Guest: JD Dillon, Advisor, Speaker, Author, Technologist
Published: June 8th, 2026
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Episode summary

A practical, deeply human look at how to properly enable 80 percent of the global workforce that actually run our world: the frontline.

JD Dillon has spent the last 25 years championing the people who serve our food, deliver our packages, and keep our hospitals running. From his early days managing AMC theaters and screaming "Yeehaw!" as a cowboy at Walt Disney World to becoming a leading voice in organizational learning, JD combines a highly practical "systems thinking" approach with incredible storytelling. He is an advisor, technologist, and the author of The Modern Learning Ecosystem and The Frontline Enablement Playbook.

In this grounded and inspiring conversation, JD explains why frontline managers hold the most challenging and critical role in any business, and shares how emerging technologies like AI translation can radically humanize the workplace. You'll hear the fascinating story of how JD conquered his fear of public speaking through one spontaneous joke, why L&D teams need to stop hiding behind department labels, and how to intentionally design connection to ensure every single shift counts.

Key topics

• 🎤 The power of connection over perfection: How a single ad-libbed joke on a college tour helped JD overcome his paralyzing fear of public speaking. It's a masterclass in remembering that your audience is rooting for you and craves human connection more than scripted information.
• 🤖 Using AI to humanize the frontline: Why AI isn't just a corporate buzzword, but a powerful tool for deskless workers. From instantly translating SOPs into an employee’s native language to acting as an on-demand digital assistant, technology can clear massive obstacles to performance.
• 🎯 Why the frontline manager is the single point of failure: How the entire weight of a company's corporate strategy rests on the shoulders of the frontline manager. JD explains why organizations must build intentional scaffolding around these leaders, specifically by helping them connect with peers facing the same struggles.
• ❤️ The "Kathy" standard of leadership: A memorable story of an epic Disney manager who balanced deep personal care for her team with strict operational accountability. It illustrates why great management isn't black and white, but an ongoing exercise in considering both the business outcomes and the human beings involved.
• 🤝 Designing intentional connection: Why leaving workplace friendships to chance is a failing strategy, especially for hybrid or shift workers. Discover how one retailer transformed their turnover rate simply by replacing day-one compliance modules with intentional time spent building relationships on the floor.

Top quotes

"It's not about delivering information, it's about connecting with people."

"I firmly believe the frontline manager is the hardest and most important job in any organization because they are the single point of failure."

"Your employees on the front line, they don't work for your company. They work for their manager. They never see the rest of the company."

"I'm not here to help people learn, I'm not here to help people develop skills. Those things might happen as a result of what we're going to do. I'm just here to help you do what you need to do or do what you want to do."

"We can all support the frontline workforce. We're all part of the story in a way that we're not for the corporate team... you will see a restaurant server this week, you will see a retail associate, you will see a grocery clerk. We can all help them have a better day."

Resources

• Whitepaper: Beyond the trade-off: Group learning for a world in transformation
• JD Dillion: The Frontline Enablement Playbook
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Episode transcript

Mike Courian: JD, welcome to the podcast.

JD Dillion: Great to see you.

Mike Courian: Great to be with you. At the top of each of the conversations I have on this podcast, I love to ask my guest what I want to be a simple question, but sometimes it doesn't turn out to be, which is, I'd love three different words that come to mind for you if you were introducing yourself to us so we could know you better.

JD Dillion: "Practical" is a word I use a lot in writing and I think it really describes me because I come from the world of operations, so I find my thinking is very grounded. I like solving problems quickly, but effectively. And I like ensuring that anything I talk about, anything I share, or the way that we go about solving problems is realistic for the setting in which we're playing. I'm less blue sky, much more grounded in the reality of what we're trying to do and solve for today.

"Systems" is another one. I talk a lot about shifting from programmatic views to systems views, but I think also because I come from the world of managing high-volume movie theaters and theme parks, I think it has developed me into a bit of a systems thinker in terms of how I attack different types of challenges.

And then the third word, this is going to be wildly overused, is "story." It's just how I communicate and I don't think I'm unique in that. I think a lot of people like to refer to themselves as a storyteller. But I do think it's a symptom of what happens after you not only work for Disney for an extended period of time, but you really professionally grow up inside of that environment, including as an L&D professional, where a lot of what we did and a lot of how we taught was by capturing and conveying stories. And anyone who's read anything that I've ever written or attended any of my sessions, especially, like, lately, I think would agree with the idea that I like to anchor the way that I communicate, both professionally and personally, in story.

So those three words, I think do a pretty good job of describing me. I'm happy to receive feedback.

JD Dillion: ...for anyone who is listening, who might have other terms to use.

Mike Courian: Well, I really like them. They give me a lot to jump off. It just strikes me that if the whole role and the whole existence of a cinema and of Disney are to share stories with the world, then I'm glad it rubbed off on you because something might have been going wrong if it hadn't.

JD Dillion: At one point in my life, I dressed up like a cowboy and screamed "Yeehaw!" in front of 70 strangers every eight minutes. Immersive storytelling at its finest.

Mike Courian: I love that. Now, another question I like to ask so I get sort of a sense of where your strengths lie: if no humility was allowed, I'd love to know what parts of the process of work are you at your best? Where do you see having, I like to call them superpowers, you might not view them that way, but things that you know you get to uniquely contribute to the work process, where do you see those?

JD Dillion: I believe I'm best at crunch time. Because I'm born from this environment where I see 2,500 people walk through my door on an hourly basis, we have to keep not only the machinery running and everybody safe, but also everyone having a good time and be, again, immersed in the story. So, I spent the first half of my life professionally in those environments where it's Saturday night and it's Star Wars weekend, or, you know, it's the 4th of July, or it's Christmas week, the busiest time for me while everyone else is on vacation. So, I kind of continue to operate in that way.

And I'm also horrible to go to any type of public event with, because it's one of those situations where I'm looking at the things that other people are just ignoring. I want to see how the machinery works. I can't go to a movie without seeing and hearing everything that happens around me. If a door opens, if someone makes a noise, I'm hyper-vigilant in that setting just because it's where I grew up in a lot of different ways. So, I think I tend to approach a lot of work from an operator's perspective, and I think it's been beneficial to...

Mike Courian: me on the people side of work in learning and development and performance and enablement because I believe that experience and that way of thinking grounds me, and again, kind of back to that point about being practical, in the reality of the people that I'm trying to support and making sure that whatever I do, it's not the best idea for me, it's not the right solution for me, it's the right thing to do for the people that are that are trying to accomplish whatever the task might be or solve the problem. It's my job to help them do what they're trying to do.

So I think coming from an operator's background and still thinking about the work that I do as if I'm managing that type of an operation helps me, again, kind of ground the way that I tell stories or the way that I try to help people.

JD Dillion: It's such a gift for those that you have influence over to have, like that you are going to their context mentally, that you're attentive to those details, that you're noticing their experience. I'm sure it'll play out as we go through this conversation, but it's- it's so amazing. Like, I almost want to say thank you for them because a lot of- I've just noticed a lot of leaders don't necessarily go there. They keep themselves at arm's length, and that might play to a perspective that can be helpful, but also I think we both know that it also means you can miss things.

And so, that's so cool. I'm going to categorize it all under "best at crunch time" and there's like a vigilance there. What else would you say are strengths of yours?

