From Corporate Climb to Team Triumph

Carlsbad, people, purpose, and impact, an essential podcast for those who live, work, visit, and play in Carlsbad.

Good morning, and welcome, everyone. My name is Brett Schonzenbach. I am the president and CEO of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce. And I'm your host today, and I'm very pleased to have with me Jani Jackson. Jani is the founder of Develop Your Team.

Good morning, Jani.

Good morning, Brett. Thank you so much for having me.

It's so good to have you here. This has probably been, you know, needed to be done a lot earlier, but we're here. So I'm excited about this. And, you know because you've you've told me you you listen to our podcast fairly regularly, so you know that I like to kinda go back and see, you know, what people's backgrounds were and things like that. So I saw that you got your BA in English lit at Cal State Northridge.

Yes.

And then headed over to Colorado later for, your master's in adult ed. So are you from are were you born and raised in Southern California? Or what what's the whole story there?

Practically.

Okay.

Born in Nebraska, but I only lived there for, like, 6 months. So I've been in Southern California since I was, like, 3. Yeah. California since 6 months. But, yeah.

You're a native.

Thank you. I'm essentially a native, and I've been in Carlsbad since 1981.

Okay. Quite a long time. And what what got you to Carlsbad in the first place?

My husband at the time, his company moved to San Marcos.

Okay.

And we had been excited to move out of LA for a long time.

Sure.

So this was perfect opportunity to get here.

Get out of that rat race for sure.

Yeah.

You spent, a significant amount of time with Farmers Insurance in your background. Tell us some of the roles you had when you were working there.

I started at Farmers in college, so it was my part time job in college. I did data entry on the night shift, and then I got into computer operations. And when I moved here, that job didn't exist in San Diego, so I handled automobile claims for a few years. And then Farmers built a regional office here, I got back in management information systems, did that for a long time, that office closed. So I did homeowner claims, which took me into the I I had this tendency to do the job and then supervise in the department.

Yeah. So I did that with homeowner claims and then got into training and then training manager, and that's how I got into leadership development and team building and those things that I'm doing now.

Very nice. And so you're in you're in leadership development with Farmers, and and you were there pretty, what, long time overall. But at some point, you left, and you decided to start develop your team. Why?

Because when so farmers restructured as companies do, and the opportunities available for me there were not in the same line of what I wanted to do. So I I left there and I had this opportunity that was also right when I was in the process of getting my master's degree in adult education and training. So I had this beautiful opportunity to think about, okay, what do I really wanna do? What are the best things about what I have been doing? And it was all about the teams and the relationships and the the coaching and how can I help people be better?

And, like, really the foundation for me, I I had some wonderful opportunities at Farmers to be part of teams that were phenomenal

Yes.

That could do anything. And because I was there for a really long time doing a lot of different things, I also had the opposite experience with the totally dysfunctional teams. And being at work is so much better when you're on one of those great teams.

Yeah.

And so, really, what drives me is wanting to help other people have that opportunity to be on those great teams that that kind work in that kind of place where you wake up in the morning or it's Sunday evening and you have to go back to work on Monday and you are excited because you get to go be with people you wanna be with and do things that are important to you.

I love that. As you know, we spend a lot of hours in the world of work. So, it's great if you can actually enjoy it and look forward to it and like your team and and click with your team. But before we dive in deeper on that, I wanna get back to you as a entrepreneur starting

Mhmm.

Up, develop your team. And, you know, coming from corporate, I know, you know, you had different roles with farmers, and so you were good at adapting and and shifting. But it's still I'm asking, but I I feel like it must have been a little bit scary leaving the corporate, environment where, you know, you got, like, a salary and that kind of thing, and then going completely on your own to start something new. Talk about that. Yeah.

Definitely scary. The the analogy that a a way that I think about it is I I have this idea that if I ever had skydived, which I have not, But I can totally picture myself in the door of the plane with the parachute on, everything ready, and not being able to jump and needing somebody to push me out the door. Yeah. And I feel like that's what happened.

Mhmm.

So, yes, it was scary, and I didn't know how I didn't know how to run a business. I knew how to do team building, and I knew how to do leadership and coaching, and that's how I found the chamber. Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully.

Yeah. But that was, they are. That's the whole thing. Taking that next step, that next leap is is a big deal. And, of course, we have huge respect for our entrepreneurs in the chamber.

They're kind of the backbone of America. You know? They're what make they're what make things happen here. I'm not sure. Did I say that right?

