In a lot of organizations, learning now has its own budget, its own strategy and a place among the priorities in the company’s long-term plan.
What has not changed (much) is that the decisions that shape how people work, for example, what they are measured on, what they are promoted for, which systems they use, how teams are structured, etc., are often still made without L&D in the conversation. Learning will often just get handed the outcome and asked to build training that makes it work.
I got together with Allyson Roote recently, a L&D leader at a professional services firm, to talk about why learning gets left out of decisions like these and what she believes would change it. What she describes comes from her own experience and from conversations with other learning leaders, and will be familiar across the profession, whatever the industry.
Four key things came out of the conversation. Between them they cover what decides whether learning is consulted or informed: how the function is positioned, what it measures, whether it can define the skills the business wants, and how it decides what to take on.
1. How L&D earns influence prior to decisions getting made
One thing Allyson has noticed across her many years in the profession is that learning can be a stated priority and still be treated as a support service. Nothing says “learning matters” more than being written into a company plan, right? Partly. A plan may say learning matters. But it doesn’t change what colleagues picture L&D doing, and if they picture training delivery, they’ll call you when there’s training to deliver. Allyson’s read is that they don’t know what they don’t know.
So the question she always asks is this: What could she be doing differently? What is she not doing to better educate the business about the value L&D has? Being involved early is earned, through credibility and business acumen. As Allyson puts it, L&D has a responsibility to continually demonstrate value beyond training delivery and help others understand where we can contribute.
Plenty of companies name learning in their multi-year plan, but what counts is whether L&D is engaged early enough to help shape solutions and influence outcomes.
If you find you’re brought in after the decision is made, ask to understand it.
Where did this come from? Who worked on it? What problem were they solving? Those questions get you the business context behind the decision, and a working relationship with the people who made it. Both count the next time something significant gets planned.
Examples from the field: When Karen Ganitsky took over global sales training for a 3M business group, some senior leaders did not know her function existed. Today, with a strategy on a page, and a clear maturity read on the function, she has weekly check-ins with senior leaders she previously had no access to.
2. Most L&D data is collected to prove training was delivered
Data collected to prove delivery can only prove delivery. This becomes a problem when leadership asks whether the training worked, or whether it was worth the investment.
Learning teams end up with delivery data because, many times, someone else asked for it. In regulated industries, for example, evaluation starts as a requirement. An accreditation body wants proof that training was delivered and received, so learning teams collect completions, attendance and satisfaction scores. Outside regulated industries the same numbers dominate for a different reason: they are the only data a learning team can collect easily and independently, without needing anyone else’s cooperation within an organization.
That also means the data will not tell you whether anyone performed better or worked differently after training.
The numbers that would tell you that are often held by other functions. How long new hires take to reach full productivity. How many people leave in their first year. How often a process goes wrong. L&D cannot decide alone which of those to track, because other people own them. Even getting access is a negotiation, which is part of why so many learning teams stay with the data they can pull themselves.
Getting hold of those numbers is one problem. Linking a change in them back to a piece of learning is another. Other things move the same numbers at the same time, so the connection is rarely clean. Allyson’s view is that it is worth making anyway, and worth being straight about how much work it takes.
Allyson suggests bringing stakeholders into the decision about what to measure, and asking them which numbers matter to their part of the business, before the program is built and before anything is tracked. In her words, she does not want to guess at the metrics that matter to them.
Examples from the field: Jushi’s L&D team works this way. Nothing gets built until a business metric is agreed and the business hands over the starting figure. What the team reports on now is cash handling accuracy and how long new hires take to get up to speed, rather than attendance.
3. Businesses are getting better at measuring performance than developing it
Companies are starting to put real effort into performance measurement. That work usually produces a set of expectations for each job level, criteria for promotion, and dashboards tracking how people are doing against both. It can take months and involve senior stakeholders across the business, and L&D is often not part of it.
What this work rarely includes is any way for people to meet the expectations. They ask managers to be good at coaching and giving feedback without saying what good looks like, and without any training attached. Left to work it out, people do what gets recorded. A manager holds the number of coaching conversations the system expects and is marked as meeting the standard, without ever being shown how to coach.
Allyson sees this across the firms and learning leaders she knows. A company decides what its people are measured against without giving them any way to build the skills involved. She treats that gap as work for L&D. Take what people are expected to do at each level, work out which skills sit behind it, then build the learning that gets them there.
She is clear that this is work L&D does alongside the business. Skills connect to performance management, career progression and talent processes, so the definitions have to be shared ones. L&D brings the expertise and facilitates the conversation, and the people who own those processes help decide what good looks like.
WeLearn’s take: building on Allyson’s advice, take each behavior the performance criteria name and define what good looks like, early. Keep the business’s own names for them, so the definition attaches to the thing people are being scored on. Agree the definitions with whoever owns promotion and performance before they go into use. Our guide to building a skills-based learning strategy sets out how to do that.
If you’d like to discuss Skills Mapping for your organization, book time with our CEO & CLO, Sean Stowers here.
4. A documented learning strategy is what keeps a team focused
It may seem like a no-brainer that a learning team should have a strategy. What is easy to miss is the job it does once it is documented. A strategy tells you what to take on and what to turn down. That matters because no team can do everything, and every yes uses time you cannot then give to something else.
Allyson keeps her focus areas short for that reason. She used to plan three years ahead and now works from a small number of areas, set by her strategy. Keeping the list short is deliberate, so everyone on the team knows what they are working on and why. When a request does not line up with any of them, her team pushes back. She sees that as what moves a function from delivering training on request to being a partner the business plans with.
Her power move is bringing senior stakeholders in while the strategy is still being developed, so they have a say in it rather than receiving something already finalized.
WeLearn’s take: this is the thinking behind our Strategy on a Page. It sets out the situation, the objectives, the approach and how you will measure performance, on one page you can put in front of stakeholders. That way L&D spends time only on what matters most to the business.
L&D as order takers with influence
Allyson is realistic about the limits. In professional services, plenty of work will always come to L&D as an order. Regulatory training has to run on schedule, and nobody is asking learning whether it agrees. In her words, we are essentially order takers, but we can influence how the order is taken.
The four things above are how that influence gets built: knowing the people who make the decisions, measuring what the business cares about, defining the skills behind what it measures, and holding a strategy that says what the team is for.