Mike Courian: I am very comfortable standing in front of large groups of people and doing whatever you need me to do to accomplish the goal. I say that as someone who for the first 18 years of their life was scared out of their mind of public speaking and generally human interaction overall. And I had this interesting one-hour moment in my life where my greatest fear started to transition into a- a toolset that I was going to be able to use for these types of-

JD Dillion: I couldn't have this type of conversation when I was younger. It was just beyond my capability. And once I overcame that, I had these kind of interesting combinations of training grounds and experiences that allowed me to be able to do whatever I need to do in front of people. So, it's a really awkward way to say that, but I was the person in the movie theaters when the movie goes off screen and everyone's very angry, I was the person they sent in to make it all okay. I was the person who standing in front of your favorite attraction would not only tell you that the attraction's unavailable right now, but make you feel like we had a good time together while we were having that conversation. And then I started to parlay that into the learning and development facilitation space. And then I spent several years hosting different events for my organizations over time. And there's a lot of interesting photos of me dressed up in costumes. Because again, once you dress up like a cowboy and scream, "Yeehaw" to 70 strangers every eight minutes—

Mike Courian: It's all pretty easy after that. Yeah.

JD Dillion: Yeah. Yeah, there's not- The only thing I said no to consistently is I'm not going to sing. I do not have any ability when it comes to that particular skill set in front of an audience. But I have a really good time if you say to me, "Hey, we're behind. Get up there and just kind of delay for 10 minutes." All right. Here we go. And I'll just find a way to try to connect with people and, again, make sure that we're having a- we're having a good time and we're here- we're doing what we're here to do. So I think I'm- I'm a unique presenter and facilitator in that regard, but it's because I had this really kind of interesting set of training grounds as an operations manager and then a facilitator for a company like Disney.

Mike Courian: So, I'm so curious. Do you have tips for the rest of us? Because I would say that is one of the most common things that can be a daunting experience for an individual. How did you convert yourself from fear to comfort? How did you do that?

JD Dillion: Do you want me to tell you the story really quickly? Because I-

Mike Courian: I'd love to hear it.

JD Dillion: -have found that not a lot of people tend to have the, "I know exactly when my greatest fear went away." Or not-

JD Dillion: really went away, because what I've learned over the years is, I'm actually still scared of public speaking. I just learned how to use that energy in a way that kind of propels me forward, and I can leverage it as part of the way that I engage and connect with people.

But I went to college 1,200 miles away from where I grew up. I was already scared of public speaking. I had had all of the bad moments that can happen to you growing up, crying in front of people, like all of the things happened to me when I attempted to talk in front of people, including in speech class in high school in front of 12 people that I had known for two years, could not stand up and talk about myself in speech class.

When I go to college, the first class I take is speech, because I know I've got a problem. I want to overcome it as part of this kind of new adventure, going to a new place. All of the bad things continued to happen. I just cannot get myself beyond the fear, focused to be able to, even when I have notes, to be able to tell a story or deliver a speech.

At the same time, I figured out that as part of a college scholarship that I had, I had to do community service hours. I was new to town, didn't know where to go to do that, didn't have a car, and was kind of landlocked on the college campus. Found out that if you gave tours of the campus, it was one community service hour for every one hour of touring given. That was my only option. I'm scared to death of talking to people, but I'm somehow going to give tours at the largest public university in the United States. This is a good decision that I made as an 18-year-old.

I'll accelerate through the story. I go to the initial training where they give you a script. I don't know the school, I just showed up. They give you a script, you're supposed to follow a couple of tours, learn how it goes, then you're going to give some tours, they're going to follow you, the experienced tour guides to make sure you're doing okay, sign you off, and you can do tours on your own, standard training process.

I went to the first tour, got my script, followed them around, made notes, and went up for my second tour. It's a Tuesday in September. I'm wearing a polo shirt with the university logo on it. No tour guide shows up. So, it's just me and a bunch of families who are there to see the campus.

JD Dillion: I don't know who to call. I just got there. So I think to myself, I have that moment where I say, "This is it. Here we go. Do or die."

So I get the group together, walking outside. I'm reading the script as we're going. I don't know what the script is to say. Get outside, start talking. Horrible. Sweating, scared, barely understandable. I was a very low talker at that point. I'm constantly projecting now, but I was a very quiet talker. So they must have... I'm amazed people didn't leave.

Ends that stop, head to the next stop, reading the script as I go. Get to the next stop. Horrible. Sweating, scared. In the background of that particular tour stop, you can see the fraternity and sorority houses. And in the script, there's a line that says, "12% of the student body is involved in Greek life." I say that, and then for some reason, not planned, just out of my mouth, comes some additional lines. I just ad-libbed, "So you don't have to be Greek to be popular. I'm not Greek, but I'm also not popular."

And they laughed. And it was like I heard something in my head shatter, where I suddenly realized, if I just say the things in my head, maybe that's how I connect to people. And then the next stop was better. And the next stop was better. And by the end of the hour, it was gone. And I started signing up for every tour I could give after that. And then I went to radio production, and then I became the person at the movie theater that you send into the theater when things are wrong, and then I start facilitating classes at Disney.

So it was this one-hour unlock where I realized, I don't have to be what someone else expects me to be. I don't have to be what the script says. I can do what comes naturally to me, and as long as it's in service of what people are here... Don't go off sideways, don't just start saying things. Deliver information that's of value, but in a way that kind of is uniquely me. That was the kind of unlocking moment for me. And it's still something I think about today, which kind of comes back around...

JD Dillion: ...original question. It's not about delivering information, it's about connecting with people. That's the area of focus. Of course, I'm going to convey information. You're here to learn something from me or to get some information from me. But I'm going to be able to deliver that information more effectively if I focus on how I can connect. That's why storytelling is a big part of kind of contextualizing what I have to say in a way that makes sense to you.

And then the other kind of two points that I would add are: one, people want you to do a good job. Instead of going in thinking that people are being critical of you, everyone there wants to get value from this moment. No one wants you to be bad at this, cuz they're investing time, money in spending time with you. So they're all rooting for you, even if they're not visibly rooting for you.

And then two, and this is the big one, they have no idea what you're supposed to say. So the way I design presentations, and anyone's ever seen a slide deck of mine, there are examples on my website, jddillion.com, you'll notice I use a lot of big images and very little text. Because I'm not locking myself into any particular part of a presentation, whether it's because I forgot what I was supposed to say, what I was planning to do, or because something about the conversation took me in a different direction. I build flexibility into my talk tracks, which makes it more comfortable for me, because there's not a big, like, bulleted list on every slide, that if I don't hit every point, people are going to notice that I'm, something is wrong.

So those are kind of two of my biggest tips, or, or three, is make it about connection, they don't know what you're supposed to say, so go where you need to go in order to deliver value to the audience, and they want you to do a good job. So just be reminded that people are rooting for you.

Mike Courian: I love it, JD. We just got a micro masterclass, everybody listening, I thought that was so helpful. And do you know what I love is that life sets up circumstances for you to have that shattering moment, because we all need those situations where we get the right amount of scaffolding. I would have never thought that being dropped in the deep end was the right amount of scaffolding for this external critic to be...

JD Dillion: ...silence for just long enough to know that actually, no, this part of me is welcomed. This part of me was even enjoyed. They laughed.

Mike Courian: I just think it's so cool. I love that that happened for you because, yeah, it's interesting why it doesn't happen to more people. I don't know if we missed them, or if the right opportunity didn't come, or if we didn't seize the moment. I'm not sure why.

JD Dillion: What's interesting is, I've told that story a lot. I clearly have beats in it, right? It's almost scripted at this point.

For a long time, for years, I kind of kept pointing to that one ad-lib, that one joke, that unlocks a part of me that was always there, that I just didn't understand how to leverage, how to share. It took me a long time to realize that's not the most important moment in the story.