They are what make I don't know. You know, you get my point?

I get your point.

But it is scary, you know, taking those leaps sometimes. So so let's let's actually let's tell people what you do with Develop Your Team.

So I work with all kinds of organizations because people are people.

Yeah.

So it doesn't really matter industry wise. And some of them are small, 55 people.

Yeah.

And for me, I'm typically working with companies from that small size up to 150 maybe, something like that. But I I work with the teams and primarily. So there's really 3 different areas of focus working with teams, team bonding, which is the relationship building part and what people often think of as team building, if they're gonna go out to happy hour or whatever, that's really about bonding. And then the next level is team development where we get into focusing on specific areas that are important to a team or where they need to develop. And that's gonna incorporate different challenging activities that the team is gonna work on together, and then we're gonna have conversations about what happened and and what were the behaviors that that were exhibited.

And then the next level is what I would call team development, which is longer term, more focused on moving the team forward. It could be working on culture, building skills around having more effective meetings or setting goals. But it but the, for team development, it's really gonna be a longer term process and commitment.

Yeah. That's fantastic. So we're gonna take a brief pause. We're talking to Jani Jackson, the founder of Develop Your Team. When we come back, we're gonna talk about some of the ways that the method she uses and how she gets this this amazing work done, and hopefully inspire you to reach out and engage her company.

So stick with us. We'll be right back. So, Janie, before we took a break, you were just starting to tell us about all the different things that develop your team does. And I should have, like, a full disclosure moment here for our listeners because we've had the benefit of having you come in and and work with our team here at the chamber. And as you said, like, you can work with teams of all different sizes.

We're small. There's 10 of us, 11 now, but 10 when you were working with us. And, but I find, you know, sometimes with small teams, this work is even more important. Maybe not more, but but it feels more important because you you wear so many hats when you're a smaller company, and you you have to, you know, be so versatile. It's not like we have full blown departments, you know, which I'm sure some in some companies, maybe you're working with a department a or department b.

But Mhmm. You know, as a small company, it's so important that we all work together really well and functionally. So, so we've had the benefit of working with you. So that was a long way of saying that. But your methods are very hands on, I feel like.

And they're very engaging, like, tactile. It's not just talking about developing teams. So talk about that, the hands on nature of of what you do sometimes, in this work.

Okay. So the the foundation is experiential learning principles and and that I incorporate that in everything I do, even if it's a more traditional workshop, there's gonna be experiential

Yes.

Hands on learn by doing elements. But a typical team building day, similar to to what we did with you, involves a sequence of activities that start with maybe lower risk, low intensity activities that are more in the bonding category. Getting people to have conversations with each other, but maybe in a a little bit different way

Sure.

From what you traditionally would. Maybe

You're you're stretching them, but it's still pretty easy stretch at the beginning.

Exactly. I want people to be comfortable, but I also want them out of their comfort zone because that's that's when we learn, that's where growth happens. And so the sequence is important because it allows people to move safely Yeah. Out of their comfort zone.

Because this is gonna be a progression the the whole day or however long you're working with them of getting a little farther out of their initial comfort zone and then a little farther.

Exactly. Exactly. So then we'll move into activities that are focused on things that we've identified. The the group that I'm working with, in conversations that I've had with them, what have we identified as areas that that they want to improve? Maybe it's communication, maybe it's building trust, maybe it's problem solving, decision making, could be there's a whole range of things.

So I will put together activities that are designed to surface behaviors around those areas, and then we'll do the activity. It's typically a challenge, a problem that needs to be solved. Maybe it's transferring marbles from point a to point b, but there are complications about how you have to go about doing it. So and we do that activity and people have the opportunity to interact, and then we talk about what happened. And one of the things that that I really enjoy about it is that maybe we set out to work on communication.

And we did this activity and then we surfaced behaviors that happen in the workplace, they happen in the activity, and maybe they're not really about communication. Maybe it's about leadership or, just the planning or strategies for getting tasks accomplished. And so we have the opportunity to talk about it and help people. First of all, we're we're talking about things in a safe environment because if you talk with people directly about their work product, it's it's harder it's harder to talk about those things. But if you talk about it in the context of a game that we just played

Yes.

It's much easier to have those conversations, and then we make the connection Yep. Back to, oh, how does this show up in the real world?

Yeah.

