The Ambition Quotient in the Schools with Nick Davies

We've talked in the past and I know that you have a kind of a different path for educators since you started in the business world, but tell us just a little bit about that progression and some things that have helped you move along in your career.

And in the course of writing a lot of my own training materials, I, my audiences, because that's when voice recognition first entered the market, it was, okay, I have people who have. I physical disabilities. I have people who have mental disabilities. I have people who are doctors and lawyers who want to use voice recognition technology, and I'm trying to write a training for all of them.

And so I was like, okay, we get into everybody in the learning space always talks about learning styles, auditory, visual, kinesthetic, I was like, that's not going to help me. So I started looking into what motivates people to learn. And what how do you address different people with different learning styles without having to reinvent the wheel every time you come to a different audience, right? So I spent many years doing that, about 10 years.

And then due to some life circumstances I ended up partnering with a guy who was really fun. And this was in the days when the internet was brand new. And we started writing online tutorials.

So that was really cool because there wasn't technology for online stuff back then and I decided I really liked that and I wanted to go back to school because at this point I have no education Okay, I'm just a person who knew nothing about computers who wanted to start a computer business Go figure that right?

We'll talk about three completely, totally different disciplines, right? So I went to college, and instead of trying to get a degree, I was like, I'm gonna learn about this, I'm gonna learn about this, I'm gonna learn about this, right? And I eventually went on and, through rather unconventional methods, got a degree. And then I got my master's degree in action learning.

Which I don't know how many people know about action learning, but I was working for a company so many people might have heard of it, especially if you're in the education space, because they do a lot of cafeterias and colleges, but anyway, working for them, they put me through a action learning program, which is very project based 18 months. You have a, project that you work on, and I won't go into all of the details about it, but it was, here's where the project started.

Here was the evolution of the project throughout the time, the 18 months. And here's what I learned. And here's the real kicker for all you education people out there. Okay. At the very end, my job.

Based on my project was to convince Sodexo that they needed to have a formal online learning program because they had a whole bunch of technical writers that were not instructional designers and they needed to convert them from technical writers to instructional designers, which was, once again, a whole different discipline. My project failed. Sodexo said, Nope, we're not doing it. Blah, blah, blah.

That's that will put you in sales and marketing for that. And so it was all about my learning journey and what I had learned and, what kinds of. takeaways I had that I could apply in my own career and different things. So there was a whole other list of criteria that determined whether or not I got my degree, which I did.

And it's rare to get a, I didn't get a traditional, once again, a master's degree because I wanted, I specifically wanted this action learning program through the same, and it was through the UK, through the same school. It fell under Oxford, but it was not Oxford. I don't want to mislead anybody there, but, it was a thing there.

So anyway, I had a very unconventional way of going about my own personal education and all the things I learned through education, which I think will lead us into this. Discussion a little bit more.

But consistently across the board, in around 2010, 2011, I started recognizing that a lot of the training programs that I was writing as a corporate instructional designer were onboarding programs. Go figure, right? And this is about the time when all of the Millennials and, all these Gen Z and, and in the corporate world, it's oh, we've got all these baby boomers and all these Millennials.

How do they, how do we mesh those two and get them to there was a whole lot about that, but there was also just a lot about onboarding in general. And I noticed that there was this huge gap from people from young people who graduated from school, an academic university or, K through 12, whatever, when they came into the workplace, they were missing five key attributes. Creativity, problem solving team building, communication and resilience.

And it was funny because that was just my own observations. I had no data to back that up. It was just, it was interesting. But in the corporate learning space, there's ATD, the Association of Talent Development, which is what used to be ASTD, one of the biggest. Membership organization out there for corporate learners learning about and a year or two later, they came out with a study and they were studying the same thing. I was observing. And guess what? I nailed all 5 of them.

And so I decided I was going to write this book and just share my own personal anecdotes and experiences with. All of these people that, all these students that I was onboarding into the corp, bringing them, trying to bridge that gap between their academic careers and their new, newfound careers and helping them to build these attributes, because I found that they were really struggling to come from the academic world into the corporate world.

It was you may know your subject matter, When you come, in some cases, because not all people will get a job in the discipline in which they went to school. I found that a lot of the types of activities that I had engaged in throughout all my unconventional journey through my academic career helped me develop those types of things. And I also learned from my own experience working with these young people. how to help them develop those. So that was, that's the short synopsis of the book.

And it's becoming more and more common for teachers, just like individual classroom teachers, to work that into a unit or two or three throughout the school year.

