Lean In To Learn Ep. 3 - The New Science of Success for Learners with guest Judith McLean

Join Jessica Soodeen as she discusses Social IQ - The New Science of Success for Leaders on Lean In To Learn with guest Judith McLean.

In partnership with Workplace Education Manitoba and thank our funder the Government of Canada Skills for Success Program. 

Joignez-vous à Jessica Soodeen qui discute de L'intelligence sociale: la nouvelle science du succès pour les leaders avec son invitée Judith McLean.

On tiens à reconnaître Éducation en milieu de travail Manitoba et à remercier notre bailleur de fonds, le programme Compétences pour réussir du gouvernement du Canada.

Transcript

Host Welcome And Guest Intro

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Lean In to Learn, your Skills for Success podcast. I'm Jessica Soudine, spokesperson for Workplace Connections, Master Certified Relational Skills Practitioner, and advocate of skills for success at work. Lean in to Learn is a series focused on insightful approaches and forward-thinking topics related to relational skills, which many of us refer to as soft skills. I'd like to acknowledge Workplace Education Manitoba and thank our funder at the Government of Canada's Skills for Success program. I, and carefully curated subject matter experts, will introduce you to an array of tools, resources, and personal journeys that will educate and empower to solve people-related issues at work, as well as build individual skills for success. So settle in and open up your hearts and minds as we lean in to learn. Welcome to Lean In to Learn, your skills for success podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Soudin, Master Level Relational Skills Practitioner. And today we'll discuss the new science of success for learners with guest, Judith McLean. Judith is a human skills guru, having trained over 2,500 leaders, frontline workers, and youth to be more self-aware, actively listen, assert themselves, express empathy, make more ethical decisions, collaborate, and become more resilient through change. She holds a master's of education degree from Ontario's municipal university and a master's of social work degree from UBC and is also a certified career development practitioner. She also holds the Skills for Success Relational Practitioner Skills. And yeah, Judith is all about connecting hearts and minds for kinder relationships, more diverse and effective workplaces, and finally more satisfying careers. Welcome, Judith, to lean in to learn.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Looking forward to this.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Thank you, Jessica.

Defining The New Science Of Success

SPEAKER_01 2:11

So very excited to have you here. And it was great to go through a lot of the WIM program with you, even though we weren't in the same cohort together. The mentorship calls and stuff. That was really great. So I know at the end of the show we'll talk about your own website. But if I went onto your website and onto LinkedIn and I started trying to research who is Judith, what's something that I would not find there?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Oh, well, I think an image that comes to mind is when I was a young woman working at BC Hydro, they had a theater company and we would entertain all the children for Christmas shows. Basically, it was a time to get partying with all your coworkers on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons after rehearsal. But I was a pirate and I was the juggler. My God. So I'm known as the juggler because I can handle multiple things at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Fabulous. As resilient women are, you know? That's that's awesome. So our topic today is the new science of success. And I'm so glad that we get to speak about this. So what do you define as the new science of success? Like, where do you see those major shifts in learning?

Generational Tension And Access To Training

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Well, I think surviving in today's work setting and understanding all of the different generations is something that's didn't really happen in 10, 20, 30 years ago. Right now, we've got five generations at work because the seniors are hanging around longer and the young people are having a hard time coming into the workplace because a lot of the jobs are taken up with older workers or people from other countries that have tons of skills just doing entry-level work. So that creates, I think, quite a bit of tension in various workplaces and how people deal with that, because some people don't get free training and they don't get paid to go to training. And so if it's coming out of your pocket, how many people can afford the training? Which is why I love what we learned with Skills for Success. They made it accessible and we learned together with a peer group, which is important, I think.

AI And The Rise Of Microlearning

SPEAKER_00 4:31

And the other, the other science of learning is obviously with AI coming in, how to champion that robot to work with you, to be your voice, and to represent what you can bring to the table. A lot of people haven't figured that out yet. But what I'm I'm I just learned yesterday, as a matter of fact, that the worldwide economic forum has said we need to be able to master the learning design with artificial intelligence. By 2030, we're gonna have to have two-minute segments of learning or two weeks, any range in between. What I learned before was just traditional classes, an hour workshop, and I'm still doing hour-long seminars for teleshealth, for example. But people can't afford that time away from work that long. They can only have four minutes, like six minutes. So teaching in that attention span is going to challenge, I think, quite a few of us to have the science behind us and letting people know where the resources are and to forgive themselves when they sometimes can't keep up. But hopefully the they want to catch up and keep up. But that's another skill.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Indeed. And that's an interesting thing about the explosion of digital information and what we have at our

Teaching Critical Thinking And Decisions

SPEAKER_01 6:03

fingertips. And when you're thinking about, because I personally think I I understand the importance of microlearnings and all of this, but maybe there has to be a shift on what's important because I'd like to know your view on, for example, strategies of teaching critical thinking or ethical decision making. How do you do that in four four minutes? I don't think that necessarily those kind of topics is possible. So how do you see the this this future blending with those kind of like decision making and critical thinking are a big are a big one today?

