Leading the Learning Function: Tools and Techniques for Organizational Impact

By MJ Hall and Laleh Patel

Leaders as Learners, Learners as Leaders

Drawing upon firsthand experiences and insights from senior practitioners, Leading the Learning Function: Tools and Techniques for Organizational Impact offers best practices, tools, techniques, and processes that successful business leaders use to develop, build, and implement their personal leadership skill sets.

The ATD Forum—a consortium for senior talent and learning practitioners to connect, collaborate, and share knowledge, best practices, and company experiences—sought to extend those accruing benefits more broadly in the profession to current and aspiring learning leaders and talent practitioners. In this book, Forum managers and book editors MJ Hall and Laleh Patel and Forum members set out to document the work learning leaders do to help themselves and others build organizational capabilities and successful results. In 26 chapters, Forum contributors—leaders in their respective organizations—offer insights and lessons about setting direction, managing processes, leading and developing people, making an impact, collaborating with stakeholders, using technology for learning, and innovating.

Growing leadership skills is a lifelong journey; gaining a portfolio of techniques others have used successfully to solve similar business challenges can provide an edge in your role as a business advisor. Leading the Learning Function is just that portfolio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950496624

Book preview

Introduction

Many say the definition of a leader is someone who can take others to a place they would not go by themselves. If this is true—as we believe it is—today’s frequently changing and complex workplace provides a unique opportunity for leaders to excel. And to excel as leaders, what must they be able to know, do, and communicate? Moreover, what changing technical areas must these leaders be experts in to build and influence the individual, team, and organizational performance capabilities of the entire enterprise? These are the challenges talent development professionals face and the questions we ask at the ATD Forum; they are also the driving force of this book.

For more than nine years, the two of us have been the hub of the ATD Forum, a vibrant consortium for connecting, collaborating, and sharing knowledge about anything related to talent development. The goal of this peer-led group is to leverage lessons learned from future-ready practices others within the community are using. This helps members stay ahead of the challenge curve to support competitive advantage and build capabilities within their respective organizations.

There are several venues for sharing practices within the consortium: semiannual community events, which are two-and-a-half day experiential labs on a topic selected by the host member; virtual web sessions called ConnectSparks, which are one-hour discussions with subject matter experts; ATD-sponsored, in-depth reports; benchmarking through short surveys; and informal conversations.

We are constantly amazed at the excellent practices these members demonstrate as they lead their respective teams. But the most interesting part is seeing these practices expand in real time: One member would share, another would ask probing questions, still another would make suggestions, and then months later, in discussions, we would hear how the initial practice had served as a trigger and was showing up in a slightly different form in another organization. Or, a team from a member company had gone to another member’s company to benchmark, and from that perspective had discovered other areas of shared interest, and they were now collaborating on another project.

This force multiplier effect of sharing learning reminds us of a quote from Seth Godin (2019):

Learning … is self-directed. Learning isn’t about changing our grade, it’s about changing the way we see the world. Learning is voluntary. Learning is always available, and it compounds, because once we’ve acquired it, we can use it again and again.

Our profession, like the workplaces we support, lives in a world the Center for Creative Leadership recently labeled RUPT—rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical, and tangled. Some of the transformations in the learning world are multifaceted and others are just new ways of operating, such as automating a system. But change, either massive or small, is always difficult. Whether the change is implementing a modern leadership process, scaling curriculum globally to accommodate new employees, upskilling employees because of new products and services, or integrating emerging technologies for more personalization of and access to learning resources, others may have gone through something similar. When facing a challenge, having examples from others and learning from their experiences provide ideas, insights, and motivation. No one is alone. When leaders engage with one another, especially those from different industries with similar challenges, the possibilities are endless.

About This Book

While sharing learning practices, exchanging case studies, and swapping resources are the hallmarks of the ATD Forum, we have found that these benefits are manifold—and we’re thrilled to extend our learning reach in this book, Leading the Learning Function: Tools and Techniques for Organizational Impact.

The Forum relies on volunteer members, and that is how this book was accomplished. After several iterations to determine the outline of topics to cover, which included a survey to our 60-plus members, we ended up with eight major areas, each including a variety of subareas. We then hosted a web session to formally introduce the project, and followed that with an outline for those interested to sign up by topic. The result was 44 expert content contributors presenting their best practices, innovative tools and techniques, and general problem-solving methods for facing today’s business challenges for learning, either as authors or interviewees.