The most important moment in the story happens about 12 minutes prior to that, when I decide I'm going to do this. Because I very easily could have given in and said, "I'm not good at this. That's the whole point of this experience is that I'm going to struggle with this, I need to overcome it, I need more time, I didn't complete the training. Am I allowed to do this?"

They probably weren't necessarily going to be happy with me if I took a group out—because, again, prospective students and their families—and trainwrecked the whole experience, and then had a negative perspective on the university as a result of my performance after I had not been fully trained yet. So, I was taking a risk. A calculated risk, no one was going to get hurt in the situation. We weren't crossing any major streets. So, I was comfortable with the fact that we could at least navigate the campus.

If I don't make that decision, and go against everything that's happening in my head, and everything that's happened to me up until that point, I don't have the chance. I don't know what will happen. Do I kind of work my way through it over a period of months to years, and eventually get to the point that I am now, and I'm able to stand up and do what I need to do as a facilitator and a speaker? Or do I keep holding myself back? Yeah, and never go down that path, never change majors, never change jobs...

JD Dillion: never become a cowboy at The Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios. I don't, I don't know what happens if I don't make that decision and go for it. And I think that's the meaningful moment in the story. That's the takeaway, is to be looking for those moments when there's a calculated risk to take, that's going to help nudge you forward into an uncomfortable space, because learning comes from discomfort. And I wasn't an expert by the end of that hour, but I now had a willingness and a motivation to seek it out, and then I spent a lot of time developing the skill set, developing my voice. This is not how I naturally sound if I just talk. I don't over enunciate literally everything I say all of the time. This is built over the course of years. So, it's about taking, kind of seizing that moment, taking the risk, and then putting in the work afterwards in order to try to get where you're ultimately trying to go.

Mike Courian: Yeah, the crescendo moment is actually just the beginning. It's so cool, JD. Thank you for sharing that with me. I loved hearing that. Were there any other things, you've given me some super strong ones. This hypervigilance within a crunch time, very comfortable with large groups now. Was there a third one that you'd want to add to the list of your superpowers?

JD Dillion: This, again, might sound kind of general, especially for someone in the L&D space. I just want to help, right? If you go back to the time I spent as operations manager, my entire career is wrapped around the frontline workforce, either being a member of the frontline, managing members of the frontline, being learning and development, and then technology in support of frontline workers, and it's all motivated by the fact that early on in my career, I saw what can happen, including for me, when you get the help you need. So, I always joke that I'm in this for altruistic reasons, because I don't think a lot of people go into learning and development for the money. But, I, I don't talk a lot about learning, or training, or very specific tactics, because

JD Dillion: Like, I'm here for the broader purpose, which is I just think people deserve help, and I'm very interested in finding the right ways to help people. And I think that helped me become a very good frontline manager. I think it helped me become a pretty good learning and development professional, pretty good technologist. And even today, when I do any work that I do in this space, whether it's speaking at a conference or writing, I'm just looking for ways that I can be helpful, and I think there's a certain value to that kind of being default mode is, will making this effort or taking this time help somebody? And I think it also kind of naturally slides me into the people side of the workplace.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I mean, I hear what you mean about it being maybe not a fancy thing or or maybe is what other people feel, but I don't know, I have a hunch that actually, it's a— I'm glad, again, I'm glad you have it, because it sets a North Star.

JD Dillion: There's a lot less ego when you're here to help. It's not the trendy conversation, right? Like, it's not AI-enabled help. I think it just puts a meaningful filter on the conversation. And I also think it allows you to kind of see through trends and hype. And when—again, when things are a good idea in a conference room but not a great idea in practice. When it just comes down to, you know, I'm not here to help people learn, I'm not here to help people develop skills. Those things might happen as a result of what we're going to do. I'm just here to help you do what you need to do or do what you want to do. And I don't think we talk about that enough in the workplace in general, in the profession of learning and development. I think somehow, some people might think it's less than. Like, it's not complex enough, it's not technology-enabled enough, it's not rigorous enough.

Mike Courian: It's not enough results.

JD Dillion: Yeah, it's just "hit the KPIs is what you need help with, I'll help you do that." I think in a lot of cases, it's just people need to feel confident in what they need to do and feel connected to the workplace. Let's—let's help you do that.

Mike Courian: Yeah, and I think that's a lovely bridge into...

Mike Courian: ...talking a little bit more. Can you give me a whistle-stop tour of where your career has taken you? And we've obviously already covered or mentioned some of your time in the cinema and Disney World. But take us through from there to where else the twists and turns have taken you in terms of experience so that we just get this picture of the broad frontline perspective that you have.

JD Dillion: So I spent about five years in the world of movie theaters, bounced around a couple of different locations, open locations, and at the same time got a part-time job at Disney World, because it was, it was a fun thing to do on the weekends and I wasn't in charge.

And then very quickly realized, oh, I really like this place. I had always liked it as a kid. I'm one of those people who is very much aligned with the magic and believes in the impact of what people experience in that environment in a theme park and, you know, connect to the stories that the company tells.

So I found a way to transition into—I tell a story in my new book about how I went about transitioning into management at Disney and the cross-training journey that I went on. And then I eventually, after being a manager for a couple of years, found myself in the right place at the right time to take on a position in the learning development project team, became a facilitator, and then eventually started designing and building content.

And then, unfortunately, my team was disbanded. I went back to operations, but at the same time got a phone call from outside the organization, from my former boss's boss, who was building a team in another organization. So that's how I jumped into the world of higher education contact centers. So I was learning and developing the frontline contact center operations for several years.

And then spent a little bit of time in the world of global logistics before jumping into technology, where I had partnered with Axonify several times as a customer, kind of speaking at events and delivering webinars. I was like a kind of very excited customer to try to tell the story of what we were doing, and then joined the team 10 years ago. So I spent 10 years getting a chance to collaborate with some really smart technologists and learn from our customers around the world and understand, you know, the frontline...

JD Dillion: ...different spaces I've worked in hands-on, as well as different spaces where I've been able to support through technology. At one point, we supported upwards of four million people around the world, helping them do their best work every day. And along the way, I was exploring different ways to tell stories, so I started speaking in the industry, started writing in a variety of different places, wrote my first book during the pandemic, released in 2022, and I'm about to release my next book, which is telling that complete frontline story. So, not just kind of my journey along the last 20 years of working with and being in support of the frontline workforce in these kind of different ways of seeing it from all these different perspectives and different spaces and contexts, but also working with dozens of contributors from around the world in different industries and roles to help tell a more kind of complete, empathetic, grounded, practical frontline story. That's where we are today, getting ready for the release of the book.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I want to really set the scene for frontline work. And so, let's bring in anyone who's listening that doesn't come from that world. How do you introduce them to the things that are unique about frontline work? Paint that picture for us.

JD Dillion: What's really interesting about the frontline workforce is that we all have a relationship with them. Even if you don't directly support frontline workers, they play a major role in your everyday life. You go out to eat, there they are. You go to the retail store, there they are. You make a phone call because your phone bill is incorrect, you need to talk to somebody about that, that's who's picking up the phone. So, we all have a relationship with the frontline, and we all have an opportunity to advocate for and to meaningfully support the experience of frontline workers.

And then, if you kind of zoom into organizations and professionals who are part of these teams, who are working every day to enable performance on the frontline, something that I like to remind people is that the frontline workforce is not one thing. So, even if we take one company, let's take a telecommunications company as an example, whoever you bought your phone from. Well, they have field workers who are out repairing cable lines and on towers every day, so they have remote team members like that. They have those contact center agents that you're going to...

