As any seasoned chief talent officer knows, selecting the right staff augmentation partner is about far more than price — it’s a strategic decision that will impact an organization’s ability to change, meet its goals and ultimately achieve success. For Cheryl Haga, a veteran senior L&D program manager and strategist, the stakes were high: Her team seemed to need a staff augmentation solution rooted in safety-critical documentation, aligned with rigorous standards from OSHA and CPUC.
Haga made an initial decision grounded in logic and experience — selecting a vendor with deep compliance expertise, which seemed like the logical choice.
“They had a really strong background in safety-critical work … but that also meant they had kind of older models of doing everything,” Haga shared during a conversation with Arturo Schwartzberg, co-founder of SweetRush.
Haga is a remarkable leader, and one of her unique traits is her ability to pause, reassess and pivot with purpose. As the project took shape, she realized what her team truly needed was innovation, design-forward thinking and an L&D approach that would not only satisfy regulators, but engage learners.
“I realized I don’t need someone to do the documentation. I can do that,” she said. “What I needed was the stuff I don’t have — modernization, innovation, the cool stuff that makes learning actually land.”
Once Haga had this realization and changed her decision, SweetRush received an email with an enticing subject line reading: “We changed our minds.”
From that point, things moved quickly. To meet Haga’s newly defined vision, SweetRush’s Talent Solutions team mobilized fast — and strategically. Haga had the need to raise the bar on the overall abilities of her in-house instructional design team to meet the complexity her learning goals demanded.
To meet those goals, SweetRush augmented Haga’s team with 40 highly qualified, culturally aligned instructional designers, dramatically scaling her team’s capacity in a short amount of time.
This wasn’t just a numbers game: Haga’s ability to lead through complexity meant every move had to be thoughtful and purposeful. Key to the success of the partnership was SweetRush’s relationship-based talent-matching process, which ensured that each instructional designer brought not only the required skills but also strong alignment with the client’s values, team dynamics and organizational culture.
Haga and SweetRush worked in close collaboration, with the goal not simply of filling seats but truly elevating the team’s capability. To meet this need, SweetRush built in a mentorship program with a focus on knowledge transfer. This approach helped the new instructional designers hit the ground running — and upskilled the client’s internal team and laid the foundation for long-term partnership.
With Haga’s strategic guidance and SweetRush’s support, the expanded team was able to manage a significantly larger workload, respond to evolving business demands and deliver impactful, learner-centered solutions at scale. However, the new speed to solution created a corresponding need to streamline document management to keep pace, and SweetRush partnered with Haga to solve that challenge as well.
Haga’s willingness to rethink the partnership showed her trademark humility, confidence and boldness. She saw that SweetRush’s strengths were what she needed — custom design, cutting-edge experiences and the ability to bring her vision to life — and, accordingly, she made the change.
“SweetRush came in with the modernization, the speed, the really cool bells and whistles — the cutting-edge L&D work,” Haga says.
As an L&D leader, Haga has a deep understanding of the qualities that enable teams to thrive. Her leadership style, which she describes in her recent book, “Titans of Training: Building a Strong Training Strategy,” is about transforming L&D teams into powerful, strategic partners for the organization.
It’s exactly this mindset that informed Haga’s decision to pivot — leading her team not just toward compliance, but toward innovation and impact.
This decision wasn’t about undoing a mistake; instead, it was about evolving and acting with intention. This skill is the mark of a leader who knows when to hold fast versus when to make a needed, yet difficult, change.
For L&D leaders navigating complex, high-impact decisions about talent, Haga’s story is a masterclass in leadership. Lead with insight, own the pivot and choose the partner who expands your capabilities — so your team and your learners can grow.
As learning professionals, we know transformation doesn’t happen when we remain in our comfort zones. It happens when we act boldly, are willing to change, and find a partner who complements and aligns with our team and vision.
