JD Dillon: Rethinking The Frontline - The 2.7 Billion People Who Keep Everything Running | EP09

The frontline — grocery clerks, delivery drivers, servers, theme park operators — is 80% of the global workforce. That's roughly 2.7 billion people who keep everything running and almost never get seen. And until this year, there had never been a book written for the people who support them.

JD Dillon wrote it. In this episode, Baryons CPO, Brooks Canavesi and Baryons CEO, Mike Hruska talk with JD — author of The Frontline Enablement Playbook, founder of LearnGeek and Every Shift Counts, and a Disney, AMC, Kaplan, and Axonify alum who started out managing movie theaters and theme parks.

We get into the night he lost Splash Mountain for four and a half hours, the trainer who changed his life (and doesn't remember him), why “I appreciate you” beats “thank you,” what AI quietly gives and takes away from how we work, why frontline managers may be the most important people in any company, and why feeling supported might be the truest definition of flourishing there is.

📕 Get The Frontline Enablement Playbook: https://a.co/d/0fTOXEmd
More from JD: jddillon.com  ·  frontlineplaybook.com  ·  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jddillon/ 

(00:00) Welcome  
(03:01) The Splash Mountain meltdown  
(07:46) Writing a 650-page book with 50 co-authors  
(12:08) Tommy, the best trainer in 25 years  
(24:14) Community that drives performance  
(36:15) Who fills JD's bucket?  
(41:23) A movement for the invisible 80%  
(56:50) AI, overload & the em-dash  
(1:11:12) Why frontline managers matter most  
(1:36:20) The virtuous trust cycle  
(1:42:23) What flourishing means to JD  
(1:47:24) The listener challenge

The New F Word is presented by Baryons — your Flourishing Partner. Start free at baryons.com.

This week's challenge: find one person whose work usually goes unseen — and tell them “I appreciate you.” 

Baryons is your Flourishing Partner. You call, it listens, and together you design what's next. Science-backed. Patent Pending. Start for free with your Baryon today at Baryons.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the new F Word Podcast, where we explore how people flourish at work and in their lives. We are honored to be here with JD Dillon. JD Dillon is the founder of Every Shift Counts and Learn Geek. He's the author of the Frontline Enablement Playbook and X Disney AMC Kaplan and Exonify. Welcome to the pod, JD. Thanks for having me. Also, we are joined today with our CEO at Baryons, Mike Carusco. Welcome, Mike. Hey, thanks. I'm excited to jam with both of you. Such exciting territory sits in front of us. Thank you for being here. So, JD, just to kind of get started off and introduce uh everyone to your background. You've managed a movie theater, you've run theme park operations, and you've worked at a contact center. Can you give us an idea of one shift that you'll never forget, whether that was good or catastrophic?

SPEAKER_02 1:02

First night I managed Splash Mountain. So, quick backstory. I managed large, complex, high-volume operations for several years up into that point. So I managed uh the world's second busiest movie theater at one point. And uh several years into my theme park operations career, I was transferred into Frontierland at Magic Kingdom Park. So it's the busiest theme park in the world. And I am in the land that includes the busiest roller coaster and the highest guest satisfaction scored attraction in the world at that time is Splash Mountain. And I go through a very quick training process to get me on board because it's the holiday season is coming up, so I have to be ready to help uh lead the operation and uh manage the team. And it's my first night where I have the radio and I am in control of Splash Mountain. And almost immediately things go sideways. Now, roller coasters and these types of environments, very big, complex machines, right? A lot of sensors, a lot of software, just a lot of things going on that you're not meant to see because you're meant to be immersed in the story. Well, in that case, we had kind of a simple technical error. It wasn't a big deal, but it was one of those issues that kept causing us to have to stop operations and having to reset the attraction. And then at a certain point, people are sitting and waiting too long. Okay, we have to we have to do an in-show, exit, everyone has to leave, maintenance has to come in, we have to try to figure out the situation. That goes on and on and on for four and a half hours. And I, at the end of that shift, have to call the person who runs park operations at two in the morning and say, Hi, I'm JD. Remember me. Here's why I lost the most popular attraction in the most popular theme park in the world tonight and why it did not reopen after I took control. Important part of that story for me is that I was I was new. I was an experienced manager, but I was new to the area. And in order to manage my way through that environment with a very technically complex operation, I had to rely on the people around me. I had to rely on my team who didn't know me yet. I didn't know them yet. In fact, a lot of the people working for me that night were college interns. Because that's a lot of the people who handle closing shifts in hospitality environments or younger professionals who don't have tenure, right, can't get the schedule bid that they're looking for, are in internship positions. And I had to turn to people who, again, I didn't know what they were capable of. I hadn't experienced this team before, and really step back and say, Yeah, you take care of, you understand this environment more than I do. I'll do the things I'm good at, you handle the things you need. Come to me when you need me, let's go. And for four and a half hours, this group of very young people, and I was young at the time too, helped me manage through a very difficult situation. We had people who were upset that the attraction was unavailable, that they had to be exited before the ride was complete, all types of things. So it was the most challenging evening of my operations career, really up front in my first night in that experience. And it spawned this interesting team engagement initiative after that. So the team decided that I was bad luck. And we created this game called JD versus the mountains. I didn't create it, they created it. So on the dry race boards in the break areas of the two mountains that were in my area, there were scoreboards. On one side it was me, and the other side was the mountain. And for the time I was there, when I was on shift, people would call over to wherever I was and say, Have we had a downtime yet? So every time an attraction went down, the mountains got a point. And every time I got out of a shift without a downtime, I got a point. I managed to barely beat the mountains that summer. Yay for me. It was more luck than it was anything, because again, big complex machines, things happen when you're working with the public. But it was that first evening that I look back to. It's one of the most memorable shifts in my frontline operations career. And it's the moment where I really learned what it meant to lead instead of manage, right? To lean in the direction of the skill set that fit the moment and fit the context and let go, still be there, still be the persons making decisions, but allow the team to take over, to do what they do really well. I'll focus on what I do. And, you know, sometimes you need to lean into the manage, sometimes you need to lean into the lead. And that's the evening that taught me how to find that balance and then built trust and relationships with my team that was beneficial moving forward. Plus, we got a fun engagement initiative out there.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

The book is something that just came out. Uh, Mike and I were actually at a conference in Chicago, and your book was on display there, and we were super stoked. Yes. See it there, the the frontline enablement playbook. Being that you just authored this book, it recently came out in the last quarter. What has that been like? And how are you arriving today as kind of an effect of that?

SPEAKER_02 6:07

What was interesting because this is my second book. The first book I wrote, I wrote entirely by myself, nights and weekends around my day job, sitting in a corner somewhere, just kind of spilling out my perspective on how things should evolve in a changing workplace when it comes to helping people learn, develop, and perform at their best. Second book was a completely different exercise for a couple of different reasons. Uh, one is three times the size of the first book, so it's 650 pages. It includes 50 other contributing authors. So I wrote 70% of this book. 30% was authored by people who are supporting frontline teams in various industries in very various parts of the world today. So executives, HR, technologists, learning and development professionals, frontline employees, and frontline managers who are doing the heavy lifting. So it was also a significant project management effort of finding these people, finding people who were allowed to share their experiences, their insights, and their practices, because big companies have big legal teams. So a lot of organizations are doing really interesting things, but can't share. So I had I had worked with this group of people along the way that shaped the story with me. I interviewed a couple hundred other individuals who maybe couldn't put pen to paper, but had interesting ideas to share that, again, helped inform uh the narrative. And then, you know, that group of people is also very much helping me drive the conversation for. Because as the introduction to the book says, it's not about a book. It's about the fact that this is the first book about enabling frontline workers, and it's 2026, and that's silly. How do we leverage this opportunity? Because for some reason, when you put pages in a bound format, people then look at you and say, he must know something. He has a book. All of this is practices from the last 25 years of my life, as well as decades of other people's experience. So the ideas aren't necessarily new, they're timely. Uh, but hopefully it gives us an opportunity to drive the conversation forward, elevate the frontline and desless workforce as well as the people who support them in doing their best work every day, and make sure that the story isn't about me. Because I have my experience. I think I know a lot of stuff. I wrote most of this book, but what I'm really excited about, and when you ask the question about how am I arriving today, there's one particular kind of excitement or moment of excitement I had very recently because I don't know if everyone else does this, or if I'm just a giant narcissist, I Google myself on a relatively frequent basis just to see, like, oh, I popped up there. Because sometimes people will quote when you write a lot of stuff and you put a lot of stuff into the world, sometimes people reference it or your slides show up somewhere you didn't expect. So I'm regularly looking for myself on the internet. And I did that last week, and my name popped up attached to a podcast that I wasn't on. And I looked at the video and the transcript and realized it was one of the contributors for my book who mentioned me and the book in the course of that conversation. But it was very exciting to see this gentleman have an opportunity to share his story. Now, I don't necessarily think it's attached to the fact that oh he's in the book, therefore he was invited to a podcast, but that's what I hope to see more of. This gentleman sharing his experience. He works in retail. So talking about his work in retail, how he's helping his business be successful, how he's helping the team be successful. And I want to see more of that because there's really interesting stories inside the frontline that are not just useful to the frontline, but can also inspire meaningful change and practice across the workplace. Because the challenge is that corporate practices don't transfer to the frontline very well. Frontline practices, I think, can be brought to life in the right context in any part of the workforce. So it's really exciting to see more conversations popping up from more people who have really interesting stories to share about the 80% of the workforce that represents the frontline in Desklas.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

We definitely want to talk about some of those stories from the book a bit later, but to start out, what I'd love to hear is so your time at Disney, your time at the movie theater, even what were some of those lessons? Tell us about the origin, how you got started, and what were some of the lessons you learned at the frontline yourself that you would never have learned in the office?

