Savvy learning leaders align L&D with strategic business objectives to maximise its impact on organisations – Collin Poage explores how to effectively demonstrate L&D’s value to leadership
The role of L&D is changing. According to Gartner: “Learning and development functions face growing pressure to deliver critical skills in an environment of fast-changing skills needs, heightened employee expectations, and economic uncertainty.”
Learning leaders need to answer the question: “How does learning help advance our entire organisation?”
How can your company cope? Salvation lies in realising the strategic potential of L&D. When business leaders see the value of learning, L&D can bridge the talent gap. Using their seat at the business strategy table, L&D can help people develop the critical skills needed to transform and innovate.
But conventional learning goals don’t always resonate with business leaders. Learning leaders need to understand the business and speak the language of the C-suite to effectively communicate the value and positive impacts of L&D. Essentially, they need to answer the question: “How does learning help advance our entire organisation?”
Tailor your message
‘Know your audience’ – it’s a winning strategy for effectively communicating and persuading, and it hasn’t changed since ancient Greece. To prove to leadership that L&D is business critical – and to safeguard your learning initiatives – you must understand how leadership thinks and prioritises company initiatives.
What is leadership’s top priority? Profit. It may sound overly simplistic, but even charitable companies like Patagonia using impact-driven business models must be profitable. Danone CEO Antoine de Saint-Affrique said it well: “Sustainability without performance has no impact. Performance without sustainability has no future.” No matter which company you work for, performance and especially profit are top priorities.
How can L&D impact profit?
There are two options: increase the money the company earns, or decrease the money the company spends. If you want L&D and your learning initiatives to be a business priority, show how learning impacts profit. The gold standard is linking learning initiatives to revenue increase. But if you can’t connect learning to revenue, then at least prove how your learning initiatives save the company money.
If you can’t connect learning initiatives to increased revenue or decreased costs, you have one last profit card to play: risk. C-suite leaders worry about cyber hacks, legal and regulatory compliance failures, product quality issues, and more. So, if learning initiatives can mitigate costly risks, then leadership can assign a cost-saving value to learning initiatives.
Ultimately, learning is on the critical path to performance. Learning sits at the heart of any strategic initiative because it gives individuals and companies the knowledge and skills to do things differently. After all, the point of a strategic initiative isn’t to keep doing the same old thing. Change is foundational to any new and successful strategy implementation. What enables strategic change? Learning.
How can L&D better align with strategic initiatives?
Building on this reminder about business dynamics and priorities, savvy learning leaders align L&D with strategic business objectives. They do this first by ensuring they have identified the top-level strategic goals of the organisation. These can be high-level or ‘fuzzy’, so the next step is to uncover the underlying set of drivers that work together to make these strategic initiatives a reality. These may be functional projects, team goals, or smaller initiatives and beyond.
Once these underlying drivers are identified, the third step is to prioritise which ones L&D can enable. The fourth and final step is to execute the required L&D effort and measure the results. But the conventional approach to measuring L&D impact needs to be upgraded.
How can L&D upgrade its impact metrics?
Transformational L&D leaders translate their own metrics for leadership. This isn’t to say that L&D metrics aren’t useful. They can be important to your department for tracking and analysing the efficiency of your learning programs. But presenting participation rates, completion figures, and engagement hours won’t impress your CEO because they’re only interim measures that aren’t directly connected to outcomes.
Avoid the instinct to quantify the activity; instead, value the outcomes. If you are not sure what kind of metrics to use, try to connect learning to money earned, money saved, and risks reduced. If you have them, utilise the specific business metrics or KPIs that your leadership has highlighted, demonstrating how you support their goals. And as skills become the new currency of work, measure the skills your employees have and the skills they can develop to increase revenue or improve efficiency.
When learning leaders deepen their understanding of strategic initiatives and business drivers, the transformational potential of L&D can be realised. It is then essential to develop business acumen that enables clear communication of L&D’s value and benefits. By championing strategic learning, L&D can effectively close the talent gap because it has the power to cultivate the skills that drive critical business transformation and the ability to demonstrate impact in a new way.
Collin Poage is Vice-President of Business Consulting at Degreed
