Meet Our Team: Q&A with Learning Manager Adriana Temali

Adriana Temali leads the learning team at the League of Minnesota Cities, where she oversees the creation and delivery of diverse educational opportunities for city staff and elected officials. Have you taken a MemberLearn course, participated in a webinar, or attended a League event? Adriana and her team are the ones who ensure those League learning experiences are customized in-house, practical, relevant, and directly support Minnesota’s cities.

Adriana takes pride in fostering a collaborative and supportive environment within her team and is committed to helping city leaders do the same in their communities.

Please describe the work your team does.

I’m the manager of the learning team at the League of Minnesota Cities. We are a part of the Human Resources and Learning Department, so we sit within the HR structure, but the majority of what our team does is work on creating different types of learning opportunities for our members across a wide range of topics.

We sometimes dive into specialty roles such as how city clerks might need to learn about a topic, or how specifically economic developers might be thinking about something within their city. Oftentimes we work specifically with our elected officials who are operating in a different way to city staff, so thinking about their roles and what they need to learn at what depth in order to be successful in decision-making and policy setting within their city. This is something that we do in a variety of ways, including conferences and other in-person learning opportunities, such as workshops.

We also create webinars that are synchronous but virtual, so all participants are attending at the same time but the event is happening often over Zoom webinar platform.

We also create what’s known in my world as asynchronous learning, but we talk about it at the League as online, on-demand courses that live in our learning management system MemberLearn.

 The learning team has myself and three other individuals. We have a learning coordinator who really helps to coordinate all of the conference and in-person agendas as well as the webinars. She is thinking a great deal about how to ensure that learning objectives are going to be targeted to the audience and how to use our time with our members effectively. She’s also thinking about the connectedness of different programs.

We also have a learning designer, and her role is really to design all of our online courses, and within that work she’s both writing course material and studying the subject matter in order to translate it to folks who are learning this topic for the first time. She’s also got a lot of artistic skills, so she’s got graphic design and video design skills to pull an online course together visually. We know that adults learn in a variety of ways and keeping information short, visual and multimodal is something that can really help with adults.

The third person on our team is a video specialist. He is working across different platforms to create short animations and to record our subject matter experts to capture their expertise on video in order to, again, have a more dynamic learning experience.

What schooling and work experience did you have before taking this role with the League?

I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado and studied psychology as my primary major with a minor in ethnic minority studies. I’ve always been really interested in how people think and socialize with each other and how we think about communities, but it wasn’t until a little bit later that I got interested in the learning field.

My life took me overseas for a little while and I ended up working at a community college as part of an HR team where I was doing leadership development work and diversity, equity, and inclusion work. While I was there, I was really thinking about how to help leaders grow and what does leadership development look like, taking somebody who’s an exceptional teacher and making them an exceptional supervisor, and taking an exceptional supervisor and making them an exceptional director. I started to really dive into what learning for adults looks like.

I got my master’s degree in human resource management with a focus on learning and development. In that world, I was really studying, how do we train people in a workplace setting or how do we retrain people who are maybe entering a second or third career? There’s lots of different ways to do that, but it’s focusing on how adults are these fully formed humans that already have all these experiences, unlike children. With children, you’re really shaping and molding them, but with adults, you’re really looking at, how do I give them this new information, but contextualize it into the experiences that they already know.

I’ve been working in a learning capacity in some form or another ever since then, and in 2015, life brought me back to Minnesota, which was my home state. I started working for Dakota County in their HR department, doing leadership development, learning work and also diversity, equity and Inclusion work. That is how I got to know the League of Minnesota Cities, and when they created this position of a learning manager, it was just really exciting because it combined being able to focus on developing learning programs while allowing me to still dabble in some of the other things that I love.

What are your top priorities this time of year, and what are you working on now?

January through June at the League of Minnesota Cities in the learning and events teams are really busy and it’s a really exciting time of year. Not only does session typically get started, which has a huge impact on many of our colleagues and our members who are going to the Capitol, but we also are welcoming newly elected officials.

2024 was a large election year and we have upwards of 450 plus new city council members or mayors who need to learn all about their role, and that’s really exciting for us at the League. We have this opportunity to help guide them and steer them through some of the good governance topics that get them started, like how to review or write a city budget, how to make collaborative decisions, how to lead with ethics in mind, and how to not break the open meeting law.

