The CLO’s Blind Spot: Why Capability Beats Hiring Every Time

Introduction

Nolan: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Talent Equation, sponsored by Infopro Learning. I’m your host, Nolan Hout. My guest today is Candice Mitchell. Candice has spent nearly two decades building and leading capability functions inside global and Fortune 500 organizations. At a certain point she realized the real problem wasn’t the people sitting in the training rooms, it was the people designing them. She founded The Talent Collective to do something the industry had largely skipped: develop developers.

She’s also a USA Today best-selling author, which means she’s already proven she can make people pay attention to ideas that actually matter. Today we’re getting into why you cannot hire your way out of a broken capability system, and why the people function is the most underleveraged growth lever in any business. That’s a tall order, let’s jump into it. Candice, welcome to the podcast.

Candice: Nolan, thank you so much. This is a conversation I love having, so excuse me if I get on my high horse a few times, but these topics are so important to me. I’m really looking forward to this.

Candice’s Origin Story in L&D

Nolan: Lovely. Before we dive in, Candice, tell us a little about how you got to where you are today. I mentioned you’ve been doing this for twenty years. What was your way into talent, and at what point did you have that big light bulb moment?

Candice: I tell this story often because I love it. I chose learning and development right out of the gate. I was still a student studying organizational psychology, in my postgraduate year, when a guest lecturer came in and told us what she did for a living: learning and development. I remember sitting there thinking, I literally cannot believe people get paid to do that work. It was love at first sight.

I got a job while I was still studying full time, as a learning and development administrator, literally the person capturing attendance, booking flights for international delegates, printing the learner manuals. I stayed at that organization for just under ten years and worked my way up from administrator to director. I got good at working with leaders, and even when I was fairly junior I started business partnering with the C-suite on building their capability. That’s really where it all started.

The Leap to Founding Talent Collective

Nolan: And why did you decide, at a certain point, to break out of that mold and start working for the business instead, building The Talent Collective to help people in your same shoes? What pushed you to think, this is my moment, I must do this?

Candice: You might not love this answer, but honestly, I was forced out. I had my first child, and this was back when working from home wasn’t an option for me. My husband was traveling for work, about half his time in the US, and I’m South African living in America, so during that whole season with babies I physically couldn’t get to work. I loved that organization, still do to this day, they’re one of the better ones I’ve seen for learning and development, but I had to leave.

So, I told myself, let me work on my own terms, which is hilarious because you end up working more, that’s such a lie. But at least I could work from home with my two kids knocking on the door while I answered emails at midnight. It was wild. Looking back, I’m genuinely glad it happened, because I’ve learned so much. I’ve now worked across fourteen industries and four continents because I stepped outside of corporation. Now I love it, I don’t think I could go back. I love being a business owner and the impact I get to have.

Why L&D Gets Stuck in Order-Taker Mode

Nolan: What a story, and you can tell how passionate you are about it after doing this for so long. I love connecting with people who’ve been at this for a decade and are genuinely experienced, not the consultants who popped up everywhere during and after COVID. One of the things that stands out, and probably why you’re so good at educating people, is that you learn from so many different organizations.

It’s not just “here’s what’s happening at my company,” it’s “here’s what I’m seeing across this CLO, that CLO, that CLO.” One trend you’ve talked about is L&D getting stuck in order-taker mode with no real way out. Can you talk about that?

Candice: There’s so much to unpack here. In my own corporate experience, and I only had the one, although I’ve now worked with so many companies, learning and development had an obvious seat at the table. We were brought in from the start, no question, that’s just what I thought was normal.

Then I started my own business and went into all these different organizations, and I remember thinking, what is happening here? This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. We’re not supposed to be reactive support functions. That was a rude awakening. I went from being an obvious strategic growth lever to really trying to understand why organizations operate the way they do, and I realized that reactive mode is the norm.

Why we get stuck comes down to a lot of things, but the first is mindset, and that’s the seed that became my book. It’s not really a book about learning and development; it’s about a mindset shift. Being a support function doesn’t mean we come second, or wait for instruction, or stay out of the conversation. We must understand that we are crucial to business success. That’s why I say we are the most underleveraged growth lever in the business. We don’t come second, we should be leading, pushing back, asking the hard questions, staying business focused. Once we operate like that, the business sees our value. It’s a no-brainer.