SPEAKER_02 10:24

I always try to find ways to promote different activities, including books in ways that I feel like are authentically me and match the story that I'm trying to tell and the way that I tell it. So to release this video, or this video, this book, I produced uh a vlog. So it's a video of me at a conference. The first time I had the book in my hand at an event, and I'm in London, and you follow me leaving that event in London where I had a panel conversation about frontline and desktop workers, and you follow me on a trip, and I don't tell you in the video until the very end where we're going, but I say it's my book's about to come out in a couple of days, and I need to make a stop on my way home. And you get on the plane with me, and I fly you back to my first job because I thought it was appropriate that I was on the road at the time the book is coming out. Let's take the book to where my first job was at my first movie theater. Because that's also where the book begins with me standing on the curb, not wanting to go in for my first day at my very first job. And I didn't know at that time, and it took me a while to understand it, but I would learn a lot about what it means to support people who do this type of work on that day. Unfortunately, a lot of frontline workers are enabled to the degree that they get the right trainer. A lot of it is hi, you're hired. This is Bill, he'll show you how it works. And if Bill is really good at his job, you have a chance. If Bill doesn't care, you might not make it through the first shift. There's a lot of unfortunate happenstance when it comes to how people are supported in the job. I got the right trainer. So I had a gentleman named Tommy who was a high school kid just like me. But he noticed I was scared. He took care of me for a couple of days. And when I served my first customer at a point of sale for the very first time, he was standing right there. So my best training experience in 25 years is my first day at my first job, still to this point. And kind of come full circle with that. I had the moment where I bring the book back and I take the photos and shoot the video standing in front of on the same spot where the book begins. Um I'm writing the end of the book, and I noticed I come back to Tommy multiple times in the book. I start off with he and I figuring things out, and then he comes back up towards the end of the book. And I wrote most of the book in public settings in frontline operations, so in cafes and uh hotel lobbies and airport lounges because I wanted to feel the experience and also it gave me a chance to observe people doing the job, and it helped me reflect and reminded me of a lot of different things. It was a very useful exercise. So I'm I'm sitting in a cafe, and that's when I realized I should find him. Like I keep talking about this guy. I don't tell you exactly who he is, I don't use his full name or anything like that. But I keep bringing him up. I haven't seen him since that first summer at that movie theater. He doesn't know he's in a book that's dedicated in part to him. I don't know how many chances you have to do that. No one's dedicated a book to me. So maybe this is cool. So I found him and we had a couple uh exchanges. And the cool part about it was he had no idea who I was. And that's the point, though, right? To me, he's very important. He sets me on a particular direction. I might have been one of those many frontline workers who doesn't feel like they can do this. This isn't a good fit for me, and I don't even make it through day one. Definitely don't stay there for five years, build the skill set that I need to then make the transition to the next company, which turns me into a theme park manager, and then I go from there. He set helped set the stage for that. But to him, I was one of the many kids that he trained at the movie theater during his time working there. So it was it was interesting that he didn't remember me at all. We actually went on a double date once. He didn't remember that either. But uh he was a very important player in in my professional experience and in my personal life, because you know, I meet different people as part of these jobs that shape who I am as a person as well, as a professional. So it was really cool to reconnect. Um, I even offered him a copy of the book and he said, no, I'm gonna buy one, which I thought was really nice of him as well. So writing a book takes you on an interesting journey of self-reflection. Sometimes it physically takes you across an ocean to go back to the place that inspired you to write it in the first place. And in my case, it took me to Panera Bread a lot over the course of the last two years. I'm pretty sure the manager at that Panera Bread is very curious about what I do for a living.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

And what are some of the lessons that you learned at those frontline positions that if you were in a corporate setting, coming out of school, coming out of high school or college, going right into traditional office work that you feel you would have been robbed of that experience and that perspective, let's say?

SPEAKER_02 15:22

I would not have the ability to be a public speaker the way I can do if I don't work in those frontline jobs for a couple of different reasons. One, I was absolutely frightened of talking to people as a kid, including by the time I get to that movie theater, part of my fear is I don't like talking to people. How am I gonna work with the public? So I had to work my way through that, and my jobs was a huge part of that because when you work in customer service, a certain amount of that is performance art because you're running into situations you don't know what you're gonna face today. One day, a kid set my movie theater on fire and I had to deal with that. One fourth of July, the power went out in the middle of the busiest part of the day. And now I have hundreds of people sitting in the dark, and I have to deal with that. So I became the manager that you often threw into these unexpected situations because I could stand up in front of a couple hundred people and say, Hi, everybody, this is bad, right? We're gonna figure this out together and get people re-engaged or make the situation better. You know, everyone here is still getting a free pass because the movie's not turned on, but we're gonna have a good time in this in this experience. And then I transition into uh different frontline roles. I was a skipper on the world famous jungle cruise for a while. I used to dress up like a cowboy and or a 1930s era gangster at the Great Movie Ride and perform in ways that as a child or a high school kid or even part of college, I would never have been able to do that. But I had these interesting training experiences where I'm facing the public and I have to perform these different roles. Sometimes perform from a customer experience perspective, sometimes very much perform from a 60-page script that I have to memorize in five days because we're we're going at that point. And it gave me an ability to engage an audience that I think is beneficial as a professional speaker and facilitator at this point. I don't use all the tricks as I as I once did, but it was just a very interesting training ground. I don't have that experience if I'm in corporate jobs. I don't have to think on my feet as quickly when it comes to solving the types of problems you do as an operations manager. Operations builds that perspective of we get it done. Right? I have to hit a number in the next hour. We are gonna find a way to hit that number, and then we're gonna do it again the next hour. And that's a huge difference between frontline operations and corporate teams, right? Corporate, you're often thinking in terms of quarterly goals, annual goals, right? You spend a lot of time architecting goals that cascade down the organization and never make sense by the time they get to the person, because by the time you decide on those goals, the company changed priorities and now you're working towards something else. Frontline teams don't think in terms of quarters or even weeks. We think in terms of days and in some cases hours. So that kind of tendency to veer towards action and say, okay, what's the problem? Let's get it done. And when you face off against, I worked in some operations where I saw 2,500 people an hour came through my front door. That level of volume makes a lot of other things feel simpler, right? Every job is difficult, everyone is very busy. But when you have to put 2,500 people through your location in an hour, and if you don't hit that number, you have to make a phone call. Other things feel a little bit lower stakes and a little bit lower pressure. So my frontline experiences both as a employee as well as management, kind of built that kind of operation sensibility that I can then take that perspective and apply to someone who's trying to help people who do these jobs, uh, do them as effectively as they can.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Super interesting. So I, you know, the the ability to improvise is like so critical because my first job was frontline. I worked at a rural convenience store when I was like 12 years old. And I would, I did not want to talk to people either. I'd rather read the dictionary or encyclopedia and have no one come in along the way. Um and you learn to improvise together uh on your own, right? But did you do you see like that team factor? Like when a team learns to improvise together, like a jazz band or like SEAL Team 6 or something, does do you think do you feel like something new emerges once you get enough sort of like team cohesion or wisdom together?

SPEAKER_02 19:39

One of the big points I make in the book is that frontline employees don't work for the company. They don't see the company, right? They never go to headquarters. You might have hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of locations out there. Frontline employees work for their manager, the person who hired them, trains them, pays them, coaches them, and knows their name, most importantly. And they don't work for your company's goals, right? They often don't share in the success of your KPIs. The best frontline teams I've ever worked with, on, supported, were so tightly connected that they worked in service of one another. We were very good at the job because we held one another accountable for our performance. We relied on one another in that way, and that forged a bond and a sense of connection that was beneficial to the operation, to the management team, but connected us in a way that made it more about community than it made it about the work itself. And in the book, there's a photo that I'm very excited to be able to share that happened a little less than 10 years ago at this point. It was at the closing of one of the frontline locations where I worked. Hundreds of people came back the night before that location closed. Most of us had worked there years before. It had been like eight, nine years since I had worked there. I lived down the street, so it wasn't very hard for me to get there. People got on airplanes and then we pulled our money together. We rented a theme park, had a party for ourselves, and then had that last evening with this place that we all came together sometimes decades before, and built that community and those connections where and what's really interesting. It's not like everyone in the photo, because there's hundreds of people in that photo. Not everyone knows one another. Not everyone likes one another. But we have this shared sense of purpose because we all did this job. We were all very good at this job. We made, we created a great experience for the people who visit us while we were there. And we continue to carry that with us, even though it's been decades and that location is still gone. We still have a hashtag that we use on social media that connects us to this day. Um, and it's really exciting to be able to share that story and that photo because I think it's emblematic of what frontline community can be when the right conditions are put in place. And again, it's beneficial because we we hit our numbers, we delivered a great experience, and it forged a connection that continues on to this day. And that's what that's what community looks like in frontline teams.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Oh, it's so interesting. You know, I I I tend to look at a lot of things as like the music metaphor. There's a big difference between people that come together and can play Beatles songs or someone that could have the creativity and the trust and the rapport and the flow state and all those things. As you as you think about like that that team cohesion, you know, you you mentioned um feedback, you know, accountability, things like that. What do you think are like the critical elements that we just kind of naturally emerge through having similar shared mission to make work slightly more fun than it should be?

SPEAKER_02 22:32

The idea we talk about in the longest chapter of the book is about the sense of connection and community and how it powers performance. And something I think is often left to the side because it's an HR thing or it's recognition and employee engagement when it's much more operationally centric than that. And the idea that I share is the concept of being gulkal in the way that you foster community. I think too often organizations think that they can force community down from headquarters. We decide what the mission, purpose, and values of the organization are. Everyone is gonna feel them and bring them to life in the exact same way. At the beginning of the chapter, there's an empty box. And I ask you the question: how many communities exist in your company? How many locations do you have? You have that many communities. Because community is a group of people that come together at that particular time and you don't know those people. You're probably never going to meet most of those people if you support a large distributed frontline team. So while you can wrap your arms around the corporate workforce and we can have activities and talk about values and how they come to life and the work that we do every day, we're all in one office. But when we talk about people who are distributed, we can still set the parameters, what this organization stands for, right? What the customer experience is meant to be. But then you have to hand off to the local team and especially the local management group. And one, say, this is part of your job. We're going to build into your workflow the amount of time as well as the resourcing necessary to drive community. We're going to make it a priority that you have a member of your team who is that community-driven type manager, because sometimes you have managers who are very operationally focused. They're business people, right? They know the numbers and they know how to how to get the job done. And then sometimes you have people who are a little more people-centric. And it's finding that balancing act of a management team to make sure that you understand the team that you have, the community you have, and the right way to bring those people together and to hold one another accountable. And that was another one of the keys in that environment. It wasn't management holding us accountable, it was one another. But management created those opportunities by saying, you know, we have a training team with a group of designated people who are going to be in that position where it's not just you're training people when you have a trainee, you're training people all the time. That's part of your job, is making sure people are to standard whenever you're here, not just when you have an assigned training shift. So it's there's tactical ways like that to infuse this sense of connection and community in service of driving outcomes. It doesn't, you know, sometimes that happens by accident, but I find the teams that I've worked on that have that and are able to leverage that connection to drive outcomes. There's intention and a system around it, but it's happening in different ways in different locations because, like I said, I took that photo with that group of people at that location, never taken another photo, worked in a bunch of other locations. We didn't have that, even though it was the same company in a lot of cases. But the way that sense of connection and community were coming to life in different ways, sometimes very tightly connected to what we were doing, sometimes not so much. And every time there was a clear connection between that sense of uh community and our ability to drive, hit the numbers, drive outcomes. So, and it's I think it's often hard to find that, or in a lot of cases, especially with frontline teams, you often legislate connection out of the job because we're so hyper-focused on every minute optimizing labor spend, right? Everything becomes a transaction and you lose that slack, which is where those moments of conversation that people start to build that trust to forge those bonds that are going to be beneficial to you later. You see that a lot in frontline operations where you know managers don't let people have side conversations. Like, how dare you talk to a peer when there's no customer right in front of you? You what you should be finding something to do. We are probably doing something that you can go too far. You can slack too much. But I fear we often, because we have not enough hands and not enough labor hours to get the work done, so people are overburdened and overwhelmed. So that slack is missing, or people aren't prioritized to foster those connections. And as a result, everything becomes a transaction. We don't build those bonds, and then we wonder why the teams fall apart, why we have high turnover, why people aren't performing at their best, why people don't respond to corporate initiatives about values and customer experience and those types of things, because they're just not connected to the work anymore. They come in, they do the job, they go home.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

