An L&D and HR conversation with… series will feature video interviews with leaders in Learning & Development and Human Resources, sharing learnings, trends and challenges from some of the region’s leading organisations.

How would you describe yourself in three words?

Damien: I think I always start with curious and people probably would describe me as energetic, which I think is true and networker. I love meeting people.

What are you most excited about in the next 12 months?

Damien: There’s so much going on in the next twelve months in our business. I’m most excited about how myself and my team of learning people actually help advance the strategy in our business. I love that really strong connection between what we spend our time on and how we are achieving our strategic objectives as a business.

And I think with our ways of working at 7-Eleven there’s a very, very clear connection between the work that we all do and what the company is trying to achieve. And so I’m really excited to be able to demonstrate how we can help the business get to where the business needs to get to, and that’s going to entail lots of different things but driving the business strategy.

How far is the potential of Agile ways of working to maximise learning and skills development?

Damien: I think the potential of our ways of working, Agile ways of working, is enormous given that most of the preeminent thinkers around modern learning in the business environment talk about the overlap between work and learning. So learning is work, work is learning and we all know that we learn most of what we learn at work by doing our work.

Our ways of working really try and close those gaps. So one of the really important elements for any of us if you’re trying to learn something, is the practise of reflection. Thinking about stuff, reflecting on what worked, what didn’t and thinking about ways that we could do things differently to improve.

We bake that into every fortnight for everyone in our business with a retro, an Agile ceremony where that’s exactly what we spend time on with the people we’re working with. And we’ve added layers on top of that to drive deliberate, reflective practise that everyone undertakes on a regular basis.

So there are the ceremonies that are indicative of agile which embed in them particular learning behaviours. Collaboration is another one where structurally we have chapters in our business and chapters are made up of people with the same skill set. And the requirement here is you come together at least monthly, a lot of people, a lot of chapters do it nightly and you collaborate with your peers about their work, what they’re learning, their approaches to that. We’ve built that scaffolding and infrastructure using agile ways of working to foster behaviourally what really matters with learning. Another one would be feedback. And so we have an Agile ceremony where feedback is a really critical part of it.

As a Chapter Lead I have my people working in squads all over the business. I go and speak to the product owners of those squads and see how they’re going, seek feedback on how they’re contributing and then I have a one on one with them every fortnight and we pick that feedback back up and we plan for areas of improvement, et cetera.

We’ve made significant inroads. We’re a couple of years in, but I still see enormous upside in trying to dial up some of those really important behavioural pieces that are easier in agile ways of working.

What was the most challenging aspect of bringing agile to business?

Damien: There are lots of different challenges. I think that quite often agile is misunderstood as either a structural thing or an agile ceremony thing.

In essence, the value of agile is in a mindset and an approach to how we do what we do. So you want people thinking differently about how they approach their work. Now, mindsets are very difficult to change and I think that you can’t tell someone the way you think about that. “I need you to stop and think about it this way. Do that tomorrow, could you please?” We don’t work like that as humans.

Our mindset comes through experience and sometimes that takes time to shift. A lot of times it takes time to shift. So whilst it’s really, really critical to have the right mindset, things like getting stuff wrong doesn’t matter as long as you’re learning from it and you’re improving and you’re iterating on the back of that. Creating an environment where that psych safety is high and you can say that that’s okay as long as we’re approaching things in the right way. That takes time and it takes experiences that people have to say I know you’ve said that, but this is how I feel because it’s what’s happening around me and you just have to be prepared to go the journey on that. Because people have different change journeys and some get there really quickly and others take a longer time and some actually say this doesn’t feel right for me, I want to go back to a business who works the way that I was comfortable with. So it’s that change journey for people.

We’re over two years in now and so the people for whom it wasn’t right probably aren’t here anymore. And we’ve been able to recruit people in saying this is who we are today. “Does that sound like you?” And so I think we’re accelerating now in terms of that mindset piece, which really is where the value in agile comes.

How much of what you’ve achieved at 7-Eleven is applicable to other businesses of different sizes and maturity levels, without necessarily going fully agile?

