Dear Thrive Interview: Master diversity in learning, managing emotions at work and more.

it is such a pleasure to be interviewing Shaheen here who is a learning and Leadership strategist and consultant I've seen her in action myself facilitating really inclusive

leadership training for people with very diverse backgrounds so I'm excited to hear her practical tips on building accessible Learning and Development

cultures and how to facilitate when you have people with diverse needs I I guess the second part also is I I heard a stat the other day from Deo ESS economics

saying that Australian businesses are expecting to spend about $8 billion in Learning and Development in 2024 but I suspect many companies are still spending budgets on traditional

training programs I guess in the backdrop of such a rapidly evolving business landscape we'll also touch on how we ensure uh learning programs don't

just sit in a silo but actually contributes to business goals as well so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it Shaheen welcome thanks Amanda so glad to be here and you're already

speaking my language this already there love it can we just start off with telling us a bit about about you your background and and your skill set I call myself a full stack learning designer or

in informal conversations the Swiss army knife of learning design um so I've done the whole bit um I have an educational background in learning design and technology in design thinking um and

I've kind of done the whole Swit we of from strategy and consultation to actually building and designing learning programs leadership capability programs

all the way to facilitation building online courses um I'm a coach I'm a mentor all of those things so yeah kind of done the whole Suite um and because I

get bought quite easily I've worked in a variety of different um industries of worked in corporate um you know large multinationals have worked in higher

education and uh I've worked on social impact so yeah keeping it all fresh I love that background and um Shaheen has also had a little bit of a stint in

marketing I have to say so has definitely done the the gamut right yes uh portfolio career is what we call it apparently Amanda that's the new word

I've learned that's it that's it now with your L&D background um and your last role being in a disability tech

company as well you you have applied a lot of accessible applications to both your facilitation and the creation of your

programs now anyone listening in can you share with us some of your tips and techniques to ensure you really create a an inclusive setup you're right

everything that I do Amanda has an inclusive lens to it and I also shy away from thinking about inclusion from a

from a view of what are the diversity buckets so am I including women am I including um people with disabilities I I don't think in that for me if we are

designing a program that's inclusive for all it means inclusive for all um so some of the things that I do to make sure I'm catering to the right human

being in front of me in my workshop or Zoom call or online course um is I ask the question so you'll see a lot of times when I send out my calendar invites at the bottom I'll have if you

know uh I want to I want to make sure that this is the best experience you have for every individual if there's something that I can do to make sure this is happening please let me know so

people know before they come into the workshop with me that um I want to make sure this is inclusive for all and if they have or they have a need for an accommodation what would that be sharing

content beforehand is another one of those similar ideas um there are some people who like to marinate on ideas

there's uh people with um neurodiversity who like to have access to content beforehand uh so this it's just um making sure that it is accessible for

everybody so sharing content is a really simple thing that people can do beforehand um so they're not put in the spot um this is especially so when you know there's a discussion I want in a

workshop and a lot of my workshops are led by discussion so instead of saying okay I'm I'm going to put a question up on the screen and we're going to go around the room and talk about this what

if I need three minutes to myself to think about the question and what my view is so sharing slides sharing questions um getting people to know what

to expect in the workshop is a really good way to set them up during the workshop it's also equally about giving people options um so one one of the

things that I'll say quite often is if you want to have a chat about this you can can come off mute or you can put in chat or you can raise your hand and we'll include you in so if again for

instance um somebody is uncomfortable coming on camera or speaking up they can just put in chat and then the trick is when you're having the discussion you

leave what's in the chat as part of the conversation so it doesn't come off as a side note that you've forgotten if you've put it in chat if you've put in chat you're still part of the

conversation and that's on me as a facilitator to make sure I'm doing that right um so yeah those are some things that I can think off the top of my head

