Heidi Saucier

Incremental change is still change

“Remake the world, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world.”
― Rick Riordan

Throughout our lives, many of us look for ways to improve. There are annual resolutions that come and go, enthusiastic commitments where we bite off more than we can chew, and the all or nothing approach to change that for some becomes nothing.

Big change is needed in certain circumstances. Sometimes, that change needs to come sooner than later because of catastrophic consequences that will happen without the change. Other times, while the big change is the ultimate outcome, tackling it with smaller adjustments makes that change more achievable and sustainable.

I’d like to share two examples of where this applies. Habits are one area where incremental changes are often encouraged. In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, the author emphasizes the importance of making “tiny changes” to better solidify making changes to either start or stop doing something to better oneself.  Clear’s own experience recovering from a serious injury required him to make small changes that eventually brought him to recovery.

I am currently in the middle of incremental change as I work to get back into a consistent exercise routine. Based on past attempts, I knew if I tried to go all in right away I’d have limitations that would become my excuse to not exercise. Instead, I started with five minutes a day of a specific exercise. I am currently 10 days in and have increased from five minutes to 10 minutes. I’ve alternated between a few different types of exercise and am committed to building the right resistance and ability to strive towards better health.

Another area that benefits from incremental change is in workplace learning and development. Even with requirements for a new hire to go through training in a defined timeframe, introducing knowledge and tasks in chunks brings better retention compared to immersing the learner in the entire process right away. In environments where you can build on task learning, this approach is valuable. Many Learning and Development teams, including my own, are moving to microlearning courses and continuous learning models to better integrate employees into the workforce. In a Modern Workplace Learning blog post, Jane Hart argues that continuous learning occurs over time, often as part of on-the-job training, and is an element that companies acknowledge is needed. While there may be some formal training that happens, the employee continues to improve as they apply learning to their day-to-day activities and gain new skills along the way.

As the workplace becomes more agile and fast-paced to keep ahead of the competition, leaders and learning teams need to collectively consider bringing this model into their training plans and pair it with mentors and coaches to help guide employees whether they are new to the organization or are looking to gain new skills for the next step in their career.

Looking at these two examples, how have you seen the benefits of incremental change personally or professionally? I’d love to hear about your experiences!

Heidi Saucier

Your mistakes can help others!

“Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something.” ~Morihei Ueshiba

I’m sure you’ve read articles that focus on learning from mistakes. Before you say “Thanks, Heidi, I’ve been down this road,” I encourage you to review the topic again.

We are often told we can learn from our mistakes and that they are an essential part of our development. It’s completely true, and your mistakes can help others grow! When mentoring or coaching someone, it’s easy to only share stories where things have gone well for us. While those are important when you want to encourage people to do something similar,  it’s just as beneficial to share when things have not gone well in your career and how those experiences have helped you.

During a meeting with a leader, she told me about a time she was coached for a similar struggle I was experiencing. She explained how that conversation opened her eyes and allowed her to make changes to her approach. As a result, she became more successful as a trainer. After she shared the experience, it motivated me to make necessary adjustments to improve my facilitation skills. Telling me what she went through showed me I was not the only person to struggle in this way and that I could overcome it.

As leaders, we have made mistakes. It’s part of being willing to take risks. Dede Henry shared in a Forbes Magazine article that while mistakes happen, how we respond to those mistakes is the key difference. I encourage you to check out the article and the strategies shared to change your mindset towards mistakes and failure. Some of the lessons we learn as leaders when things don’t go right have turn into key steps on our development journey. They may also be the experiences that someone needs to hear at just the right moment to redirect their path and achieve their goals.

How has sharing your mistakes with someone helped them grow? I’d love to hear your examples!

Heidi Saucier

Turning 50 – reflecting on five decades part 3

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the last few posts that have reflected the decades of my life from a personal, professional, and historical perspective. This post will wrap up the overview of the last five decades of my life.  

2016-2025

Turning 40 was a pivotal point in my life from multiple perspectives. Desiigner’s “Panda” was the number one song on the radio (or satellite, or however else you listen to music). I would experience great joy with the birth of my son (it’s hard to believe that he will be nine in less than a month!) and great sorrow with the unexpected death of my husband. In this decade, we learned the words Brexit, SpaceX, and COVID-19.  Zoom meetings became the norm during quarantine, and we never expected to be stressed about having enough toilet paper at home. We also saw the emergence of A.I. which had been around for many years but now accelerated into the mainstream.

