In this episode of Learning Matters, host Doug Wooldridge sits down with Heather Torres, Director of Learning and Development at Brown & Brown.

Heather shares why proving ROI is essential for L&D leaders and how aligning learning strategies to business goals transforms L&D from a cost center into a true business driver. She also offers a candid perspective on AI, comparing its adoption to her grandmother’s first cordless phone: intimidating at first, but life-changing once you realize the benefits.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why ROI should be the centerpiece of your L&D strategy

• How to align learning programs with organizational goals

• Real examples of training that delivered 7x–11x ROI

• Practical ways AI can streamline repetitive tasks in L&D

• The importance of meeting learners where they are

• Why confidence, mentorship, and ownership matter in career growth

🔗 Connect with Heather Torres on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hltorres/

At ttcInnovations, we help businesses create lasting change with immersive learning experiences. Through instructional strategy, design, and content development we empower employee confidence, performance, and results.

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I think AI is really scary to a lot of people. It's very scary to people in our industry, not just because of the regulatory stuff that we have to follow, but because it's unknown. If go to a website and little chat pop pops up, hey, ask me if you have a question, that's AI. If you've ever used autocorrect or Grammarly, it's also AI. So are the recommendations on things like Netflix and the real time navigation.

on your Google Maps and all of that. That's all AI. So people have been using it without knowing it. Oftentimes leadership in my experience would say, trading only happens in the classroom. You need to pull them out and you need to go to the classroom. And then there was this whole other group that said, no, everything can be done online. I'm here to say, I look at what are we trying to impact? What are we trying to do? What behavior do we want to change? And what's the best way to do that?

Maybe we need them to fill out this thing in the computer system a little bit differently. So maybe it's a pop-up.

Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm Doug Wooldridge, your host, and today I'm very excited to be speaking with our guest. She has helped shape impactful learning experiences to support individual employee growth in organization.

performance. She concentrates on designing and delivering initiatives to build necessary skills and foster confidence. Her writing has been featured in publications like Manage HR and CXO Insights, and she's Director of Learning and Development at Brown and Brown. Heather Torres, welcome to the show. you. As always, we'll be discussing the latest and greatest developments in the world of learning and development. I'd like to start off with this, Heather.

Thank you, it's lovely to be here.

What strategy matters most in learning and development today?

I would have started with aligning your learning and development business goals to the strategic goals and initiatives of the company, but Regina Dunning took about a few episodes back. So I'll take it a step further and build on what she talked about. And that's, have to approve our ROI, right? And you need to report back to leadership, but making sure that that is focused on the business goals and business strategies. So.

not reporting out, we had this many people and this many hours of training, blah, blah. How did we move the business metrics? So super easy example. We need to sell more widgets. How did we do that? Well, we had this many initiatives or these specific initiatives focused on that particular widget, whether that's a product training or sales skills or presentation skills. And we had

This number of people go through that, and then we tracked their sales afterward, and they had 30 % increase in their sales, or whatever that metric is for your company, versus the people that didn't go through it had a standard of 10 % increase. Being able to give those metrics specific to those business goals, whether it's selling a widget, customer retention, reducing call center times,

improved safety, whatever it is, you're showing the business that you truly are helping and that you're improving things that are important to them. You're speaking in a language that your leaders can understand and appreciate. You're showing the value of what you're doing and now you're no longer a cost center. You're actually a business driver and that's important because we all know what happens when times get tough, costs get cut.

So if you're a business driver, you're probably a lot safer and you can do a lot more to impact your company than if you're just viewed as a cost-sensitive.

think that's an incredible way to look at it. And I imagine that as technology advances, the ability to collate data and be able to present it in a much more diverse and specific way in certain aspects can be much more helpful. Do you find that there are any tools that you guys use that really help you analyze the data that you're getting to really showcase that ROI?

Yes and no. It depends on the initiative that you're working on. Really, you're probably pulling data from a lot of different places. Some of that data, and it depends on what you can get access to through your company. Some of that data may need to come from your students themselves. Some of it you might be able to pull from various reports within, but then...

you do have to review it. So using AI can really be beneficial. AI is great for spotting trends and helping to do all things data because that's what it does is data. So I think use your resources to help streamline that a little bit and ease some of that burden for you. I think that's really helpful and impactful.