And how it's going to change the whole dynamic of the workplace, which I believe it's going to be very disruptive and it's going to cause a lot of problems. And what's going to happen is all these kids that are graduating from these schools and universities or whatever, and entering the workforce, what the discipline that they come in with. In a year's time might not exist. And so what do we do? What do we, these kids are?

After all these years of being put through what I consider conveyor belt education Yeah. Are all of a sudden going, I don't know. Like I said, I encountered that through all the, through all my years. But it's just gonna become on an ex expedited schedule. And because of that, it is coming so important that they develop these skills.

They're just to help you just move through life.

But then their kids, or their friends found out, Ooh, I can work for, at this time in 2010, 20 an hour, which they thought they were getting rich. And I can work remotely. On my own hours, they thought they were in seventh heaven, right? But that's where I really started going, Okay, I'm dealing with a ton of these college kids who come to, don't know how to manage their time, don't know how to deal with a project plan, don't know how to deal with any of those types of things.

And so I spent a lot of time training them how to do that, at the behest of my daughter, no less, who was actually pretty good at it. Thank goodness. And she was a great inspiration and a help to me. And that's. They say you learn the most by teaching and by teaching them, that's how I learned how to do that.

Especially with like public records requests or whatever, but just, are there other things that could be done like that to help ease a school leader's job? Not like your day to day operations, but other things, and I'm sure there are. I just need to sit down and think that one through for longer.

My son became an electrician and my brother hired him and especially in the vocational space. You're going to find a lot of. People coming into that space, employees who, for whatever reason, they probably didn't do well in school or, and they don't have a lot of good work habits and blah, blah, blah, whole story, right? Anyway. They were really struggling at 7am on Fridays to get their, 17, 18, 19 year old kids to stay awake for safety training. Can you imagine that? Go figure, right?

Safety training is so exciting. And so my brother was complaining to me one day and I said why don't you just let them teach safety? He's I'm not letting them teach safety training. Are you kidding? He said, that'd be the worst thing we could do. These guys know nothing. And I'm like, That's the point. I said, you don't just say here. I want you to teach this. You say next Friday. You are going to be teaching this safety protocol. Now we're going to spend the next week working together.

On your presentation and during that time, you're going to learn all of this information and by them, not only learning all that information, they're also whenever you have to teach something, you have to break it down. You have to, there's so much you have to do. My mom learned this to teaching piano and everything. Yeah, there's so many little things that we don't think about. And teachers can fully appreciate this.

And so they not only learn the subject matter, But they also learn how to communicate and, all these kind of things. And then when they're teaching their peers, their peers are going to start asking questions and then they're like I don't know the answer to that, but they have somebody there who can help them. But through that process, so I would really strongly encourage teachers to allow your students to do a lot more of the teaching.

And but prepare them don't just throw them into the deep end of the pool and say, I hope you learn how to swim here. But, I just found that to be 1 of the most powerful ways of helping people learn in general is to get that opportunity.

And I didn't ever see myself as a leader. If everybody sees themself as a leader and takes the time to really internalize what that means. We behave differently. If I were, let's just say I was a CEO and I have a whole bunch of people who are really struggling to find work life balance or whatever. If I put myself in their shoes and I start walking their walk, then all of a sudden I look at things differently.

And so when we talk about harmonic leadership, we talk a lot about quiet leadership, about servant leadership, and about walking in other people's shoes. Because when you do that, and things through that different lens, it naturally creates harmony.

Because we're connecting with other people simply because we're understanding them and we're no longer focused on spreadsheets and bottom line and, teachers making sure we have all of these, when you're as a teacher, you might, you're a leader, but if you put yourself in your student's shoes and try to walk their walk and talk their talk, it creates, I would think, in my experience doing this, A harmonious environment, I know this is so woo out there, that's why I said it takes an hour to talk about it, but this harmonious environment just naturally reduces stress, obviously I talk a lot with my hands, and brings people closer together.

And I know like when I was in graduate school, we were we actually had to do that for a whole day We literally had to go shoulder to shoulder with a kid and follow them through their day, but when people don't force you to do that, I think we forget and that's a great reminder of go sit next to a kid in a classroom and view the teacher from their perspective, not just from an evaluation perspective or a coaching mindset or anything like that. Thank you for that perspective, Cheryl.

And she says, I love coming to your group because I feel better. And she says, even though we're all on zoom, I feel connected to people.