These contributors focused on practices that are essential to developing performance behaviors to achieve desired business results—but there are no magic formulas. Like their practices, their stories are also different. Some are straightforward case studies with lessons learned. Others look a bit different than what’s typically found in a business book. Instead of the usual expert-talking-to-novice approach, some chapters read more like a novel; several even include self-talk about an experience. This mucking around with ideas and questions is similar to how we acquire knowledge and skill in our daily lives: we struggle, we talk with others, we search, we solve problems, we iterate, we see associations, we learn, and we do.

As editors, we are excited to share this body of knowledge and expertise with all talent professionals, especially those leading the learning profession. This book was made possible by the collective contributions of more than 50 individuals representing more than 50 percent of ATD Forum member companies:

• 31 people contributed content as an author or co-author of a chapter

• 11 were interviewed about their thoughts on leadership

• 4 contributed interviews and case studies on tools

• 12 acted as content reviewers.

Our ultimate goal is to provide guidance on how Forum learning leaders carry out their roles to assess and build organizational performance capability that supports the business’s competitive position in their respective market. The actions they take use generic leadership and management skills and address specific organizational learning pain points and challenges. The book’s 26 chapters are divided into eight sections:

• Section 1, Setting Direction, looks at methods for proactively prioritizing and making sense of the complexity of the work. It includes aligning learning solutions with the goals and objectives of the enterprise to build capabilities. This involves a holistic view of the organization and deep understanding of what enables competitive advantage.

• Section 2, Managing Processes and Projects, features ideas and practices for assessing, understanding, and communicating performance needs and gaps within the organization and ways to build solutions. It zeroes in on processes and constructs unique to the learning arena.

• Section 3, Leading and Developing People, examines ways leaders can personally create the environments and opportunities for enabling others to excel in their roles as talent professionals. The ideas begin at hiring and onboarding and extend through continual coaching and encouraging their professional certification and credentialing. The section includes a variety of ways to set others up for performance success by serving as a spark to ignite curiosity, energy, and motivation, which can lead to new capabilities.

• Section 4, Making an Impact, considers how the learning profession builds capability, enabling the organization to reach its business goals. Metrics, dashboards, and evaluation processes are covered.

• Section 5, Stakeholder Collaboration, focuses on understanding, communicating with, and influencing those we serve in our organizations. It recognizes the value of collaborative partnerships, the ways learning can be structured to be more efficient, and the importance of a governance board.

• Section 6, Enabling Learning Using Technology, explores everything from the basic technologies available to track and monitor learning to emerging and disruptive technologies that are changing the way learning content is designed, developed, delivered, and consumed.

• Section 7, Innovation, recognizes how the future of work and learning is being fueled by advances in technologies and neuroscience.

• Section 8, Leader Behaviors and Practices, is jammed with moments of impact when leaders have had informal and formal opportunities to interact with and support others. These stories zero in on the many ways leaders show up, move the needle on performance, and continually reskill, upskill, and new skill themselves.

We hope this portfolio of personal stories, tools, techniques, and examples for solving business problems and challenges through capability building is both helpful in your current work and inspiring for building more powerful learning in the future.

If you take action on these ideas by experimenting with new tools and techniques and expanding your practice portfolio of resources, you and your team will be more able to address the performance challenges your organization faces. We encourage you to ask thought-provoking questions to trigger further research. But don’t stop at experimenting with these concepts and building capability in your own organization. Be a leader who takes others to places they would not go by themselves—share your own challenges and successes in building performance capability in case studies and through articles, blogs, videos, and books. These actions will enable you to continuously get better at getting better with your role: coaching, guiding, and encouraging others to be open to new opportunities. Your result will be learning professionals who are masters at advising and guiding business leaders on changes that influence the future of the organization—building performance capability at all levels and in all areas!

—MJ Hall and Laleh Patel

Section 1

Setting Direction

Section 1, Setting Direction, looks at methods for proactively prioritizing and making sense of the complexity of the work for now and for the future. This involves a holistic view of the organization and a deep understanding of what performance enables competitive advantage. What does the organization want to accomplish in light of internal capability and external constraints and changes? How does the organization set priorities and communicate to all parts of the enterprise?