JD Dillion: ...and a call to get an upgrade or something's wrong with your bill, and then the retail stores where you're going to go in and buy the latest version of a mobile device.

Those three people work in the same organization, but their day-to-day realities are very different. But even within those differences, there's a set of shared attributes that I think fuses the frontline together and helps us have a conversation that can move across industries. Because I do think there's a lot of nuances to working in grocery versus working in manufacturing versus working in healthcare. But there's a lot of those attributes that allow us to kind of share practices across spaces, to learn from one another, to have a broader conversation about the frontline or the deskless workforce.

And those are factors like the fact that a lot of these people are mobile. They don't sit at desks. There are some exceptions: people who work in contact center operations, maybe people who work the front desk at a healthcare facility. There are people who do work desk-based frontline jobs, but the majority of these folks are on the move, whether it's in one facility or between different locations.

As a result, they have inconsistent access to technology. Even if they do have access to technology, they may be using a lot of different types of devices, so it's not laptops and desktops. It might be handheld scanners, wrist-mounted devices, personal mobile phones, radio devices. So there's a lot of different technology in their world, but it's meaningfully different from the relationship that we have with technology as corporate workers.

This work is very structured. They are operations-focused all the time. They work in scheduled shifts. They are directed. They do not get to make a lot of decisions or have a lot of autonomy. A frontline employee generally can't say, "You know what I'm going to do right now? I'm going to go take 30 minutes of additional training." That's not a thing that happens. They have to ask permission for pretty much any use of time because labor hours are so tightly controlled, because they're one of the biggest budgetary levers that management has.

As a result, these team members are micromanaged, directly assigned tasks, physically put in position. And they also work in very challenging environments, very constrained...

JD Dillion: environments, where it's physically and emotionally challenging work, high-risk, high-compliance, very SOP and compliance-driven. And the last one I'll say is that it's also a meaningfully varied workforce, where it's a group of people who are doing a lot of the same jobs. That's what's interesting, you compare the calculus of frontline and corporate work. In the corporate office, you may have 500 employees who do 400 different jobs, and they're all hired as specialists into those roles. You look at the frontline workforce for that same company, they have 20,000 frontline employees who do seven different jobs. So it's a lot of people doing very similar work, but those individuals are meaningfully different.

Different experiences, different motivations, different reasons for being here, different skills they bring in. In the same induction class, sitting next to one another, you have someone who's worked in retail for 30 years and previously worked for this company, sitting right next to a 17-year-old who's never had a job before and has no idea what they're doing. And they're figuring it out together. Which again, is not something that you commonly see in the corporate space. So it's those attributes that if you, if you look at them and apply them to all these different industries, you see them across the frontline workforce, even if the work that's being done is different.

Mike Courian: That is so helpful. And, and it's so obvious you have a lot of experience in this space. I'm just reviewing those attributes and they're really interesting. There's so many places I want to go. But, I'm going to let you lead it. You posed something interesting to me around how technology can help strengthen parts of the frontline workers' experience. Do you want to go there for me and, and let's explore that for a little while?

JD Dillion: Even in the last couple of years, it's been interesting to watch the relationship between frontline work and technology evolve because in 2019, if I was having a conversation about where technology fits in a variety of different frontline spaces, through the pandemic that changed. Because suddenly, screens became more popular. A lot more hardware got pushed into the frontline because

JD Dillion: Business models changed. Because now people were ordering online and picking up by the curb in retail and grocery environments, right? And now you add AI on top of that, and there's a considerable opportunity to meaningfully impact how work is done, especially in certain places where technology is easier access.

Now you have environments like a manufacturing facility, where you cannot bring devices on the floor. It's a safety risk. There might be mounted screens at different work stations, and we can find ways to work within that, and I think that's part of the story about frontline technologies getting creative with how we integrate technology in the flow of work, because it's not naturally going to be there.

In my book, one woman who works in manufacturing talks about the fact that, well, if we want to put a device somewhere, we have to think about how we're going to drop power from the ceiling. Because there aren't just naturally outlets in the floor in this type of facility. So it's these types of decisions or strategies you have to come up with. It's meaningfully different again as compared to other types of work.

But when you look at what AI can do and the story around AI and changing work, I think it's another great example of how the frontline tends to get left out of the conversation about the future of the workplace. How long have we been talking about will they, won't they with remote work for the last couple of years, which is almost entirely irrelevant to the frontline workforce? And now in conversations about things like agentic AI, I very rarely see people think about or show examples of the meaningful ways that AI is impacting the frontline workforce.

Two of my favorite examples: one is language translation. So many people run into a barrier of basically being able to understand information, let alone learn or apply it, because it's not made available in either a language that they prefer, or they might not just be a great reader. So they may struggle with the basics in a way that then limits their opportunity to do a good job. Introduce AI to the conversation, and our ability to now automatically translate information at a very solid level, if not near perfect, now we don't have to make a decision as an organization to say, well, translation's time-consuming and expensive, yes.

JD Dillion: Which are the most popular languages and who are we leaving behind as a result? Now, with technology, we're even with AirPods we're getting to the point where we might be able to facilitate conversation in real-time very soon, in a way that I could have leveraged as an operations manager because I had several team members who spoke Haitian Creole because they're from Haiti. I couldn't have a one-on-one conversation with these team members. I always needed a go-between for anything that was a little more complex. Imagining how different, not just the work, but my relationship to people, would have been with this technology in hand.

But take that a step further. Well, now we can reinterpret information in a way that makes more sense to you because the SOP was probably written by a lawyer, for lawyers, not understood by the average human being. Well, now we can reinterpret information based on what's most comfortable for you or your preferred reading level. Or, yeah, if you're not a great reader, AI can talk to you. So you can ask questions of information and have it read back to you. Again, removing what seem like basic hurdles but meaningful obstacles that people often have to overcome in these types of jobs.

And then the one other example I would use is the digital assistant. The ability to unlock information in a way that doesn't force frontline workers to have to guess or rely on the person next to them who's going to tell them the real way we do it here, or have to wait for the manager who has a lot going on and can't be the go-to for everything, even though every email ends with, "If you have any questions, ask your manager." Managers don't know everything. So, the fact that we can now move from a world where if you don't know where the information is or you don't have an email address to log into that system, you can't get to it, to a situation where, no, we can put a—we can put a prompt field on every person's device and just let them ask. Gatekeep the information, right? Lock things down so they're not going to get incorrect information because these jobs are high-stakes jobs. If the wrong information comes across, it could put someone at risk. But within that kind of structure, there's just these basic but really impactful—

JD Dillion: ...obstacles we can help people overcome right now with this technology, let alone where we might be able to go with it when it comes to scaling and personalizing, and actually delivering the type of experience that fits this work, not just in learning and development, not just in performance, but in critical factors like how we schedule people more effectively, how we make sure get people get paid more effectively, how we foster connections between people within the organization.

So, a lot of different things we can do to kind of improve the foundations of frontline work through technology that are becoming more and more available to us, but again, not often talked about because it doesn't sound nearly as exciting as saying agentic a lot.

Mike Courian: Well, you've done something important for me in what you've just shared, which is it was hopeful. So much of my lens that I'm viewing a lot of the change at the moment, even though I kind of consider myself a power user and am trying to find new ways to automate different parts of my various roles that I do for this business, it's often so dystopian, and so I love this hopefulness. And I can see it pinging two things that you told us about earlier: one, you care about the experience people have, and two, you want to help.

