TJ podcast: Building L&D influence in a changing world, with Don Taylor – episode 331

Key takeaways:

Created by ChatGPT

• Showing value has become urgent for L&D
  
  Don argues that demonstrating value is no longer a vague aspiration around ROI. For many practitioners, it now feels tied directly to job security and the future of the function
• Influence comes from relationships, not simply access
  
  Being invited into strategic conversations is often the result of trust, networks and strong communication built over time. The goal is not merely a “seat at the table”, but genuine influence
• Strategic L&D requires a different skill set
  
  Moving from delivery into leadership means developing new capabilities, including prioritisation, relationship-building, comfort with ambiguity and a more entrepreneurial mindset
• AI is accelerating uncertainty across the profession
  
  Technology has risen sharply as a challenge, but the bigger issue is the sense that L&D’s role itself is changing and that the future is harder to predict
• Listening and conversation are becoming business-critical skills
  
  As work becomes more digital and AI-mediated, Don and Jo explore whether people are losing the ability to listen and converse well, even though those skills are fundamental to relationships, influence and effective work

Podcast summary:

Created by ChatpGPT

Jo Cook is joined by Don Taylor to explore why showing value and building influence have become increasingly urgent for L&D. They discuss the relationships and skills needed to operate more strategically, the uncertainty AI is creating across the profession, and what entrepreneurial L&D leadership looks like in practice. The conversation also considers how Covid and AI have changed the way we work, and why listening, conversation and human connection matter more than ever.

The conversation draws on findings from the TJ L&D Influence Report 2026, which explores what helps L&D build greater influence, demonstrate impact and contribute more effectively to business priorities. We also compare and contras to Don’s data in the Global Sentiment Survey 2026.

These themes will also be at the heart of the TJ Conference 2026: L&D Means Business, taking place in September, where practitioners will come together to examine what it really takes to operate as business people, strengthen strategic influence and turn insight into practical action. You can also contribute to continuing research in this area, closing soon. 

Thanks to ⁠TechSmith⁠ for providing Camtasia and Audiate for editing

Speaker:

1. Donald H Taylor

Transcript:

Created by TechSmith Audiate and formated by ChatGPT

Showing value, building influence and navigating a new world for L&D

Jo Cook: Don, one of the things that came up in the TJ report was making impact legible to the business. We weren’t really arguing about whether that mattered. Of course it matters. The conversation was much more about how we can actually show impact in a way the organisation understands.

In your Global Sentiment Survey, the results around showing value were climbing again this year. It seems like a profession that might be returning to this question. Do you see that as a sign of progress, or are we still wrestling with something?

Don Taylor: We’re definitely still wrestling with it. Showing value has been a perennial issue for as long as I’ve been involved in learning and development. Certainly, since I’ve chaired the Learning Technologies Conference for the past 26 years, it’s always been on the agenda one way or another.

What’s interesting is who is saying it’s important. The people who returned to the survey, having done it last year, are far more vociferous. They’re much clearer that it’s important to them than the people who came to the survey for the first time this year.

That might sound a bit weird. What’s going on?

I think there are two groups of people responding to my survey. There are people who are regularly involved in online conversations about what we think is important, and other people who are less often involved. They might be too busy doing their work. They might just not fancy doing that.

There’s a sense that talking about showing value is important. Whether people are actually doing it is another matter. There’s an awful lot of heat around this. I’m not sure there’s much light.

Showing value has become existential

Jo Cook: That’s an interesting narrative. I was talking to someone just this morning who, within the L&D department, was leading the C-suite by saying, “Come on. What are the business objectives? What are we trying to achieve?”

Whereas the narrative we often see is that L&D isn’t doing a good enough job.

Through the Global Sentiment Survey, one of the things I’ve picked up from you is how urgent this is.

Don Taylor: There’s a real sense of urgency around everything, which is quite normal for L&D. Everything’s important!

But the value piece is particularly urgent right now because people see it as existential. They see showing value as being core to keeping their job, and they explicitly put it like that in the challenges question, which asks, “What’s your biggest challenge this year?”

So it’s more urgent now than it’s ever been. Not for some vague reason about showing ROI, but because: I need to keep my job.

Jo Cook: Is that entirely because of AI, or are you seeing something else?

Don Taylor: It’s different in different parts of the world. It’s AI plus.

Everywhere there’s an AI undercurrent. In addition, in places such as Belgium and New Zealand there are particular cuts taking place in budgets, especially in large employers such as governments, and that’s driving it as well.

Suddenly, showing value isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential.

There may be other drivers particular to individual industries, but basically AI is underlining a whole sense of uncertainty in L&D, and that’s precipitating a bunch of other stuff.