For the learning leader, this means being visionary at the learning level. But more important, it means being aligned and integrated with organizational goals and objectives, as well as the desired business results. This includes setting direction, deploying plans for execution, and simultaneously managing changes associated with both strategic transformations and daily transactions.

In chapter 1, Lisa Gary shares how Ingersoll Rand uses Lean and Hoshin Kanri to focus on a few vital priorities they call their North Box, and how this philosophy is replicated in every division to create alignment. This includes keeping two questions front and center in all decisions: Where will we play? and How will we win? The approach includes recognizing that while executives set direction, employees execute that direction through their respective actions and performance.

In chapter 2, we learn how a midsize bank aligns and integrates learning with the larger corporate goals and objectives using a four-step approach: know the business, build a business case, engage senior leaders, and communicate results. For each step, Sandi Maxey provides actions, tools, and thought-provoking stop and think questions. She also suggests using the business model canvas to provide a clearer perspective for how the parts fit into an operating system.

In chapter 3, we experience a personal journey of learning being pushed into the organizational strategy. Teri Lowe uses her own conundrum as the starting point, and then uses questions, actions, reflection, and feedback to sort through the information and share her point of view of the big picture and how learning fits into the overall strategic system.

The personal journey described in chapter 4 starts with the desire to be strategic. The first lesson is that having the title does not make one strategic. However, through continuous research and lots of experiences, John Kelly recognizes that the first step is summarized by ACT: the need for access, credibility, and trust. He blends this with a framework from Peter Block and integrates project management techniques to develop his formula for being future focused.

1

Syncing Up for Synergy

Lisa Gary

Open your email, access social media groups, read professional journals, or attend a course or conference. What is a consistent theme learning and development (L&D) professionals hear? For learning to be effective in delivering the performance needed for business results, your learning assets must be strategic and aligned with the organization’s needs and goals both now and for the future.

But how does this really happen? In basic terms, it means that the learning leader is future focused and has the experience and skills to align their functional work of developing people with the organization’s future needs. Another way to put it is strategically developing organizational capability.

Future focus and alignment are especially critical for learning professionals because we have multiple roles along a functional spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we serve as technical and functional experts responsible for developing cognitive, performance, and behavioral intelligences using learning and training best practices. On the other end, we serve as business learning advisors assisting senior executives to build competitive advantage at the organizational systems level. Our role focuses on assisting senior executives with clarifying strategic priorities, determining use of resources, and identifying gaps and roadblocks for productivity and results.

No matter the role, the primary goal is enabling the organization to succeed, however success is defined, by increasing the overall capability to be competitive. This workforce capability is a force multiplier for success, which includes having all employees performing at desired levels, constantly building new capabilities, and being inspired to excel personally and professionally. But more important, employees need the knowledge and skills to work collectively as interdependent teams with a common mission and common goals.

Our success as L&D professionals is defined by creating opportunities for developing workforce capabilities at the individual, team, and organizational levels, even as the pace of change accelerates.

Various Roles Require Numerous Skills

To be proficient at building competitive advantage in the complex and ambiguous environment that pervades every industry, learning professionals need to be skilled in organization development practices, such as leading change, catalyzing innovation, and future visioning. They need to understand the business and know how products or services are produced and delivered to make money for the organization. They need to have financial acumen. Additionally, they need to understand how the organization is designed and how it operates—especially how all the parts fit together. They need an in-depth understanding of how the organization’s people, processes, and work are connected to deliver results. This understanding requires systems thinking to see the organization as an interdependent ecosystem; critical thinking to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information to make decisions; and strategic thinking to have a long-term perspective to address challenges and solve problems by identifying and closing gaps and building competitive advantage.

Having the requisite knowledge and skills is the starting point. But learning leaders also need to act, which means having a portfolio of tools, techniques, and practices to implement as needed. There are several elements to consider when working with enterprises interested in gaining greater competitive advantage through organizational alignment. These include having a clear direction or focus, understanding the customers and their changing requirements, knowing where and how you compete (for example, low cost, customer service, or product innovation), having internal processes to support customers, using measurements to monitor progress toward the desired state, and constantly evaluating the impact of the collective work. These elements are anchored in a clear understanding of organizational challenges, goals and objectives, strategies designed to meet these challenges, awareness of the competition, and the change needed to continue to excel. Additionally, all employees need to be motivated and incentivized toward this end, thus creating a winning culture.