Has this always been your mindset? So really focusing first on the ROI as well as aligning the business goals and stuff like that. But has this always been your thought process or was there like an aha moment that really led you down this path?

Growing up, I wanted to either be a teacher or own a business. And I started with the own a business, although I didn't own one, but I helped run businesses. So I came to this position from a business background. And so I really have always, for the most part, had a mindset of what's ownership gonna wanna see? What are the leaders gonna find important? How can I make sure that what I'm doing is impactful and really resonates with them?

So I already came to it for the most part with that perspective. I've certainly seen other people talk about it in recent times and kind of scratched my head and thought, isn't that what people were doing all along? Like, I didn't know I was an outsider here. Because those were the numbers that were important to me. I'm not here to just train X amount of people. I personally want to help grow them and develop them.

and propel our business forward. So for me, that was just a natural part of it.

Do you have like an example of maybe some of your biggest application for this type of strategy?

So we did a pilot test a couple of years ago, a particular sales course. We took some new salespeople. So they weren't new to sales, but they were new to our company. We brought them together for three days. And we did sort of a level set of the capabilities that our company has and how they can help their customers. And we weren't really sure if this was going to resonate. Everybody had a great time, but smile sheets and

My book don't really tell you the story. I'm happy that you were happy, but sometimes even when you're not happy, you learn more. So we went back six months and 12 months later and asked them for information about how they've applied this information going forward. What did you find was most useful? What did you apply? Check the boxes for all of these things. And it, because this was sales, we asked them about the sales. So.

Did you have new sales as a result of this? Check the boxes for the things that were in this particular series that you used in acquiring new business. And then what tell us the story of a new account that you brought on? And so we did two different sessions of it, and we had roughly 25 people in each.

about a third of the people that actually responded to the surveys. And in looking at their sales, we had a 7x and an 11x ROI on those just based on the data that those teammates provided for one sale that they brought on because of this. But to have a third of your people give one case study and it just blew our numbers out of the water of anything I could have ever hoped for.

Like, wow, that was really impactful. So to go to leadership and say, I'm astounded. Look at how well this did. And we were taking a guess on, you know, how well this was going to be received. And for these people who were already experienced, did, were we really giving them what they needed? Well, apparently we really were.

How do you deal with, let's say a business doesn't have a control group for training. So you don't really have a baseline of folks that didn't take the training to really get that data difference.

Yeah, if you don't have a control group, have to go by, you can use your people as a control. looking at, and if we're sticking with the theme of sales, because again, this is going to be different based on what you're looking at, but we're talking sales here. So you can look at those salespeople. What were their sales six months, a year, 18 months before, and how did that average out versus how does it average out after your course? Now you

do have to really factor in that you're not the only thing that's influencing them. So you can't say 100 % of this growth is attributed to this initiative that we have. Some of it is, but there were other outside influences. Do they have a mentor or a coach in the office that's working with them? Was there some sort of a contest? Did the other product or widget get pulled from the market?

Did the if you're selling somebody else's product, did the vendor come in and do another training? So there's other things that influence it. So you're never going to have clean 100 % data, but you can get pretty close. You can get close enough to say, yeah, you know, we did have a 7x or an 11x increase and here's what we estimate that to.

What top trends are you most excited about coming up in our crazy industry here?

You know, there's a couple. One is maybe less of a trendy more of just a general thing, but I'm really excited that learning and development as a department and as a business is being more valued by the companies that we work for. And I find that really exciting. And I think that there's some perpetual motion behind that. think we're pushing it forward as learning and development professionals. think we are.

presenting ourselves and our case better when we're aligning to the business goals and strategies and how we're talking about things. But I think that builds some momentum within the community to where leaders are saying, it's not just that you're doing really good, but look, maybe this whole thing is bigger. I think that's amazing. The general dynamic and discussion between return to the office and remote work, I think, has had a really positive

albeit polarizing, on learning and development. know, the argument, where's the best place to work has allowed us to come in and have some discussions about where's the best place to educate people and what's the best way to do it. Oftentimes leadership, in my experience, would say, trading only happens in the classroom. need to pull them out and you need to go to the classroom. And then there was