I think they're really great tips and it's funny that you sort of say asking the question up front sharing the content earlier because quite often facilitators don't want to share things

until they're actually in the session and I like your approach because it makes people potentially less anxious and it does get them to prepare a little bit more for for the sessions as well

can I ask you something a little bit more pointed and a bit more specific are there any specific examples of accommodations that you've had to make

um that you you've had to really accommodate for oh there's so many of these um am so in you know in my last organization where I worked with lots of

people who identified as neurodiverse this was a whole new um Arena I was walking into and made a bunch of mistakes but learned learned very

quickly and and I'm so grateful for everybody who took our time to talk to me about this um um I was talking about this only a few days ago there was one

uh particular Workshop that I remember walking in and the problem with a lot of best practices in L &d and facilitation

is they don't work for um neurodiversity they don't work for different thinking Styles they don't work for different brains and so a lot of things that I had been taught

as being best practice have had to change um very quickly on my feet so this particular Workshop that I was talking about if you looked at the zoom recording you think nobody in the room

was engaged um there was one person who was kind of sitting to the side throwing a ball there was one person who had the camera off and I remember walking into the zoom workshop and just being like

why am I here like nobody wants to be here um kind of ped along um and then it was only at the end of the workshop that

the that I was told um this is a bunch of um neurodiverse people and so for

me this is engagement I'm looking at you in your eyes and having a conversation that's too much sensory um overload for

um for some brains and so I might be looking outside but listening to you I'm still engaged but you don't think I'm engaged and so it's quite nerve-wracking

as a facilitator when you have to do that um and so that I think that was that was a big learning for me is to not let my assumptions of what engagement

looks like to take to the to to then project that on other people in the workshop so um so I think this goes back to the human- centered approach that I

was talking about earlier Amanda so um there's a bunch of questions ask myself whether um the the session needs to be in person or hybrid or remote um so who

are the participants in the room what works best for them what's the content of the workshop is it reflection based is it discussion based um do I want to achieve connection so for instance if

I'm running the start of a three-month leadership program and it's a cohort um I need connection and we know through research that best connection happens in

person so that will need to be an in-person Workshop um is it reflection so people can do reflection in their own spaces um that might need not

necessarily be in person it could be an online so it's that context of who who are the humans in the room what do they need and then also what are the outcomes

within the workshop that I want um so but then adding to that like personally what I love I love an inperson Workshop um I think there uh there's there's an

energy and I think that's the human connection which um which kind of has been um a bit harder now to get you know

postco but I also have heard um from different brains that people work better and feel more comfortable being online

um so virtual is my second option hybrid is always harder to um just logistically um and also from an iion point of view

hybrid is always the hardest to work because you're trying to cater to an audience in the room plus also people on Zoom or whoever is like on a big screen behind you people on the big screen

behind you cannot see the faces of the people in the room um their tiny dots in a big boardroom that sort of stuff it's always hard doing hybrid from an inclusion point of you people are

worried about talking over each other and zoom fatigue is real again I think Howard it was has done done a big piece of research around Zoom fatigue and how real it is and what are the reasons for

it so there's again there's a bunch of stuff in there but um always always going back to the The Design Center human Center design thinking to be like

who are the people what's the outcome I want to achieve and therefore what might be the W rater on it fantastic so you touched on human centered design thinking can you just walk through

through what that is and then how leaders might be able to apply uh apply it when managing their teams yeah so um design thinking has been around for a couple of decades now

um it's a structured thinking process is how I think about it and it's at the core of a lot of the work that I do um I think of it as a circle that reiterates

itself um so you always start with the discovery and this is my favorite um section to be in um I think as designers and as practitioners we don't spend

enough time in Discovery but the discovery phase is all about knowing your people so who are you designing for who are they what do they do what's their Journey like what's their daily

life like but then also the outcomes what are the outcomes you want to achieve from this program um the why of you doing things so what what's the problem I'm trying to solve and I think

it's really key and I'll point this out um for me that what's the problem I'm trying to solve is at the core of design thinking um and often it requires

peeling back a few layers um and I see this in learning all the time where somebody comes to me and says we need uh we we need to solve the problem of communication in my team and then I'll

be like how does communication show up as a problem what's the problems you're facing how how does this um turn up within your team meetings you pull back a few layers and sometimes you go like