While there are many options, frameworks, models, and ideas for getting better at organization development, especially in aligning processes and performance, the following four suggestions can jump-start your journey.

Develop Strategic Insights

Gathering data and asking questions are critical for moving from a focus on developing tactical training to serving as a business learning advisor with an understanding of the organizational system. Two places to start are the self-assessment tools offered by Peter Drucker (2010) and the Organization Profile from the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, offered online. Both tools focus on general questions you need to ask to gain strategic insights, such as:

• Mission: Why does the organization exist, or what is our purpose?

• Vision: What is our aspiration, or what do we want to be? (For example, are we laying individual stones or building a cathedral?)

• Values: What do we believe? (Values are not the statements on the wall. Values are the way life is lived every day, the way the organization does business. The values are the criteria against which all decisions are compared before actions are taken.)

• Customers: Who receives our products or services?

• Customer requirements: What are the products or services our customer groups need from us?

• Critical processes: What key crosscutting operational processes do we need to employ to support our customers with a high level of satisfaction?

• Measurement: What metrics will show how our processes are doing in support of the customer requirements and determining satisfaction?

Once the direction is known, we continually review our situation in terms of:

• What are the internal and external challenges keeping us from being competitive within our market (for example, being the supplier of choice)?

• What are our goals at the highest level?

• What objectives will enable our highest-level goals?

• How will we reach the objectives and goals (that is, what is the game plan—strategy—for reaching these goals to overcome challenges)?

• What tactics and methods are needed to execute the strategies with a high degree of success?

• How are we developing and incenting our workforce to ensure they are a competitive advantage?

Gathering data and asking questions about the measurement system are critical, but that’s not complete in and of itself. It is imperative to use analytical methods to dissect and make sense of the data.

Talent professionals typically see the goals and objectives and then focus on building individual capabilities to address them. According to Alec Levenson (2016), however, for individuals to be successful they need the right combination of three factors: individual competencies, motivation and attitudes, and aligned job design—including whether a job is aligned with the larger group. This increases the scope of our work to continually building intellectual capital and capabilities at the group or working-team level. As Levenson states, We need to know whether the whole of the group’s output is greater than the sum of the individual jobs’ tasks. If not, then talent at the group level is not performing as it should.

Link to the Most Senior-Level Goals

Another way L&D professionals can ensure strategic alignment is by making a direct connection to the top goals of senior business leaders for the various business units. Put yourself in their position. What are they being held accountable to deliver? Is their goal cost reduction (which could include process improvements, decreasing errors, new technologies, or increased employee productivity)? Is the goal revenue generation through new sales or higher customer satisfaction (which increases loyalty and expanded sales)? Or is their goal regulation and compliance to prevent errors?

If you are an organization that uses a goal deployment process, aligning the learning function is generally easier. The goal deployment process, or Hoshin Kanri, is a Lean planning and execution method for ensuring the strategic goals of a company drive progress and action at every level. A Lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it with zero waste. To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams, which flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, space, capital, and time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and very fast throughput times. Information management also becomes much simpler and more accurate.

Using the Hoshin Kanri process at the organizational level enables L&D to be aligned and integrated with strategic priorities—what the process calls the North Box. This helps keep the talent professionals from becoming order takers from individual managers in siloed departments. It also facilitates a focus on the projects that are likely to have the greatest impact at the system level. With this focus and direction, L&D can more easily say no to requests that might be pet projects and not part of the North Box. Additionally, the structured approach of Hoshin Kanri spills over to the way L&D itself operates; for example, the way it designs, develops, pilots, and measures projects. This has a compound effect because L&D then uses more business language and less learning language.

Have an Executive Sponsor

Another way to ensure strategic organizational alignment is having an executive sponsor for your learning solutions. A sponsor is someone willing to dedicate their time, effort, energy, political capital, and leadership to delivering the business outcomes. If L&D is driving the solution or we, as learning professionals, care more about the outcome than helping the business leaders address their challenges to meet their goals, we need to stop and assess what we are doing. The best part of this organizational alignment strategy is that L&D does not move forward with an initiative unless it has an executive sponsor.