Two Moves That Earn L&D a Seat at the Table

Nolan: When you’re consulting with organizations and you see that order-taker mode is actually the norm, what’s the first thing you push them to change? Is there one trend, one first step, that won’t fix everything but moves things forward?

Candice: Can I give you two? The first is, know the business like you run it. At my previous company I knew how beer was brewed. I never brewed it myself, but I knew the principles, how packaging worked, how delivery worked. I was in the warehouse watching it happen. I knew that business like I owned it. So, when I sat down with C-suite leaders, I could speak with real confidence because I knew the business that well.

Second, and this ties in directly: spend time with the people doing the work. Don’t show up in a suit and tie, put on the safety boots, the reflective vest, the hard hat, whatever it takes, and get onto the floor. I was working in rural South Africa at the time, and rural South Africa can be rough, no tourists go out there. I went with our sales team to call on bars in these rural towns, some of them selling beer through a literal hole in the wall. I was the only person from corporate who ever went out there, and that’s exactly why I was good at my job. They knew me, they knew I cared, I knew their world. Those two things are the real power move, and from there you can have any other business conversation.

Tying Training to Business KPIs

Nolan: It’s interesting you say that. I was talking recently with someone whose job is essentially a production function, and I told them AI is going to take a lot of that work away. Historically their KPI has been pure output, and that value driver only survives so long. The real question is, what KPIs actually drive business value for the company, not how many eBooks, white papers, or training manuals get produced. If you can attach what you do to a real business KPI, ideally a revenue driver, that’s the better path.

I think the fundamental question is, do you want to be held accountable for doing what you were told, on time and on budget, or for making a measurable difference to the business? Knowing the business also means knowing the actual levers inside it. I had a guest on the show who said it’s nearly impossible to know every function in a business that well. You had ten years to learn yours, not everyone gets that.

What he does instead is, before getting on a call about an unfamiliar function, he goes to AI first and asks it to help him understand the likely business drivers, so he walks in already armed with something instead of starting from zero.

Candice: No, you’re not giving value back if you just show up and say, tell me everything. I love that you brought that up, because yes, those ten years mattered, and I was good at my work because I put in the time. But I was the only person from corporate going out into the field, and I literally had to ask permission to do it. I was determined that it would drive my success, and it did. I was sent on three postgraduate courses, a top business school, the works. They invested heavily in me, and I think it’s because I put in that effort.

I don’t want anyone using “I can’t know the business” or “I’m just a consultant” as an excuse. I’ve been a consultant for ten years now. One client was in construction, so I took a LinkedIn Learning course on how cement is made, just so I could speak the language in those conversations. Another client, a fourteen-week engagement, brand new industry I knew nothing about, I read industry reports, put together summaries, and learned that industry in about three days. I don’t know it in depth, obviously, but I can walk into a conversation and say, here’s what I read, does that track, how are you actually experiencing this? That alone builds far more credibility than just asking someone to explain everything from scratch. Coming in with three or four thoughtful questions is a game changer. Whether you’re internal or a consultant, that’s non-negotiable.

I want to come back to the KPI point, because one project really stands out. A client needed brand-new call center reps trained on twenty-eight different products across different hardware. It was a lot, and I had eight weeks to pull it off. Again, I spent time in the field first to understand it. We also had to learn the clients we were serving, because for a lot of them, the device they were using was often the first electronic device they’d ever owned, no computer, no smartphone, some still had Nokia flip phones. I never would have known that without going out there myself, I could have guessed, but I wouldn’t have guessed it ran that deep, so I had to build the training up to that level.

The KPI we reported on was first call resolution, not how many people we trained, not training hours, none of that. Just first call resolution. We were aiming for somewhere around seventy-five to eighty percent and landed at eighty-two. One of the biggest wins of my career, and it came from taking two steps back first.