And everything you just described was a beautiful way that this technology can be a conduit to help those flow easier. Help a better experience flow for the manager-worker relationship, but also for the worker-to-customer relationship, and then also, the fact that I could speak to my Haitian worker in their language, and I can manage the relationship. I can form the connection, rather than it being sort of a degree of separation.

And I'm guessing that hope and that positive outlook comes from you're seeing these things actually being put into place and starting to make a real difference. My concern has always been that people will actually be taken out of the equation, and that the secret goal...

Mike Courian: ...is to replace people, but I'm not hearing that in what you're saying. What am I missing?

JD Dillion: There's a reality we have to acknowledge and that, as I mentioned earlier, labor hours are the largest lever that frontline operations have to manage their budget, especially in low-margin businesses.

Mike Courian: And at this point, I've been wanting to ask you, what proportion of the workforce is frontline? Because I think we're talking about a lot of people. So what is that?

JD Dillion: 70 to 80% of the world is frontline workers, especially when you include folks like in agriculture and these types of spaces. 70 to 80% of the working world is on the frontline.

What's been interesting, yeah, because I think the important part of the story that I tell in my book is that, while I'm talking about improving the experience and I fully believe everyone deserves the support to do a good job, I find everyone who goes to work wants to do a good job. No one wants to get hurt today. No one wants to get yelled at. People are motivated in different ways. Some people are very into this role, and some people are very not into this job. Sometimes that's them, sometimes it's the job has turned them into kind of a disengaged, demotivated individual. And I've seen all sides of that. But in 25 years, I have never run into someone who just does not want to do good today. People want to feel proud of their work, they want to feel confident in their ability to do that job.

So people deserve support. At the same time, we can't come at this like it's an altruistic pursuit, because organizations are not out to deliver the best possible employee experience. They're out to drive outcomes. They have shareholders and stakeholders. So do we. So we have to balance that.

So I think we're in a critical place to be able to do that. To be able to adapt our strategies to apply tools, tactics, and technologies in a way that elevates the experience and, in doing so, drives the outcomes that people rely on the frontline to create. Because whether it's sales, customer satisfaction, safety, productivity, everything relies on the frontline team member...

JD Dillion: ...especially the frontline management team. So if we can do right by these people, help them elevate their confidence and capability, that connects to outcomes the organization's looking to achieve. But we have to justify these improvements and these investments based on business outcomes, not based on what's right or what's best for people, cuz it's unfortunately just not how a lot of business decisions are made. I've seen the organizations who do this really well can lift both sides of the equation at the same time. We just have to keep that in mind.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I think it's a win-win.

JD Dillion: Exactly. And that's what organizations who foster great frontline employee experiences, often are the most competitive and profitable in their industries. They have figured out how to make it work for them. So I think there's always ways to take pieces and parts from those stories and figure out, well, how does it work in your space? Cuz you can't just take what another company does and apply it in your world, cuz you're working with different people, different stakeholders, different products and services, but I know we can have both sides work out. We just have to keep those things in mind cuz too often we focus on one side or the other and then the strategy falls out of balance, and then no one gets what they're looking for.

Mike Courian: Yeah, I took notice of you calling out the frontline managers as possibly this very pivotal role that maybe isn't acknowledged as much as it could be. In the best you've seen of organizations when they're making wonderful systems for those frontline managers to operate in, how are they enabling those managers to get their best out of their people? Are there common themes that those organizations are doing? What are they doing to get the best out of them and how is that evolving as technology is changing at the moment?

JD Dillion: What's interesting right now is that as a lot of corporate teams are being impacted, whether it's being impacted by AI, being impacted by the potential of AI, being impacted because AI is being used as a reason for organizations to make changes, to restructure, all of those different things that companies do, we're seeing greater investment move...

JD Dillion: ...towards the frontline workforce, specifically to the frontline management team. There is example after example of organizations that are either increasing pay, increasing training, changing the role, increasing staffing so that managers can do their jobs differently. Because I think organizations have figured out after several years of pulling back, of kind of pushing more and more demand, more and more outcome, less and less labor resource towards the frontline, I think a lot of companies have figured out kind of where the breaking point is.

And in a lot of cases, they've lost a lot of know-how from managers that they relied on for a long time. I know of several companies who talked about the fact that their average tenure dramatically changed during the pandemic. Because they had these people, either in senior employee roles or in manager roles, that had worked there for 10, 20 years, knew how everything worked, and you could rely on them during periods of change because they would prop up the organization. And then, for different reasons, they walked away. And you're left with a considerably less experienced crew, and when we try to fill in the gaps from a management succession perspective, it's a lot of next person up. It's not necessarily the right person. It's not necessarily a person who's either interested in being a manager or has the people skills to be a manager. It's just you're the most experienced employee, you understand how this operation runs, now you're in charge of people. Go.

40% of frontline managers think twice about having taken this job because they didn't know what they were stepping into. I firmly believe being a frontline manager is the hardest and most important job in any organization because they are the single point of failure. They're responsible for making everything the corporate team wants to happen or needs to happen actually come to life inside of the operation, and they've got to deal with the complexity of people. How do we motivate people to perform? How do we drive change through the members of the team? They're also facing the customer. They're the kind of last point of response for challenging customer situations. The biggest issue facing frontline employees today, it's not pay. Pay is top three. It's difficult for customers.

JD Dillion: ...because the level of incivility hitting the front line over the last couple of years is way beyond anything that we've seen before in most spaces. And it's the manager who sits in the middle. And the the kind of tagline I use to talk about the importance of frontline managers is that your employees on the front line, they don't work for your company. They work for their manager. They never see the rest of the company. What they do see and what they do respect is the person who hired them, trains them, pays them, promotes them, coaches them, and knows their name. And that's generally not the rest of the organization.

So, if a if a manager, a good frontline manager can take a decent job and turn it into an exceptional experience that people talk about forever. A bad manager can take a decent job and turn it into a nightmare. So, it's if there's one place to invest, if there's one thing we can improve that's going to domino and echo across the rest of the of the operation, it's the frontline manager and helping them. And like I, like I said earlier, it's about making sure they have time, they have the resources, they have the support, they have go-tos.

One of the most powerful things that you can do is connect managers with other managers. Cuz so often people are on an island, right? They're the only person there. They run their store, they run their location. They've got questions. They might not know what they're doing, but they have no peers, and they can't go ask their boss, because you can't really admit to your boss that you don't know what you're doing, especially if it's causing you to miss goals. But there are, again, thinking about the scale of the front line, so many other people out there.

When I managed movie theaters, there were hundreds of other locations. I just didn't know who was there, and I wasn't going to start cold-calling other theaters and say, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing. Do you know what you're doing?" So, just the ability to—it's not even about formal training programs, right, and leadership development. It's simple things like making sure managers have time, the appropriate amount of labor hours, the right resources, the ability to call on their peers for help when they need it. So, it's putting that scaffolding around this individual, because we know...

JD Dillion: We got a lot of people in role today, and we're going to promote a lot of people into these jobs that aren't ready, that maybe don't have foundational skills. We could wish that we'd always be able to find the right people, but the math doesn't work for us, right? Because if you have 20,000 locations, you need 20,000 location managers. What are the odds that you have 20,000 people ready to go all the time? You just don't.

So instead of thinking about the perfect way to kind of build an emerging set of leaders, how do we put scaffolding around the position so that everyone has a chance to become a great manager? But then around that, start making decisions differently about who we promote, who's in the job, who shouldn't be in the job, these types of factors.