Leadership development introduced us to James Clear’s Atomic Habits that encouraged continuous improvement (yes, I highlighted this book in a past post), Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Designing Your Life challenging us to consider career maps and doing work with a purpose, and Kim Scott’s Radical Candor that helps leaders find the balance between giving direct feedback and having personal care for team members. Leaders during that time included U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Vladmir Putin in his second time leading Russia, France’s President Emmanuel Marcon, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This most recent decade saw the strongest growth in my professional life. I earned my Master of Training and Development at Oakland University in December 2016, right at the end of my first trimester with my son. Not too long after his birth, I moved into a new role at work where I was an instructional designer and facilitator for sales support staff, starting to develop my instructional design skills. Almost two years later, I accepted a promotion to my current role leading a team that designs training for providers and staff that do business with our company. This experience has grown and stretched me as a leader, learning to build a team and develop relationships with co-workers and key stakeholders that foster collaboration and support for each of our training deliverables. It also taught me about leading teams in a virtual and hybrid environment, which was a factor in my interest to research organizational support for remote workers (You can learn more about that journey in a previous post).

If you remember my last post, I joined our company’s chapter of the National Management Association in the previous decade of my life. In this decade, I moved into roles that included an officer that oversaw the planning and hosting of our monthly meetings and two years as our chapter’s Board of Directors chairperson. Through the experience, I discovered an opportunity to become a National Director with NMA. This is a role that serves as a liaison between the national organization and the chapter you are assigned to. In 2023, I was sworn in as the National Director for my local chapter. Through my experience and involvement on board committees, I was nominated to become an officer on the board. In the fall of 2024, I was voted as the National Secretary and am now serving as the National Treasurer. It’s an honor to serve in these roles, and I look forward to future opportunities within the NMA board.  

2026

So here I am, starting the next decade of my life. It’s been about a month since I turned 50. The history is being laid out before me, and now I start to anticipate what the future holds. What will my career look like over the next 10 years? How will I grow as a leader? What knowledge will I have gained? How will my son grow up?

I don’t have these answers yet, and that’s completely ok. I look forward to this next path on my life journey and hope to have some amazing stories to share with you down the road as I continue this blog. Thank you for taking the time to learn about these five decades.

What were you most amazed about? How did it help you reflect on the decades of you life? I’d love to see your comments! PS – The number one song on my 50th Birthday was Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drop Dead.”

Heidi Saucier

Turning 50 – reflecting on five decades part 2

5/18/26 – Turning 50 – reflecting on five decades part 2

In the last post I started sharing the first two decades of my life including historical moments, leadership and professional development happenings, and other highlights of life. This post continues the story, moving into the next two decades.

1996-2005

As I turned 20, we were a few years away from what the world thought was going to be a major global crisis: Y2K. We thought computers were going to freak out and the world was going to lose the ability to function due to our reliance on technology. Thankfully, it didn’t. Mariah Carey topped the charts that birthday with “Always Be My Baby”, Dolly the sheep emerged as the first cloned mammal, and the summer Olympics were just a few months away in Atlanta, Georgia. Email got its start with the launch of Hotmail (how many of you had an account?), Wikipedia (I still use this to look up information), and YouTube (one of my guilty pleasures!). This decade also brought tragedy with the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing at the Olympic Park during the summer Olympics, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks which brought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Princess Diana.

Leadership development during this time introduced many of us to the concept of emotional intelligence with books like Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman. Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese, the popular story that tells us how to adapt to change (there’s a kid’s version that I need to get for my son!), and Kerry Patterson et al.’s Crucial Conversations that guides leaders on how to effectively communicate to people in high stakes scenarios. Leaders during the decade included U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin in his first time of serving as the President of Russia. During these years, I continued to develop as a leader through my time as a youth group leader at a local church. That role brought valuable lessons about delegating and planning and discovering that youth ministry was not meant for me. It was also in these years that a few call center jobs laid the foundation that sparked my interest in training.

2006-2015

When I turned 30, Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” which became the elimination song on American Idol that year, was the number one song on the radio. This decade of my life brought the beginnings of Twitter (now X, though I still remember how we used to “tweet”), the first iPhone (now at version 17!), and the creation of Bitcoin (I had no idea that this even existed back then!). We were not without hard times with the “Great Recession,” the BP Deep Horizon oil spill, the Boston Marathon bombing, and a tsunami in Japan. I got married in this decade and decided to further my education through the Master of Training and Development program at Oakland University. While studying, I made great connections and friendships with many I still  keep in touch with. One is now a colleague of mine where I work, and another ended up becoming my realtor.