Pull Up Your Own Chair

Nolan: Something you talk about, I think it’s close to a quote, or maybe I’m blending a couple of things you’ve said, but it’s something like: L&D doesn’t need permission to pull up a chair, it needs to stop waiting for someone to offer it one. A lot of what I’m hearing is, if you tell yourself “that’s not really my place, I’ll wait for them to invite me,” you’ll be waiting forever.

I operate in an environment that’s a bit more open than a traditional corporate one, so maybe this is a good question for you since you’ve got a lot more context across companies. My take is nobody is going to offer you a seat, because they assume that if you can add value, you’ll just add it. It’s an empty chair, there for the taking. Nobody’s putting a lock on it, they’re just too busy with their own work to think about keeping L&D out of the room. Is that really the case in your experience? Is the chair genuinely just sitting there for the taking, or is someone actively keeping people out?

The Boardroom Story That Proved the Model

Candice: I love that, yes, I could not agree more. I say something close to that myself, it’s part of my brand voice. It’s funny, I had Claude read through a lot of my material recently, and one of the things it pulled out was basically: just pull up your own damn chair, what’s stopping you?

But I do want to acknowledge something, because I don’t want anyone listening to think, great, Candice, everything’s sunshine and rainbows for you. It’s not. I was at one company where I was flat out told no, I could not go spend time in the field with the people doing the work. My manager said no to that request directly. That was a slap in the face, honestly, and to this day I still don’t fully understand the reasoning, no matter how many times I’ve tried to make sense of it. For what it’s worth, that company also had a turnover rate of over one hundred percent.

So yes, when learning and development is invited in, pull up your own damn chair. But be proactive about getting invited in, too. I tell this story a lot: when L&D is welcomed, get yourself in the room. Honestly, I’m pretty pushy about it, I’ll just say, I want to talk to you, I have ideas, I can help you here. That was actually the premise of our prep call for this episode: you cannot hire your way out of a capability problem, it is so much more expensive not to develop people.

I remember once sitting in a boardroom full of managing partners, very senior people earning serious money. The CFO was there, the head of talent acquisition, the chief people officer, the managing partner running the firm, and a room full of other managing partners. These are finance people, they don’t take any nonsense, I couldn’t talk my way around them with fluff. But by the end of that meeting they were asking, Candice, when can you start, can you do more, can you do this for my wife’s company?

Because I was speaking their language. I knew the business, I knew the pain points, because I’d done the research. I told them: your people are expensive to hire, and if you don’t develop them, guess who leaves? Not your lowest performers, your high performers, because they have options. If you want to keep your best people, you develop them, you build real performance and career pathways tied to development.

The CFO and the head of talent acquisition were both in the room, and I joked, so, is my way cheaper than your way? And they said, yeah, way cheaper. That was such a win, honestly a really fun meeting to be part of.

The Real Cost of Losing Top Performers

Nolan: That’s a great point, and attrition is such low-hanging fruit that rarely gets pulled into ROI conversations. Like you said, you tend to lose people after the first ninety days, or once they’ve settled in after a year, and it’s usually your top performers leaving for somewhere else, because the lower performers just hide out as long as you let them. If you’re not developing people, the cost is astronomical, not just the literal cost to replace someone in your top twenty percent, but the cost of getting a replacement back up to speed, and even then you’re probably not getting the right person.

Best case, maybe one out of three works out. So you’ve talked about how you can’t hire your way out of a broken capability system, and at the heart of that is knowing the real cost of losing people versus the cost of developing them, and being able to prove, I know this business well enough to know this keeps people around.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the cost of people today. People tell me AI is going to replace humans, and I say, sure, but did you know that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta pay some of the highest salaries for their employees? Why would that be? The companies supposedly building products that replace people are also the companies clearly paying up for the best people. They can afford to, sure, but I think it’s because they’re so close to the technology that they understand it more deeply than anyone. If the companies building the models are realizing that giving the model to one person creates okay value, but giving it to a different person creates ten times the value, do you agree that in this AI era it’s actually the opposite of what most people assume, that you pay whatever it takes to develop your best people, because otherwise they’ll leave and get paid four or five times as much elsewhere?

Why CEOs Are Prioritizing People Capability

Candice: As you’re talking, I genuinely have to catch my breath, I’m so excited about this. Learning and development, talent development, whatever we call it these days, is becoming so important. I want to shout it from the rooftops, this is our moment.