And and that's how teams then have the opportunity to go back to the real world and and progress forward because they can see, oh, when I acted this way in the activity, we didn't get a good result. But when we did it this other way, it worked out better, and I can do that I can do it that way at work too.

Yeah. No. That's great. One of the things you said at the beginning of that was that, you you identify with the company you're working with. You know, what what are things that they wanna work on.

And I remember you approaching me, and I really appreciated that. So ahead of time, you know, you knew what would be most helpful to us. And so you and I dialogued on that, and so then you crafted those various activities that we did, to that. And I thought that was that was so great and so helpful. And and so it wasn't just like I guess what I wanna share with the audience is it wasn't like you came in with a preplanned list of things and just said, here's my process.

This is how I do it. You met with me and said, what would be best? You know, what are you trying to achieve? And then you craft it. I love that.

Very personal.

It's always customized. Yes. Always.

Always customized. And then so with us, you we did I can't remember exactly, but it was, I wanna say 3, 4 hours.

Yep. Yep.

It's a half day. Half day. Talk about what are the because you you did mention earlier, you know, there's there's that kind of a format, but when you're developing teams over time

Mhmm.

You know, it could look different. So what are the different formats that and ways that you can bring this to a company and implement it, etcetera?

So there is the half you know, similar to what we did. Yeah. Sometimes companies want just an hour or a couple of an hour hours at the beginning of some longer event that they're having, but a a longer term team development situation, a good example that I can share would be what I did with my own team when I was first learning how to use experiential learning activities for this. So I had the opportunity when I was working at Farmers. I got to go to a full day seminar on team building facilitation, and I walked away with that thinking, this is the greatest thing ever.

And, hey, I have a team, I'm gonna practice on them.

So Good built in kidney pick.

It was great. It was great. So at that time, I had 9 people on my team, and they were spread out all over the state of California. Nine field trainers and each one had an office that they were assigned to. So our first team building was a half day part of a multi day meeting, but half day doing exactly what we talked about, like I did with you.

And then since this was a virtual team, we actually only saw each other in person about every 6 months. So when we got together again in 6 months, I put together a smaller program, an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours, kind of working on the same kinds of things. And 6 months later, another half day, 6 months later, another so and and in between, we incorporated things that that were relevant to the work that we were doing. So over this maybe 2 year time period, I love this example because I could really see the impact and see the difference, and this is part of why I wanted to carry on with it. But companies, again, restructuring as they do, our department was reduced from 9 trainers for 9 offices to 6 trainers for 9 offices.

So we had to figure out how they had to we had to figure out how to work together differently to be able to offer that same level of support to those offices, which we did, but it all came out of the team building and the development that we did over time. And, ultimately, by the time we got this couple years into it, my team was in demand. There were other other parts of the country doing my work that were asking, can you can your trainers come out and help us?

Because They saw the results.

They saw the results. Yeah. And people would comment on how how, you know, your team, you know, they're they're having so much fun, but, boy, when something needs to get done, they are on it. Yeah. It is done.

That's interesting. You know, and you just said a key point there. They're having so much fun. Right? So these days, it was fun.

Right? And this kinda interactive, hands on team building things, They were very fun. Lot of laughter.

Oh, yes.

Which is great. It's a and, you know, my, my thing is is that in continuing develop develop my team, it's like we're we're people first, and then we're a a job description second. You know? And we have to be able to relate to each other as people, and as human beings, more so than just roles. One of the things that I've seen throughout my decades of being in different work environments is we judge ourselves on our intentions, but we will frequently judge our coworkers or others on their actions.

Mhmm.

So rather than stop and take the time to find out, hey, what what were you thinking when you did this or that? We just jumped to the conclusion, the narrative we've built in our mind and, you know, hammer versus if we were to be asked about something like, oh, well, what I meant when I did this was this or when I said this was that. And so we judge ourselves always on our intentions and others on their actions. So breaking that down to where we can pause that and say, why don't we just have a conversation and find out what they meant? Because it usually isn't as bad as the narrative we built in our head.

Mhmm. But it comes from work like this and bonding like this and, you know, that kind of thing to to create that level of, interaction.

Right. Right. I think it's that's that value of building relationships because when you have those relationships with people, then you are more likely to assume best intent

Yes.

And and understand them, and that they're they have different experiences than you, and that they may have a different perspective, but you care about each other because you've gotten to know each other. And so you work harder for each other. Yeah. And you can say hard things that need to be said. And, yeah, you're less likely to have those misunderstandings.