Leadership development during this time brought Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (I recently read this book and as a fellow introvert resonated with many of the themes she shared), Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and Brene’ Brown’s Daring Greatly. These books challenged readers to better understand the value of introverted leaders, consider the science to help us make good habits and break the ones that hold us back, encourage women to continue pursuing leadership, and that it’s ok vulnerable. Leaders during that time included U.S. Presidents George W. Bush as continued his first term and served a second, Barack Obama as the first African American President, and Angela Merkel as the Chancellor of Germany notably leading the largest European economy through the financial crisis of 2008.

During these years I officially started my career in learning and development, moving into a trainer role at the call center I was working at. It was there that I discovered the ADDIE model for developing training and gained support and insights from other professionals that eventually led to me working for the company I’m still at today. The MTD program I previously mentioned included classes that taught me about developing teams, submitting requests for proposals, various leadership styles, and the principles of instructional design. I served on my first board, supporting a professional group tied to our grad school program and helped planned meetings and events for students to gain additional education and networking opportunities in the learning and development field. I also joined my company’s chapter of the National Management Association, first attending meetings then moving on to write articles for our newsletter and chairing a committee. Little did I know then where that would take me in the next decade of my life.   

Next time, I’ll share the last part of my five decades on earth with more history and experiences. What memories do you have from these ten years? How did you grow professionally during this time? I’d love to hear about it!

Heidi Saucier

Doing the impossible

I hope that the questions in the past posts have allowed you to reflect on your life journey and given you some new insights. On to the next question!

What was something that seemed impossible – but you did it anyway?

For most of us, we’ve had times in our life where we faced the decision to move forward with something we didn’t think we were capable of or thought would be an uphill battle to reach the finish line. At that moment, we could have decided that it was ok not to move in that direction. We had every right to do so. Instead we chose to slay the dragon, overcome the giant – whatever you want to call it – and do what it took to achieve that goal.

I recall a few of these moments. Some changed my perspective. Others taught me the importance of perseverance and resilience. Not all were major events. One instance was making a simple choice to stop eating food after 9 p.m. I had a habit of wanting just one more snack before bed, which is not a healthy practice. As I’ve been exploring ways to make better choices and lose weight, I saw repeatedly that late night eating has a significant impact on our metabolism. I made the decision to put this into practice at the first of the year. I was sure I’d cave and convince myself that I needed just one more thing to eat, and that hunger pangs would constantly taunt me. Even still, I put reminders on my phone and made a conscious effort to make 9 p.m. the cutoff point. I’m happy to share that I have only had one moment where I ate something past that time and overall have not had any major cravings. While it was a small decision, I know it will have positive effects on my overall health goals.

Another example is on a professional level. Recently, I needed to support the design of a microlearning course to address a learning gap. While I am skilled to lead an amazing team that produces quality training courses, I will be the first to admit that I am not a rockstar instructional designer. At the same time, I can create simple courses and navigate through key instructional design tools. I was nervous to take on this project but knew it was necessary to help reduce the errors that our core audience was making in a particular area. The pre-work was the easier part, identifying the objectives and creating the storyboard and script for the lesson. Once I completed that and received approval from stakeholders and subject matter experts, I started the challenging part for me – using the design software. It was a combination of Vyond and Adobe Captivate, two tools that I was familiar with. I consider myself to be between an advanced beginner and competent user, having created videos in the past. I began putting the work together then asked my employee, who uses the tool regularly, for guidance on complex tasks. He was happy to help and gave honest feedback that helped me make key revisions and learn new ways to use Vyond. This led to a successfully designed course that was published on training site for our learning audience to access.

These two examples helped strengthen my leadership skills. How? First, making healthier choices brings me the energy I need to lead. If I’m fatigued or am dealing with health conditions that take me away from work, I risk not being an effective leader. In the second example, I was willing to jump in and ask for help to ensure I was supporting the needs of our team. Leaders should not be afraid to ask others, including their own team members, for their expertise to help them with decisions or key tasks. Your employees can be critical resources that help you build stronger teams. With that in mind, there’s no shame in leaders to ask their employees for support. What are things that seemed impossible for you, but you moved forward in completing the task or goal? Share in the comments!