Open LinkedIn on any given morning and someone is telling L&D to stop being an order taker. Push back, become a strategic partner, set the agenda rather than receive it. The advice is everywhere and it sounds correct.
It also keeps coming up in WeLearn’s conversations with the senior L&D leaders heading to TICE in June for a panel on why L&D’s seat at the table so rarely translates into influence. In one of those conversations, Sean Stowers, CEO and founder of WeLearn, came at the question from a different angle:
You're never going to not be an order taker. You're taking the order. The question is, can you influence what the order is?
Sean isn’t arguing that L&D should give up on influence, he’s arguing that influence doesn’t come from refusing the order. It comes from what you do with the order once it’s in front of you. You ask a question or two. You reshape the order before you start building to it. You keep doing that until the people placing orders start placing different ones because they’re seeing things differently and recognizing what is truly required for effective training to be built.
Three L&D leaders heading on stage at TICE — Karen Ganitsky, Global Sales Training Leader at 3M; Brian Jarvis, Senior Manager of WMSBS Learning and Development at WM; and Valerie Marsh, Senior Director of Learning & Development at Jushi — have each built real influence inside their organizations: shaping what their businesses invest in, what the work gets measured against, and what their teams are asked to build. Here’s how.
"Is this the best use of our capacity?"
Brian’s team trains the staff at a large national customer service operation — people who spend their working day on the phone with customers. He described a loop most L&D leaders will recognise. A business partner came to him convinced the team needed more training on one specific issue, and the request kept coming back on repeat.
Brian decided to pull the call data before building. Of the thousands of customer interactions on file, only a small fraction touched the topic the partner was pushing. He brought the numbers back so the two of them could look at the request together.
“Is this the best use of our capacity?” Brian told us that’s the question he puts to every request that lands in front of him, including this one.
What the team actually needed wasn’t a course. It was a reference they could pull up in the moment, when a customer asked about something they hadn’t touched in seven weeks. That distinction matters because it’s the entire job. The original order was “build training.” The actual problem was “no reference material on the floor.” Same partner, completely different brief. The data was what made the conversation possible.
Without data, you can push back with an opinion. Brian pushed back with the call records. The partner couldn’t argue with the numbers — so they didn’t.
It's not brain surgery. It's 'get the numbers.'
Brian’s move depends on having the data. Many L&D teams find themselves stuck without it. The numbers that would let you challenge an incoming brief — sales figures, customer outcomes, call volumes — sit inside other teams’ systems. What L&D usually owns is its own data: completions, satisfaction scores, registration figures. None of that tells you whether anything actually changed in the business.
So when a partner shows up with an urgent request, you’ve got two options. You can push back on gut feel, or build what they’ve asked for. Pushing back without numbers feels like guessing, so most teams build.
Valerie, Brian, and Karen have each found a different approach.
Valerie’s approach is beautifully simple. If you’re running sales training, get the pre-training numbers. Get the post-training numbers. Sales data exists somewhere — usually on a dashboard a finance team is already looking at. “Sometimes it’s just as simple as that,” she told us. “It’s not, afterall, brain surgery.”
Brian’s approach kicks in when revenue data won’t be released. He runs a pre/post confidence survey instead — a specific measurement, taken before an intervention and again twelve months later, asking people how confident they feel doing the parts of the job the training was supposed to address. Correlation rather than causation, but the spikes are big enough to mean something to a business leader. He’s been using it for his team’s current work rolling out AI tools across the company.
Karen’s approach is different again. Her stakeholders couldn’t agree on what L&D measurement should even look like, which left every conversation about her team’s value starting from scratch. So she stopped trying to design something custom. She pulled up the Kirkpatrick model — the most recognised measurement framework in the field — and laid it on the table. This is how you measure L&D. Here’s where we are. Here’s where we’re going.
“We too often overcomplicate it,” she told us. “We’re afraid to lean into the simple.”
All three are doing the same thing underneath: refusing to accept that the data has to be handed to them. Each found a different way to bring it to the table.
The best data isn't in the LMS
Building a baseline gets you part of the way. The harder question is where the data that actually moves a stakeholder lives (and we already know, that’s rarely the LMS).
Karen ran a sales training program last year that her team measured carefully — completion, post-program assessments, the metrics L&D typically owns. But the data that ended up proving its impact came from somewhere else entirely: a shift in the company’s sales activities figures that surfaced when someone outside L&D pulled a CRM report. The program had landed harder than her team had planned for, and it was the CRM that showed them.
What Karen’s story makes visible is something Sean kept coming back to in conversation: L&D leaders who only have LMS data to tell their impact story don’t really have an impact story to tell. The LMS knows what people completed. It doesn’t know whether anything changed. The data that does is in the business’s own systems — the CRM, the call logs, the sales dashboard, the customer service tickets. L&D leaders who can pull from those systems can make their case in numbers the business already cares about.
"I didn't wait for permission"
Doing the work is one thing. Making sure the people who ‘place the orders’ can see it is another. Most L&D teams are quietly excellent inside their own four walls and largely invisible outside them, which is why their stakeholders keep asking for the same things in the same way.
Brian’s response was to make the work visible without waiting to be asked:
“I didn’t wait for permission to start advertising what I’m doing. I just did it. And then no one responded to it. And I just kept doing it.”
He’d started self-issuing impact reports to leadership — written up, distributed, no sign-off requested. Nobody asked him to stop. Eventually people started reading them. Some of the work he was sending out turned out to be more interesting to senior stakeholders than he’d realised, and the visibility shifted what got asked of him next.
What Brian’s reports changed wasn’t the work, it was leadership’s picture of what the work could do. As that picture sharpened, the briefs landing on his desk started to reflect it.
"This is actually my job"
Brian uses data to challenge other people’s briefs. He uses the same instinct on his own work.
A year into a multi-year L&D strategy, his company started moving faster on AI than the original plan had anticipated. The signals were everywhere: cross-functional initiatives, requests for upskilling, an executive team that kept bringing it up. Then a colleague in a town hall asked him directly: what are you doing to prepare the workforce for this?
He brought AI to the top of his priority list. “This is actually my job,” he told us — the question hadn’t surfaced anything he didn’t know in theory, just the gap between knowing and acting on it.
Strategy that stops updating loses its usefulness. Brian keeps his alive by changing it when the business asks for something the original plan didn’t account for.
That's the work
None of this is the kind of work that finishes. Karen, Brian and Valerie have spent years getting their organizations to ask for different things than they used to — and they’re not done. The panel in June is a chance to hear how they’ve gotten this far.
If you’re at TICE in June
Karen Ganitsky, Brian Jarvis, and Valerie Marsh are taking this conversation further on stage, with Loren Sanders, VP Learning Strategy & Consulting at WeLearn, moderating:
L&D Has a Seat at the Table. Why Isn’t That Translating to Influence?
June 17th, 2026 from 11:15 am to 12:15 pm in the Empire Ballroom A–C