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Well, decision making is is a really interesting one. I can remember starting off a lesson with a number of women from another program, and we all agreed that our decision making around finding our first spouse was ridiculous. The criteria that we used, we all agreed. We made terrible first decisions. So some of us stayed optimistic and tried it again. But around critical thinking, I am late to the table on critical thinking. And I'm glad there's some excellent books out there to help us figure out what is really required to think more strategically. And over what do we have control? Because a lot

Kindness, Safety, And Respect At Work

SPEAKER_00 7:22

of people are trying to solve problems way outside their domain of what they can influence. And the the level of worrying and anxiety that I see in the workshops that I present at, the young people particularly keep thinking we have to resolve all these things on their own. And they haven't found, and so the point of critical thinking is be fair to yourself, be kind to yourself. That's and finding kindness has a new definition from my perspective. And I'd add it to the critical thinking aspect of things. To be kind is not to just be sweet and kind and giving tea to people, it's about calling people out on bad behavior, dealing with toxic behavior and difficult behaviors before it's contagious and runs rampant through a whole organization. And letting you people know that you're not, as the leader, going to put up with things. So leaders need to critically think is their workplace safe to work in? I spent a lot of time dealing with respectful workplaces, and some of the feedback I'm getting from the workforce, they don't feel safe at work. Nobody's really looking after that element. We need more of that, right? Nice.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

And so, yeah, and you've got a

Social Work Lens In Learning Design

SPEAKER_01 8:46

your background in social work and adult education and workplace training. I mean, you can you unveil a lot of this, you know. So, how would you say that those disciplines inform how you design your programs? Because it's programs that you're not just getting people to complete, but we have to give tools that people can apply, like right after the training.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Well, even if you're thinking about how you assess what the real issue is. And when you're in social work, if you're a clinical social worker, you have to do case notes that meet certain demands of government officials and various levels of bureaucracy. And then you have to be able to put a plan together to help a client or their family or all of the players involved so you understand how how systems work together, like they call ecosystems, right? And so, for example, when I worked on reserve, we had a fellow that his idea of problem solving was taking a rifle to the welfare office to deal with the substrapus caseworker that was managing his file. And it turned out she denied him access to custody of his child. That's why he went catalistic. And so, my role as the social worker and systems, we had to give time off for the caseworker. She was totally burned out and making not the best decisions. But the impact could have been quite violent. So that's my social work. When I'm working in workplace education at the at the college, I have to teach employability skills to people who aren't used to Canadian employability things and even how to understand how to deal with weird and strange behavior in the workplace. And so if people don't know the unwritten rules, they know the written rules, you know, but they don't know the unwritten ones. And I have to coach them what that culture could do to their careers. And the other issue is around clients that I a lot of our clients end up being exploited. They don't get paid well, they don't get paid right wages, they don't know how to ask for overtime pay. So we teach them employment standards and then how to negotiate those standards in the workplace for some employers who may or may not know them either,

Growth Mindset And Optimism

SPEAKER_00 11:15

right? A lot of people are exploited and disadvantaged. So I'm fortunate I can draw on my social work background around social justice issues without being too annoying and then getting people on board.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Well, that's really good. And and that's implying that that growth mindset and the and the influence, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Absolutely. Yeah. Carol Dweck's stuff is very popular in our classes.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Oh, very good. So Carol Dweck is writing, has written a book and it's an audio book. You can get it on Libby on the uh Canadian Library app called the Growth Mindset, and it's quite the game changer in the way that people think. And so, how would you say that that growth mindset really works into this new science of success? Because I think younger generations and dealing with older generations, like you've hit five generations. That's impressive to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, when I think of some of the older workers that I've worked with, they really took Edward DeBono's sixth thinking hat seriously. And they that one was always the black hat, the dark, doom, and gloom, and cynical one and pessimistic. And so asking people to try on a different hat than their normal one starts to open up that mind and to think of possibilities. One of my major lessons I draw, I shared in all of my classes at the community college, is bringing optimism in into our system. And because without that and without hope, a lot of people give up too easily. And so I wanted them to be able to believe that, yes, they are employable. They may not get the right job the first one out the gate, but they are there is someone out there that's a good match for them. But they need to learn to network, present their best foot forward, and believe that they have something to contribute. But if they lack the confidence and they're they're they're beating themselves up, they're not going to be that competitive in the workplace.

unknown 13:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Absolutely. So, what are some tools that you use with them to increase the optimism to get that whole

Mentoring Across Ages And Sectors

SPEAKER_01 13:22

thing?