well it's not a communication problem it's a psychological safety problem um so sitting in the problem space the longer you do that the better you're

designing for the right problems to be solved so that's a discovery phase once you've done uh a a fair bit of understanding your people consultations data wherever you're getting your

information from you then start to think about what's the problem you're trying to solve and generally this is where you boil down the essense of your Discovery phase into a how might we question question how might we improve

communication Styles um how might we improve communication skills within this team how might we improve psychological safety um so that's the Define phase and then you go into design so both the

discovery and the design phases are really focused on the human um and this is where the human centeredness of the design thinking comes into play so again if you I'm designing for these people

have they be in the are they in the room with me so I know I'm designing for the Right audience so you can't design for people who are not not there and we've not had a say so um thinking about

solutions to the how might be problem that we've designed building a prototype taking it to Market and then reiterate so that's the circular model you always prototype reiterate prototype reiterate

and sometimes like it's not always a neat Circle right sometimes you have to go back to Discovery and you go like oops actually in the design stage you realized we didn't ask this really important question or we didn't speak to

this cohort of people we should have spoken to and have to go back to Discovery so um but it's a great way of thinking and that's what I like I I like

structured thinking I like I like to use Frameworks and tools because we all have certain biases and mental models are the best way to get over that um so I try

and remove all bias that I can from my thinking by using structured Thinking Tools and design thinking is one of them um I think that's some context for

design thinking um how leaders can use that is um you know start to put leadership as a layer on top of design thinking so in the discovery phase do

you know what your team actually does um do you know what a day in their life looks like um that will help you really solve some of the problems that they might have

spoken or not spoken about um so sometimes you might say I don't have time but it's really that they it's not that they don't have time it's just that they have all of this admin stuff that's

coming that way that if you knew about you might be able to remove as a problem so that's one way you can think about that in the discovery phase so know your

pro know your people um know what their journey is like um another way to think about the discovery and design phases is to understand your people in terms of um

capability so what are the skills the jobs need the job needs from them um where are they in that um spectrum of skills knowledge capability and trying

to help them through building their skills um again not possible unless you know what they're lacking or what the

job needs um so um that might be a way of of thinking about leadership um coaching is another really great way of integrating design thinking into your

coaching methodologies so again asking questions to help you yourself to think about your teams in terms of of okay um what's the problem you're trying to

solve how can I help you on this problem and guide them on a journey using coching methodologies along with the design thinking

framework that's a really helpful guidance I think and I also wonder when you're going through the discovery phase

what is the best way to get the right insights I I love using the five v um as a tool if yeah sounds like you've heard

of it um it's it's keep asking why for every answer that you get um so I'll demonstrate this with an example um let's go back to the same communication

example we gave we talked about so my team needs communication skills why do you need communication skills because I feel like there's a

disconnect between my people uh between two members of my team why do you think there's a disconnect um one person said something the other person doesn't

understand it or well maybe they ignore it why do you think they ignore it psychological safety um so um might not be have been the most refined example

but that's what I could come up on my so the the idea is you keep asking why until you get to the root of the problem and don't take the first problem

that's in your face as the most um as being the correct one so that's a tool I use quite often to to dig deeper love it now I um you've got a workshop

that you run around managing emotions uh in the workplace as well can you just talk through uh what that is and what tips people might be able to take

away yeah so um I I read a read piece of research from um Yale foundation and they've come up with this great um

research on how to manage emotions um there's a lot in the workshop but I I'll give you some of my top tips um the first thing as with everything is to be self-aware of the emotions you're going

through and I think we live in this world where it's not really okay to sit with your emotions um much as discomfort as you were talking about so my first

invitation to people in the workshop is to sit with your emotion feel the emotion that you're feeling and then name the emotion so there's been

research done around name it to tame it um so instead of just being like not having a great day um what are you feeling um is it anxiety is it confusion

is it overwhelm what is the emotion that you're feeling and there's so many beautiful emotions that we've I think stopped talking about there's Intrigue there's awe like when was the last time