How does the future of work look as we think about increasing that engagement for the frontline? So where we have this disengagement, and a lot of frontline workers, we've talked about this before, JD, don't have screens, they don't have a computer, they maybe don't have an email. And if they do, they're not checking it because they don't have a system. If we want to work on the engagement where they're not just clocking in, clocking out, what are some recommendations for our listeners who might either work as a frontline employee or manage a frontline group or be an executive of uh a team that has field engineers or frontline workers? What are some suggestions that you've seen over the years work to kind of create some of that slack without pushing it too far, but to build trust uh to allow them to engage with the work and to feel that their voice is heard? We hear a lot that it's an echo chamber. I'm just shouting into the void from the front line. The people in the glass offices make the decisions, it comes down the line and we're stuck implementing it. And I literally heard this from a uh a retail manager two months ago when I was talking to them about what they do with like their checking in, checking out on shift and things like that. And she was literally that was the sentiment. And this is someone with 20 years in retail. So it's still prevalent. But just what are some suggestions? What are some things maybe from the book or that you've uncovered over time to try to build some of that resiliency and those bonds and that trust loop?

SPEAKER_02 28:30

You can't mandate engagement, you can't mandate motivation, you can't push from the corporate office and say, you know, there's no, there's no five-foot rule that's going to save you. I think just look around, there are a lot of brands right now who are in that moment of something went wrong. They prioritized the wrong things, their business model started to break, they started to feel it from a sales and a revenue generation perspective. And now they're in turnaround moments. And all of those turnaround moments often rely on the frontline to get it done. Because the corporate team's making the plan, the frontline team is facing off against your customers, your products, and your services every day. You need them to be bought in and properly supported and engaged to make any type of reinvigoration of service standards, customer experience, turnaround moment happen. The way you do that is first you just kind of look around at the teams who are very good at this. Who are the most profitable frontline operations out there in the different industries? You start to notice something. So the most profitable grocery chain, not the one with the largest revenue, by the way, not the biggest company, the most profitable companies, the most profitable company in uh restaurant or retail, the most uh in restaurants, fast food, the most profitable one in grocery, the most profitable one in grocery retail, all these different spaces, hospitality, they all have something in common. I don't have to mention them by name, just fill in the blanks because you probably know who they are. They all have created these unique systems by which this connection and this motivation and this purpose fuels the system. Take the example of the most profitable food service business. One, their franchise model is different than most other businesses. You can't buy 300 locations from this company. The max you can buy is three. You can buy one, then you have to prove yourself and prove that you can hold to the standards of the company, then you might be able to get second. And the most locations that any individual owns in this one business is three. Compare that to most fast food businesses, very different structure and system in place. What does that do? Well, if you are the person who owns one fast food restaurant, you are likely not a multi-billionaire who just owns a bunch of businesses. That's not who they're selling to. This is what you do. You are running this business. This is your family's income. That means you're there. So the owner's in the building on a regular basis. So I'm not working for someone I never see. I'm not working for a faceless company. I'm working for that guy who I can build a relationship with and can hold me accountable. And he can also make spending decisions when he sees that something is broken. I don't have to submit a ticket that our restroom never works to a team that's never been in that restroom and doesn't know what type of impact that's having on both the customer and the employee experience. The guy's right here. He might fix it himself today. So the system is different. This same organization has also cracked the code on employee connection and community. What they do, instead of just randomly hiring people based on applications, they go out and recruit groups of people. They go to schools, they go to churches, and they find people who already have a sense of connection, who know one another, they bring them in together. And it's something that I didn't realize I had accidentally done in the past. Because when I opened one of my movie theater locations, I had to hire 200 people in a week. So I basically hired a high school. Why was that team so good at what they did for the first several months before I started to lose people because we started to staff down? I didn't have to worry about connection. They had a shorthand amongst one another. They already knew how to relate to one another, get the job done together because I brought them in as a unit, as opposed to trying to bring in a bunch of individuals and force relationships and trust to happen very quickly. Those are all tactical decisions, right? They didn't just trip over this type of capability. And it's why they're able to drive the types of profitability, the types of customer experience, the brand reputations that they have. And I see it happen over and over again. So it's not just that fast food business. It echoes. It's not the same system, though, right? The most profitable grocer doesn't do the exact same things. But what they did was they thought about the systems of work. They understand the importance of retaining the right people, driving an engaged, capable frontline team to face their customers, to deliver the experience that's going to bring people back, build that customer loyalty, drive the CSAT up. They figured out the system that works for them, and they repeat that system as they scale their frontline businesses. So the ones who are the best at it aren't the best at it by accident, right? The best guest experiences or customer experiences you have usually aren't one-offs. Disney's not great at this because they're Disney. It's because the systems that they've built inside the workplace enable the potential for that execution. And then it's the frontline teams and the management groups that they put in place that bring it to life every day. So I think that's the big, the big takeaway and the big learning in focusing on the frontline workforce and researching, having conversations with these folks is you start to uncover it's not about company values. It's not about training. It's about the systems of work being designed in order to drive the types of employee experience and outcomes that you need in order to deliver the experience that are going to ultimately drive sales for your business.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

You've spent quite a bit of time in the frontline and researching and enabling the frontline, kind of flipping gears. Who's enabling you in your life, personally, professionally? Who are those that fill your bucket? You've spent so much time pouring out to others and supporting others in your management, uh, from an operations perspective, from a training perspective, you know, outside of work or inside of your work today, who's who fills your bucket?

SPEAKER_02 34:23

I'd say the two things that immediately jump to mind are one, I operate from the perspective that no one has ever read or watched anything I've ever done. Because in a lot of cases, it's not that I'm writing books for me, but it's a meaningful exercise in sharing to foster my own learning and development. I figure out ideas and kind of codify concepts by sharing them. That's part of the challenge of the book, is I already have better ways to explain what's in the book. As I talk about it and share it more and more, it's like, ah, I should have come from that perspective. That makes more sense. But when I do have the opportunity to be out and about and go to events, and that's where I hear how these ideas come to life. Because when you write a book and then you throw it into the world, I know how many I sell. I don't know who got it. And then those who read it, I don't know who's applying it. I don't know what they're applying, and I don't know the impact of that because I'm not attached to the book as a consultant or advisor in every way. But then when I have the chance to go to events and speak in different settings and meet different people, it's the moments when people come up to me and they say things like, My entire team did a book club. This happened to me last week. We did a book club with your book. And this is what we're doing with it. I usually reply with, Could you send me an email with everything that you just said? Because I'm very interested to understand what is working, what's not working, what parts of the story should I elevate in other ways because people are finding value in it. So it's those moments where I get reminded that one, oh, someone read the book. And it's helping. That's ultimately why did I get into the learning and development side of the workplace. Uh, it's not for the money and it's not for the job title. It's because I'm one of those people who just wants to help. When I was an operations manager, I wanted to help people have a good experience and help people do a good job. And I just kind of transferred that motivation into learning and development for the second part of my career. So every time someone comes up to me and says, hey, this helped, that pushes me further and saying, Oh, I should help out. Another thing I've I've been doing for the last five years, if anyone follows me on LinkedIn, I share job postings on an almost daily basis. It started out as me just hunting for job openings and then curating the list and then pushing it out to my network. And then people started sending me job openings to share with people, which made it a little bit easier, but also meant I had access to some postings that maybe people couldn't find on their own, which is which is nice. So I've been doing that for five years because I know what happens when organizations start to make decisions and they start to change how they operate and what happens to support functions. It happened to every support function I ever worked in. So I just wanted to try to help. And it's not a huge thing to do, just to post jobs that maybe someone hasn't seen before. And then every once in a while, I'd say, at least on a quarterly basis, someone comes up to me at an event or messages me on LinkedIn and says, Hey, thanks for sharing that. Uh, I I saw that job you posted and I got it. That's why I still do that five years later. I don't think the effort of curating and sharing job posts is, yeah, it's not a lot of people do it. So it's not just me. Um, I do I do it in the moments where you might be scrolling TikTok or Instagram, I'm scrolling job openings. That's how I keep up. And it does provide me a certain lens into how things are going from a job marketplace perspective, how jobs are changing, because I might be the person who's read the most job descriptions in this space in the last five years. So it gives me a bit of insight into what people are looking for, what they're not looking for, where physical jobs are, what industries are hiring more than others. I just kind of know that stuff now. But it's those moments where someone says, thanks a lot. You know, it helped me. Or the other thing that happens a lot, and I know other people see this as well. A decent number of people send me messages when they get laid off or when they're looking for a next opportunity. And I can't do a lot in those cases to help, but I can do what I can. So those are always moments that also keep pushing me forward to say, like, if there are ways I can help, I will look for that. So those moments of human connection in a world where you know technology tends to make things more content-centric and transactional and swipable, um, those moments where people reach out and say this was helpful to me propels me forward to say, well, maybe I can find another way to help. That's how that works for me, at least.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

You're connecting the dots. A, B, C, D, always be connecting dots. You know, philosophy. And it's deeply, it's, I mean, it's deeply interesting. So, you know, a a couple, a couple things. Like, so we say 80% of the workforce is is frontline. Um, that's a big number. You had 70 collaborators work with you, you know, on the book. And what what I'll what I'll call you build it, you essentially build a community around the conversation. And I think it's the beginning of conversation. When you and I talked before the book came out, it was like, it's a book, but really it's the beginning of conversation. Um, and when we think about the scale of the frontline workforce, this is the fact the fact that this is the first thing about the largest workforce in the world. I've do you feel like you're creating a movement? Because I feel like you're creating a movement here. Well, I'm trying to, basically.

