Learning that means business

Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears and never regrets. So said da Vinci - presumably in Italian - and it’s a sentiment which holds an enduring appeal. Learning broadens the mind and the individual. It’s glorious for its own sake. 

 

But admirable though this view of the world is, and rewarding though it would be to operate an L&D department as an open-ended library of content into which happy workers could dip at their leisure, we all know the truth. L&D is a cost centre. Learning leaders have to justify their expenditure, show clear results and prove real-world value. They have to be accountable and, what’s more, they must embrace that need for accountability. L&D has a budget and customers - and it must show that it’s delivering value for money. 

 

An acquaintance of mine recently suggested that L&D teams are not always as financially literate (perhaps business-literate is a better term) as they could be. He didn’t mean in the way they manage their own resources, but rather in the knowledge and understanding they have of their customers. He suggested that providing “learning” is a reassuring cushion which insulates them from the reality that their customers - the managers and employees across the business - have very specific skills-based challenges, and that L&D teams don’t spend enough time trying to understand those challenges. 

 

 

Skills growth = performance

With learning clearly connected to skills, “...talent management, performance measurement, and career navigation are all anchored in a common skills language, and L&D plays a crucial role in nurturing this ecosystem.” So said Deloitte last year, evangelising the skills-based organisation as one which could move faster and react more readily to evolving market demands and technological advances. And that’s true, but it’s as true of everyday essential skills as it is to the challenges and opportunities of, say, building an advanced AI tool. 

 

More than anything, this is about solving specific business problems. What are customer service teams struggling with? Does the marketing team need to convert more leads or boost customer service ratings? It’s about channelling people into personalised learning pathways using the media and formats that suit them best. This is learning for performance, rather than for its own sake. One-size-fits-all almost never does: L&D teams need to analyse the skills gaps on their own doorstep. The goal isn’t to crop-spray teams with a cocktail of good stuff - rather, it’s a careful calibration of which resource needs to be directed where, and always with a specific aim in mind. Know the product better. Negotiate with more confidence. Eliminate defects from a production line. 

 

And with this very specificity comes a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the business itself. Are skills shortfalls repeated across departments? Why, or why not? Are there areas where younger cohorts naturally have more knowledge or confidence, and how does that affect recruitment and talent management? Learning metrics are not a demonstration of how hard L&D is working, or how persuasive they are in getting teams to complete courses. The real measure of learning lies in the performance metrics of the departments it serves (yes, serves), and its value is found in the measurable improvements which managers can see and report on within their own teams.

 

 

Care about the management issues

As a guiding star, learning teams should consider three persistent calls on management time: risk, change and performance. Boosting skills will offer a strong solution (or, at least, the foundation of one) to all three. Working with a manager to understand what they’re worried about will tell its own story. 

 

The more time that L&D can spend with managers and leaders, getting to grips with their concerns and immersing themselves in the realities and practicalities of managing teams, the more they will be able to support them. L&D is a service, and it must sell that service within the business. The better learning teams get to know their customers, the better they can cater to their needs. They can draw from the lessons of performance management by scheduling regular check-ins with managers, getting out there and understanding what’s happening on the ground. This then informs the resources they deploy and supply, and the changes and evolutions they themselves need to make. 

 

There is a temptation, in all disciplines, to immerse ourselves in our subject. But that only makes sense if we see it through the lens of what we want it to achieve, and we can only know that by understanding the challenges of the organisation. L&D, as we’ve said, is a supplier, but the ideal is to be a true strategic business partner: to rebrand the offering of transformative learning in a way which links directly to the objectives - both tactical and strategic - of the managers who employ it. But we can only do that by understanding the broader context. The more we immerse ourselves in other people’s problems, the more likely we are to solve them.

 

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Nelson Sivalingam is Co-founder and CEO at HowNow

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and JLco - Julia Amaral