Here’s an example of this strategy at work: Ingersoll Rand (IR) set a North Box goal that the whole organization would understand its newly designed materials playbook and deliver cost reduction to its operations. As a manufacturing organization, IR has a lot of expense and risk associated with the materials it takes to manufacture its products. The executive sponsor, who was the head of integrated supply chain, decided that everyone should go through a custom materials learning path to ensure that they understood the playbook. The Ingersoll Rand University (IRU) learning team met with this leader on a monthly basis, co-designing the solution that he then signed off on. The IRU team met with him to provide feedback and deliver completion reports so he could report to the executive team on the progress. The business impact was that they were able to cover material inflation and manage it in a strategic way. This helped to create consistency in operations globally. Because of this result, the alignment and execution for future endeavors remain well structured and continue to be followed. The head of integrated supply chain delivered incredible lasting business value, and the learning function enabled his and the organization’s success.

Create a Governing Strategy

Another way to ensure alignment and focus is to get help prioritizing your learning function’s initiatives by creating a governance strategy. Most organizations talk about driving performance. Ingersoll Rand, on the other hand, focuses and acts on delivering performance. This distinction—which is built on its vision, mission, purpose, and values—is what enables IR to align its strategy to achieve big goals.

How do you align your learning organization to deliver both the what and the how for ensuring performance is delivered? Let’s face it, there is never enough time or resources to support everything that is asked of the learning function, so you need a mechanism to help with this critical process. Said another way, what requests can you say no to? A key way to achieve this organizational alignment is to form a governance board. Ingersoll Rand’s enterprise learning development and prioritization strategy is directly aligned because of the engagement and involvement of its governing board.

This governing board is chaired by the chief learning officer, and the chief executive officer, chief human resources officer, and vice president of talent are standing members. It also includes key business and function leaders of the executive leadership team. The governing board meets twice a year to ensure critical business alignment to the learning strategies and provide approval for investments in key talent and leadership development programs. This ensures resources are dedicated and prioritized to the initiatives that are most critical for the company. This powerful relationship between the learning function and the executives has enabled continued investment in learning and development, even during economic downturns, and delivered incredible business results time and time again for the company.

It’s important to note that we never take for granted what makes us unique. While many organizations may find value in providing learning assets that are much broader in application and general usage, the training our corporate university provides is directly aligned with the business; that allows us to work more efficiently to solve business needs in real time. Because of our involvement and investment in the strategy governing board, we always have our finger on the pulse of the organization’s strategy and objectives, and therefore its learning and change needs.

We decided early on that we cared about how our people achieved results, not just what the results were. —Ingersoll Rand CEO

Moving Forward—Eating Your Own Dog Food!

While knowledge and skills are critical, nothing happens without leadership—that’s who gets people engaged, committed, and energized to perform with excellence. Leaders harness the momentum of the organization to drive change. They provide direction and support. Part of being the learning leader is working with your team to create a strategy that ensures the learning organization is driving change and prioritizing the right focus areas. But, how do you go about creating a learning strategy? What steps do you need to take?

Leadership and organizational momentum are critical to driving change and promoting a continuous evolution of ideas. They are also imperative to drive strategy development. At Ingersoll Rand, we believe that if we are not continuously improving and innovating, we are becoming obsolete. Innovation is one of our core values, and our mission of growth excellence, delivering operational excellence, and building a winning culture is what has delivered premier performance for our company. The tool used is a dynamic strategy.

In Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Lafley and Martin (2013) state: Every day we make choices. Some are small, while others have huge implications. The good thing about having choices, even the hardest ones, is it means that you can take action. You can influence the world—not just today—but into the future. Choosing what to do and what not to do—in conditions that can be ambiguous, heavy with consequences, and changing constantly—is the definition of strategy.

So, with this backdrop, we determined that we needed to take a fresh look at our enterprise learning strategy. As the CLO, I set out to apply our own standard of what we as the learning function were teaching our leaders. We had developed robust strategy, standard work, and tools, as well as a workshop that trained our product managers to create a strategy for their products. This was eating our own dog food, as the saying goes. Applying business strategy to creating a learning strategy was very challenging; however, it was also very rewarding. What we learned and the process we undertook are things I recommend for all learning functions.

In 2018, IRU embarked on an ambitious learning strategy refresh. We looked at the whole enterprise learning function with the goal of determining key focus areas for the function for the next three to four years. IRU applied Lafley and Martin’s critical strategic decisions process methodology, called Where will we play and how will we win? (Figure 1-1).