No kiddin'

this whole other group that said, no, everything can be done online. I'm here to say, I look at what are we trying to impact? What are we trying to do? What behavior do we want to change? And what's the best way to do that? Maybe we need them to fill out this thing in the computer system a little bit differently. So maybe it's a pop-up. Maybe they just need a flow chart that tells them if then, if this do that,

or maybe we do need to pull them together into a classroom to do this together. And maybe this could be a self-paced e-learning that they could go back to. There's so many ways that we can help move the needle forward. And I think because of this discussion about where's the best place to work, it allows us to have more conversation about what's the best way to learn.

in this environment and I feel like people are a little bit more open to that discussion now than what they were before. We're a little less strict in one lane versus another.

I think that's a good thing too, because I think to find success in this industry, you need to have flexibility and be open to experimenting because learners are always changing how they learn based on technology differences in how folks just learned just growing up in school and generations differences and the diversity of folks. So you really need to just

and everything and see what works. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you find that you need to go back to the drawing board, but just having that want to experiment and find out new ways to teach people I think is exciting.

is. Yeah. To meet people where they're at, to help them grow and develop within their job skills, but their career and as a person, I think that's amazing. In my opinion, you have to meet them where they're at to be able to do that.

What do you find is the most challenging aspect of helping employees move forward in their career and really find that path forward?

I think that's probably different at every company. understanding what opportunities are available and helping them to see that they can own that. know, there was once a mentality that you have this job and this is the only job you're ever going to have and you never change companies and this is what it is. Then we go all the way to you should change jobs every two years because that's how you

grow. I struggle with that part too. Like, I don't know. We have to help people see that it's not the company's job necessarily to push you forward. You don't have to stay in one job and be stuck. You can't, you can't if that's what you want to do. When you found your spot, you don't have to go up the ranks and be promoted to owner or some day or CEO or whatever. If you find your niche, then stay there and you

do that. But if you would like to continue to explore your career path, you can do that. And here's how. So getting them to have that ownership mentality of their career and their skills, but then helping them see what skills are going to really get me to where I want to be. What do I have now? How does that apply to something else? And then where can I, what gaps can I fill and where can I do that? And I think that

AI is going to be really helpful in that as we go forward and as that develops and we embrace that a little bit more. I think it's going to allow for that to happen a little more easily for everybody.

How are you all leveraging AI in your environment?

Full transparency, I work for an insurance brokerage and my particular business segment is health insurance. So we are in some of the most high scrutiny regulated industries there are. So we have to be late adopters because there's so much at stake, but even we are saying

There's a lot that can be done here. So open the can just a little bit and take a step back. think AI is really scary to a lot of people and it's very scary to people in our industry, not just because of the regulatory stuff that we have to follow, but because it's unknown and people tend to be scared by things that they don't know and they don't understand and they don't understand that they've been using it already. AI, artificial intelligence sounds

Well, it's not art. It is artificial, but it's not intelligent. It's machine learning. It's a computer that's learned something and it's really good spotting patterns and regurgitating that back to you and helping people to see you've already been using it. So you call the phone company with a question about your bill and the little auto voice says, hi, Miss Torres. Are you calling about your account at XYZ address? Say yes or no.

and walk through that, well, that was AI. If you go to a website and a little chat pop pops up, hey, ask me if you have a question, that's AI. If you've ever used autocorrect or Grammarly, it's also AI. So are the recommendations on things like Netflix and the real time navigation on your Google Maps and all of that. That's all AI. So people have been using it without knowing it.

And I think when you start to help them see, it's been here and I'm using it. Okay. Maybe it's a little less terrifying. Although still terrifying because people still think it's going to be really super smart and it's going to take their jobs. And no, you, it can take the repetitive data driven things and streamline them and make it easier so that you can do the human centered piece of that. But it requires a human.

