TJ podcast: L&D needs to stop talking about learning, with Cathy Hoy – episode 332

Key takeaways:

• Understand the business, not just the learning
  
  L&D leaders need to know the organisation’s strategy, priorities, commercial drivers and language if they want greater influence
  
• Make impact visible in business terms
  
  Move beyond attendance and knowledge scores to measures that matter to the organisation, including revenue, cost savings, time to competence and cost of inaction
  
• Protect time to think strategically
  
  The move from delivery into leadership is difficult because the doing does not disappear. Creating space to step back, think bigger and lead is essential

Podcast summary:

Should L&D leaders stop talking about learning? That’s one of the provocations in the latest TJ podcast, where Jo Cook speaks with Cathy Hoy about what it really takes to move from managing learning activity to leading L&D as a business function.

They explore why commercial confidence matters, how L&D can get involved in business conversations earlier, and why simply reporting attendance figures or knowledge scores is unlikely to be enough if senior leaders cannot see the connection to organisational performance.

Cathy also challenges some of L&D’s familiar habits, including the amount of attention given to ROI, and argues that measures such as cost of inaction can sometimes create a much clearer business case. The conversation also gets into the career transition many L&D professionals find difficult: moving from doing the work to creating enough space to think strategically, lead the function and understand the wider organisation.

And one practical suggestion stands out: get out of the L&D bubble. Attend industry events. Learn the language of finance, sales, operations and customers. Understand what actually drives the business. If L&D wants greater influence, that understanding has to come first.

Links from the podcast:

TJ Influence Report

TJ readiness enablers survey

TJ conference 2026

CLO100

Thanks to ⁠TechSmith⁠ for providing Camtasia and Audiate for editing

Speaker:

1. Cathy Hoy

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Transcript:

Created by TechSmith Audiate

Jo Cook: One of the themes that came through strongly in the TJ L&D Influence Report was the need for L&D to be more involved with business conversations earlier, rather than simply responding to requests and being the ‘order taker’ we hear so much about.

That feels very aligned to the work you’re doing with CLO100 around developing L&D leaders, not just L&D functions.

Cathy Hoy: It’s a really important message. I think not only should L&D be involved in the conversations early, but L&D should be leading them. At a real L&D leadership level, you should be telling the business where the business is going, how you’re going to support it and how you’re going to make sure it gets where it needs to go.

If you understand what’s coming down the line, the headwinds and tailwinds and macro-level influences such as climate change, ageing populations and economic uncertainty, and you understand how they’re going to impact your organisation, then you can get ahead of the game and prepare the business.

There was a line in the report about connecting to business outcomes and delivering real impact. For me, if you’re not involved in those conversations, or leading those conversations, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do that.

And if we’re not connecting learning to business outcomes and driving real impact, what is the point of us? For us at CLO100, that’s pretty much the core of what we do: helping L&D leaders align learning more closely with the business and helping them think more strategically and commercially.

Building commercial confidence

Jo: A lot of the responses in the report talked about impact, but it’s often an area where people feel less confident.

From your experience of developing L&D leaders, where do they struggle most on that commercial side? And what actually helps them build that confidence?

Cathy: I think it’s probably not just L&D people who struggle with the commercial side of things. Anyone who isn’t used to being in an overtly commercial or finance-driven role can see figures and think, ‘Oh God.’ It can take you right back to school! Because you’re not used to it, that’s where some of the fear comes from. It’s about being brave enough to get outside your comfort zone and have a go.

It can also be difficult to take that leap if you’re in an organisation that hasn’t asked for commercial data from you. In L&D, you can end up thinking, ‘I’ll give them what I can: the number of people who turned up to the training session or the results of a post-training knowledge test.’ But like any other function in an organisation, if the C-suite can’t immediately see where you’re adding value, eventually they’re going to question why you exist.

If the data they get from L&D says 450 people were trained, or there was a 25% improvement in post-training knowledge tests, so what? Those things do help the business, but we’re not making that connection clear. We need to talk about things such as revenue growth. Perhaps a sales training programme led to a 15% increase in quarterly sales, adding a million pounds to the bottom line. Or perhaps you reduced onboarding time from six months to four months and can work out what that saving represents per person. The business needs to see that kind of value.

It is quite a leap if you’re not used to it. If people aren’t asking for it, you might wonder whether you want to rock the boat or put yourself through the work of learning it. Formal training can help if you want a good grounding. That’s the route I went down. But a lot of it is simply practising and spending time with people in your organisation who already do it. Sit with the finance team. Sit with the sales team. Understand what they’re talking about and learn on the job.

Get closer to the business

Jo: I always go back to when I worked for Turner Broadcasting, which included Cartoon Network and CNN. I partnered with the IT helpdesk and we did floor walks. We’d go around different areas of the business and ask people what questions they had. IT could fix all the little technical things, while I might get questions such as, ‘How do I do this in Excel?’

But it also meant going into the office of the VP of that department and simply having a conversation: ‘Is there anything I can help you with? What’s going on for your people?’ That three or five-minute conversation could uncover things I might never have heard in a formal meeting. I might not even have been able to get that formal meeting because their diary was booked up for three weeks. Something relatively simple like that meant I could see a lot more of what people were doing and build that experience.

You’ve talked about making the business case and being able to say, ‘We’ve saved this much money.’ But what if the business isn’t asking you for that? What if you’re ready to move away from ‘bums on seats’, but senior people are saying they don’t care and they just want the training delivered?

