What a great question. So my, my number one recommendation would be keep the end in mind. What is it that this learning product is intended to do? And how does that translate into the behaviors that we need to train on? That’s similar in education as well as it is in in corporate learning, it just looks a little bit different. You’re talking about, you know, outcomes in education, you’re still talking about outcomes in corporate learning and development. I found personally that the skills do translate pretty well. We do need to, we do need to kind of reorient them a little bit. And we do that through our instructional design and our instructor certification programs. This is you know, this is how to be a corporate L&D professional and how to do it specifically here at DES. And that seems to work pretty well.

Scott Rutherford
My thanks to Adele Cook for her time and her thoughts. If there’s a topic or a guest you’d like to suggest for a future episode of this podcast, please contact me. You can reach me through the AXIOM Learning Solutions website, axiomlearningsolutions.com. This podcast is a production of AXIOM learning solutions. AXIOM is a learning services company that provides learning teams with the people and resources needed to accomplish virtually any learning project or objective from on-demand learning professionals who will work alongside your team to complete learning content or project outsourcing. If you’d like to discuss how AXIOM can support your learning goals, contact us at axiomlearningsolutions.com. And thanks once again for listening to the AXIOM Insights Podcast.