The process started with a small group from Ingersoll Rand University conducting a full current-state assessment by:

• Generating a list of hypotheses to prove or disprove. It was important in this step to be critical of the learning function and allow the team to state any unspoken statements (such as this learning function should be completely outsourced). This process allows you to cast a wide net of questions.

Figure 1-1. The Strategy Choice Cascade

Source: Lafley and Martin (2013).

• Gathering all key facts and data about the learning organization (including head count, courses offered, delivery methods, evaluation results, and learner feedback).

• Scanning the external environment to see what other learning organizations were doing. For this scan we used an on-demand survey through the ATD Forum to survey other best-in-class learning organizations. We also conducted private interviews with learning leaders from a variety of industries who were also members of the ATD Forum to gain an understanding of their best practices.

• Conducting an internal survey of business leaders to determine how the learning function was viewed. As members of the Bersin by Deloitte group, we were also able to use their high-impact learning organization diagnostic.

• Interviewing our senior executives and HR leaders to gain their insights. The 21 questions asked of all executives as part of the strategy refresh are listed at the end of this chapter for you to use in your organization. The data were synthesized into key organizational insights based on themes, patterns, and topics.

• Researching the external environment by reading more than 100 research articles—our external research data-mine process. We assigned and disseminated seven to 10 articles by topic to small teams, which then worked together to glean the insights, implications, and recommended actions from the research. Using small teams allowed everyone in the global learning function to be a part of the strategy refresh process, while also allowing us to quickly and efficiently develop and prioritize the trends taking place in the learning marketplace. This process gave everyone in the talent organization a chance to join the change journey and to dream and brainstorm on what the future state could be.

Once we completed our current state assessment and external environmental scan, we scheduled a learning strategy workshop. We used the same strategy workshop that we delivered to our product managers. To execute this, we worked closely with our corporate vendor, Strategy Generation Company, to deliver a two-day strategy off-site that would help us recalibrate our approach. Another innovative part of the process was inviting two learning experts from an external learning organization to join the workshop to serve as a fresh set of eyes and ask questions. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to engage outsiders in your strategy process. Having objective, independent minds weigh in and ask insightful questions that both challenge and validate the direction is a very powerful addition to the process.

Once completed and reviewed by our team, the enterprise learning strategy was presented to the IRU Strategy Board, our governing board, so they could understand the current state and the envisioned future state, as well as our recommended pathway there. This allowed the board to give input to the strategy as well as approve and buy into the direction. To ensure that all members of the IRU team were well versed in the new strategy, one of our team members, Jennefer Pierce, created a summary graphic version, called a placemat, for each of them to display at their workstations (Figure 1-2). The visual allowed us to keep our strategy uppermost in our minds every day.

Figure 1-2. The IRU Learning Strategy, or Placemat

As you can imagine, this was a major project requiring extensive planning, organizing, directing, and doing—it was a lot of work! You need a core team to manage the project, but you also need leadership to champion it and constantly emphasize its priority and value for meeting the organization’s needs to deliver results. IRU was fortunate to be in a position to dedicate time and resources to an externally facilitated strategy workshop, but ultimately it was our team’s execution power that enabled the change to happen. After finalizing our strategy, we produced a 10-minute video for our internal social collaboration site Yammer, to serve as a further reference for our journey to the future, a reminder of our guaranteed success, and most important, as recognition of the sweat equity our team had put into the process.

While creating a strategy using a new and innovative refresh process may seem like a huge, once-in-a-generation effort, it’s actually an ongoing, iterative process. For every organization, creating a learning strategy is critical for knowing what you want to aspire to and how to set big-picture goals. As the organization evolves throughout the learning strategy change initiative, it creates the momentum and sustained energy for the team’s efforts to make the necessary changes and deliver the big-picture goals. An added benefit of this work is that the entire team is rowing together and learning new skills. To ensure excellent delivery of this new reality, the team should pause every two months for a full-day meeting to revisit its progress, discuss the overall strategy within the learning group, celebrate the progress made, and, most important, to build the team’s internal capability.

Summary

Several conditions must be in place for learning to be aligned with and focused on the organizational goals and objectives needed to produce the desired business results. First and foremost, TD leaders must understand the strategic direction from a systems perspective and the details of the business:

• how the business makes money

• the business model employed

• how the company tracks profits

• who the stakeholders and strategic business partners are and what is important to them

• the overall competitive position of the organization (for example, competitive marketplace advantage).