I read a lot, Deloitte Insights, McKinsey, those long industry reports, the World Economic Forum, Forbes, all of it, and I can’t ignore the trend. I can pull the exact sources for your show notes if you want them, but one finding stood out to me: the number one focus area for the majority of CEOs right now is people capability, building human skills. It’s the single biggest thing on their minds.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can see where this is going. These leaders are going to look to us to lead, to come to them with business acumen and link people capability directly to business strategy. Something like, CEO, you want to grow the business, go global, here’s what your people need so we can support that, and here’s how AI can accelerate it or create efficiencies. It’s on us.

Waiting for people to come to us and say “we need training on X” is such a missed opportunity. Honestly, it’s frustrating just thinking about it, because they need us. They need us to step into this moment. It’s going to be the biggest opportunity learning and development has ever had. Talent management is one of the top human skills right now, we need to step into it, but I don’t think we’re ready yet.

Forward Deployed Engineers and the New Skill Stack

Nolan: I was doing some research recently on forward deployed engineers, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term, but it’s this idea of finding someone with deep technical knowledge and a ton of business acumen, software developers who are in extremely high demand right now. Palantir is the company most associated with the role, I’m not sure if they coined the term, but they’ve really leaned into it.

The idea is you put someone business-minded in front of the client, and they leverage a tool like Claude Code to get the technical work done. So you’re empowering a kind of superhuman developer with business context, which is a unique skill, because engineering minds don’t always focus on the people side of a business.

I was looking into how Infopro Learning could build a forward deployed engineer program, because the cost of an FDE is something like three hundred thousand dollars a year minimum, compared to a regular software engineer at around one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand. If you can spend fifty thousand training the right person into that role, it pays off easily, especially since they already know your business. One developed person can do the work of about thirty. You can apply this same logic to almost any function, take marketing as an example. Your blog writer, if you just train them to write better blogs, that’s not the real unlock. The unlock is, what if you give that person a tool like Lovable or Claude, enough design sense, and enough basic understanding of how things get built, that they don’t have to do the programming themselves, they just direct the tool. Now that one person can write the content, design it, build the social card, and publish it across the website and LinkedIn, work that used to take four separate people.

Candice: Yeah, exactly.

Nolan: And the tricky part, like you said, is that figuring this out requires going directly to the business. If you’re not thinking deeply about how AI is changing the actual roles you train people for, you’ll keep building the wrong solution. You have to stop asking, how can AI create better training, and start asking, how is AI changing the role of the people I’m training, and build from there. Go to your IT person and say, I’ve heard about forward deployed engineers, do you know what they are, how valuable would that be? If we built a four-week or two-month program that gave a highly technical person this kind of business acumen and communication training, would that be valuable to you? They’d jump at it. But if you don’t offer it, they’ll go build that skill on their own, and they won’t think to come to L&D first, not because they don’t care, they just don’t know that’s an option, it’s not their job to know that.

Their job is building software. It’s the same point as before, they’re not locking L&D out of the room on purpose, they just don’t know if the chair exists. You must go to them and say, AI is changing your job, how can I train your people for what’s coming. That’s the move. If you can do that, you become competitive for your company.

AI as Table Stakes, Human Skills as the Differentiator

Candice: Yes, one hundred percent. I love that phrase too; you become the competitive advantage. I’d add that AI itself is going to become table stakes, everyone will be doing it, so what differentiates you will be your people, the hard-to-replicate skills, critical thinking, strategy, even just reading a room.

When I worked with that client I mentioned earlier, the fourteen-week engagement, I understood the business, spoke with the CEO and the C-suite, ran focus groups, all of it, then ran the transcripts through AI afterward. But when I conducted those interviews myself, I didn’t send out a survey or hand that part to AI. At one point the CEO hesitated to answer a question, and I just asked, what are you not saying? That opened up one of the best conversations I’ve had with a CEO. No survey, and no AI, is going to ask what are you not saying. That’s a human skill, that’s the communication, the connection, the emotional intelligence we need to keep leaning into.