SPEAKER_00 13:22

I draw a lot from Martin Seligman's work on raising optimism in within even families. If you have a pessimist dad and a pessimist mom, that kid's probably going to be very anxious going through the elementary grades, right? And the point is, some children really believe if they were bad at something, they make it pervasive and they make it permanent, as opposed to that's just a one-off skill I can't do, and it's just temporary. Someday I might be able to do it. A lot of pessimists don't get past that. Like I was raised by a really dark pessimist, and then I became, you know, Rebecca from Sunnybrook Farm. So there was quite a lot of contrast with my dad and myself, right? But knowing what I know now about the world, he had some reason to be warning me all the time, too, right? So some sure, some essence of what was true. But it's not my first choice to stay grim about what's going on in the world. And if you have all ages and some people denying young people's perspectives or denying a new way of doing things, those young people aren't staying. I've read statistics, they last maybe 11 months on a job. Even with a shortage of jobs, they're they're cutting out if they're not being welcomed, right? And a lot of them want mentors, but the mentoring can go both ways, right? If I did my master's thesis on the impact of mentoring, and ironically, I was trying to do it in the post-secondary system, how faculty, older faculty, longtime faculty would would embrace the young faculty coming in. And there was so much tension between the two groups, actually. But I didn't go get far because my I was then married to someone in senior management and I was faculty. I was considered sleeping with the enemy. Oh, wow. So when you have an enemy and you have strong people that have large personalities dominating a culture, particularly in a small town, right? It didn't happen so much in the big cities, but in the small towns, it was very clear. So I ended up taking my master's thesis into the health sector, and the VP of nursing was for a major health authority. She helped escort me through her system. So I ended up doing mentoring on healthcare workers instead. They mentor well in the health professional. Although they a lot of them told me nurses eat your eat their young. So talk about a cultural warning. Yeah.

Building Trust For Vulnerability

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Interesting. Yeah. And I'm sure those dynamics were really different in the healthcare system versus an academia or versus a corporate setting, you know. But at the end of the day, we're we're lucky that that some of the skills from our web training and stuff can are very applicable. And your breadth of background and what you can dig on, dig from is very interesting. Um, it makes me think right now, actually, to pivot a little bit. Do you find yourself also, and I don't mean to ask a closed, closed uh question, how do you find yourself coaching or mentoring people in the way of that intergenerational understanding around this new science for success?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Ironically, when I go into a room with all different ages, I ask some interesting questions and allow some of the older workers to share their wisdom. But I also ask all of them to be vulnerable if possible. I make the place really safe to do that and say what's goes on in this room stays in this room, right? And and therefore, because I also share vulnerable things about myself, and that gives them a wind of, okay, this could work. And my my favorite session happened with probably about 300 people in a room, but the most senior level person was actually a member of the legislative assembly provincially for a large ministry, and he was vulnerable in that room, giving then permission to the leaders and frontline workers to also do that. And they came up with some really positive strategies that they were going to take back to work at the end of that workshop. So for me, it's it's gaining people's trust. And age doesn't mean a thing anymore. Like we're all dealing with the same harsh realities, but we've come out the other end. Those of us that are older have have lived through things that young people are still going through.