Mike Courian: I'd never seen it so clearly that the whole weight of sort of the system that comes down from the top meets at this very person who has to do all the translation to the people that they manage. It's so much expectation, maybe entirely unspoken, but you can almost feel the magnitude coming down the pipes and and hitting this exit point. It's really intense when you consider it. And time, labor hours, the resource made available to them, and connecting with their peers. Connecting with peers really stood out to me.

How do organizations make space, or does the manager, to be honest, just have to be proactive and do it outside of work hours? How do organizations make space for that connection? Because I know what you're saying, it's like the secret unlock, but it feels like totally counterproductive to when they have operational requirements and deadlines. How are organizations managing that tension?

JD Dillion: In my book, I have various stories that are told by people in frontline roles, so people who are today employees and managers in different industries to, again, ground the conversation in reality. So it's not what I think is happening, it is what they tell us is actually happening. And one of those individuals is a manager of a hair salon. And in her interview, she talked repeatedly about how she calls this one other salon manager three, four

JD Dillion: ...times a day. Sometimes it's just a talk and be like, "Can you—do you believe what's going on right now?" or "Do you believe that decision that the company made?" And sometimes it's, "Hey, how would you do this?" or "Hey, you having this problem over there?" So, it's, I think we tend to kind of over-structure connection. Like, it's got to be a meeting on the third Thursday of every month, we're going to get together and talk about how things are going, as opposed to saying, "Well, maybe there's still structures."

I think there's tremendous opportunity and value in leveraging technology to foster more connectivity, cohort-based activity in frontline teams, because again, you're often so siloed into what's happening in your building when there are other people going through the same training program or the same experience. And some partners I've worked with talk a lot about using technology to make big companies feel small on the frontline.

So, I think there's tremendous opportunity to leverage it in a structured way, but sometimes it's just letting people know who's out there, making those introductions. If you're new to the company or you're new to this role, who do I call? Who's willing to take my call? How do you create those connections? Because I'm not going to accidentally run into the other manager. And I had the benefit, especially when I worked at Disney, I worked on larger management teams. I had 12 other "me's" on these teams. I didn't see people a lot because we worked opposing shifts, so we kind of saw each other in the handoff.

But there were certain people I got to spend time with. And one person I talk a lot about in the book is a woman named Kathy. Kathy was an epic frontline manager. She had worked at the company forever, since before I was born, and she had a level of trust and respect from the team members that I just didn't understand right away. And I had to spend time with her and just listen to her. She didn't necessarily teach me. We didn't sit down and go through lessons or go through SOPs, but I just got to work with her and see how she worked with people and connected with people, and how she prioritized the operational side of what we did and the human side of what we did. And I basically went to school for a summer with Kathy. And it changed me in a meaningful way because I came into that job with five years of management...

JD Dillon: ...experience. But I didn't know what it was to be a frontline manager like that until I got to spend a couple months alongside Kathy. Way more valuable than any amount of time I would have... that I could have spent in a classroom, right? Or completing e-learning modules that tell me what these things are supposed to be. So it's- it's those types of moments, whether it's formal mentorship, those kind of informal connections where you just know you got someone to call, and they're going to pick up because they're having the same experience that you're having, or a group text message chain, or a Teams channel that you can go to, or just installing these connection points that you can pull on if you need to as a manager, and then surrounding that with the more structured opportunities to connect with people, to talk through different activities, to learn alongside one another.

But starting with the informal, and then building on top of it, rather than starting with the structured, and then that slamming directly into the reality of the job, which is, you know, you could schedule a 30-minute call weeks in advance, you didn't know the delivery was going to be like that that day, and that customer was going to be particularly upset about something, and the weather was going to be bad, and that's just the reality. Every day as a frontline manager, you go in with a plan, and the plan never happens because three people call in sick, and you still got to open the doors on time.

Mike Courian: Yeah, interesting. When it's informal, how do you make sure it happens? I imagine a lot of managers are longing for it to happen. The two managers at the hair salon, that's almost friendship, and it's camaraderie, and it's all these things. But when somebody's new, and they don't have that person or a- a channel established, how do you help the informal happen?

JD Dillon: I think that's where additional support is necessary, and where a- a great use of L&D's time can be, is continuing to touch base with, spending time with, visiting people who are in that position, rather than, like you said, assuming something is going to happen, or making it awkwardly formal in a way where it's- it's less organic, less relationship-oriented, less about building trust and more about checking a box, which is unfortunately what...

Mike Courian: ...out of training or a lot of mentorship activity can feel like.

JD Dillion: Absolutely. I think it's giving people a lot of different opportunities, because people may want to connect in different ways. Some people may be way more comfortable sharing information in a text chat, getting a bunch of thoughts back. Other people may definitely not want to do that, and may be more about finding that one person that they can call on and regularly, you know, making that connection in a different way.

So I think it's not assuming that one way is going to work for anybody. It's having constant conversations with the people who do these jobs and asking, "What will make your life easier? Right? What will help you be successful in the job?" Not making it, like I said in the very beginning of our conversation, not making it about what I think is right, or what would be helpful to me. What meets the moment? What helps the most number of people? And then how can we fill in the gaps for other folks, and not just assume people want to engage.

But at the same time, challenge people, right? Because people may have been engaging with or using tools for, in a certain way, for a long, long time, and may not have explored new ideas or new opportunities. So trying out and piloting and testing things, but anytime we try to introduce a new tactic, or a new program, or a new solution, doing it in a way where we validate that it's going to work and then leverage the voices of the people that we're supporting to advocate for it.

Because I have never found that any frontline team or management team wants to be the L&D department. They want to hear from people like them, who are doing this job, dealing with the same challenges, and they want to hear that something new is helpful from someone who's in the role, not senior management, who doesn't do this job or hasn't done it lately, and not support teams who may, in a lot of cases, not spend a lot of time inside of that environment, or at least not visibly.

And that's another reason why I always tell L&D people, sign things with your name, instead of putting like, "the department" behind everything. My relationship, when I was in contact centers, with the people I was supporting meaningfully changed when we introduced a wiki as a knowledge management platform, and it wasn't just because we

JD Dillion: ...trying to put information in their hands on demand, they could self-serve their way through problems, all the things that shared knowledge practices do. I noticed that I was very quickly going from a person most people had never interacted with, that you only recognized when you heard me talk, because I was the voice in the e-learning. And when people noticed that, it—I didn't necessarily get high-fives when they realized who I was, when my voice became apparent. But when my face and my name got attached to all of these articles that we were publishing, because I was listed as the author in a lot of cases, or if you asked a question in the knowledge base and I showed up and answered the question and helped you solve a problem in the moment of need, all of a sudden, I was getting messages asking for help. Or all of a sudden, I was in conversations with people I'd never met, but they knew who I was. So, my relationship as the L&D guy changed because my face was plastered all over the solutions I was trying to provide in a way that was connecting people to me because, suddenly, I was the guy who was trying to help. I wasn't this learning and development or training entity that people couldn't connect to because I was a depar—a support department.

Mike Courian: Yeah, you gave space to make it personal.

JD Dillion: Yeah, I created a relationship and a connection because I was a person trying to help, and you could see me doing it in real-time versus, "Oh, you have a problem? I'll be back in six months after we go through an analysis, and develop, and get things approved," and all of that kind of stuff. No, I'm on the ground with you, even if you can't—you, I've never been in your facility, but I'm there with you because you can see me acting alongside you. So, the more that we can do that in the way that we're supporting people, the more it's about people helping people, not function helping people, and the more trust we're going to build, the more we're going to understand the people we're supporting, and the more we're going to have a conversation about it rather than just constantly kind of pushing information or training at people.