Stop obsessing over ROI

Cathy: That is challenging. If the business is funding training but isn’t interested in why it’s happening or what impact it’s having, perhaps they simply haven’t connected learning to either cost savings or revenue generation. Then I think it’s your job to make that case. We also get really infatuated with certain things in our industry, and I still find the amount of conversation around ROI incredible.

I’m not saying ROI isn’t useful. We absolutely have to demonstrate a level of business impact and show where we’ve contributed to the organisation. But the time it takes to demonstrate ROI and genuinely follow it through often means that by the time you’ve done it, people have moved on and forgotten about the project. I certainly wouldn’t use it upfront in a business case. Focus on something more useful, such as the cost of inaction.

That can get you sign-off much more quickly because people can immediately see the problem: ‘We’re leaking £230,000 a week because we haven’t addressed this issue, and you can fix that?’ That creates an immediate connection to the business. There are things we focus on too much in L&D and other things we don’t focus on enough. If the business can’t naturally see the commercial link to learning, we need to help them see where the value is being added.

L&D leaders should stop talking about learning

Jo: In the TJ report we talk about the Readiness Enablers Index. The idea is that there can be bottlenecks in the way: stakeholders, getting access to data, permission to experiment, or the tools and support available.

Where do you see those enablers fitting into the personal development of an L&D leader or the development of their team?

Cathy: If you’re an L&D leader and you want to develop yourself, I would say: stop talking about learning. You’ve got a whole team of subject matter experts. That’s why they’re your team. They can talk about learning. They can worry about the right LMS, the right font colour or the right session plan. You shouldn’t be worrying about that. You should be talking about the business.

If you want to step up, you need to understand much more about the business. And I don’t mean simply knowing, ‘We sell stuff, therefore we make money.’ Really understand how the business works. What’s the strategy? What are the priorities? What are the commercial drivers? As an L&D leader, you need to lead the team and let them be the learning SMEs.

We don’t always help ourselves as an industry either. We’re lucky to have lots of wonderful L&D events, but how many people go to other business events? If you work in manufacturing, do you go to manufacturing expos, or do you only go to L&D conferences? Get yourself out there and learn more about the business side.

Learn the language of your industry

Jo: Have you been to other types of events where you’ve had those little lightbulb moments and taken something useful back?

Cathy: I’ve worked in retail and hospitality, among many other industries, and I love those because they’re so customer focused. I used to go to customer experience and customer service conferences and expos. They were fantastic because they reminded you why you were in that particular business and industry. Learning is obviously a massive part of customer-facing roles, so it becomes much easier to make the connection to the business.

I also remember learning a completely different language. I’d probably still been very focused on learning and learning outcomes. Then after one particular conference, I suddenly found myself talking about basket size and footfall. I had this whole new language and thought, ‘My God, why didn’t I know this sooner?’ That sort of thing can be really helpful.

Making the move from delivery to leadership

Jo: In the summary of the TJ report, I make the point that L&D should be looking at enablement over delivery. Let’s say someone is an L&D manager and wants to move from a broad focus on delivery towards enablement. They may still have to do the delivery while also trying to think strategically. How do you manage that step in your career?

Cathy: I actually think that’s probably the hardest point in your career. I was talking to one of our members recently who’s going through it. When I look back at my own career and the move from manager towards a Head of role, that transition was a nightmare. In some ways it was harder before I actually got the Head of position.

You’re still having to do the doing. You’ve got to stay on top of everything, but equally you need to demonstrate to your boss and their peers that you can lead. Yet you don’t get the time to lead because you’re too busy doing the job. For me, what helped was diarising time to think. It sounds really simple, but it was about giving myself permission to have a strategic day.

You can become so overwhelmed with all the doing that you lose the bigger focus. You don’t have that helicopter view any more, and there’s no way you can lead a function without it. It might be one day a fortnight. For some people it will be more and for others less. But have that strategy time and think about the big picture. What am I doing? Are all these small things I’m managing every day still going in the right direction? Are they going to help me achieve what I need to achieve?

It also helps you start putting yourself into that leadership mindset. Once you get into a more senior role, you need to spend much more time on that and much less time doing. You need great people in your team who can pick those things up so you can lead the strategy and clear obstacles out of their way. If you’re making that transition, get strategic thinking time properly into your diary and don’t sacrifice it.

Giving people permission to think

Jo: Thinking about this more broadly, how could L&D help people elsewhere in the business make that same transition?

Someone might move from the shop floor or a manufacturing role into leadership, for example. How can we help other people with that, rather than just ourselves?

Cathy: We need to do it ourselves and lead by example. For some people, strategic thinking doesn’t come naturally, so there could be a formal intervention such as a strategic thinking workshop. For others it might be shadowing or reverse mentoring with a colleague in the organisation who does it really well. Giving people ideas, sharing what you’re doing and role modelling it can all help.

Earlier in my own career, I went through a strategic planning and strategic thinking workshop while I was in an L&D project management role. It really helped me think differently. I think part of what it gave me was permission. Maybe that’s something L&D can do for people in other functions too: give them permission to take that time.

There are still organisations where people think that if you take a day to think and plan, you’re not working. Perhaps L&D can come along and say, ‘Actually, this is what we recommend, because otherwise you’re not going to be able to make that transition.’

Jo: I love that. Thank you very much.

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