Why Managers Can’t Skip Immersing Themselves in AI

Nolan: That’s basically the forward deployed engineer equivalent for learning and development. You already know how to change people, you know instructional design, you know change management. The real question is, do you know how to go talk to the business, pull that information out, and rapidly build something useful from it? Maybe you do, maybe that’s the gap to build.

Real quick, before we move on, I want to ask about something that came up at ATD and again on a call yesterday. When it comes to leveraging AI, and it sounds like you use it constantly, I keep hearing from managers, I’m trying to get my team to use AI and I can’t quite get it to land. When I dig in, they usually admit they don’t really know AI that well themselves, they haven’t dug into using it much. In my experience, if you’re going to train your team on something and explain its value, especially with AI, you have to immerse yourself in it first. You can’t pull your people forward if you haven’t gone there yourself. Are you seeing the same pattern, that if the manager doesn’t know it, it’s hard to bring the team along?

Candice: Yes, definitely. You can look at it at the manager level, but also at the leadership team level. Are they using it, and are they talking openly about how they’re using it? It’s funny, sometimes people want to hide the fact that they used AI on something, like it’s cheating, so that happens too.

When it comes to L&D specifically, we have to know this so well ourselves. Actually, Nolan, this is funny, I almost went to tears recently. I was putting together an annual program for a client, something I’m normally really fast at, and I thought, let me try doing this with Claude. I plugged in the PowerPoint connector, I’ve got Claude Cowork running, I’ve dispatched a bunch of tasks, I’m really getting into it. But it took me about thirty times longer to put that one deck together using AI than it would have taken me on my own.

That’s the point I’m trying to make. Sometimes it’s not two steps back, three forward, it’s thirty steps back. It genuinely takes that long to learn this properly. It’s hard, my brain hurts, I’m exhausted, I’ve been going to bed at eight thirty. I’m usually a nine o’clock person.

Nolan: Hey, that’s my bedtime too, let’s not make fun of the early risers here. I’m a nine o’clock guy myself, though Love Island putting out an hour-long episode every single day is pushing me past it lately. Anyway, I digress.

Candice: Now I’m in bed by nine most nights too, but lately even earlier, because I’m so exhausted from learning this. I put my kids to bed at seven thirty and basically go straight up myself. But that’s what we have to do. Learning something new is hard, period. I don’t love the phrase “let’s make learning fun,” because it’s hard, it’s hard to grow, it’s hard to do something completely from scratch. We become beginners again, even with twenty or thirty years of experience in L&D, this is genuinely brand new. You have to go through that discomfort yourself before you come out the other side, but we have to go first. That’s where the urgency comes from for me.

I have two brothers in IT, so growing up I never even had to figure out how to download my own music myself, back when that wasn’t exactly legal, they handled all of that. Now I can’t rely on them, I have to figure things out and dispatch them myself. It’s uncomfortable, and that discomfort is exactly why people avoid doing it.

The AI Adoption Hate Curve

Nolan: Yeah, my brothers have moved on from that too, can’t even use LimeWire anymore. I always tell people, I learned to change my own oil about a decade ago, and for most cars it’s an incredibly simple thing to do. It’s also not expensive to have done professionally, it’s not a huge inconvenience either. But if someone told you it takes two hours and costs twice as much, you’d just accept that, because you have no real basis to push back. The same thing happens if you don’t learn AI yourself, you’ll accept being told it’s only marginally better than what you’re already doing, and you’ll get fleeced, not maliciously, you just won’t know enough to set the right bar.

AI training is a big part of what we do now, and what I tell people is that the typical AI learning curve starts in the basement, because your first experience was probably with a mediocre tool a couple years ago, something like early Copilot, and you thought, this is what AI is, this is terrible. So, people go through a hate phase. Then they actually try a good tool and think, this is the coolest thing, this solves everything, now I get the hype. Then they hit a second wave of frustration, because they start giving it more complex tasks and it can’t keep up, and they think, what’s wrong with this thing. Eventually they realize the tool isn’t bad, they just haven’t learned how to use it well yet, it’s only as good as you are. As you improve, it improves. It’s a real peak and valley, and the goal, at least for us, is to flatten that curve, because every dip is a point where people are tempted to just give up and decide it’s too hard.

