Facing this situation, what can a Learning & Development (L&D) leader do? This article shares my lessons learned leading and implementing a strategic learning plan across multiple territories within the fast-moving consumer goods industry. Here are six tried-and-tested techniques to identify, prioritize, and execute a strategic learning plan that accelerates performance and enables strategy.
1. Realize your importance: Your ability as an L&D professional to understand the business and be a credible advisor is the most important lever to influence talent and business decisions. In doing so, the standard for L&D excellence is higher than it’s ever been. The list of expectations includes traditional L&D excellence such as instructor-led training (ILT) and peer learning, technology-enabled learning such as social networks, and pulling those levers in sync with talent management to nurture a learning culture. Considering which elements of L&D have relative impact on the achievement of business goals, advisory firm Corporate Leadership Council’s research revealed L&D staff capabilities (51 percent) was the most important factor, followed by L&D strategy (43 percent), L&D structure (5 percent), and L&D tools (1 percent).
This reinforces why my No. 1 is about you. You are using your business acumen to proactively expose the business plan’s risks and opportunities, and influence both talent and business outcomes. Often, this is a different focus for both business leaders and HR business partners (BPs), who may be more comfortable thinking about and making decisions on capability for individuals, and not for organizations. In other words, it’s a paradigm shift.
Helping your leaders shift their thinking about L&D relies on your skills “to facilitate and enable learning. L&D teams should build skills in performance consulting; gain expertise in new technologies, including social and mobile; and work to cultivate strong learning cultures within their organizations,” according to research & advisory organization Bersin by Deloitte. Both Bersin and CLC research point to the same outcome— your ability to help leaders identify and prioritize capabilities increases alignment between what the business needs to demonstrate and what capabilities it invests in to make a difference.
2. Evaluate run vs. grow: When learning needs analysis first launched, there was limited visibility on whether formal learning activity was spent on capabilities essential to keep the lights on or activities that would differentiate performance in the marketplace. My team used the technique of categorizing formal learning in the portfolio as either running the business (such as foundational selling or presentation skills) or growing the business (such as creating customer business plans or executive leadership development). As it was the first time the organization was to formally consider the strategic impact of learning, L&D helped by drawing a line where 70 percent of the following year’s activities and investment were dedicated to running the business and 30 percent to growing the business. Annual forecasts showing classes, timing of delivery, and total hours of formal learning provided HR business partners and leaders with a pragmatic view of their predicted training plan.
This saved time, reducing HR BPs’ time to create their learning plan from 14 hours to an average of five hours. The time they did dedicate to the learning plan could be better spent on prioritizing the “grow” initiatives and assessing the balance of run vs. grow against their people and business plans. Besides formal mechanics, prioritizing learning needs in this way allowed for planning how to embed these organizational capabilities.
3. Analyze demand vs. consumption: Numbers talk. One business unit’s historical data showed two years of over forecasting the quantity of learning it could consume. Quantifying the learning “demand” allowed a comparison of how much was asked for (demand) and how much was consumed (consumption). The last two years showed a business unit request on average of six days of training per learner. Consumption data showed 1.2 days. In response, I applied Michael Porter’s advice—“the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”—to learning plans. As a result, the business unit forecast L&D activity consistent with its historical trends; learners did not feel the company overpromised and under delivered; vendor agreements were better negotiated; time and investment were directed toward the most valued L&D activities; and line managers focused on a few, prioritized capabilities and guided their application to the job.
4. Consider the mechanism to feliver prioritized learning: As a sommelier would flex her knowledge about old world and new world wines to enhance a meal, consider the mix of learning delivery vehicles to make it as easy as possible to apply new skills to the job tasks. One organization I worked with had a learning portfolio that was 90 percent ILT and 10 percent online learning (OLT). While the split was high touch for learners, the investment of time and money limited flexibility. The foundation of the right architecture to leverage the flexibility of technology-enabled learning was critical to executing a more versatile learning delivery approach. This contributed to the implementation of a learning management system (LMS) as the foundation of learning delivery.
The target was to diversify the portfolio in two years to 60 percent ILT and 40 percent OLT. After 24 months, actual results were 40 percent ILT and 60 percent OLT. The diversification of learning delivery vehicles affected the learning plan in important ways. From an operational perspective, learning needs that used to appear in requests, such as Microsoft Office, were shifted online. For learners, this meant the individuals who needed MS Office capability would have 24/7 access. Within 12 months, learners had access to 1,000-plus online courses, resulting in a shift from content being “pushed” to a more intuitive approach where learners “pull” the information they need when they need it. Results of diversifying the delivery vehicle contributed to positive feedback in the organization’s recent employee engagement survey, showing a +6 statistically significant improvement to the question, “There are sufficient learning opportunities for me to receive training to improve skills in my current job.”
5. Focus on leader-led training: “When senior leaders set the training agenda, capability building more often is explicitly linked to immediate business goals than when other groups do so,” according to McKinsey research. This translated into the implementation of several tactics, such as governance, learning design, and clarifying the role of the line manager. For example, the CEO handselected a cross-functional group of high-potential leaders who acted as a sounding board and sparring partner for the level of alignment the learning plan had to the company’s vision and business plan. After two years of working with this cadre of leaders, one leader remarked on L&D’s progress and an ambitious target: “It’s not a question if we trust L&D to deliver. We see you make it happen and with a level of quality we never saw before at this company. The point now is that the speed of change at the business is so fast. I’m not expecting L&D to keep up—I’m expecting L&D to help the organization learn faster than the speed of change.”
6. Go beyond the classroom: When implementing a new approach to customer business planning, the Learning Design team broke up the course into eight complementary modules. In between each module was “homework” that was relevant to the customer, such as analyzing customer and consumer data to identify growth opportunities. As such, deployment was not perceived as additional work but rather as a way to improve the work that needed to be done in any case. Formal learning was established as a workshop, which started with the most senior commercial leaders in the country, followed by them co-facilitating with external experts for their account leaders. This shifted the role of external facilitators, as well as that of senior leaders themselves. This approach also implied a cross-functional effort, as the customer plan was not only a result of the account leaders but also the contribution of specialists such as insights and marketing. The pilot resulted in $276 million in incremental sales.
It is an example of what Bersin calls “organizational capability development.” Bersin research validates that L&D organizations that implemented this type of learning delivered profit growth three times greater than competitors over a four-year period.
These six techniques have helped me, my L&D team, and my business leaders accelerate performance and enable strategy using L&D. What has worked for you? Share with me via LinkedIn at: be.linkedin.com/in/ldonaire/.
Lindsay Donaire is a 2013 Top 5 Emerging Training Leader. She is also a native New Yorker who has spent more than half her career outside the United States and all of her professional life supporting talent decisions that generate business outcomes. She has almost exclusively associated herself with the colors red and white, first as a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and then working with Campbell Soup, Levi Strauss & Co, and most recently Coca-Cola Enterprises as associate director of Learning & Development.
