For years, I designed leadership development programs that taught communication, coaching, feedback, and accountability. While participants learned the skills, lasting behavior change remained inconsistent. This session shares the evolution of my thinking, the lessons learned from the "messy middle," and the practical framework I built to address the missing ingredient: curiosity. Attendees will leave with a simple approach they can use to design leadership development experiences that create more meaningful and sustainable behavior change.

Three Key Takeaways

1) Identify why leadership skills often fail to transfer from the classroom to the workplace and recognize the mindset barriers that get in the way.

2) Apply the P.A.U.L. Framework (Pause → Ask → Understand → Lead) to strengthen communication, coaching, and decision-making under pressure.

3) Design leadership development experiences that cultivate curiosity alongside leadership competencies to increase learning transfer and lasting behavior change.

Any L&D pro can pick a great system — an LMS, an ATS, a new interview method. The harder job is getting people who didn't choose it to actually use it. Drawing on two real, concurrent rollouts across an 8-market fitness organization — a Topgrading + Paradox ATS integration and a Crunch Connected LMS rollout — this session shows a repeatable pattern in why rollouts stall and what closes the gap. In one case, field teams avoided a simple tool because they imagined roadblocks before testing it. In the other, resistance came from learning new mechanics and absorbing new ongoing tasks on top of the day job. Same root cause, two different flavors.

Three Key Takeaways

1) A diagnostic for sorting rollout resistance into two buckets — imagined roadblocks vs. real new-workload friction — so you solve the actual problem instead of over-explaining the tool.

2) A field communication and phasing template adaptable to any multi-market or multi-team system rollout.

3) Language for the two most common objections: "what if this breaks" and "this is one more thing on my plate."

Championship cultures begin with the person behind the role. In this interactive presentation, award-winning author and leadership coach Joni D. Goodman, CPTD, introduces her Rappel™ Framework, a five-step approach that supports talent development professionals in strengthening self-awareness, emotional intelligence, trust, resilience, and accountability- behaviors integral for creating championship organizational cultures.

Participants will leave prepared to apply the Rappel™ Framework:

• To strengthen trust, collaboration, and accountability.
• Use emotional intelligence strategies to navigate difficult conversations and build psychological safety.
• Develop actionable plans that foster resilient leaders and lasting, people-centered culture change.

Do you really need to build something new or is there more potential in the learning you already have?

This interactive session helps talent and learning professionals step back from individual courses and examine the larger learning experience. Whether the learning is developmental, onboarding, leadership, or regulatory participants will explore the modalities they currently use, what each one accomplishes, and where opportunities may exist to strengthen the experience. The goal is not to build the “perfect” learning program. It is to learn how to look at what already exists, recognize what may be missing, and make intentional choices about where to go next.

Participants will take away:

1) A broader view of learning by considering the learner's experience before, during, and after a training event or required course.

2) A practical way to examine existing learning and identify gaps, overlaps, and opportunities across modalities, resources, practice, and reinforcement.

3) Ideas for making meaningful improvements without starting over by building on existing content, technology, resources, and support.

For an audience that designs learning for a living, this session also models what great learning looks like. Participants engage through interactive exercises, peer-to-peer conversation, and a live AI integration that makes the learning immediate and personal. It is not a lecture. It is an experience built for transfer. Participants leave with a practical framework for shifting difficult conversations, strengthening intrinsic accountability, and building the kind of human connection that makes every other training investment more likely to stick.

After this session, attendees will be able to:

• Reframe empathy as a courageous, strategic leadership skill rather than a personality trait.
• Apply empathy and accountability together without sacrificing clarity, compassion, or their effectiveness.
• Use a structured conversation framework to surface resistance, shift perspective, and build trust.

Planning, Design & Construction departments are known for building campuses, infrastructure, classroom and lab renovations and capital projects. At The University of Texas at Austin, we've also focused on building something equally important: our people and staff within our department. This session shares the journey of developing a scalable talent development strategy that supports a diverse workforce of project managers, planners, construction administrators, skilled trades professionals, and administrative staff. Attendees will explore how learning pathways, leadership development opportunities, career growth resources, strengths-based development, and employee engagement initiatives were intentionally designed to create a connected talent development ecosystem.

The session will highlight practical lessons learned, challenges encountered, and key decisions that helped move development efforts from isolated training events to a strategic workforce development framework. Participants will leave with ideas and tools they can adapt within their own organizations to strengthen learning, development, and employee growth.

Three Key Takeaways

1) What type of needs assessments may be helpful? Identify the building blocks of a sustainable talent development strategy that aligns employee growth with organizational goals and workforce needs.

2) What mindset shifts need to happen from Training to Talent Development. Apply practical approaches for creating a connected learning ecosystem through learning pathways, leadership development, career growth resources, and employee engagement initiatives.

3) Recognize common implementation challenges and lessons learned when scaling talent development efforts and learn strategies for gaining buy-in, maintaining momentum, and adapting over time.

Consider that the current generation was not exposed to the learning environments of old. But even more shocking, empirical data show that GenZ really is differently motivated than all previous living generations.

Lecture, text-heavy, next-button learning programs are ineffective and unattractive to this generation.

The problem? As designers of learning experiences, we create programs that we enjoy and that feel comfortable for us, not ones our learners will choose, complete, and apply.

This session will arm you with scientific and practical reasons for gameful learning for the new generations. We will also look at specific game mechanics that will engage our new learners. And we will learn to avoid “self-hugging” as we design learning experiences for THEM.

Yes, the kids these days really are different. Let’s future proof our learning portfolio for the generation that will soon be leading our organizations.

• Explain the biological and neurological case for play as the primary mode of human learning across the lifespan.
• Interpret Reiss Motivation Profile findings to describe how Gen Z’s Core Desires differ from previous generations and how that shapes learning preferences.
• Identify at least three “self hugging” design habits in current programs and articulate their impact on Gen Z engagement and application.
• Redesign an existing learning experience concept using gameful mechanics (e.g., collection, protection, narrative, psychological safety) aligned to Gen Z’s motivational profile.