There has to be a human in control of it, reviewing it and telling it what to do. It can't think. But it can take the repetitive tasks out of your work. And that's where our company is moving towards leveraging it. And we've got our toes dipped in the water to do some of that. So what repetitive things can it streamline? Some people like to have it write their emails. I will say that I don't.

will draft a communication and then instead of spending 45 minutes because it's going to leadership and I need to have all the bullet points and how do I call this out really well for them, I draft these are the things I need to say and I say, here, help me format this for leadership. It's different if it goes to the CEO versus the CFO and it will help do that. It'll ask me, hey, well, are you doing a presentation? you want?

talking points for this person versus another person. You can give it tons of information and it will summarize it for you or you can have it. So if we're looking at insurance policies, it can find certain exclusions and clauses and insurance policies for you. So don't have to page through 100 some odd document, page document. You can review data and spot trends, can help you brainstorm ideas.

And then certainly in learning and development, are tons of uses, image creation and video creation and voiceovers. Some are terrible, but I have had some that are fabulous. I have two voices in a platform I use that I really like. I try not to overuse them. Although sometimes they say funny words or they say words in a weird way. And I wonder, is that voice better in a different language?

Because I'm like, why would anybody use that? That sounds really weird. But maybe in Spanish or Chinese, it sounds great. don't know. But I really think AI can be used to help support us in our work in a way that allows us to do the things that are really human centered and impactful and for me anyway, bring me the greatest joy. Do I?

like data entry? No, it kind of sucks the life out of me. So it can do that for me so that I can do those other really meaningful, more strategic tasks that make me good at my job.

Definitely. And what do you think the role of L &D in helping a business figure out what to do with or about AI is? Is it more than simply training people on tools and prompt engineering, that type of thing?

Absolutely it is. I think this is one of those things that is a company-wide culture shift. I don't think any one person or department can own it. I think we all have to come at it together and help each other almost in a from the ground up bootstraps effort kind of a way because we all know when leadership says something from the top it goes in one ear and out the other.

If you have a couple of people on the ground doing something, you have a couple of people on the ground doing something. It takes both to grow everywhere. So I think leadership has to support it. I think they have to work with the securities and technology teams to have the right tools. I think they need to work with learning and development to say this is what it is and how it works and how it can benefit you.

And then you have to have people at the ground level who are interested in it and are using it and are telling people, Hey, I just had it do this. Look at how much easier this was. I had to create this report and this normally takes me hours and look at how fast it did it. And in showing those real life use cases and getting people in the office to see, well, that was easy. Okay. Maybe I can do that.

And I think we all have to really work together to say, we're not looking to replace you. We're looking to help make you better and make your life better. And here's how, and here are some thoughts. And you have to be very careful about this along the way. So let me give you an analogy. this may seem a little farfetched, but stay with me here. So in, I think it was the early nineties or so.

My grandmother, who was quite a bit older at the time, her husband had passed a few years before and she lives in a two-bedroom house with one phone on the wall in the kitchen and has a very long cord, but she has to run to get the phone when it rings. She has lots of kids, everybody's college, check on her and see how she's doing. It's a hassle and she likes to go outside and she likes to work in her garden. So.

The family gets together and decides she could really benefit from having a cordless phone. So they were really expensive at the time. The family goes in. I told you this goes way back. mean, we're way before cell phones were even thought of. The family pitches in to buy her cordless phone for Christmas and she opens it up and everybody's sitting around. They're so excited. we can't wait to see grandma's expression. And she opens it up, followed promptly by what is it going to cost me? So was an epic flop.

And so it sat in the room for a while and my mom worked on her and worked on her and worked on her and finally convinced her just let it's not going to cost you even just let me plug it in. Let me plug it in in another room at the other side of your house. And there it sat. And then one day all of a sudden we go to visit. Grandma's excited because she got a phone call and she answered from the other side of the house. She didn't have to run to the kitchen to get the phone. And wow, that's great, grandma.

And then all of a sudden she's taking it with her to other spots in the house. And then she takes it out to the garden. And all of a sudden this is the greatest thing that's ever happened. Because she was scared of it and she didn't understand the use case. And so her mind was closed and she couldn't see how fabulous and how much this was gonna help her. And I feel like AI is a little bit of a cordless telephone at Christmas. People are terrified.