Social Intelligence And Crucial Conversations

SPEAKER_00 18:10

We were poor, we didn't have the money to afford university, we had to take out student loans. Some people never paid them off for 25 years. Well, that whole philosophy changed with young people. 40,000 for what I paid 6K for. I mean, wages were a little bit different, but not that much of an extreme. Yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for young people trying to find affordable places to live and to pay for their training. So I still do a lot of stuff pro bono, knowing that they don't have the resources yet, but then I engage them to work for me. I get it back in paid labor from some of my grads, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Fabulous. That's so awesome. And I imagine that that, you know, like you're teaching those grads too some of some of the tools and tricks of the trade. So, what would you say are some of your favorite tools from WEM that you've put into practice? That's in addition to your already, you know, deep, deep career.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Well, the big one is is what was a bit newish for me was the social intelligence, the way they itemize things in there. And I ended up doing quite a lot of research. My favorite book that came out of that was Crucial Conversations. How to have difficult conversations with people, because that's what a lot of managers don't know how to even get started. So, what I've learned to do is express the impact when you don't take on those tough, toxic situations or toxic people. And and the impact is now, people are talking about the impact more often. It's strategically, because you can't afford to keep having high turnover with your best talent because they're leaving bosses that don't know how to boss, they don't know how to lead with ethical conviction, what's appropriate behavior. And like I said, with young people, they need to be heard differently than some of the Jen Ys and Jed Chads. Like I I'm a boomer, and so I've got what I grew up with is very different than what I had going on, right? So the traditionalists were very different again. But I learned to be more forgiving because I started to understand their history. So with what young people are facing now, and the

Resilience Practices And Real Cases

SPEAKER_00 20:35

mental health challenges, the statistics about what's going on with mental illness and so much anxiety with so many people. And part of that's because of our lack of optimism, too. So I I connect some of these topics and let people know they don't have to suffer in silence. And I the other thing around what I've learned from Wim, giving real backbone to the topic of resilience. I love teaching people how to become more resilient. And if they've got that, they can weather the storms, right? They can get through the challenges. And I feel really blessed that what we're doing with workplace education, Manitoba, across the country. But at the same time, we've lost our American partners to the South. And we have to find new partners from all over the globe. And and to be able to collaborate with people that are outside of North America, it's it's it's drawing on all the skills we're we're learning in Workplace Education Manitoba. To collaborate authentically, where everybody gains, and we learn from each other. Like I learned so much from you about so many things technically, and you're such an engineer mind, but you you're more linear, and I'm very lateral. So I'm becoming as much more linear because I can say there's benefits to doing it that way, right? Yeah. We got serious problems to work out.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah, because nothing of this is super light either. So it really interested me when you said the resilience piece. Are there one or two exercises explicitly that you like, or maybe one exercise explicitly

Where To Find Judith And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 22:19

that you like to practice in your sessions?

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Well, even just to do the the pre and post, right? Like to measure where people like for my practicum in our program, I had to go through a concept of resilience with two guys that were in the drone industry, right? And the irony was the first fellow was Russian, the other guy was from South America. Totally different cultural approaches to resilience as well. And the one one fella had a death in the family, and the Russian wasn't paying any mind to that at all, and not realizing he had to go through a grieving process, right? Because we're someone close. So I had to kind of explain in Canada how we approach these things, right? But resilience through grief is different than just resilience through, you know, product not working well, and and teaching compassion and and helping the two of them bond. So what came out of the lesson called resilience was a better collaborative partnership and a deeper understanding why the Russian wanted the other fellow to do more and vice versa, so that we were able to give them more resources that made sense from from the all that fabulous material that Workplace Education gave us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

That's amazing, Judith. That's amazing. So when our this was such a rich conversation, and we've talked about a bunch of resources that hopefully people, when they want to replay this and listen to those different books, I used to listen to the audio version of Crucial Conversations. Thank you. I used to listen to that on my way to work. So for someone to get in touch with you and to engage you in some sort of work, where would where can we find Judith McLean?

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Well, LinkedIn is the easiest. And I'm really featuring the relational skills. I learned that you can play with your name and put what you do beside your name in LinkedIn. So it comes up all the time now. And so I'm featuring the relational skills there. And I'm really feeling quite excited that I'm getting to teach with the app that's just coming out, it's just being launched. I'm helping sell it internationally. So I have colleagues in other countries that have agreed to help market our app, Relational Skills app system-wide. And so I'm really excited about taking into corporations that can learn with micro learning on their terms, very affordably. And like I've been teaching since 1986, right? This is a long journey of teaching adults. But I'm most excited about making a difference in more corporations that we need to make Canada a stronger, viable, economic place to be, because we've been too dependent on America for so long. And so now we can go globally and and grow grow grow so strongly, having those crucial conversations, being wise, like the book that we have, the wise advocate. Like when you're a wise advocate, all of your work is advocacy, right? So to put bring that into the corporate boardroom, it's it's like heaven. You can combine everything from my past. It's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Yeah. Oh my God. Thank you so much for this rich, rich conversation. You've been a fab podcast guest here, and um really, really appreciate it. And yeah, so thanks for everyone joining in here and listening to the Relational Skills and Skills for Success podcast. Lean Into Learning.