Mike Courian: Before we totally leave this space, I'd love to ask, what are the things you remember learning...

Mike Courian: Kathy, what were the things that she did remarkably well?

JD Dillion: I'll start with an odd example and kind of pull it back from there. Kathy was the first manager I ever saw lend an employee money. Now, I'm not saying that you should lend your team members money because that is, that's a level of trust and relationship that a lot of people are never going to get to. But, I built on top of that kind of an understanding of how she was building relationships with team members, and getting to know people not just as workers but as people.

And, I understood that was important before then because I had previous manager experience. I felt like I had developed some solid relationships with people along the way. But, she showed me what it was like to take that to another level and to make time for that, and to have a meaningful conversation in the moments that you have on the job.

And, yes, I was, and she was the type of manager who, you know, we didn't work 40-, 50-hour weeks. We worked 70-hour weeks. Because, it was in those last 10, 20 hours that you got to actually focus on the people side of the job because you were spending the rest of the time focused on customers, and services, and the nuts and bolts day-to-day process. But, I saw, I saw what it was like to care and to have a meaningful conversation, but at the same time, respect the boundaries. The money thing might have slid over the boundaries a little bit, not to say anyone should do that. But, it was that moment where I went, "You can do that."

But, to be a manager that people could trust and could go to and have very personal conversations with, and at the same time, respect their authority, and know that, "I can't push. Like, there's a line here. I'm going to have to hold you accountable. I'm going to have to write you up if you do something wrong, or if you don't come to work regularly. We're going to have that conversation." And, in the book, there's a moment where I show you how, I didn't necessarily say that Kathy caused the change. But, Kathy was one of the people that impacted me in such a way where I learned a different version of being a manager. And, I just, I, I walk through the story of how, when I was a younger manager, there was a situation that happened with an employee and I made a certain decision and it was a by-the-book decision. I executed the rule because that's what I thought my job was. And, then, you fast forward...

JD Dillion: three years, and in that time, I've changed roles, changed companies, but also gone through that experience with Kathy and several other peers. And a very similar moment happens and I've learned by that point it's not a black and white situation. Yes, there are rules. Yes, there are guidelines. But I have to consider the bigger picture: how making this decision is going to impact the team, how making this decision is going to impact the person involved. And I made a very different decision that caused a very different outcome. At no point in there did I go through a learning and development program that taught me how to be a better manager. I just had the right experiences with the right peers that helped me kind of see the bigger picture of what we were doing here. Yes, I was running a business, but a business is a group of people working together to accomplish a goal, and I think that's always true of teams, but I think it's especially true of frontline teams because again, you don't see the other teams, you don't see the bigger company, you see the people you work with every day. And I believe frontline employees are not here to drive your corporate goals. They're very proud of when they do hit the goals, but they often don't necessarily feel the outcomes of those goals. They're here for the success of one another, and when they have a great relationship with the manager, they will go the distance to help that manager be successful as well. And I think that that team dynamic is also what I learned over time through members of my team. But yeah, that ability to facilitate and kind of make those personal connections, but at the same time, be the authority figure that's going to have to make tough decisions, but to consider both sides in that decision-making is something I picked up along the way.

Mike Courian: It's so cool. Even just the story of her creates such a sense that she had a spacious character. It was clear to them that she had space for them. And I just think that's so cool. I love that. So Kathy, wherever you are, we admire you and we thank you for your work and the impact you had on the people around you. But JD, I want to transition now to just ask a few questions about this thing that you've poured your heart into, your most recent book. So it's called *The Frontline*

Mike Courian: ...line enablement playbook, and it's due out on May the 5th this year. Want to know, why did you write it? Why now?

JD Dillion: I've been trying to advocate for and get frontline conversations into the professional community for a long time. So, it's not a new pursuit by any means. And I have found that we just weren't ready to talk about this part of the workforce. I think because it's complicated. I think because it's very hard to get your arms around the frontline team. But at the same time, I think it's often hard for people who are in support roles within frontline organizations to see themselves as part of the larger professional community.

I know that was true for me because I was so in my bubble, right? I didn't come from learning and development or HR. I came from the operation. I moved into a space where I was now responsible for helping other people do a job. And it took me a while, and some kind of right time, right place, to realize there was a bigger conversation out there. There were conferences and other people in the industry that I could learn from. There was social networking and all of these different factors that helped me become a better learning professional. But it took me a while to see myself.

And then I do think, in the last couple of years, the conversation around the frontline workforce changed. It changed as part of the pandemic, but I also think it changed coming out of the pandemic, where we now got a very definitive example of how much we rely on people, how much they drive not just our organizations, but our communities forward in meaningful ways. And I think there's now space for that conversation in a way that we maybe weren't ready to have several years ago.

So, I told my publisher after my first book that if this goes well, if people like the first book, and you want to go again, this is the book I want to write. Let me know when you're ready to tell this story. And then it took a couple of years, but they came back around and said, "Okay, we want to, we want to do a frontline book." And then I surprised them a little bit, and I said, "Well, here's what, here's the deal. Uh, I can't write this by myself. I know a lot about space. I've spent my entire career working with frontline workers, but I don't work in every industry. I haven't worked in every part of the world."

JD Dillion: ...any help. I'm going to need to go find those people at the beginning of this project. So, I went out in search of people who would help me tell the frontline story, again, in a practical, grounded, empathetic, but outcome-driven way, and I wanted people to contribute who were doing the job today. Of course, some people who work in roles like me, who are maybe more on the consultant side, the technology side, but, like I mentioned, people who are in frontline jobs, people who are managing frontline teams, people who are L&D or HR or executives or operations or people who are around the frontline space in as many spaces, regions, industries as I could.

And what it came down to over the last two years, I worked with more than 100 people overall, but 50 people are named contributors in the book who shared their story, shared their practices, shared an anecdote about their experience as a frontline employee. And I, along with my editors and my contributors, pulled together what I'm what I'm referring to as three pounds of insight because it's about 680 pages or so. So, it's a—it's a long story.

But it took that much content and that many pages to tell what I felt was a representative story about what we can do today to help people do their best work every shift. And on the back of the book, at the top of the summary, there's a tagline that I'm using as part of the storytelling around the book, which is, "Every shift counts."

And that's what I'm trying to accomplish with this book is, I know I can't fix everything. I can't help people get paid better. I can't necessarily help people get better health benefits as part of their job, but what I know we can do as part of this conversation is to give people a chance to do their best every time they clock in. We can try to make every shift count, and every shift be an opportunity not just to perform, but to learn and to do a little bit better, and to develop yourself, maybe in service of this company and this job, maybe for what you're going to do later on. And it's also a fun play on words. Every shift counts in the world of shift-based workers, but every small shift that we can make strategically in how we evolve our practices in a way that makes sense and fits the frontline work...

JD Dillion: course, the frontline's going to be better for it, and the organization is going to be more successful for it. So, that's a journey we've been on for two years, coming up like you said on May 5th. And if anyone out there is curious, wants to learn more about the story that we're telling, the book is now available for pre-order. Information is at frontlineplaybook.com or the even more fun URL, jdwroteanotherbook.com will also take you there.

But, yeah, very excited for the book to release and then for all the storytelling that we're going to do around it because I see the book as part of the journey and part of the conversation, not the end of the story.

Mike Courian: Yeah, really the start. Can you give us a tease on what in the playbook do we have missing from our understanding so that we can be making every shift count?