SPEAKER_02 39:44

It's more frustrating than it should be to be a person who advocates for the vast majority of people. You think that would be easy, but I I think I'm just reflecting one, what a lot of frontline workers already know and feel, and two, what we've seen for the past couple of years. Because we had a moment there where we very much valued frontline and deskless workers, and then we didn't. And that's been the case for a very long time. We dismiss the work uh either as low skilled, which drives me nuts. Because anyone who ever says frontline work is low-skilled, I'm going to throw you on a construction site or give you a 12-hour shift as a server. You tell me who has skill to be able to do this work. Or two, that they're introductory jobs. Uh in the beginning, or somewhere in the beginning of the book, I ask the or I challenge people who are not hopefully there's no audio version, so you're not driving when you're consuming the book, to just kind of close your eyes and picture a frontline worker. Who do you see? And I think a lot of people see the version of me at the beginning of the book, because I'm a high school kid who's just got a part-time job on the side to make some extra money because he's going to college soon. But then I challenge you to go to the grocery store and look around. You see that person, see a lot of other people too. You see people who've worked in that meat department for 30 years. You see retirees who this is, you know, this is something just get them out of the house because they like talking to people. You see all different types of people doing this type of work. And it's frustrating that we we don't understand that, but I'm happy to try to help elevate that awareness. It it has been surprising to me when I say things like that 80% number. I thought most people would know that. Maybe not the number itself, but just be like, yeah, most people. Like, because again, you live your life. You run into these individuals, you don't run into the marketing department from Nike when you go buy products from Nike, you run into the frontline workforce. So we're all part of the story. Hopefully, I can help people recognize that if you support frontline team members, I've got a story to tell you and a bunch of field testing practices to share. If you don't support a frontline workforce as part of your job, you are going to interact with them today. And you have a chance to improve that day in that interaction just by how you treat somebody. Uh, one of the calls to action around the Every Shift Counts initiative that I started as part of supporting the book was how you talk to people, how you show your appreciation. So I ask people to swap some language. So instead of saying thank you to frontline workers, which I think recognizes the task more than it recognizes the person, I challenge people to say, I appreciate you instead. Because one, it stops people in their tracks. They're not used to hearing that. And two, it focuses on the person, not the thing they just did for you that they're going to do hundreds, if not thousands, of more times today. So I, you know, I wish it was easier to elevate the conversation around not just the frontline workforce, but the people who support them as well, because that's the audience that we're trying to directly help so that that can echo to the frontline workforce. But the professional conversation, associations, events, publications, they're just not built for this conversation at this point. So hopefully we can improve that. That's one of the big reasons why I went out and found the group of collaborators, both the people who are named in the book as well as other people who are involved. Uh, a lot of times when you write a large book with a lot of different people, you kind of go to experienced authors or people who have done this before. In my case, I have a handful of those individuals who have written their own books or contributed to others. Most people who contributed to this book have never written for a book before. And most of them I've never met in real life. But something drew me to their story. Uh, someone recommended, hey, you have to talk to this person. Or I would just throw things out on the internet and people just raise their hands. One woman who works in uh wood manufacturing who's moved to a new company since, because it's been three and a half years uh since I first connected with her. Um, I'd never met her before. Now I see her on a regular basis because we're now running in the same circle in terms of what we do professionally. Uh, but she was an individual, just found me online, said, I have something to share, and connected with her, understood her story, and found a way to include it in the book. So so the hope was that you, you know, you connect with a large number of people who understand how to do this job or passionate. About doing this work and supporting this team. Uh people from across industries, from around the world, activate that conversation, put a book out there, because again, once you put something together, it seems like you know something. Uh, and then see what happens. So that's my hope over the course of this year is not just to promote the book, but to see how far we can drive the conversation, right? How many stages can we get the frontline included on? Uh, how many uh conference sessions can we activate? How many people want to publish stories about frontline workers? And the other factor, kind of back to what I was saying in the beginning, is it doesn't have to be about the frontline to include the frontline. You could be writing an article or presenting a session or writing a book about anything that relates to performance in the workplace or employee experience. And my hope is that I can help you include the frontline and desolist workforce in that. Because you may be telling a story about technology. Do you recognize that the vast majority of people don't sit in front of a screen all day? How would your story change just to include them, not to focus on them, just to include them? Because I do find a lot of people who are, example, retail training people, they might go to a webinar, go to a conference, they hear really interesting ideas, and then they have to raise their hand and say, I like everything you just said. My people don't carry devices. How does this work in my environment? And my hope is that I can inspire enough people to say, oh, I have to include that in the way I tell the story so we don't force people who are in this environment to have to figure it out for themselves of how do I make this work in my unique setting. So frontline work is different, frontline support must be different as well. Got a pile of ideas to share, but even more importantly, a lot of people motivated to share their stories as well. So it doesn't have to be about me. It's about a large group of people who are inspired by and want to do their best to support the people who do the heavy lifting every day.

SPEAKER_01 45:58

JD, you mentioned the amount of job openings and just descriptions that you've gone through over the last five years. And you've seen this change. And we hear things about, you know, you hear two sides from the media. There's less jobs because of AI. You hear there's more software openings than ever with AI in 2026. So, like, you know, the jobs data looks good, but you're seeing the actual job descriptions change. And can you just explain to the listeners a bit about some of the general themes that you've seen change over the last five years, whether it's AI related or not, just kind of like what's that workforce of the future? What where is it trajectory heading towards in what you've seen over the last five years?

SPEAKER_02 46:44

There's a clear consolidation of capability and function. So less specialty roles, especially when it comes to enablement jobs, and more people who are expected to be able to take advantage of shifts in how work is done, shifts in tools and technology to be able to not just handle more, but do different types of work. And that kind of echoes the reason why this book is called the Frontline Enablement Playbook. It's not the training playbook, it's not the learning playbook. Enablement's a broader story. And I see more and more organizations, again, especially in the areas that I focus, asking questions about why do we have four different functions that all kind of do the same thing? Do we need knowledge management and communications and learning and development and talent development? And, and, and we all one, overlap in terms of capability and tools, but two, we're also competing for a limited amount of time and attention with the people who are doing the job every day. And ultimately we're all trying to drive the same thing, which is a capable, confident, motivated team that can help us achieve our goals. So even in job descriptions for specific roles, you can see one, the obvious infusion of AI in terms of the tool set and expectations of skills is clearly there. But even beyond that, it's a well, you're not looking for a person who can do one thing. You're not looking for a person who can do five things. Part of that is the, you know, do more with less, consolidation and budget. But it's echoing in what people are looking for in terms of capability, because I don't necessarily need someone who can build online courses anymore. I need someone who can build an online course as part of a tool set. But it's now more about being able to help me drive a particular outcome, drive performance. Like we're gonna hit a goal. I need someone with a set of skills, not someone who can do a particular part of that because I'm not resourced for that or budgeted for that, or we just need a greater level of agility because we're gonna have to try to one, keep up ourselves with the change in nature of work, and then help other people keep up with the change in nature of work. And I don't know exactly what I'm gonna need in six months. So I'm gonna hire a dynamic skill set as opposed to a group of specialists, unless we work in a space where specialty is uh particularly required.

SPEAKER_01 48:55

That's fascinating. I've been kind of ringing this bell for the last three years that education as we know it, like as far as an educational system, is getting kind of flipped on its head. We've always rewarded specialty. So it's you get your undergrad, and then if you want to specialize in something, maybe you go get your masters. You want to further specialize, maybe you get your PhD. And we rewarded most of the time, salaries and prestige or just upward mobility with those types of specialties of skills, whether it was just the tenure of years you've put in to refine those skills, or it was the education path plus the tenure of work that you put in. And now, and I see this every day, we've been working heavily over the last decade with AI, back when it was slow and not very good, to now when it's amazing. But as we've worked with it, and I I've always called myself a generalist. I'm a technologist by trade, but like I've always been general, right? From marketing to design to technology to business operations to, you know, everything in between. And from a business development standpoint, that's been a really good asset to have, uh, to just be able to strike a conversation up with anyone and talk about things, you know, at least in the general state and keep a conversation going. But I find that that skill set is the skill set of the future for AI. People that can describe a process, people that can describe functionality, like a product requirement document, someone that has that skill to interview or understand a process and kind of describe what they want to do. And as a general sense, not a specialized sense in just one myopic dynamic of business, but a more general sense, are extremely valuable in the era and age of AI.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

I would say it's a um, again, just the sense that I have is there's there's a increasing gap between deep expertise and broad generalization, right? Because do I I don't necessarily need someone who has some level of expertise. I either need someone who is dramatically deep in a particular domain that's of great importance to us, machine learning engineer, right? Dramatic, deep capability that I'm gonna pay a lot of money for. On the other side, I need people who are just as flexible in their ability to continue to evolve as they are in our ability to help us uh evolve. Because I'm not gonna turn my team over over and over again as the organization shifts. And I think it's a particularly important to people who are in functions that support work. Because again, I don't know what the company's gonna think is the most important thing in a couple of months. So, kind of like my first book, instead of focusing on specific tools or tactics or content or topics, I need to build a system and be able to point that system in whatever direction we need. Because today the most important thing might be a compliance initiative. I've got a system that's gonna facilitate that. And then next month we release a new product. I need the system to support that. Then after that, entirely big process change. Well, the system needs to support that so I can move at the necessary pace. And then the employee isn't constantly getting shocked and surprised based on what happens to me this time. Because that's one of the challenges I find is that how do I get help here often doesn't make sense to people doing the job because the target keeps moving. So for certain problems, I go over here. Certain problems I look it up over there. This time I got training in this way. It's a digital thing. I have to go sit in a room for a while. Next month we have training, but we're all going to sit in a room and someone's gonna tell us stuff. It what are we doing? And how do I then attach a sense of value and purpose to these different tools and tactics so it makes sense as part of my job versus it being, oh, the next thing that they throw at me, and then I'll go back to doing the job that way that we actually do it. So I think that all kind of echoes from a similar place in the idea that we need to shift that idea from programs and specific tactics and tools to systems that foster agility and readiness inside the organization, and then use that concept of that system to say, okay, what talent do I need? What tools do I need? What systems do I need to make that system work? Because the system will persist and then need to flex and bend as the as the workplace changes in a much stronger and more resilient way than a specific program or content or specific technology or specific LLM, right? Because what's the best LLM today? Won't be tomorrow. Did anyone else hear laugh, by the way, when people were saying like prompt engineering was the career of the future? Did you all have a good chuckle over that? Because I was in tech at that moment and I just sat back and said, you have to engineer your prompts. Your tech sucks. Like what are what are we doing? Um, because again, we just try to catch the wave, right? What's the most popular thing? And written right now, building agents is the most popular thing, and then give it a year and a half. We don't want people building agents. We want people, like you said, describing the problem and pointing the systems and the tools in the right direction, versus, oh, I have to architect the right tool for every circumstance. But it's it's the conversation of the moment. People are going to vive code their way to the future.

