From Learning to Leverage: A Conversation with Rita Barger, Director of Logistics Enablement, Constellation Brands

Undercurrents surfaces insights from leaders driving capacity-building
and performance improvement beyond traditional L&D
to explore where learning happens and where it’s headed.

By Mark Britz

There’s a moment in many learning careers when the work starts to feel incomplete. That’s where my conversation with Rita Barger kept returning to—what happens when you move beyond learning and development?

Rita’s career doesn’t follow a straight line. In fact, it includes a 13-year pause. She stepped away from the workforce to raise her children, and when she decided to return, she went back to school, rebuilt her technical foundation, re-established her network, and started again as an intern making $10 an hour. As she put it, there was no shortcut, only a willingness to re-enter, learn, and earn her way forward.

That mindset carried into her next phase as an instructional design consultant, where she spent a decade working across organizations, building solutions, and running her own business. But more importantly, she was learning how businesses actually function, how decisions get made, how relationships shape outcomes, and how credibility is built over time. That exposure would later become one of her most valuable assets.

The Work That Isn’t Training

When Rita eventually joined Constellation Brands, she pivoted to become an individual contributor on a newly formed Change Management team. It was a conscious decision to understand the inner workings of a large, complex organization before trying to lead within it.

What she found there was something many learning professionals eventually encounter: Most organizational challenges aren’t rooted in a lack of training. Rather, they’re rooted in misalignment. Decision rights are unclear. Sponsorship is inconsistent. Competing priorities create friction. Cultural dynamics shape whether change is accepted or resisted. That’s what change management is really addressing.

“As I learned more about change management, I realized that it builds on everything that I love about learning and development and instructional design, and then goes farther,” she said. ” It’s not just capability building, it’s also the systems and  infrastructure that make those capabilities successful.”

Training still matters—but it’s rarely the deciding factor. Systems, sponsorship, and clear decision-making are what make the change stick.

Training as a Lever

One of the most important shifts in Rita’s thinking is how she now positions learning. Training, in her eyes, shifted from a goal to a tool, a lever rather than the solution.

That distinction changes everything about how work is approached. In her current role, training is rarely the starting point. The work begins with understanding the system: what needs to change in the operating model, who owns the work, how decisions are made, and where breakdowns occur. Only after those pieces are clarified does capability building come into play. People need to be ready to learn and to adopt new ways of working. For the training to stick, it requires both the awareness of what’s changing and the desire to step into that new environment.

This reversal, from starting with content to starting with context, is subtle but significant. It moves learning from being a response to being part of a broader strategy.

Co-Creation over Control

If there’s a defining capability in Rita’s work, it’s not instructional design. It’s influence. Change, as she describes it, cannot be imposed. It has to be built with the business.

“Organizational change has to be
co-created with the sponsor
and the leaders in the business
in order to be successful.”

Rita Barger

For Rita, that starts with “how you bring people along—step by step—so the change feels like their idea. You give them time to digest the plan, shape it, and feel heard. That’s Change Management 101.”

In practice, that means letting leaders and stakeholders shape the direction, even when the path forward feels obvious. It means creating space for alignment, input, and shared ownership. And it means accepting that progress may feel slower in the moment.

But that slowness is often deceptive. In organizations that value alignment, pushing too quickly creates resistance that stalls progress. The trick is learning how to move at a pace that builds momentum instead of breaking trust. As Rita described it, you often have to go slow to go fast.

And as her scope grew, she found that the hardest part wasn’t the plan—it was the behavior around it.

The Coaching Layer

Over time, Rita’s work expanded into coaching, not as a formal addition but as a natural extension of change management. Systems and processes can be redesigned, but behavior is what ultimately determines whether change takes hold.

Coaching, in this context, becomes less about giving advice and more about building awareness. It’s helping leaders understand how their actions, communication, and decisions influence outcomes. It requires trust, empathy, and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations.

It also reflects a broader shift in her career—from building solutions to shaping behavior.

She describes coaching as “a rare opportunity to give someone honest feedback and then walk alongside them as they make real changes over six to nine months. It’s simple but incredibly powerful. Those who embrace the process are often the most successful—because as soon as they start monitoring their progress, transformation follows.”

Where AI Fits & Where It Doesn’t

Like many today, Rita is actively experimenting with AI. She sees it as a powerful tool for refining communication, exploring ideas, and accelerating certain types of work. But she’s equally clear about its limitations.

“Context is the missing link. Individuals rarely give AI the whole story, and even external coaches often miss the mark because they aren’t fully embedded in the company. They miss those unscripted moments, passing in a hallway or at the bar (at Constellation, there is a bar in the office), that are so critical to the real narrative.”

Similarly, AI operates on the information it’s given, and in organizational settings, that information is often incomplete. Situational awareness is partial. Nuance is missing. And without that, outputs can quickly become misaligned.

You really have to pay attention to the AI, she emphasized. “In person, conversations have a natural flow and generally stay within boundaries. Leveraging AI as a coach can be helpful, but requires additional oversight to avoid hallucinations, miscommunications. In some sense, you have to coach the AI yourself!”

More importantly, AI cannot replicate the human dynamics that sit at the center of change. It can support coaching, but it cannot replace the trust and connection required for it to be effective. “(AI) might tell you to build a network or build your brand, things like that, but I think where mentoring really helps is people feel that connection,” she said. “Mentorship, in particular, remains deeply human and rooted in shared experience, empathy, and genuine investment in someone’s growth. Another thing AI cannot provide is someone to be your champion in the room when you’re not there.  Something a mentor or coach is able to do that can build or strengthen your brand and network.”

Measuring What Actually Matters

One of the more complex challenges Rita described is measurement: “In traditional learning environments, success is often tied to completion rates, assessments, or system adoption. In change management, those metrics don’t tell the full story.”

“Transformation depends on multiple variables such as leadership engagement, project execution, resource alignment, and more. Training and change plans can be well designed and still fail if those other elements are not in place,” she said.

To address this, her team developed broader measurement approaches that assess the health of the entire transformation effort. They included sponsorship and change management, project management, project staffing, vendor capability  and IT, Finance and HR support. Instead of isolating learning, they look at how all components are contributing to (or hindering) progress. It’s a more complex way to measure success, but it’s also more reflective of reality

Taking a Step Back to Move Forward

Throughout her career, Rita has made choices that prioritize long-term effectiveness over short-term advancement. Stepping back into an individual contributor role. Investing significant time in certifications. Taking the time to understand the organization before trying to influence it. These decisions reflect a different view of growth, one that isn’t strictly upward, but outward and deeper.

The Undercurrent

What stayed with me after speaking with Rita is how clearly she sees the role of learning within a larger system. Learning doesn’t disappear as you move closer to the business, but it does change shape. It becomes one lever among many, rather than the primary solution.

In complex organizations, performance is rarely constrained by knowledge alone. It’s shaped by systems, relationships, incentives, and clarity. Training can support those things, but it cannot substitute for them.

The professionals who expand their impact are the ones who recognize this shift. They move from building content to shaping conditions, from delivering programs to influencing outcomes. That’s the transition from learning to leverage, and once you see it, it’s difficult to approach the work the same way again.