It’s one of those things that feels harder the longer you wait, because there’s no real “catching up” anymore, people tell me that all the time, that they feel behind. But the reality, and I know this wasn’t supposed to turn into a full AI adoption conversation, but here we are, is that the runway to go from knowing nothing about AI to being above average is incredibly short. About a month, if you actually dedicate time to it.

Teaching People to Be People First

Candice: Yes. One piece of advice I give people starting out, and I just did this myself, I have HubSpot and just connected Claude to it. I literally asked Claude, what can I even do inside HubSpot. Just asking the tool itself what it’s capable of is basically a cheat code, because you don’t know what you don’t know. I do the same thing in Canva, I’ll ask, you’re connected here, what can you do for me. Starting from zero is genuinely hard.

I’ll add one thing, though, that I push back on a bit with my own board. One of my board members is deep into AI and we go back and forth on this constantly. His view is that we can talk about AI all day, but what actually matters is the people. We need to talk about their capabilities and acknowledge that this transition is hard and frustrating. This is one of the biggest shifts of our lifetime, on the scale of the industrial era. I’m a millennial, I’ve lived through fax machines, flip phones, dial-up modems making that screeching noise, having to choose between using the phone or the internet because you couldn’t do both at once. We’ve been through a lot of shifts, but this one is bigger. I really want us to lean hard into the people side of our businesses, the human capabilities. We don’t just need to teach people how to use AI, we need to teach people how to be people, and the AI piece follows from there.

Nolan: I told someone recently that the real value of having a human teach people about AI is to remind them that we’re still human. I know that sounds strange, but there’s a real psychological benefit to a person teaching you this versus being told to go take a course on Udemy or LinkedIn Learning. There’s something oddly dystopian about a machine teaching you to use a machine, almost a Skynet vibe.

Candice: Right, and both of those platforms are pretty surface level anyway, you’re not going to get real depth there. I actually have a course on Udemy myself, and it’s on my bucket list to become a LinkedIn Learning instructor too, but I know what I’d be giving people there is genuinely my surface-level material, whatever fits into thirty minutes or an hour. It’s not good enough on its own.

Talent Development Academy and the Cohort Program

Nolan: Exactly. So, bringing this back to why we’re doing all this: a lot of it started with how AI can help earn that seat at the table, and the fact that you can’t hire your way out of a broken system. We’ve talked about the value of people, and the value of L&D. If the value of people has never been higher, doesn’t that mean the value of the people who train your people should be at an all-time high too?

Before we wrap, I want to give a couple of shout-outs. If you like what Candice has to say, she’s got a few things going. There’s the Talent Development Academy, on-demand and self-paced, on her website, talentcollective.org, roughly a thousand dollars, go check it out. She’s also launching a small cohort, limited to twenty-five people, that hasn’t even officially launched yet and already has a few seats taken. By the time this airs it should be live, it kicks off September ninth, a more in-depth ten-week intensive program, definitely worth checking out too. Okay, promotion handled. Candice, what’s the one thing you want to leave people with?

Closing Thoughts

Candice: I’ll say this, you will never be the same after those ten weeks. This is a big moment, a big moment for learning and development people specifically. I say it often because I genuinely feel it, in my body, in my bones. The moment is big, and we need to step into it, or it’s going to pass us by.

I’m very much a millennial, and there’s a line that’s been stuck in my head for this exact reason, the idea that you only get one shot at something, so don’t miss your chance. I feel that every single day, whatever I’m reading, whatever post I see, whatever client I’m talking to. This is our time. We’re feeling scarcity and fear right now, but we have to step into this moment and trust that we can do it, that we’ll be fine.

We’re smart enough, step into it, own it, but meet the business where it needs to be met. We cannot keep relying on frameworks built in 1952, we cannot keep leading with learning outcomes, because frankly, no one is asking for those anymore. We have to lead with the business and figure out how we bring people along with us, and we just happen to do that through building capability.

Nolan: Lovely, what a great way to end it. Candice, thank you so much for joining us, I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Hope to have you back on sometime soon.

Candice: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Nolan, this was awesome.