Damien: I’ll talk about this at the symposium, but I think there are plenty of things that even if you’re not an agile business, you could take, pick up and learn from.

So test and learn is a common vernacular in our business. We like to take small bets and experiment with stuff, work out what works and what doesn’t. You don’t need to be agile to do that, but you do need to foster a culture where it’s okay to do that because testing and learning means things aren’t going to work. And again, culturally, if you can build an environment, even within a small team environment, say okay, this is how we’re going to do it, then you can create more value because the flip side of that is people are worried to get stuff wrong so they don’t push the boundaries enough.

Another thing I think which I’m quite fascinated by when we change to agile there are our ways of working. There are new agile roles. There’s the mindset piece. One of the things that within that change is the creation of what’s called the Chapter Lead. And I’m a Chapter Lead. I look after the learning people here and we have Chapter Leads around the business with different craft or skill sets that they look after. The role of the Chapter Lead is to be heavily invested in the growth of the people who report into them.

Any business can do that better by focusing on it. I’ve come across people leaders in my career who’ve been extremely good at the growth conversations and the growth experiences that they have provided for me. But equally I’ve come across a lot who have just focused on the work. “I need you to get this done”. And then there are other leaders who hoard people because they don’t want to let them go.

I think there are elements of the Chapter Lead role which if you could dial up with any people leader in any business, you’ll get incredible value from it. And that can be as simple as regular things that you do with your people and deliberate conversations around development.

We’ve got an annual cadence of everyone gets a one on one every two weeks. There’s a chapter sync every month. We do learning retros every six months. We do development conversations every six months. We do an end of year evaluation every twelve months. We get feedback on a regular basis. None of that is particularly unique to agile but Agile just dials it up a little bit. So I think there are things that any business can learn from and pick up and experiment with on small scales or larger scales to get to create value in the space of how you help your people learn and grow and foster a career.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received in your working life? 

Damien: Best bit of advice is probably to follow your passion and that the rest will fall into place. I would say I haven’t been at all deliberate in my career in the way that some people are. They’re very focused on I want to manage a large team, I want to work in a big company, I want to do X and Y and Z and I’m going to plan and I’m going to put things in place to help get me there. I’ve been much more ad hoc and I think it was advice very early on in my career. Do stuff that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning because it makes you tick. And if you do that the right things will appear to you at the right time and you’ll know what the right decisions are.

So follow something that you’ve got some passion about because otherwise, you just find yourself going through the motions. And it’s not a career, it’s a means to an end. So, yeah, follow your passion.

What are you most looking forward to at the L&D + HR Symposium?

Damien: Well, what I really love about these sort of events are the networking opportunities with people who are wired the same way that you are and the conversations that you can have.

I’m looking to grow my network as well. I love having a really strong network of people. There are a lot of people I’ve never met in person who are actively part of my network in digital spaces like LinkedIn. I have fascinating conversations about L&D with these people and met a lot of wonderful people that way. So for me, this is an opportunity to meet people and to grow my network and to learn from them.

And I’m really looking forward to some of the speakers. I’m fascinated to hear a little bit about AI, and I know we’ve built that into the agenda. It’s just evolving at such a pace that I think we all need a very strong grounding in what’s going on. So I’m looking forward to that part of the symposium.

And there’s so much rich content that will be covered, so it’ll be a great opportunity to reflect on where are my gaps and what do I want to grow next individually. So I’m staying relevant and up to date, so they’re high on my radar.

Will you be opting for wine tasting, golf or paint and sip?

Damien: They’re very difficult choices. I enjoy golf, but I think the people who play near me on a golf course probably don’t have the same experience, so I’ll probably give myself and them a bit of comfort in that. Won’t be my choice.

I do love my wine, so the fact that it’s in the lovely Hunter Valley and that may well be what I look at. Although the paint and sip also is particularly interesting. They’re two of my passions. I delve into art, although probably a little bit more niche. I don’t use the paintbrush, I used aerosol, but that’s another story. So the the idea of painting while sipping sounds particularly appealing.

L&D + HR Symposium, 1-2 August 2023, will bring together 180 L&D and HR professionals for a day of conference featuring inspiring international keynotes and the best local case studies.