They don't understand so they can't see the benefit. You have to go into it with an open mind. Do I think that it's going to take over the world? No. Do I think that it's going to take your jobs? No. Do we think we have to be cautious? Absolutely. Don't just tell it everything about you and don't let it do everything without checking it. Let it assist you. Let it. I heard I've heard several people refer to it as an intern.

It's there to help you. It's super eager, but it also needs a lot of guidance. So if you think of it as your intern, what kinds of things would you have an intern do? Those are great things to have AI do. And then you go back and check it just like you would an intern and you do the last little bits, but it can help get you to your end product a little bit faster and offload so that you'll get to do that really strategic work that you're good at.

I think that is the exact approach that people need to take with it. And businesses have to be patient with folks as they adopt as well. Just like your family was patient with grandma.

It's turned into just kind of something that we throw out there. that one was really good. Cordless phone. It's turned into a family joke.

Well, since you've taken me back in a little bit more into your life and into your family's life, I'd like to dig into the personal side of things. So tell me about you, Heather. Take me back to little Heather days. What led you to get into the world of learning and development? You said at the beginning of this that you were thinking about potentially being a teacher or business person. You went the business route. How did you end up becoming the director of learning and development at Brown and Brown?

Yeah.

most of the schools in my area. So that didn't happen. And I quickly needed a job that would pay the bills and was looking for something that would be steady and slightly more recession proof. So I ended up by happenstance in health insurance, which if you ever talk to somebody that's in health insurance, they got there by accident. I think in the thousands of people I've met, there've been like three that did it on purpose.

Most of us get here by accident. So I spent over a decade in the health insurance space, helping businesses that offer health and dental insurance and all that to their employees and running the department, utilizing the business background. And, but I really leaned into training my team and I worked with my customers with an educational focus. Like, I want you to understand this. I want you to make an educated decision.

And so we've gone through all of this and then here comes a position for somebody to start a learning and development department for all business segments. And I was like, wait, I think this position was built for me. So I raised my hand and five years later, here I am.

And lastly, before I get you out of here today, if you could go back in time, let's say 22, just getting out of college and whatnot, what advice would you need to hear? Not really what advice does the younger generation need to hear? They get that enough, but what do you need to hear?

I think I needed to hear to have more confidence and faith in myself because I can do things I don't realize I can do and that it's okay to toot your own horn a little bit. Like there's outright bragging and showing off and then there's like, hey, no, I really did this thing and this is kind of important. That's something that growing up,

no, you don't go around and brag about things. And I think especially as women, we are taught that, that you need to kind of take a step back and be a little bit more moderate. But in a business world, you can't. Leaders are busy. They have a million things going on. And if you can't come to the table and go, hey, look, I did important thing one, two, and three, and look at this extra fun thing over here that was a really big deal, if you can't say that, they're not going to know about it. So.

I would tell myself to just have more confidence and to be able to do that and to find somebody to mentor you. My son, he's 22 and he was talking about he didn't want to work for this company that he really liked because that guy can't really mentor him in the way he wants to. I'm like, oh my gosh, if I had thought about finding somebody to mentor me at 22, the things I could have accomplished. It's just a whole different mindset.

I leaned into people that I really agreed with and liked the way they worked and I wanted to emulate them, but I didn't really look for a mentor. I think that would be a really big deal too.

Yeah, I think mentorship is incredibly important, especially at a young age. And not only does that help you learn as much as possible about whatever industry that you're in as quickly as possible, it also just gives you the confidence to ask questions and to not know everything all at once. and that confidence then leads to you being able to be like, hey, yeah, cool. I just did this. I do know this. And and I think that's wonderful.

Where can people connect with you, Heather?

You can find me on LinkedIn. I have a super exciting profile name. It's H-L-Taurus. Alright. H-L-T-O-R-R-E-S. I'm happy to connect.

Well, we will put that in the show notes and the show description and people can find you. And thank you so much for giving us this incredible insight. It's been truly a pleasure speaking with you today, Heather. I really appreciate it.

It's been my pleasure. been an honor to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me on.

If you learned something new or had a laugh, share the show with someone you know. This has been another episode of learning matters. As always, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't hesitate to reach out to us here at TTC innovations to see how we can assist you with all your training needs. See you next time.