5 Minutes with Diane Caine
Authored by half full, llc
Over the last few months, we’ve been pulling back the curtain on our people — the individuals who power our half full, llc, vision, mission, and values, and enable us to do our most important work with our clients.
Today, in our “5 Minutes With” blog series, we’re giving you the chance to learn more about Diane Caine, our Training and Development Cultivator who ensures our workplace training and development arm not only meets our clients where they are today, but also positions them to reach breakthrough moments together tomorrow. Connect with Diane here and dive into our catch-up below!
And be sure to scroll to the bottom to catch up on the profiles to date!
Your career experience has ranged from working as a teacher to Global Payment Compliance Manager for Bank of America to running your own coaching business to now working at half full. What has motivated you in your career journey along the way and how did your path ultimately lead you to half full and saying YES to the opportunity?
My career decision started during senior year of high school. I was choosing between one of two paths — teaching or business. As a naïve 18-year-old, my decision was pretty simple. Teachers had summers off but weren’t well compensated, while business management gave me more options and a greater opportunity to earn a better income. That was the extent of my thought process in the beginning!
After graduating from JWU, I moved from working in a small medical supply business into my first real “corporate job” at a mutual fund transfer agency. I started with entry-level data entry and from there moved into a contact center role as a customer service agent and then ultimately became unit manager. Moving up “through the ranks” allowed me not only to learn, but also to teach. When I left that role to move to CVS, I continued to move up in leadership positions.
It was after the birth of my second daughter that I decided it was a good time to try out teaching. I obtained my substitute teaching certificate and started subbing at all levels, from elementary to high school.
When I opted to return to full-time work, Bank of America had just acquired Fleet Bank and the leadership role I was hired in was bringing their internal customer service call center online. My time at Bank of America was amazing and rich with learning experiences, from project management to operational efficiency using Six Sigma practices — which is how I obtained my Green Belt Certification and learned a great deal about change management, leading global teams and, most of all, people development. As I continued to move up to a senior leadership role, succession planning was an integral part of the process. Helping my team grow from individual contributors into leadership roles gave me joy.
In my quest to be a better leader, I obtained my coaching and DISC certifications. My love of helping others develop is what led me to start my coaching business on the side. I had just started to build some momentum when COVID hit. Thankfully, it was also during that time that I met half full Founder/President Rebecca Twitchell and learned about half full. I was immediately in love with the work half full was doing and asked Rebecca if I could just come join them!
I didn’t really come to the realization that my career path had joined my 18-year-old desires into one until I joined half full; leadership, after all, requires mentoring and teaching!
As half full’s Training & Development Cultivator, what does your role entail and what's the most meaningful part of your work?
My role as Training & Development Cultivator entails ensuring that our training and development services meet our clients’ needs, particularly when it comes to building a strong workplace culture. Often, our work starts with understanding the company’s vision, mission and values, then determining how to best support our clients to model those values and behaviors for every individual in the organization. Building a healthy culture requires consistency, repetition, patience and time.
As we build our training programs for our clients, my role involves collaborating with the half full team to listen to understand our clients’ needs and supporting them in a number of ways, from administering and training on DISC assessments and Clifton Strengths to designing and co-facilitating leadership development cohorts that range from 6 sessions to 10-month programs.
In addition, I work alongside Rebecca to ensure that we are continually growing our ecosystem of facilitators and trainers, which means I’m accountable for ensuring our facilitators are fully trained and prepared to support our clients. It also includes curating our facilitation and training workshop library.
It's been a BIG 12 months for half full in terms of launching our Flex Facilitator model and with 14 folks joining the ecosystem.
We are so grateful to the incredible folks who have recently joined our Flex Facilitator ecosystem, which enables us to have an even larger number of talented trainers and facilitators to partner with our clients. What can you share about our latest group of facilitators?
They are an amazing group of humans with a rich diversity of lived experience and expertise. The group includes a variety of people from former corporate executives, professors, small business owners to community leaders. They come with experience in various fields including technology, human resources, healthcare, finance, government and the military.
The common thread with each one is their genuine desire to help others grow and to create impact. You see it in their eyes and feel it in their hearts, when the room is full of them the energy is electric!
Their onboarding process includes a phased approach in learning the half full way. Learning from us, learning with us, and finally facilitating the facilitators. Once they complete the process they are invited to co-facilitate with the core team.
My favorite part of working with them is learning from them. Each of them has unique perspectives, they are genuinely curious, and they are open to sharing with one another. I also love working with each of their different personalities. They all have their own learning styles. It continually helps me to grow as a facilitator and trainer not only for them but also for our clients.
Our Flex Facilitators Also Blog! Check Out Our Latest Flex Post Here
What workplace challenges/opportunities are you most passionate about helping leaders navigate today? And why?
I would have to say, communication, coaching for growth and succession planning. In my experience, failure to communicate effectively and consistently is the root cause of most disruptions. It is part of the reason why I was drawn to obtaining my DISC certification in the first place. Understanding how people are wired to communicate and how to communicate in a way that connects with individual members of the team was a cornerstone to my own career success. When leaders can communicate expectations, feedback and accountability effectively, they can develop not only high performing teams, but they can also cultivate an engaged culture centered in empathy.
I love succession planning because I know that success is in succession. I believe the leader’s number one job is to share their knowledge and prepare the next leader (aside from producing results of course!). They should always be looking for and bringing along the talent that will keep the organization moving forward.
What is one thing folks might not know about you that has most informed your work, career passion, etc.?
Relationship building, communication, emotional agility, inclusion, empathy and self-awareness are not SOFT skills; they are ESSENTIAL skills.
As a female moving up “the corporate ladder,” I encountered my fair share of gender bias and navigated some uncomfortable behaviors early in my career. As I progressed into the global space, depending on the cultural norms of the country I was working with, my gender (regardless of the title I held) could impede progress. I would sometimes have to enlist my male peer or manager to influence the outcome, where I normally would not have had to.
Another major event that informs my passion and our mantra at half full — we are people before we are professionals — was navigating major life changes while being expected to exceed expectations on a project with unrealistic, yet expected, deadlines.
Envision this… a project with a “normal” timeline of 6-8 months was reduced to 90 days. In that same timeframe, I was getting remarried, selling two homes and purchasing a new one to move our blended family into, and so on. When I made an error on a presentation, the senior leader whom I indirectly reported to had little empathy for what was happening outside of work that was affecting my ability to perform. In his opinion, it immediately made me a “does not meet expectations.”
The saying “Leave your stuff at the door when you come to work” is impossible. Everything comes with us, no matter how well we think we can compartmentalize our emotions, about what is happening at home or in the world. Empathy and compassion for humans in a leader’s care is a must!
Final question...which half full value most resonates with you and why?
“All of them! However, if I had to pick one, I would choose: We do not judge or assume. It is one that stretches me as a human, because we are, by nature, judgy creatures! It also resonates with me so much because it is a core tenant of coaching, that everyone’s map of the world is different. It requires empathy and compassion for every human.
We all carry a story with us, we all have different strengths and talents and we all desire to be seen, heard and accepted.
Catch up on our other 5 Minutes With profiles here!