SPEAKER_01 54:15

For sure. And but we're seeing this like time and time again, even in agentic development. Anyone that I know that's been deep in it for you know the last three years, you know, we've been building agents before agents were a cool term, and now it's everything. And it'll be something else, as you mentioned, in 12 months. But anyone that's really working with these types of technologies, if you're babysitting these agents, the amount of information that is coming back at you, because you're sending multiple droves off into simultaneous parallel universes to develop artifacts for you or whatever the work product is, if you're the human in the loop, that stuff is now coming back to you like you just threw a hundred boomerangs out and now they're all coming in and you're trying to catch them all at the same time. So the fatigue, the overload of information is it, we're just not built for that, like human nature and the level of work. So like most of like the I'm I'm talking, you know, the 10Xers or the 100 Xers in software engineering and just like really people I respect are getting overloaded where they have to take like a two-hour break just from what they just like did, just so they can regroup their like gray matter back from being frazzled to then be effective again to send out because they are getting months or multiple months of work done in days, but the the brain's just not ready for that.

SPEAKER_02 55:48

And do we no one's asking the question, do we need that level of productivity? Right? What's where are we where is this taking us in that regard? Um I don't think we have an appetite for talking about a complete upheaval of how society works at any at any moment, anytime soon. Um what's the point? I I don't think we're there. We're we're very enamored with the technology. I don't think we understand what the point is. And we haven't it's really interesting to watch the conversation shift on a dime. And right now, the the big conversation is you know, the um it's not just the human in the loop or the human in the lead part of it. It's it's well, we implemented a bunch of tools and we didn't understand how work worked. And suddenly we're blowing out of our token costs because we didn't, we didn't architect systems around how the work was done. We've we incentivized utilization, and that came back around to get us on the other side, which is where, of course, it did. Um, but if we if we truly have an understanding, again, it's not necessarily about people, it's about understanding work and systems of work and designing intelligent systems that can use the tools in the right way so we don't overload ourselves or we don't unleash the wrong data sets or come to the wrong conclusions. And you know, the more we understand the work and we more understand the relationship between technology, the work, and data, the more we can understand where to point that system. So it's going to drive a positive outcome and not just make us that much more productive at creating more work. And oh, by the way, I'd love to meet a person who tells me that uh AI is really good at writing stuff, because I've also never met that tool or that person. So it's just, but I am taking the M-dash back. Let me say that as well. I use a lot of M-dashes. I didn't even know it was called an M-dash. I don't know if that's an indictment of my English teacher. I just know that I use a lot of dot dot dots and a lot of dashes in the way that I write. If you want evidence of that, read the first book. You're gonna see a lot of dashes. So I will not be AI'd out of my own writing style. In fact, I'm gonna take the other route and say, AI learned that from me. I was here first. So I am, and there's a I've I have a peer out there who posted something on LinkedIn that says something similar, is they're spending so much effort and time trying to make sure what they write doesn't sound like AI that it's they're slowing down because they're concerned about that perception. I take a slightly different filter on it and say, and and and and that's why the the two book thing is interesting. Because I I remember when the first book came out, because it came out the day before Chat GPT released publicly. And that's one of those moments where you go, oh, oh no. Like, does this make sense now? And then I wrote 12,000 additional words to explain why this does make sense in the age of AI. Um, but then I wrote this book with all the tools available this time. And so there's an introduction to this uh where I explain how AI was used in the creation of the book. And it's everything from like when I did interviews, the transcription, and in some cases translation tools were used in those cases. Um, as a writing assistant, every time I needed just a better way to say something, throwing that back and forth. The AI never came up with the right way, but it triggered me to say, oh, what if I did this instead, right? Those types of moments as a collaborator per se. Um, one of the biggest tools I used was Notebook LM. The fact that I could take a research repository and put it in a place that I could then query it versus the first book. I had tabs open and like books open on a desk and was like, where did I have that research that one time? I had to have notes. So just the fact that I could say, okay, I'm talking about onboarding. What's available in the research I've collected to this point on onboarding? Here you go. Okay, this is what I've got. This is what I need to go find now. So just the use of those tools in that way. So it didn't write for me, but it completely changed the process. And it allowed me to write a book three times the size in collaboration with 50 other people in similar amounts of time than it took me to write one book by myself. That was one-third uh the length. So interesting kind of before and after experience with the introduction of AI, but again, it required me to understand and set the expectations and say, this is how I'm going to use the tools to benefit what I'm trying to accomplish versus allowing the tools to overwhelm me or to take over the wrong parts uh of the story.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:16

Super interesting. So, you know, re in the last recent period of time, $600 billion has been spent on AI. Only about 5% of projects are showing some kind of impact or effectiveness or productivity or customer value in some ways. I kind of think it one could say that before AI, we couldn't align and coordinate all that well. And it just made us faster and stumbling together, maybe in some ways. Because anyone I know that is advanced in their AI tradecraft, none of them work less, except one friend I have in marketing. Other than that, nobody works less. Everyone works more. And it's like you're getting to an unlock and you say, Oh, I could just keep going. I keep going. I was talking to a friend in private equity, and they're building software till midnight at night. They they can't go to sleep because they see a problem and they know that like the only really limitation is their creativity and imagination and a little bit of time on task in order to solve stuff. You know, so with given all of that, and when you think about you know the front line of enablement, you know, in the future, how do you see people growing, not just individually, but actually growing together and you know with that team cohesion?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:30

So if you take the pretty simple example of a digital assistant in a frontline workplace, so let's say it's a grocery store. And now every employee has uh the ability in their pocket to be able to ask any question, query the entire collective knowledge of the organization, answer the customer question right away, uh, solve a problem, complete a process, stay safe on the job. And they don't have to ask the person next to them, hey, how do you do this? Or they don't have to go find the manager and say, Hey, uh, I need help, how do you how do you do this? That sounds great, right? We increased productivity, less uh guessing on the job, less demand on the manager. What did we lose as a result of that augmentation of the workplace? Now I don't have that conversation with my peer where we both say, I don't know, let's work through that. Let's see if we can figure it out together. We don't have that moment. I don't go find the manager and ask for their help and have that relationship building moment or that moment where the manager helps me, now I trust the manager more because they were there when I needed them to be there. We transacted connection out in that particular moment. Now, I don't think that means we don't do the thing, because I do think providing frontline workers with finally with direct access to information in their preferred language without requiring them to have the best reading skills, right? Knocking using technology to knock down those barriers is a good idea. But when we do it, we have to take into account what gets lost when we leverage technology to reduce connection and friction, because some friction is good. Because it's in those moments where you start to create those connections. You start to connect to something bigger than the job itself. Or you make friends with this person, and that's meaningful to you. And you didn't have a reason to talk to them in the first place now. So we have to be we have to be purposeful and have intention when we start to redesign the systems of work and say, not just what are we gaining, what are we losing? And if we're losing something, do we need to go find it and put it back, reinfuse that sense of connection, that trust and relationship building in some other way? Because that's important to us and our ability to get the job done. Because work is not a series of transactions. It's a group of people working together in sh in sense, you know, uh to achieve a common goal, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. So, how do we keep that going? And I don't think that's a new problem. I think we struggled with that for a long time, especially when it comes to the conversation around remote and hybrid work. So I've been a remote worker for most of the past 15 years, and I spent a lot of time watching other people build relationships and not having the opportunity to do it myself. And I use the example in a lot of conversations of just a meeting where a lot of people are in the room at the office, and I and a couple of other people are watching online because we're not in the same place. And what happens before the meeting starts? I'm sitting there on mute because anything I say is heard by everybody, but I can hear the room, and I'm hearing a bunch of different side conversations take place that are not necessarily about the work. Maybe it's about a different project, maybe it's about something that happened on the weekend, maybe people are making plans, they're gonna have lunch together. I'm hearing community and being removed from it because we didn't have a purposeful replacement for me to be able to have the same type of or maybe a different type of engagement that would get me the same outcome. And you don't feel like you're part of the team in a lot of those cases, or you have to take extra steps to force yourself into the team conversation because you're just not there. So I think it's that same challenge we've had with remote work where a lot of companies don't get that right, now amplified across the workforce when it comes to how we support people, how we connect people to something bigger than the job or the next task. I think the frontline workforce is a place where we can learn from that because we rely so much on that sense of connection and sense of team. And their relationship with technology is so different that it is a when you go from I have to go to a back room to search a SharePoint site to find information to, oh, I can just pull out my phone and ask a question and get an answer. That's a huge leap. That's significantly bigger than I think the transition from I have teams. To I have copilot uh for corporate workers. So we have to do that with intention because otherwise we risk losing more than we gain. At least that's what I believe. And I think that's what will be borne out if we if we don't come at it with that uh sense of purpose.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

I love it. I I think you I think you're thoughtful about the right things and thoughtful about the things that could potentially disappear. And that's the human connection, you know. And in his book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly talks about the fact that it wants two things only, to connect to us more, but to connect to us better. And I think that people's propensity is towards option number one. Let's just find people and connect them to technology more and everything will work itself out. But that connection of human to humans are really, really important thing, which kind of segues into something that you talk a good bit about, which is mentorship and and the and the role of mentorship. And you know, I I'd imagine Tommy had some of that role for you, but I'd imagine through your career you had that role for others too. Some of them you might not even remember. You know, they they probably remember that exact moment, kind of like that pivotal moment from a teacher where the teacher's like, yeah, you're just another student. But that moment for you is really important. You know, as you think about mentorship and technology and the art and the connection with humans, how do you how do you think about that fuzzy sort of design space that's in progress?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:22