Yeah. Exactly. So, obviously, a key part of this during, the different exercises that you work with, you already mentioned this is getting people out of their comfort zone, so that you can stretch and and, and get them to to bond. You also, though, teased up in your corporate experience before you launch, develop your team, You know, that that was pre obviously, that was pre COVID because you've been doing this, for a while now. But, that remote working team and, of course, that's just gone exponentially bigger since COVID, and everybody got used to Zoom as a way of operating.

And so many more people working from home, working remote than ever used to. What challenges does that present for, developing team dynamics and and growing them and keeping them, etcetera?

Mhmm. Having camera is really important, really valuable. But the it's it's interesting because with with a virtual team, you're you're still trying to get at the same outcomes. And I think this really came to light with the pandemic. The people in the experiential learning field, doing the type of work that I do.

Typically, it's been in person, and and yet the need was still there. And so in creating a program, changing the focus to what's the outcome that we want, and then finding a way to do it virtually. And it turns out, there are all kinds of fun things that you can do on Zoom that get people interacting, that get people moving. There are tools like the breakout rooms help, but there are annotation tools and ways that you can play on the screen. People can get up and go get an object and come back and talk about it with their group.

Just really lots and lots of ways. So it's still thinking about, okay, what are we trying to get to here, and let's find a way to do it.

Yeah. That's awesome. I it's I'm listening to you just wondering, is there some do you guys people in your world as, leadership developers, do you guys get together and brainstorm these ideas? Because that's amazing. Just listening, going, I wouldn't have thought of that.

I wouldn't have thought of that. That's awesome.

Yes. Yes. First of all, I mean, there are conferences I attend a couple of them every year that one with the Association For Experiential Education and another conference with a similar group. It's an it's an acronym that I can't tell you what it stands for. So NCCPS, I know that, but where practitioners get together and share share their knowledge.

Yeah.

It's a really fabulous group in that way, but also during the pandemic, these people got together on Zoom, and there were a couple of guided practice groups that I was part of and and still participate at at times, because one of them is is ongoing, and there would be 40 people at these weekly gatherings and people would be sharing what they had learned. 1 of the groups published 2 books during, like, 21 2021, 2022. I have a section in one of the books, but it's one of them is called the learning curve, and it's about that process of learning how to do these things virtually. And then there's another one on virtual facilitation.

Oh, that's amazing. Makes sense. But, you know, when we don't get to look behind the curtain, we don't see those things. So Yeah. That's fantastic.

So somebody who is hearing about this and is going, oh, man. I I could use this in my company. You know, this would be great. This could be so helpful, etcetera, etcetera, is the best place to go to your website, which I believe is develop your team.com?

That would be excellent. Yes. And then there's a button there. In fact, it's all over to, click on a button to set up a free 30 minute consultation.

I saw that a free 30 minute consultation. So that's kinda your starting point. You can just get a chance to meet with them and talk through and see if it's a good fit. So develop your team.com, get that 30 minute free consultation, and start the exploration journey. Yeah.

Now that's great. Well, I'm a big fan as you know, and I'm on your website still, singing your praises, which, I wholeheartedly believe. And so anybody out there, you're looking to take your team to another level. Jani is definitely a person that can help you get there. So go to develop your team.com.

Anything that we missed that you wanted to share? I don't wanna cut you off.

The one thing that I would add would be for businesses, like, whoever you are, when you are gathering with your team, take a few minutes at the beginning to have some conversation, whether it's a purposeful question that you ask people and get everyone to share. But do something to allow that time for people to connect and bond. You will get have a more productive meeting in the moment, but then that's also gonna pay off over time in those relationships that you're helping people build.

Yeah. Absolutely. I love that. Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time and for all that you engage with our chamber.

Just this morning, you were leading one of our coffee connection, little networking mixers, which, they always get a little taste of what you do to facilitate groups and, leadership there. But, you've been very engaged with us throughout my 6 years here. And so I really appreciate you and for all that you do, and, I hope lots of people come, to your site.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you and everything that you're doing here at the chamber. I I love this chamber, and I've learned so much over the years here. Wonderful.

So grateful. Thank you.

Wonderful. Yes. Our pleasure. Thanks for joining us today on our Carlsbad People, Purpose and Impact podcast. If you got value out of our episode today, please hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app, and please tell a friend.

Can't wait to see you next time on Carlsbad People, Purpose, and Impact.