Stop asking for a seat at the table

Jo Cook: In the TJ report, the data showed that quite a strong barrier to influence wasn’t so much the tools or measurement frameworks. It was access to the right conversations, early enough, with the right people.

Does that align with what you’re seeing when you talk to organisations?

Don Taylor: You have to be involved in the conversations early on. But too often, that has been seen as the starting point.

For me, when I look at organisations that are doing this successfully, being involved in those conversations is a by-product of other things happening in L&D. In particular, building relationships, building networks and establishing common communication.

That means that naturally, of course, you’re invited in. You’re not trying to get into the conversation. It’s just assumed you’re going to be there.

Jo Cook: I like that you’re relating it to communication, trust, networking, deliverables and all those other things, rather than that negative narrative of L&D begging for a seat at the table.

Interestingly, when I go to conferences or webinars in other areas, whether it’s sales, marketing or IT, I often hear the same thing: “IT needs a seat at the table.”

I’m thinking, how big does this table have to be? Who is at the table if no one’s sitting there?

Don Taylor: I don’t care if L&D has a seat at the table, but I do care if it’s got influence at the table. I think that’s the point.

Whatever you’re doing, you need friends. You never start a friendship by going and asking somebody for something. You start a friendship because you’re doing something together. You have a cup of tea with somebody, whatever. You build that friendship. You build the relationship, and from that everything else comes.

Yes, it’s simple to describe, but it’s actually very difficult to do. You have to consciously make the effort to do that and not do something else.

Very often in L&D, the something else is creating content. It’s busy work. It’s the backbone of what I’ve always done.

When you’re leading a team, that’s much less important. In fact, I’d put it right down at the bottom of what’s important, in contrast to building and maintaining those relationships.

The skills change as you become more strategic

Jo Cook: I think that’s relatively easy to say if you’re already at that L&D Leader, Head of L&D or similar level. But when you’re trying to get there, you have to do double duty, don’t you? That can be really challenging.

Don Taylor: I look at it like you’re climbing a mountain.

In the foothills, you need boots, a stick and a knapsack on your back with your sandwiches. When you get to the snow line, when you get to the strategic level, everything changes.

You swap your boots. You need crampons. You don’t need a backpack, you need oxygen. You don’t need a stick, you need an ice axe.

You need different tools.

What you’re describing is that very often we’re making our way onto the ice and you need to have both sets of things available to you.

The trouble is, nobody ever gives you these tools when you’re doing a great job designing training programmes. To lead the department and be strategic, you need a new set of skills that you won’t develop naturally on the job.

You have to deliberately go out and develop them.

Jo Cook: I think that’s a really good point about our own self-development depending on where we want our role to go.

Going back to the point about tools, my evidence in the TJ report is from the tiniest sample size compared with your roughly 3,800 people this year. For me, tools and support were down at the bottom. People were saying that wasn’t their biggest barrier. It was a barrier for some, but not the biggest.

In your report, technology had gone up as a notable challenge in 2026 compared with 2025, which I’m assuming includes AI. Whereas things like strategy, skills and talent had gone down a little.

How are you interpreting that?

AI has put technology back at the top

Don Taylor: The fact that technology has come up this year isn’t surprising. I think it’s the result of us waking up after getting a bit complacent with AI.

Technology and AI was the number one concern in 2024. It dropped back to number two in 2025. It’s back this year.

There are three things that are absolutely perennial among the top challenges: demonstrating value, budget and resources, and learning engagement and application. Those things are always going to be on L&D’s menu.

But technology is absolutely being driven by AI, because that wasn’t there in 2022 and 2023.

Another challenge now is change, uncertainty and the feeling that we have a new role to pursue. That uncertainty, and I wouldn’t even say fear, permeates everything else.

For me, that’s the most unsettling thing. There is this sense that we can’t keep up and we don’t know what the future is going to be.

That’s scary.

From order-taker to entrepreneurial leader

Jo Cook: Absolutely. One of the quotes I included in my report from a conference delegate was:

“We need to think learning rather than training. Think change rather than learning. Look towards development for tomorrow, not just solving problems today.”

What are the signs that we can see when a team has made that shift from being an order-taker delivering content into a more strategic, forward-thinking role?

Don Taylor: I’ve done a lot of thinking about this with my co-author on some of the other reports.

For us, it comes down to leadership, and in particular leadership that is, after using lots of different words for it, entrepreneurial.

The leader needs to have an idea of where they want to get to. On the route there, they’ll duck and dive and make things happen.

Some things won’t be important, but a sense of priority and understanding L&D well enough to know what is essential and what has to be stuck to is important.

On that route, and this is in contrast to how most people in L&D work, they also have to be comfortable with ambiguity.

They have to say: “I don’t know everything. I won’t know everything. I don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I know this is the route we need to be taking.”