I think in a lot of ways, that sense of connection is a solution for the leadership development problem that we've had for ever decades? Leadership development is one of those things that at a certain point you just kind of have to tap out and say, well, maybe we're wrong because we've been spending so much money on it and it hasn't worked yet. In the book, I talk a lot about, and there's an entire section dedicated to frontline managers, because in my opinion, they're not just the most important people in the frontline story, they're the most important people in the workplace. Because frontline managers turn corporate strategy into everyday reality, and they're stuck between corporate stakeholders, customers, and their team. And they have to make a decision about where they spend their limited time and attention. And I find most frontline managers, including myself, spend their time either avoiding getting a phone call or where they get bonused. And that's what motivates them to make certain decisions or lean in certain directions. Leadership development fails frontline managers. Now, some organizations have the benefit because, again, their systems are designed in such a way, and there's a gentleman in the book who shares his story. He has the perfect leadership development experience. He works for that company for six months before he's ever allowed to manage anything. And he has to learn every role, he has to work alongside the general manager. Perfect. Most organizations don't have that luxury of being able to be very selective what they hire, very limited turnover, and to put people through the perfect mentorship experience to prepare them to step into the role. Most people in frontline management positions are more like me. Hey, manager left. You're the best employee. You're up. You don't have time to go to a class. You're definitely not going to sit down in the back room somewhere and complete an hour-long e-learning module because you might sit down at the computer and then something happens. Uh I open one of the chapters of the book. You can tell how exciting I am as an individual. This chapter begins with, it's New Year's Eve and I'm in Panera bread. That's where that's where I party. I sat behind the restaurant manager for over four hours and watched her not make the staff schedule. She didn't know I was there. I didn't know I sat, I just sat down at a table behind a table with a tablet on it and a bunch of paper and no person. And then eventually the restaurant manager sat down and then got up and then sat down and got up and get sat down. Because every couple minutes, something happened that required her attention. And I know she didn't get that staff schedule made that day. Just the fact she's making the staff schedule on New Year's Eve is an interesting observation. So there's no way she's going to say, and you know what I'm going to also make time for? My own development, because she's putting out fires, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes very literally, in order to get the job done because that's what she's held accountable to. It's driving the results, not necessarily developing herself or her team members. So in the story that I tell about frontline managers in the book and through my own experience, I think the smartest thing you can do if you're one of those organizations that's struggling to be able to offer development and to build a capable, reliable, motivated frontline management team, is one, stop the leadership development program and replace it immediately with just connections to other managers. That's not the only thing you do, but it's the first thing you do. Because managers learn best from people like them, people that don't hold them accountable for something. You can't tell your boss you don't know how to do your job today and ask them for help. But you can talk to another person who's been through it, who understands it and is not going to push back on you. There's a woman I interview in the book who is running a hair salon and she talks about how many times a day she calls a manager at another location. Sometimes it's just a vent and be like, can you believe this? And they have that relationship. Sometimes it's to ask, hey, my computers went down. What did you do when you faced this and troubleshoot? And there were an infinite number of times where I was managing a movie theater and I knew someone else had dealt with this before. They weren't here because I was the only manager here. And I we had hundreds of locations, but I wasn't going to cold call other movie theaters and be like, hi, I don't know what I'm doing. Do you? So if we can play that connector role, whether you're HR, learning and development, field support, whatever role that you're in, and just help managers find people like them. Because sometimes I was benefit, I had the benefit of working on larger management teams. That was really where I learned how to be an effective frontline manager. So there were 12 of us, and I would maybe see a couple peers every day. I learned through those experiences, whether or not they were trying to formally teach me anything. But a lot of times I was the only manager and I was the only location. The next location was in another town, or it might be in another state. You might be the only frontline location in the entire country. Where are the other people like you? And being in this job can be very lonely. You're not friends with your team, you're their boss. Their relationship to the work is very different to you. You're the face of the company in a lot of cases. So you might take the blowback from different things the organization does, which challenges your sense of relationship and trust with your team. So just help managers find other people like them. And it could be a text chat, it could be a monthly Zoom call that they can attend if they want to, or maybe a series of conversations on certain topics and just get out of the way at that point and let that network and those relationships foster and then build on top of that versus making developing your leadership team about content and about structure and about programs. You can insert those things when those are the right moments, but you have to acknowledge most people who do these jobs are going to spend 60 to 70 hours a week just doing the job, yet alone finding time and motivation and energy to engage in any type of other development opportunity. But if I can, I don't need to connect with every manager here, but if I can find four or five other people that are my go-to's that I can rely on, it's not necessarily a formal mentorship program, but those connections are invaluable. And those are the names that the if you open the beginning of my book and the dedication, I had to tell the publisher I'm gonna have a really long dedication because it's dedicated to one, every frontline worker, and then the people who trained me over the years as a frontline employee, so my trainers, and then a group of other people who taught me how to be a manager. And those people are never gonna know that they're in the book. I haven't seen them for a really long time. That was my leadership development program. Their names were Allison and Dan and Kathy and Joey and all these people that made a difference to me in ways that they'll never understand. Uh, and unfortunately, I never had the chance to finish a formal leadership development program in any of my companies or roles because I had a job to do. And that's where the priority was placed.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:56

Wow. I I really appreciate that perspective and sharing. So it's not intentionally creating the leadership or program, it's creating the space for it and allowing people to make their own place essentially.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:09

Yeah. And then you can, like I said, layer on top of that structured activities when it makes sense. Example, one of the most valuable classes I ever went to was called leading in a unionized environment, because I was new to a team that had union members on it. And that was, I didn't want to figure that out in the moment. So sitting down in a room with a person who had expertise in that topic and teaching us the basics of what you have to consider when you're working with unionized labor, great experience, super handy. Unfortunately, I had to go on my day off because they no one was scheduling me for these types of things. So I found a way into that room. But uh, that was an example where I did need a more structured alternative. So it's it's flipping the model. And that's a lot of what I do in my books, is it's not about getting rid of anything. It's about flipping how we look about that support and again, leaning into the reality of the people who do the job, what tools they have, what resources, what availability looks like, you know, not asking people to come to training before and after their shifts. That's something I run into a lot with frontline employees or people who are in frontline training teams, is they'll say, you know, we've scheduled these training sessions and no one ever comes. And one of the first things I usually ask is, when are the sessions? And inevitably the answer is before shifts or after shifts. And my reply back is, okay, before shift. When is that? Okay, like seven in the morning. How long how late did people get off their second job last night? People aren't coming to that. Or they have to uh rearrange childcare. Someone has to take someone to a school, like appointments, life is getting in the way because these are folks who can't decide at lunch to go to the doctor like corporate team members can, right? So that doesn't work. And then after, like, oh, after the shift, great. What do these people do for a living? Uh they work in auto mechanics. Oh, so eight to ten hours of working on people's cars, then they're gonna sit down and focus on some type of hour-long training activity. No, they're not. It just doesn't make sense. So that's again an example of like we have to come at it from the perspective of the people who do the job. And I I think the benefit is a lot of people who support frontline workers, like me, were frontline workers. Some people aren't. And they have to get closer to the work and understand the experience of the job, even if you can't do the job yourself. You might not be an auto um, not auto, an airplane mechanic. You're not going to learn how to be an airplane mechanic. You can understand what it's like to be an airplane mechanic if you spend enough time with people and talk to people who do the job. Uh, but it maybe if you're like me and you did come from the front line, how long has it been? How often do you go back? How many conversations do you have with people who do the job? Because what it meant to do that job 10 years ago is probably not what it means today. It's probably too similar. That's one of the things I continue to learn because I try to go back or have these conversations as much as I can so that I can stay relevant and sound like I know what I'm talking about. Um it's unfortunate how often I run into the same challenges because I would have hoped we would have solved certain things over the course of the last 20 years. So the job is similar to the job that I experience as a frontline employee and manager, but that's not good enough. I have to understand how people feel about the work and how that is evolving. Simple example, I never had anyone shove a camera in my face as a frontline manager. I got out of that work right as the combination of social media and smartphones started to create viral video moments. I didn't have to deal with that. I'm very excited and I'm very sad for people who do have to deal with it. That's something you have to understand. So the smartest thing I ever did as a manager and then as a learning and development professional was I would regularly go back into operation and do the job myself whenever I could. So at least once a quarter, if not more often, I would clock back in and do six to eight hours on shift to feel the job and feel the friction and work with the public again, and then also to be seen because the people I was supporting saw I can do the job, I'm willing to do the job, and I'm good at the job. So when I show up as your manager or show up as someone who's trying to teach you something new, there's a different relationship and level of respect we have because I've done it too, versus being someone who's just trying to tell you how to do the job. So those are always really important days for me. And again, often days that I worked on my sixth or seventh day because it wasn't part of my job, but I found ways to make it part of what I did.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:39

It's fascinating. You know, even from a corporate standpoint, when I came out of college, my first job was at FedEx. I worked at FedEx Ground. I was a software engineer, but part of their culture and just the way that they ran the business was even me as a rookie software engineer on the team, I did a ride along with a FedEx ground driver. I did a ride along with a home delivery driver and a freight driver. Then I went to a package sortation facility, which was Columbus, which was closest to Pittsburgh. And I got to see the operation, the package handlers, how they load trucks, and was just, you know, not in like I would have been a danger to be contributing at that point because I had no idea. But I got to ride along, I got to talk to them, meet them, understand how the business worked. Um, they were independent contractors, the drivers. So some of them had bought lanes, multiple lanes, had multiple trucks, had people driving for them. They were kind of running their own small business within the network, whereas uh UPS at the time was unionized labor, as you mentioned. And for me, that was so profound to really it increased my engagement with the work. So no matter what I was doing from a technology standpoint, I knew that I was supporting that end customer that was receiving the package, whether it's business or a hospital, we did custom critical where we would deliver hearts and refrigerated trucks and things like that. So you then have this different level of engagement with the work. You're not just building a report or you're doing some technology that supports the sales team. You actually, and we got to go to the sales department and kind of see what they did all day and the how they worked with customers. So that was just part of how they ran their business. And like looking back, I just didn't recognize it until I went and worked other places. How profound and how much more engaged I was. And even to this day, like if I have a choice of how I'm shipping something, I choose FedEx all the time because they've imprinted this level of like loyalty and just understanding and engagement with the brand. So, you know, when I think about that, even for corporate office work all the way to um, you know, those that have more frontline employees, where have you seen that? And do you have stories from the book where companies do that extremely well, where they kind of get all levels of the corporate environment engaged where they get to, you know, we work with a convenience store locally that all of their LD department is in the stores and working at the convenience stores and you know, just seeing the day-to-day because they're building training and trying to help out. So they do have that culture. But you know, what other companies or or just stories from the book show that kind of example where even the executives, even the marketing department, even the sales department get a chance to spend some time on the front line and see kind of the end product or the interface with the customer?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:38

