In our post immediately following the TICE event, we wrote about how L&D earns influence at work: asking better questions before building, speaking the business’s language, and putting its results where leaders can see them. If you missed it, it’s here
That post was about L&D getting noticed by the business and earning recognition — being invited into the conversation and taken seriously in it.
This one is about what happens next.
Getting invited into the conversation is a start. Becoming a partner the business relies on comes down to how you handle the work once you’re trusted with it.
When we sat down with leaders Karen Ganitsky of 3M, Brian Jarvis of WM, and Valerie Marsh of Jushi after our TICE panel, we noticed they all share one habit. Each of them takes ownership of a business outcome — a number the business is trying to move, like attrition or ramp time — and holds themselves accountable for it. Once you own an outcome that way, a lot of other things follow. Here’s what.
You measure whether it was worth it
L&D has plenty of ways to measure learning. Kirkpatrick, Phillips, LTEM, sixty years of models. Almost all of them answer one question: did the learning work?
If you own an outcome, that question isn’t enough. Your stakeholders aren’t asking whether the course worked. They’re asking whether it was worth it.
So these leaders agree on the measure of success before they build anything. They pick a business number that matters — attrition, ramp time, the cost of a bad hire — find the person who owns it, and agree to track it together from the start. When the program ends, the impact is already framed in a number leadership cares about, and there’s no argument to win.
You say no when it isn’t a training problem
Owning the outcome changes what you agree to build, too.
Some of what reaches L&D isn’t a learning problem. It’s a hiring gap, or a broken process. Build a course on top of one of those and it fails, and the outcome you signed up for never moves.
A team once came to Valerie sure they needed training on a compliance system. She looked closer. Nobody had defined who owned what, so tasks kept slipping through the gaps. A course would have taught people to run a system that was broken by design. She sent the process back to be fixed first.
Turning down work takes some nerve. It also earns trust. When you decline the requests that won’t move the number, people believe you on the ones you take.
You share the credit
Here’s the part that surprised us most. If you own an outcome, you don’t need to own the whole cause of it. Why? Because a business result almost never has a single one.
Attrition drops, and training helped, but so did a pay change, a new manager, a better hiring process. Your instinct might be to claim the win for L&D, but successful leaders will give it away.
Here’s one example from the TICE panel: when turnover fell after a new onboarding program, Valerie could have taken the credit. Instead she pointed out that HR was restructuring at the same time and weak managers were moving on. She called it a shared result. Karen describes L&D the same way, as an agent of change rather than the source of it.
That kind of honesty pays off twice. People trust the numbers you do claim. And you avoid the credit fight altogether, because if you never say training caused the result, no one can argue it didn’t. You get counted in the win without having to own the whole thing.
You give it time
Owning an outcome is a commitment that plays out over years, and the leaders on our panel were all very clear about that.
Karen lives by three words: passion, persistence, patience. Most L&D leaders have the first two. But patience is the one they can lose because the business wants results this quarter, while proof will often show up much later.
Owning an outcome also takes a team. None of these leaders moved their numbers single-handed. Each rebuilt their team to get where they are, hiring for the gaps and giving people room to grow. Karen described this well. She sets the direction, and she credits her team with the real work of getting there. A leader can own the outcome, but the people around them are what actually moves it.
Where to start
Becoming a partner starts with a shift in what you hold yourself accountable for. Own the outcome, and the rest follows: you measure what the business values, you turn down work that won’t move it, you share the credit, and you commit for the long haul.
All three of these leaders started the same way, with an honest look at their own function. The WeLearn Learning Strategy Scorecard measures where you stand across six dimensions of L&D maturity in a few minutes. It’s the same read our panelists used to find their footing.
If you missed TICE and you’d like to hear more of what Valerie, Brian and Karen had to share during their panel, check out the full session here.