we talked about being in awe of something so I I really encourage people to sit with the emotion feel it and then name it because research shows that when

you name an emotion it helps it it loses power over you so I say I'm feeling really overwhelmed and then the second

stage that is why might I be feeling it sometimes you get to like the middle of the day and you just like this whole day has just been terrible I don't know what happened but then if you sit with it you

go like well actually I'm feeling overwhelmed because as soon as I woke up in the morning this happened and that's led me to 6 hours later feeling how I'm

feeling so just that knowledge of how you're feeling and why you're feeling it is is a great um it it already helps to start dissipate some of that

emotion now once you've done that then there's you know we talk about some of the thought strategies and some of the action strategies you can take to feel start to feel better again um again

there's a bunch of these that we talk about um my favorite one is reframing um so reframing the emotion that you're feeling as something that's

stress driven to well maybe it's just telling me something about myself um maybe because I'm feeling overwhelmed because of that one thing that happened that generally I don't feel overwhelmed

about maybe it's telling me that my cup's not full um and it's an indication that I need to do something about this or this this niggling thought that keeps

coming back to me um I need to reframe that as it's telling me something about an action I need to take um why do I still keep thinking about it so reframing your

negative emotions as what's it trying to tell me but is it really a bad thing um all of those things that's reframing that's um that's a thought strategy we

talk about um so yeah I I love that Workshop because um I think as saying we we are often on the um on the treadmill and we don't stop and think and what this Workshop does is it gives you the

space and the permission to pause think and then actually gives you strategies that you can personally build for what works best for you and

you can walk away with a list of these other things I'll do I'll identify my emotions and these might by some ways I can um work through my

emotions wonderful I think um that sounds like a really practical Workshop that you're running Shaheen and you you've taken some um some Theory and and obviously put your own spin on it as

well and I think having lots of experience in L &d and and a variety of different businesses you have you've seen a lot right and so I think that overwhelm whether it's overwhelm

disengagement whatever that looks like um it's such a coaching technique to name and and and sort of reframe so I love how you're you're thinking that way

I I wonder what else um in your toolkit can you support our de Thrive Community with what are what are some of the the the skills that you've acquired that you

can uh apply to support our uh our members so there's there's a lot of the advice and coachings as we've been talking about in terms of um anything

that's people related so whether it's building programs leadership capability um dni um mental well-being I've worked

across the organization and a lot of those initiatives it's the design and delivery of of those workshops um um but I think my real strength lies in kind of

the the human Center design thinking um so focusing on the human but then also taking a step back and looking at a

systems view of it so how is it that we can design something that is human centered but also ties in with the business goals it also ties in with the social purpose and what's the

environment and the structures you need around it to make sure that the pro that we've designed really thrives um often

what happens is we we expect a 90-minute workshop to change things it doesn't um so really focusing on what's the problem you're solving what might be the

business goal that we're trying to achieve and then designing something that's sustainable because we've built the right environment for that program to thrive

in wonderful and I think with your human- centered design thinking that matching of figuring out what the real problem is and and matching that to what is actually happening in your

organization that you can help one-on-one or even teams um figure that out and and work out a a sort of sustainable and actionable

solution now my last question to you is what does thriving in work life mean to you ah such a great question

um I love variety so I love having like five different projects um on my plate where each of them is making me think at

1,000 miles an hour um that's thriving for me but then also having the right space for me to be able to pause and

reflect um and do deep work along with doing really creative Innovative work um so that's yeah that's thriving for me where I can be myself I can have fun um

I'm trusted and I feel like I belong but at the same time do great work that's Innovative and creative um all all all in the same

life you sound a little bit like me Restless wanting to make a difference wanting to try new things I'm I'm I'm certainly hearing

you uh it's been such a pleasure to speak to you Shaheen uh thank you for all of your great tips I think there's a lot of awesome takeaways here uh and for

our thrivers on the platform Shaheen is is available and is one of our advisers here and can offer a lot of support to you and your teams uh as you as you grow

and and find challenges in your business thanks for having me Amanda this has been fun