There are a couple different examples. I mean, in in the public world, there are a couple of high-profile organizations who have made relatively recent decisions to do something similar. Taco Bell is one of them, who has a requirement for the corporate team members to spend time working inside a restaurant to, again, not just appreciate the work, but you never know how many different decisions you make in your role that are informed by that experience because you just know something now about how the job is done that you didn't know before. So when it comes to designing a campaign or a tool or an application, you're just a little bit closer to reality, in addition to obviously wanting to bring people who do the job in to those conversations to inform it. So it's not just relying on your experience, but your experience helps to create that sense of connection and awareness. Um, one of the contributors to the book that I interviewed was at the time the CEO of Foot Locker. And it was something that he talked about in his organization, is getting his various levels of management closer to the experience of the stripers, who are the people who are selling shoes in the store, to understand what the experience is like. And that this gentleman even logged into their learning platform every day and completed training activities alongside the team. And I know that he's definitely telling the truth with regards to that activity because he also talked to the learning and development department who would get phone calls from him whenever there was something wrong. Because he would say, I found something. And it's that's a really interesting dynamic to have the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company talking to the learning and development team because he found something that might be an issue in the training material for the store associates. So let's talk about kind of shared accountability for the employee experience in that regard. And then another place I spent a lot of time over the last 10 years or so was in the grocery space. And a lot of grocery is still regional businesses, a lot of it's still family-owned businesses. And in those environments, what you see is the example of when there's pressure points on the front line, when it's holiday season, right, when it's the week before Thanksgiving, the corporate team one knows they're not getting any attention from the store teams. The store teams are heads down because it's the high volume period of the year. But instead of doing what some companies might do, which is, oh, this is when we go on vacation. No, it's when they go into the stores. So their teams go back in. Because one, a lot of them are from the frontline operations. So they just kind of go back and do what they've done. Or they just find places to support. And one, it's not being disruptive. And two, it's not just being uh supportive to the locations that are closest to headquarters. Because that's the other thing you find is that I I don't think any corporate team member has ever on a site visit seen the real frontline operation. I know it was never the case for me. When I knew you were coming, and we always know you're coming, even if you don't tell us, we have a network. I changed things. Because again, I don't want to get a phone call. So I'm gonna show you the version of the operation you need to see. Because I know if you see a mistake, we're likely not gonna have a problem-solving conversation. I'm gonna hear about it from my boss, which is unfortunate, but it's also reality. So that's how a lot of managers operate. So instead of just visiting the locations that are near headquarters, especially if you're a large, sprawling frontline operation, how do you go out there and show your support and show that connection on a regular basis? And the other thing I would caution is a lot of times management, corporate, district managers, they spend a lot of time on the locations that are struggling because they think that's where the help is needed. Then they ignore the other locations. And sometimes your top-performing locations, your top performing management team, actually feel left out because they don't see you, right? They don't get that extra visit. Corporate team thinks they're doing what they're supposed to do and help the people who need the support, but they don't realize they're leaving other people behind. So that's another kind of important observation in terms of how you kind of architect the sense of connection between corporate and the frontline. So you avoid the us versus them mentality, which is very much alive when it comes to how employees and managers think. And I think one of the most controversial moments in my book about frontline enablement is in the last section, there's a header that says, Am I the bad guy? Because there's an unfortunate reality that you could think, regardless of what your function is, your marketing, your sales, your learning and development, you're in the corporate office, and you're a huge champion for the frontline team. You came from the frontline team, you're very supportive. You appreciate the hard work that people put in every day. But the frontline team doesn't like you because they don't they don't know you, they don't think you get it, they don't have that relationship. And HR is the really easy example. When does HR show up in the life of a frontline employee? When they get in trouble or they get fired. Not a regular, hey, you're here to help. And that's why there's simple ways to overcome that unfortunate reality that people may perceive you differently than you want to be perceived. One is to have that reflective moment, don't just assume that because you provide training and and support, that people have that sense of connection and understand your value. So come from the perspective of the people who are doing the job that you're trying to help. And two, one of the things that a lot of people brought up in my conversations that was unprompted. So a lot of people have discovered this. And it was one of those moments where I realized, oh, I did this too. I just didn't think to write it down until a bunch of people told me about it. Put your name on stuff. We go through a lot of effort as corporate teams. And again, I think it's a bunch of different functions have this moment where we overcomplicate what we call ourselves and how we present ourselves to the organization, organization in service of trying to clarify our value. So the question I would ask anyone out there watching or listening what's your function called? If you're learning and development, I'm gonna go on a limb and say you're not called the training team. You're called something like the center of excellence in learning and performance. You have a jacket with that on the back of it, don't you? I did. In all of my different companies. At one point, I was on a team that called ourselves Support Training and Multimedia Projects. Stamp for short. Why? Someone was trying to make us sound real fun and impressive, right? Meanwhile, you say that to someone who does the job every day on the front line, it just sounds like more corporate stuff. So I had this moment when I was in contact centers where I was known broadly in that organization as the voice of the e-learning, because I was the e-learning developer and I was the narrator. So you didn't know who I was until I said something. And then if I'm in one of the other offices somewhere else in the country and I talk, you could see people suddenly notice it's the guy. And that wasn't great because it wasn't, I was forcing you to complete all this training. So I didn't have a great reputation. And then we started to change the way we approach enablement. We started to get less into courses and programs and more into tools and resources and knowledge sharing and these types of ideas. And as part of that, we built this knowledge platform. And my name and my face appeared a lot because I was authoring a lot of content. And then all of a sudden, people started to send me messages. And they were like, that was really helpful. Hey, could you add this? This would be really helpful to me. I didn't know these people. We didn't have a meeting. They knew who I was now. I was the guy who wrote the helpful thing. I was the guy who was here to try to make the job easier. I wasn't the corporate learning and development department anymore. I was JD. And you knew him because my face was attached to all the stuff that you were using. So it's a really interesting idea that I deployed successfully and that a lot of other people are finding value in is just attach your name to stuff. Be a helpful person instead of a corporate support function because people trust people. If it's Jane and Jane has been very helpful to you in the past, and Jane says it's really important to us that we complete this compliance training. Like I know it's not fun, we gotta do it. I'm really helpful you do it. Jane's asking me to do it. Okay. I like Jane. Jane's usually really helpful to me. So I'll do it for Jane instead of I'll do it for the corporate learning center of excellence, dot dot dot dot dot department name. Right. So that again comes back to just being people, people connecting with people, people supporting people, but corporate and function and process gets in the way of that, unfortunately. And we now risk technology getting further in the way of that if we don't think about how we connect through technology and we allow technology to step in too often. Um because again, like let's take that knowledge management example of mine. Let's infuse that with AI. Well, I went from being the guy, you found the articles and you saw me attached to me. Now you're just gonna ask the chatbot the question, the chatbot's gonna answer it. You don't know it was me.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:31

One other quick one on what we call the virtuous trust cycle, you know, from frontline to corporate. When feedback's provided, challenges, friction are reported that maybe make it through the frontline manager up to corporate. Corporate has an initiative, they're actively working towards solving this issue for for multiple locations. They do solve it. The word never gets back down to the front line. And companies that do it right, there is this virtuous trust cycle where people feel heard, action is taken and prioritized, things are changed, work gets easier, gets more efficient, gets better, and people understand that their voice is heard. There's not a lot of those examples, I can imagine, but I'm sure there are a few. Um, can you give some examples of either some companies or industries that have done that pretty well?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:30

It is hard to find because I think the kind of current state of affairs is I think most organizations are now at the point where they understand the engagement survey doesn't matter. But I think a lot of organizations are looking for the alternative. There's a desire to create that two-way street of communication. There's a recognition that bubbles have never bubbled. So nothing ever bubbles up from the frontline to the decision maker unless you trip over the right influence, influential people along the way. Right. But it's going from frontline employee to department manager to store manager to district manager, that just doesn't work because you're going to slam into priorities and perspectives along the way. So I don't think a lot of organizations have found the solve for that. Some of the things I have seen work, and that others have applied as well, is one, technology now gives us an ability to parse a large amount of information we couldn't before in survey form. So if we allow people to engage in the work and instead of just asking them questions about the work, capture insight and perspective about the work, that's a little more clean. An example from one of the companies I worked with was they had a promotion going on for a certain product and they wanted to activate the frontline teams. Well, instead of sending out a standard message with a set of instructions of how to set up a display, they sent out a challenge directly to their employees that the managers, by the way, didn't read because it was in an email. It got devalued by a lot of the management team. It got straight to the frontline employees, though, because they had a communication app. And suddenly all of these pictures of these different product displays were flowing out of the frontline operation to the point where the managers were calling corporate and saying, What is going on? Like, what are our employees doing? So they had broken that chain of communication by going straight to the employees and they activated a sense of motivation because this was different. This wasn't the job I do every day. Oh, you're asking me to come up with a creative display? We can work together and do something fun with that to sell this particular product. Cool. That's not the standard tasks. I'll just jump into that. Add a prize on top of it. I'll go after the prize because I want free lunch today or what have you. So there are ways to kind of break through when you don't rely on games of telephone and the traditional hierarchy, these types of ideas. But again, you have to do it intentionally because the thing you don't want is to accidentally overwhelm yourself with a bunch of different perspectives that you can't possibly demonstrate that you've seen or actioned. But I do think it's important to understand employees get it. Like if you work in a large company, you know you have 500,000 people who work here. You don't expect the company to do all the things that you ask for. You just expect your perspective to be appreciated and to be told no if the answer is no, versus being glad-handed and be like, sure, we'll take a look at it and you never hear about it again. So again, what's the expectation of frontline management when it comes to those types of conversations? Do you have enough listening posts installed? And one of the best ones I've ever used is, you know, instead of trying to listen to every employee, can you listen to the right employees? So maybe going into your frontline operation, and instead of asking managers for volunteers of who should be involved in different initiatives or who should be kind of that representative of the frontline workforce in a particular location, uh managers give you their favorite people, employees give you the real person. So if you ask employees who makes your life easier and then rely on those people. Because a lot of times those people give it to you straight, kind of a pain to management because they care and they raise their hand a lot. I want those people on my team. So if you create connection points inside of the operation where you have those trusted folks that you can go to for feedback and ideas, they're the natural listening post for their team. So in a lot of cases, the team is going to them, but you can hear from them in a much more direct fashion. And that scales more effectively. Because I only need a handful of those individuals because they're going to give it to me straight and reflect frontline reality at scale, and then we can leverage that feedback and then message back towards the frontline when we do make changes or we decide not to do particular things. And again, make it make it a conversation, not a corporate communication exercise. Because that's in the book, I provide an example of the fact that I think the way that we communicate to teams, I think unfortunately, a lot of times one fails to properly engage and enable them, but also I think sometimes disrespects people. And again, we may not know we're doing it. So I write a multiple choice question, pretty simple, in the book. First, I write the version you see in a lot of training. And I can attest to this is real based on both my own experience as a content provider and as a practitioner, but also on Reddit. Because if you go to Reddit and you scroll through different companies' subreddits, you see a lot of screenshots of training materials and a lot of commentary about it. So this is all very real life. So it's a scenario that I write about a refund. Customer demands a refund. They're very upset. And then the the options for what the employee should say back, all of which are not language that any human being has actually used. And the correct answer is the one that is perfectly stated. And then the response by the customer is very appreciative. No customer has ever been super. No customer goes from amazingly angry to I'm very happy to be here. That's not how it works. So I rewrote the question and said, you know, the HR department's not going to let you use the language that people actually use in these situations. But let's be a little bit more direct and blunt. And so that when the employee completes this required training, they can at least look at this question and say, Yeah, that's it. That's how that works. That's what I would say. It's not just effective training, it's also respectful of what the job is really like versus what people think the job is like. Because the unfortunate thing is I think if you went to your corporate team and you asked, like, do people do the SOP every day? They're going to say yes and they're going to believe it. That's not how it works. People get the job done. That's how it actually works.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:26