That’s not something a lot of people in L&D feel comfortable with, but I think it’s a crucial characteristic of a successful L&D team: being led by somebody who has a slightly maverick twist, a focus on the horizon and the ability to duck and dive to get there.

L&D is entering a new world

For me, the key thing is that we are in a new world. That’s the bit I really want to stress to people.

I have no consultancy, no book and no tools to sell. My concern is just to make sure that L&D knows what is going on in the future.

When things have remained largely unchanged for decades, it’s easy to assume it’s always going to be that way.

It won’t.

It will be very different in the future, and we don’t know what it looks like. That’s why communicating and sharing what has worked and what hasn’t worked is so important. It’s why things such as the TJ Conference are so important.

Get people together and discuss this stuff.

Jo Cook: Would you say things stayed, within reason, on an ebb and flow until perhaps Covid? Was that a tipping point before other things happened?

Don Taylor: No. I think the launch of ChatGPT was the big difference.

It is true that in the survey’s challenges question, which we launched just as we were coming out of lockdown, I can see a hangover from that. But everything else is pretty much the same.

Since ChatGPT, I see this transformation in what people are thinking and feeling about what they’re doing.

If I compare that with when I was doing classroom training with adults in 1987, it is such a vast difference. That was before the World Wide Web, before email, when people smoked in offices. There was no question then that life was always going to be like that.

Well, it isn’t.

And we have to have that same realisation now. The future is going to be very different.

Covid changed work. AI changed the trajectory

Jo Cook: I definitely see your point over that longer term.

For me, I see a real difference around Covid and lockdown. Partly I was impacted as a virtual specialist, obviously, but bigger than that, from an L&D point of view, there was a huge amount of digitisation which progressed very quickly.

Then there are the other elements around working from home, working from the office and hybrid work. How do you manage that?

I also think it affected individuals, which then affects our organisations. People started asking: What’s my purpose? What do I want to do? How do I want to change things, if I’m in a position where I can make those choices?

I don’t think Covid was the big bang. It was a little bang beforehand.

I think you’re right that the launch of ChatGPT was the massive pivot, but it came off the back of a significant pivot during Covid, purely from an L&D and business point of view.

Don Taylor: I would definitely buy the idea of Covid being seminal from the point of view of how we feel about work and how we do work.

The shift towards being able to work from home, with its accompanying positives and negatives, hasn’t gone back. Some people have been recalled to the office, but by and large we are in a different world now.

Then add to that the sense of alienation and the atomisation of society, where individuals are much more likely to be isolated than they were in the past.

Of course, that has been an ongoing process, but it has definitely been noticeable since Covid.

You have people being isolated from work, being online and now working increasingly with AI, perhaps using it as a conversational partner, coach or somebody to talk to when they’re having trouble.

That’s a big shift. And it has happened in quite a short time.

It’s not entirely helpful. Sometimes it’s very helpful. But I think it’s worrying that this has happened without much notice being taken of it.

Are we losing the ability to talk to each other?

My source of evidence for this is that more than once recently, people have said to me, “Oh, you’re a really good conversationalist.”

My conversational skills have not changed in the past 20 years.

What has changed is the person I’m talking to, who perhaps isn’t used to talking to somebody who is listening to them, thinking about it, thinking about how that adds up to something else, and then coming back with an observation or a question.

That worries me.

We are no longer apparently talking to each other as we used to. I think that’s an effect of Covid, AI and this increase in the online world.

Jo Cook: I think you’re absolutely right.

I’ve worried for years about people’s conversational skills. I’ve been known, in my personal life, to leave a party because I’m thinking, “I can’t have a conversation. Everybody here is talking at me.”

I’m more than happy to join your conversation. I want to know about you. I want to know what’s going on. But I don’t want it to be 100% you. There has to be some conversation back, and thinking and listening.

Don Taylor: We always have a good natter, Jo.

Jo Cook: I wasn’t leaving your party, Don.

Don Taylor: Thank you. I just wanted to be sure!

Jo Cook: But you’re right. This then comes into how we listen and pay attention at work.

How are we listening to our boss? How do we influence other people? How can we possibly influence someone if we’re not listening to them properly?

It gets bigger and bigger. I think that’s what you’re referring to.

Don Taylor: It’s an interesting area. Weirdly, having made all this fuss about relationships and conversation, I hadn’t even put the two together.

Of course, it’s crucial that we extend that ability to listen into the workplace properly.

It’s very sad that people aren’t doing it.

But that’s OK, because there are learning and development departments that can put on a course to help them with listening skills…

Jo Cook: Yes. That’s one approach, for sure.

Don Taylor: He said sagely and wisely.

Jo Cook: At which point I’m definitely going to stop the recording. Thank you, Don. Always a delight to speak.

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