The learning content must be integrated into the business context (that is, integrated with the business’s language, goals, and values). This context steeps the training in the organizational reality and culture. Additionally, learning activities must be grounded in the performance needs of the individual employees and the roles they play within their work groups. What does it take to enable groups of employees working together to successfully achieve organizational results? This direction and alignment enhance the overall system, thus enabling leaders to keep the workforce connected, working together, and focused on the big picture, as seen in this chapter’s examples. This in turn generates value and impact, thus creating a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Strategic alignment of all learning programs, both formal and informal, with the organizational direction is good for the business. It demonstrates the contributions and value of the learning function in developing people by increasing organizational capabilities and interoperability among and within business units. But more important, it leverages the ability of the learning leaders to make an operational impact on senior-level goals and objectives, which in turn positively affects results and thus competitive advantage.

Periodically stopping and conducting a total refresh of the learning strategy is critical to steering the learning ship in a new direction. While we benefited from the assistance we received from memberships in professional consortia and consultants, the efforts of the learning team in gathering and sorting data and engaging in building the future, were magnanimous.

Key Takeaways

While all organizations are unique, there are some must-haves for future focus and alignment. They generally start with the result—competitive advantage.

Incorporating a management philosophy like Lean or Hoshin Kanri can help focus the direction, determine priorities, align processes, and create a common language.

A governing board includes critical decision makers and stakeholders who can champion initiatives and keep projects on track.

A complete refresh of a learning strategy takes time and effort, but has huge benefits for the organization and the learning team.

Questions for Reflection and Further Action

1. What structures does your organization have in place to ensure that learning is aligned with the goals and objectives of the business? How do they influence the work your department does?

2. What is your organization’s North Box (or top-level strategic breakthrough priorities)? How is your learning team ensuring that the capabilities needed for these priorities are in place today or being built for tomorrow?

3. What aspects of the strategy refresh could work for your team?

QUESTIONS ASKED DURING EXECUTIVE INTERVIEWS AS PART OF THE STRATEGY REFRESH

1.   Regarding external trends and internal capabilities, what external trends are facing Ingersoll Rand?

2.   What skills and capabilities will be required for employees and managers that we may not have today but will enable us to successfully execute in the future?

3.   What business value or value proposition does IRU bring to Ingersoll Rand today?

4.   Looking into the next three to five years, what additional value would you like to see IRU delivering?

5.   Conversely, what should we (if anything) stop doing?

6.   If your business or team has a learning need that cannot be met by IRU today, where do you go to fulfill that need?

7.   What would you recommend IRU do to gain a more competitive advantage in the internal and external marketplace?

8.   Regarding leadership development, what is working well and what needs to be improved?

9.   What (if anything) should we do differently with our high-potential cohort leadership development programs?

10. Regarding strategic capabilities, what is working well and what needs to be improved?

11. What should IRU’s top three priorities be for the next three to five years?

12. What are your measures of success for IRU’s products and services?

13. What is your perspective on our leaders being in the classroom and sharing their expertise with our talent?

14. What amount of time would you want your senior leaders to give to this endeavor?

15. What are the upsides or downsides of a pay-per-seat model?

16. Would you allocate budget dollars and pay-per-seat for your employees to attend IRU programs?

17. As for benchmark data, what might IRU learn from you if you were to reflect on your past experiences with other high-performing enterprise learning functions?

18. What else would you like to share with us that we did not ask?

19. What effective learning solutions and processes do you see from your strategic business unit technical/product-training teams?

20. What inefficiencies do you see?

21. What overlap in learning content or audiences compared with IRU’s scope do you see?

2

A Proactive Approach to Strategic Learning Alignment

Sandi Maxey

Does senior leadership view your learning organization as a critical component of the company’s overall success, a cost to be avoided, or somewhere in between? In a 2015 study by Human Capital Media, learning leaders were asked to compare how they view the value of learning to the business with how they believed their organization’s business line leaders perceived it (HCM Advisory Group 2015). Overall, learning leaders viewed their departments as strategic enablers of achieving business objectives. Conversely, they believed that their organization’s business line leaders were more likely to view the learning function either as costly but necessary or as a pure cost center. This may not be a surprise to learning leaders, but what does it mean?