So being that we're the new F-word podcast, we talk about flourishing in the workplace and at life. JD, what's flourishing mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:35

Immediately my mind goes to just feeling supported. I I don't think anyone is a success unto themselves. I think there's always someone else or a group of other people who helped get you there. We've mentioned names of people for me that helped me feel like I can do it, that I can do the job, whether it was 17-year-old me feeling like I can serve you popcorn and not have a mental breakdown in the course of that interaction because I'm so scared of talking to you. Or it's the people who I get the chance to interact with today as someone who's advocating for and supporting frontline employees and the people who support them that say something was useful to me. So I feel like I am flourishing and being able to contribute and kind of delivering value when I feel like other people out there recognize that and are there for me. And that's what, again, working with so many different people on this particular project, I can only do it because they were there for me when I needed them. And I had a question or I needed someone to share a story. Uh, you know, I got I got more no's than I got yeses. But I think one, that's life and that's work. Uh, that's the reality, because yeah, everyone's in a different place. But that's what that's what flourishing means to me is like feeling feeling supported and that you can turn around and raise your hand and someone's going to be there to say, I gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:59

And when you lose track of time outside of work, so you're you're not working this weekend, you're on a holiday, you completely lose track of time. Time, you know, you have this time dilation process, but it's like you're in a flow state. What kind of activities are you doing outside of work where that happens?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:16

It's a hard question for me because it doesn't happen very often because I I tend to do the types of things we've talked about around my normal work schedule. So I've written two books, nights and weekends. So I didn't really have time off during those periods of time, which is when I suddenly stop writing for a period of time because I don't really want to look at words anymore for a little bit, and then I come back around the other side. I watch a lot of YouTube. And where I particularly go is does anyone here know who Casey Neistat is? He's a he's a YouTuber. He's he's the original cinematic vlogger. So he didn't create the format of vlogging, but he elevated it because he's a professional filmmaker. And there was about a five-year period in the 2010s when he shot a vlog every day and produced a video about whatever he experienced. And he has really interesting stuff. One of his videos is he's uh has a it gets upgraded to a $32,000 airplane seat and takes you, he was kind of the first person to take you on a luxury tour of an airplane seat. And then that became a thing that a lot of people have done since. But he he lives in New York, he rides an electric skateboard, very much a hard-working guy. And I will go down the rabbit hole of Casey Nystat old videos from like eight, nine years ago, because he instills a sense of motivation for me. And it's not just like he's working hard, so I have to work hard. It's more the storytelling aspect of it, like how interestingly he crafts this day into an interesting story that makes me feel something. And it causes me to get back up and say, what's my version of that? And then I had this random, it's a small world in a really odd way sometimes, right? I'm speaking at an event in Toronto and I get to my hotel early and I walk around the corner to get a slice of pizza. And I'm coming out of the pizza place holding a slice of pizza, and I look across the street. Here comes Casey Neistat running down the street. And then I watched from across the street as he found a place to put his phone, and then he ran away and then ran back up to the phone in order to shoot that moment because it's all staged, right? So to have that selfie moment, and then he took the camera and ran away. And then I found out I was like, oh, what's the video tomorrow gonna be like? Because I know he's shooting today's video, publishing it tomorrow. Like, first of all, what how do I run into him in Toronto of all places? And then I watched the video the next day that he publishes. He's there to speak to a different event. He was in the room below me because when he opened his window, I'm like, that's my view. So I I counted the the flights uh on the next building and went, oh, he was downstairs yesterday.

unknown 1:41:53

Huh.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:54

So again, small world after all, but I go down the rabbit hole of I try to go down a rabbit hole more productive and more inspirational YouTube videos, as opposed to where the algorithm can send you. But I'd say that's where I'll I'll lose a couple of hours of time just kind of experiencing life via Casey Neistat every once in a while. Or other YouTubers as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:14

Yeah, amazing. So, you know, a challenge for our listeners, um, just based on what you said, would be let's find someone that usually goes unseen that you see working in the workforce wherever you happen to be, and tell them you actually appreciate them. Say, as JD mentioned, I appreciate you, versus thank you for the task. So that would be the challenge for listeners. If we can each find someone this week, uh, that would be a really awesome thing and probably make someone's day.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:43

And I can level that up slightly just because we've been talking about the frontline workforce. Take that opportunity with someone that you interact with on a regular basis that you maybe haven't said that to, just in public life. As an example, and my local grocer, you might have this experience as well. My local grocery store, I have a favorite cashier. She doesn't know that she is my favorite cashier. You probably have that person that when you go to the restaurant, you're very happy when you get their section, right? Or when you walk into a sandwich shop, that person does it right. And these people don't tend to know that they're making a difference for you in a subtle but meaningful way that sometimes just makes your day a little bit better. You get a little bit lighter because you can rely on these people to do these simple but meaningful tasks for you. So appreciate that person in a simple way. And again, that that you know, I appreciate you goes a much longer way in that person's day because you don't know, you don't know who who else they dealt with for the last couple of hours while they're on shift, and then then they have that moment with you. And I have that all the time at Disney during the holidays. People would bring us food a lot. So as cast members, people would just like randomly hand us cookies. I don't necessarily recommend that because stranger food, you you you appreciate the sentiment more than I don't know you or where this was. Cool. Thanks. Cards are nicer than consumable items in that case. But it was always a great day, and people would go into the break room. They'd be like, You see who was here? The the XYZ person was here, and they gave us this. So you can have those moments. Uh so this week, find that one person that you rely on that doesn't know that you rely on them and appreciate them.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:23

Thanks for that. Yeah, that's great. And JD's whole thing is really making sure that no one has to figure it out alone on the job, as we've heard about and in this book. We recommend that you get it. We have a link in the description of this podcast that you can click right out to buy a copy on Amazon. We'll also link JD's information where you can find him online. And, you know, that's really the same instinct of making sure that no one has to figure it out alone on the job that is behind Baryons. You know, we've built the flourishing partner that's in your corner, and you can start free at Baryons.com. That's B-A-R-Y-O-N-S.com. You can get a free 30 days of unlimited calls to start your journey there. JD, for our audience, where can they find you online? What's the best uh locations to look for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:14

I try to make it as easy as possible. So my website's jddillon.com. You can find the book at frontlineplaybook.com. My first book is available at jdrotabook.com, which is a little more exciting name. And I'm also uh readily available on LinkedIn. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, happy to have a follow-up conversation. You know, help anything I could do to help enable your frontline team or enable the work that you do every day. And I I greatly appreciate everything that folks do to highlight the frontline Desless Workforce. Appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation to really dig into what we can do to make sure people can do their best work and make sure every shift counts. And if there's anything I can do for anybody else out there, please let me know.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:51

Thank you very much. Mike, anything in closing? JD, lovely having you.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:55

I'm I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm half, I'm halfway. I'm halfway. And but it's but it's been um but it's been a book of flipping for me because I find something, and like, and this is something you recommended to me ways back. Like it's not a linear journey. None of us on our linear journey. The only linear journey we're on is to find someone to tell them we appreciate in the frontline and make and make them feel appreciated because we wouldn't get anywhere without the billions of frontline workers without out there. So appreciate your thoughtfulness. And like I said, I think you're creating movement. And I think we need more people to be part of asking the question of how do we take care of the people that actually take care of us the most everywhere all the time. So thanks for being on with us.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:37

Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for that. And um, you know, I any everything I try to do, whether it's a conference session or a book or an article, I try to tell a story as opposed to talk at people. So I write a narrative structure. And anyone who picks up the book, and including yourself, Mike, I'm I'm curious to get your feedback once you're done on what your favorite story from the book was, because there's a lot of stories direct from people who are doing the job, including 12 stories of frontline employees and what their experience is like day to day now. Those are my favorite parts of the book. And I am honored to be able to tell their story in a way that and I because I have maintained contact with the people whose stories I captured. Uh, they have copies of the book as well in a lot of cases. And the thing I keep telling them is like, your story is gonna help other people have a better experience on the job because you're gonna inspire change in that way. Because we have an opportunity to change people's lives in the way that we enable them at work. Um so I'm interested to hear, not just, you know, hopefully the book helps people. I'm very curious to hear what story in the book impacted them in a particular way. Uh, because I know it's gonna be meaningful to the people who share their stories.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:45

Well, thank you so much, JD. We really appreciate you coming on today. And um, we'll get everything up and running as soon as possible. So it'll be all ready to go. All right, thanks so much.