Learning Revolution 2023

Where: BDO Grand Rapids - Business Service Center, at 5300 Patterson Ave SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49512 

We had a great time reconnecting in person during the May session and hope you will join us (in person) for West Michigan ATD’s seventh annual Learning Revolution! This is your opportunity to engage with other learning professionals in the area while adding to your learning toolkit. Plus, there will be coffee and bagels!

What is this event, you may ask? It is the chapter’s annual showcase of the work and ideas of our local talent development experts. Learning Revolution presenters will spend 25 minutes sharing what they are doing to increase organizational effectiveness through the development of people. This year there are three sessions that will be held back-to-back with a short break in between. 

Presentations

Coaching for Performance Improvement

Amber Anderson, Head of Leadership Effectiveness + Coaching at Ora

We’ve been raised our entire lives to believe the best way to improve our performance is to change our behaviors. Sports coaches, teachers, and parents all told us to take different actions to get a different result so it’s no wonder that we now make this same mistake in our roles as learning professionals, leaders, and coaches.

But to create substantial and sustainable performance improvement, we must take a different approach.

We must coach people in a way that creates inner change to sustain outer change.

In this session, you’ll learn how to leverage the Personal Accountability Model to do exactly that.

Amber Anderson is a learning and leadership effectiveness professional dedicated to empowering leaders and fostering personal growth through soul-centered leadership.

Amber serves as the Head of Leadership Effectiveness + Coaching at Ora, a global clinical research organization in ophthalmology. In this role, she leverages her expertise to enhance leadership skills and cultivate effective teams.

With a passion for transformative change and a deep understanding of human
potential, she recognized the need for a holistic approach to personal and
professional development and founded Grace + Grit Coaching where she equips leaders with the necessary skill set and mindset to maximize their impact in a way that is authentic, joyful, and expansive. Moreover, she emphasizes the significance of emotional self-regulation and empowers leaders with the energetics tools to navigate their own nervous systems to ensure sustainable change.

As an Immunity to Change Coach certified by Minds at Work, Amber helps
individuals navigate the barriers that hinder personal progress. Additionally, she is a certified Life + Weight Coach from the Life Coach School, enabling her to guide clients towards achieving a balanced and fulfilling life. Amber has also earned certifications as an Advanced Leadership Coach and as an Integrative Change Coach by the International Association of Counselors and Therapists, enabling her to bring a comprehensive and holistic approach to her coaching practice and internal clients.

Putting the "I" into DEI

Courtney Simmons, Principal and Owner of Inclusive Insight Group

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work must be “everyone work”. Often in organizations with dedicated DEI staff, the work is viewed as owned by a few, and coworkers have a hard time seeing how they are a part of the larger strategy. For organizations without these functions larger questions loom about how to even get started if this work isn’t owned by anyone. In this session, we’ll discuss how you can take action as a key factor of accomplishing good DEI work.

Courtney Simmons, Principal and Owner of Inclusive Insight Group is no stranger to corporate spaces. “Growing up” in corporate organizations ranging from just over 1000 employees to Fortune500, she learned quickly the implicit and explicit ways organizations – and the humans that work for them – communicate that others don’t “fit in”, and developed a passion for working in those systems to make requisite change for true inclusion, equity and belonging. Skilled in learning, facilitation, co-creation, and collaboration, she’s recently made the move to shift from working for one corporation to sharing her insights as a consultant with Inclusive Insight Group.

Analyzing Performance Factors That Impact Training

Jeff Hoxworth, Partner, SDI Clarity, Co-Founder, Expectancy Learning, Past President, West Michigan ATD

As learning professionals, we all know training is critical to improving unsatisfactory performance. However, have you ever experienced decent training that just didn’t move the needle as intended? Maybe training wasn’t the issue!

We live in a professional world where we receive requests for training all the time. When this happens, there are several factors that should be considered that, combined, impact employee performance. Analyzing each of these factors helps determine root causes for performance issues, which may or may not include training! Let’s discuss!

Jeff has been helping clients solve a variety of talent issues for over 25 years, from defining robust learning curricula. to designing classroom/virtual classroom/eLearning, to facilitating programs and coaching leadership and employees, to defining and implementing corporate universities.

He is VP of Learning at SDI Clarity, where is has spent over twenty years building and maintaining client relationships within Fortune 500 and local companies, providing thought leadership in all areas related to talent development and applying innovative approaches to learning for both client and SDI-offered programs.

Jeff is a co-founder of Expectancy Learning, a cloud-based mobile-enables talent management and development platform that fully integrates training, development planning, and performance management to produce an overall experiential learning, development, and data-driven ecosystem.