For learning leaders to achieve strategic alignment with the business, we must understand where the perceptual disconnect described in the study originates. Business line leaders are judged based on goal achievement, which, for most businesses, equates to numbers such as production, revenue, fees, or billable hours. Learning, on the other hand, is often measured by the number of classes, participants, or course ratings on a smile sheet. What’s not obvious to senior leaders is how these learning numbers affect business results. In a 2019 study conducted by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), less than half of respondents (40 percent) believed their learning evaluation efforts helped them meet their organization’s business goals (ATD 2019a).

As the learning leader, you might consider strategic alignment at two levels:

• At the organizational level, you align the learning strategy with the organization’s overall business goals, objectives, and strategy.

• At the business line level, you align specific learning initiatives to the goals of the unit.

For example, if the organization’s strategy includes organic growth, the learning function might develop an enterprise-wide sales training strategy with multiple sales training initiatives for specific business lines under that umbrella.

This chapter will present a case study describing how the learning team at one midsize community bank in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States implemented an intentional strategy for achieving strategic alignment with the bank’s overall business goals and objectives to gain support for an important, but somewhat risky, learning initiative. The details of the story are presented using the framework of a four-step model. For each step, we’ll explore the actions taken, the tools and techniques used, the lessons learned, and practical suggestions for how you might apply the model in your own organization. Finally, each section will provide a list of stop and think questions to stimulate your thinking (Schellenger 2015). It is important to note that the tools, models, and methods used by the featured organization in this case study are not the only tools available. They were simply chosen by the bank’s learning team based on best practices and how well they fit the organization’s culture.

The Case and the Conundrum

The bank in our case study has operated for more than 150 years in a large metropolitan area known for its affluence and strong growth. It is categorized as a large community bank with assets of more than $8 billion and approximately 950 employees. The learning team is made up of five learning professionals. The competitive environment for banks in this market area is intense. Readers without a banking background need to understand two simple concepts to grasp the basics of our story:

• Banking, in general, is now a commoditized industry. Banks have reached product parity; they all offer the same basic products and services. The large commercial banks compete for market share on the basis of price and technological innovation. Community banks, on the other hand, must differentiate themselves with service and expertise; in a word: people.

• Bank profits come primarily from commercial lending, or lending to businesses. Community banks rely on a cadre of skilled commercial lenders to source new loans and establish deep banking relationships with businesses in order to be profitable.

We now reach our business conundrum in the story. The number of skilled commercial lenders available for hire are dwindling. In the 1980s and 1990s, large commercial banks recruited thousands of fresh college graduates from the best business schools and put them through rigorous credit training programs. However, these programs were eliminated during times of economic downturn. Fast-forward 20 years and the banking industry, as a whole, is facing a shortage of skilled talent for its most profitable product. New commercial lenders have stopped entering the pipeline, and the existing supply is aging out of the system.

The bank’s learning team realized that this was an opportunity to partner with the business to solve an undeniable problem. Despite the criticality of the situation, they knew it would be challenging to persuade senior leadership to invest in a learning solution because any recommended remediation would involve significant cost and risk. Thus, the keys to successfully selling the learning solution would be demonstrating that the learning team understood the problem and had the bandwidth and expertise to solve it internally. In addition, they needed to engage with business leaders to develop a solution using the same rigorous business standards as product development and technology investments. In other words, the strategy for solving the problem needed to align with the business strategy for achieving revenue goals.

As you assess how your organization’s learning function can become more strategically aligned with the business, you might want to start at the business line or program level, particularly if you work for a large organization. To help you focus your search for a specific project to align with business needs, ask these questions:

• Which job roles or skills are most critical to your business success?

• What are industry forecasts saying about future trends and outlooks?

• What new technologies or innovations are expected to affect your business?

• Where is your industry or organization experiencing the greatest pain points?

The Learning Leader’s Point of View

Before digging into the model and the specifics of strategic alignment, let’s pause to consider how the bank’s learning team views the learning function’s role in the organization—what we do, whom do we do it for, and most important, why we do it. You might think of this as the mindset for alignment. Simply put, the team believes the learning function’s sole reason to exist is to support business objectives. This belief was documented with vision and mission statements to clearly articulate their role relative to the larger