JD Dillion: The longest chapter in the book has nothing to do with learning and development or training or things that I think we would consistently or typically consider to be kind of in the domain of what we do as people who enable performance on the job. There's a reason the book is called *The Enablement Playbook*, not *The Learning Playbook* or *The Training Playbook*.

The longest chapter is about community and connection, and we talked about it already in our conversation today, but I believe if you don't take that factor into account, thinking about how people are motivated and how they connect their work to the bigger outcomes and mission of the organization, it doesn't matter how much training you provide or how much performance support you provide, it's not going to land in the way that's going to give people in your organization a chance to do their best.

So, we really dive into this idea of what community means on the frontline, and different examples from my own work, from other contributors' work, of how they were able to foster connection in service of driving meaningful performance. So, it's those additional dimensions to the story that will hopefully round it out and help you maybe identify why is our training not landing, or why are our kind of traditional tools and tactics not working. Maybe we haven't considered part of the frontline experience in a way that'll help kind of drive our tools to be more successful because—

JD Dillion: always say, it's not about getting rid of everything. You don't have to completely stop what you're doing today. A lot of practices that are most common in the frontline, like hands-on job training, it's the number one way frontline employees learn to do the job. You don't learn how to weld on the internet. You learn how to weld by working with an experienced peer who will show you the trade and help you work through it. So, those things continue, but how do we augment them? Or how do we make them that much more impactful? So, that's kind of the view that we take.

What I hope people respond to is that instead of just kind of writing a guide book, where step one, step two, step three, I don't think that's the way this works. I think every organization, context, and environment's different. You have different tools, different technologies, different devices, different rules and regulations. So, instead of just kind of giving you a list of things to do, we wrote a story where you follow me on the journey of, you know, discovery, myself figuring out why these different factors are important, how we can bring them to life. And then, I integrate the stories of everyone else who contributed. So, you can, you know, if you just want to read chapter five because chapter five is the thing that you're struggling with today, you can just pick up chapter five and go. Or if you want to read front to back, 680 pages worth of storytelling, it might take you a little while, carve some time out of your schedule, you can also read the full narrative, and it builds on itself to tell the story of the people who are doing this work and the people who are doing their best to support them.

Mike Courian: Amazing. I'm very excited for you. To bridge from that world into the world of many of the listeners of the podcast that aren't in a frontline context, I would love to know, as sort of our last thing to round us out, where do you throw your dart first when it comes to forming that sense of connection amongst workers? And particularly, if we're going moving from the frontline context to a non-frontline context, where's your best guess? Where's your hunch of how we do that in today's working world?

JD Dillion: My immediate thought is intention. And let's take it out of the frontline space and apply it to remote workers in a corporate environment. You don't build...

Mike Courian: ...meaningful relationships over Microsoft Teams?

JD Dillion: The things that come naturally, or at least maybe at some point came naturally, get that much harder even when technology's involved in the conversation.

So, I've been a remote worker for the past 15 or so years, for the most part. And I feel like I watched people form a community versus being involved in it in a lot of cases. Let's take a simple meeting as an example that I'm joining remotely, but maybe some other people are in the room. I'm watching people, often muted, because they don't turn the audio on until the meeting begins. So I'm sitting in silence, unable to talk to anybody in the room because I can't pick one person and have a—right, if I say something, the entire room's going to hear it.

But I'm watching people have those side conversations where relationships are built. I'm watching people talk about the fact that their kids are in the play tomorrow and they're going to leave early because of this, or they're going to dinner later—whatever those side conversations are. That's the connection. That's community. That comes to life then in the work later on. But it requires intention when it's not part of the natural order or how things work. And I think that's why—that's where a lot of remote teams fall down, is because we don't have that. And you're not going to just naturally Slack message people those side conversations, especially if you haven't built relationships with them already.

So I think it's also true in the frontline where if we—yeah, there's an example in the book where I talk about a retailer who specifically carved out a huge chunk of day one of onboarding. Instead of front-loading the training and saying, "Well, we've got to get the compliance taken care of, right? Before you get on the job, there's all these things, so we're going to sit you in a back room for six hours, you're going to click next to continue," which still happens to a lot of people in frontline jobs. I've seen people stand up and leave and never come back from that particular experience. It's called a quick quit.

So instead of that, this retailer said, "No, you have two—you can do two hours of training on the first day. The rest of that time needs to be spent on the floor with peers and with the manager building the connections," because they realized people don't necessarily come back for work. They come back because they like the people, especially early on. So if they start making friends and they start realizing, "Oh, this is a good manager here..."

JD Dillion: ...not going to risk the job down the street. I don't know what that manager's like. This person seems like they're going to be good. That's the intention in fostering that connection, rather than just hoping that people make friends on the job when it's so important as part of the frontline community.

So, how do we bring intention to the workplace? Who's responsible for doing that? Because if it's just up to the manager, well, managers are overwhelmed in corporate environments, too. They're also expected to be individual contributors as well as manage the team. Great managers can figure out how to balance those things out. Not everyone has a great team manager.

So, are there people within your organization, preferably not the HR function, because I think we default to, "well, that's an HR thing." No. Just because it involves people doesn't mean it's HR's responsibility. Are there human beings who are responsible for the experience of work? Maybe they share it with HR, maybe they don't. But it's their job to think about this kind of stuff and say, "how do we foster connection in a hybrid or remote workforce? Where do we input that intention into how work is done, how the systems of work function?" So, it's not just about productivity, getting the tasks done. It's about building relationships and connections that are going to make the work stronger and also keep people here longer because they're not just working for the KPI of themselves, they're working for the team.

So, it all comes down to: what does intention look like in your workplace? And how do we make sure that there are people responsible for putting that in place and then evolving it as the work evolves? Because what works today may not work two years from now.

Mike Courian: JD, it's been so fun to listen to, I'm going to say, your stories. And you said that at the top. You said, "maybe it's cliché," but I don't think it is at all. You are a great storyteller, so I really want to affirm that.

But what I think makes the stories vivid for me is they were very grounded, and they were very practical. And so I just wanted to echo, those were two of the words you gave me at the top. So thank you for having the vigilance to stay in this domain and build this vast picture and perspective because you...

Mike Courian: articulate it really well. I've not been that frontline worker before, but I feel like I've been on a journey and I can really see it clearly. And, and you know what I've been so struck by is you're describing a universal human experience. Now, we don't all have to deal with, face-to-face with customers, we don't all have to, face some of the challenges that the frontline workforce is facing at the moment, but we sure do, outside of work, there's a million ways that we have this experience. Like you said, that 75, 80% have a huge impact on the world. And so, thank you for being in this space, and thank you for all you've shared with us. It's been a real fun journey for me. I've really enjoyed it.

JD Dillion: It's my pleasure to tell the story and hopefully I do a good enough job representing and advocating for a workforce that, you know, we rely on every day for everything in our lives, let alone in our kind of professional existence. And I just want to echo the point that you just made and that I made at the top of our conversation. We can all support the frontline workforce. We're all part of the story in a way that we're not for the corporate team. Right? You don't regularly run into the corporate teams of different organizations that you might work around or buy the products and services of. But you will see a restaurant server this week, you will see a retail associate, you will see a grocery clerk. We can all help them have a better day.

So, if I also hopefully can inspire some folks to think differently about those interactions, because it goes a, a simple thank you or, "You're doing a good job," or, "Thanks for being here," goes a long way for people who are doing this kind of work. So, in addition to advocating and supporting our, in our professional lives, we can, we can all be part of the frontline story in our, in our everyday lives as well.