We work on a program that’s called the Elected Leaders Institute, which has two different pathways in it. One pathway is for those brand new elected officials and then the other one is for more seasoned or experienced elected officials. In January and February, the Elected Leaders Institute takes up a huge amount of my team’s time. In tandem to that, we are always working ahead, so we are working on our programs that happen throughout 2025. Without giving too much away, we’re actually building two new programs that we’re hoping to launch by the end of this calendar year.

It’s a really exciting time on our team!

What is your role in organizing the Elected Leaders Institute? What do you enjoy the most about this event?

My role with the Elected Leaders Institute is to come up with the program content and think through what is the best way for folks to learn when they’re new to their role or when they are people who are looking to brush up on their leadership skills. I get the chance to plan out both programs: the foundational and the advanced program.

The advanced program is really fun because it changes every year. It’s looking at bringing new topics and new speakers to people who maybe have been on council for a few years already, and so they already know the basics, and they’re starting to think a little bit more about those subtle skills like communication and negotiation. It’s really fun because we take a sample of what we hear back from our members throughout the year through feedback and surveys or meetings with them, and then we look at what the needs are right now for cities across the state of Minnesota and how can we build a program that meets those specific learning needs.

The Foundational Program is a great program. It’s a more stable program because it’s always aimed at the newly elected folks. There’s a core set of competencies that we’re working around and it’s a blended program. We’re helping people try to not drink from a fire hose, so to speak, but do a little bit more of a drip, drip, drip method which we know works best with adult brains.
So for three weeks, folks will take some of our online courses, they’ll get some of the informational downloads and the factual information about how certain laws work or what their role is, and then they join us for two days in person where they get to walk through scenarios, meet with other people, meet with subject matter experts, and really put that learning into a more contextualized and useful format. Then when they go back into City Hall and their cities, they can hopefully apply the Foundational Program lessons.

Conferences are fun and they are important in the work that the League does, but when you have 700 people who all have different needs and are all starting in different places, it’s pretty hard to tailor the content. The Elected Leaders Institute is a much more specialized program where we really have a sense of who’s going to be in the room and we can cater to the needs of those folks in a more targeted fashion.

I love when we get to dig deep for really specific audiences and deliver results where we hear from our members that it hit the spot for them and it was exactly what they were looking for.

What is one thing that you wish members knew about your team?

One is that we think really hard about the programming that we put together. It might seem sometimes like we are catering to greater Minnesota or to really large cities, or to really small cities, but we actually are constantly thinking about how is this going to apply or be scalable to as many people as possible.

I think the other thing that I would love for people to know is that we’re always thinking about representation. We know it’s really important for our members to hear from a variety of subject matter experts. The person standing at the front of the room has to have the knowledge and skills to lead whatever the topic area is, but it’s also really important that we make sure that we include and hear from a variety of types of people who are leading in cities so that our events are reflective of the folks who are really doing the work.

The last thing that I wish people maybe knew about our team is that all of our MemberLearn courses, all of our online coursework is completely written and designed and created 100% in house and that is extremely rare. Most organizations who do online learning have consultants or outside third parties that are either writing or doing the video or the animation work, and we are lucky enough to have a dedicated couple of folks who do this for our members. It’s great because when we create an online learning course about open meeting law, for example, it’s really targeted and specific to Minnesota cities, and we can write scenarios that really work for our members.

The second thing that’s really cool about it as well is that it means that all of the graphics and all of the imagery and all of the language can really be tailored and honed in so specifically to just this one audience because it’s not an off-the-shelf safety course that was written for people all around the world to use. Our courses don’t have the corporate lingo that you see in a lot of online courses, but this takes a ton of time and a ton of talent. I always want people to know how lucky the League is to have the talented people that work on the learning team.

Why do you do what you do? What do you enjoy about your job?

I think I was always destined to work in the public sector, and I’ve always had a mission or a value around creating a wider good or a wider impact in the place where I live. The reality is that my job exists across a wide variety of sectors and a wide variety of organizations. So I think the “why” for me is why the League, why Minnesota cities? To that extent, I think it’s that I get to work with really great people all the time who are smarter than me. I love walking into a room and just realizing, oh man, everybody here has so much experience—both our members and my colleagues at the League, and it keeps me on my toes. I get to keep learning, and I get to keep trying new things.

I do really love creating learning opportunities, but I think it’s the environment that you get to do that in and the supportive nature of coworkers that really makes the job great.