David James is CLO at 360Learning, host of The Learning & Development Podcast and former Director of L&D for The Walt Disney Company.
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How do you measure the success of your learning and development function?
Engagement? Satisfaction? Enhanced performance? Improved results? Or with a complicated calculation of return on investment?
Each learning and development team will determine whether they need to justify their spending on learning and training or whether they hold themselves accountable for demonstrable improvements.
But what does the organization actually require from its learning and development function?
How our stakeholders respond to this question may prove misleading. What would they say? To run courses? To look after compliance training? And that’s a shame because corporate L&D can be perceived as low-stakes if all we do is meet stakeholders’ baseline expectations that can be fairly simple to achieve—not easy, because it still takes work, but simple. It’s enough to just put the building blocks together for a comprehensive face-to-face and digital learning offering. The organization expects "training" and the L&D function provides it.
But when we ask questions less about "learning" and more about the challenges the organization and its leaders, managers and employees face in order to survive and thrive in challenging economic times, it doesn’t take long to get to higher stakes aims, such as:
• Achieving better results
• Overcoming specific challenges
• Addressing inefficiencies
• Retaining good people
• Helping employees who are struggling
• Ensuring people and skills are readily available when the organization needs them
• Making the very most of the existing workforce
• Being nimble and adaptable in response to turbulent times
• Having a positive and productive culture in which employees feel they belong, are committed and can succeed.
Each and any of these goals may already be a priority for your organization and none of them are likely to be predictably and reliably enhanced by a comprehensive learning provision. But we can get so much closer to achieving them if L&D leaders see their role less as the providers of "learning" and more as the key drivers toward a thriving internal mobility program.
If an organization develops its people with a commitment to their mobility and progression, then everybody wins—but this doesn’t happen solely by hoping that attendance and consumption of content equate to skill development, and not even with a modicum of repetition and practice thrown in for good measure. No, it takes analysis and understanding of the actual blockers to internal mobility.
In one organization I’ve witnessed, internal mobility wasn’t prevalent because a senior decision-maker had a tacit set of expectations that were never externalized or recorded and they only knew "it" when they saw "it." This meant that people rarely progressed to new and different roles internally and there was an over-reliance on external hires. This demotivated the workforce and was costly to hire for roles. What they needed to do was explore—with the key decision makers—what the desired characteristics were, and not just incorporate these into the hiring process but also into the development opportunities offered.
Learning and development can do this across an organization. Not necessarily all at once or as a one-size-fits-all top-down exercise but by beginning with areas of the organization—or cohorts at a particular level—where there is a talent or skills gap and an over-reliance on external hiring. Or even worse, where there is a demand-side imbalance in the jobs market, creating difficulty in attracting external candidates. What are the skills and experiences being sought by hiring managers and how can the organization develop these skills internally—coupled with the experience of the culture of the organization—and by doing so create an advantage for internal candidates over externals?
This cannot happen as a byproduct of building a comprehensive blended learning provision. Instead, it starts with robust analysis of factors holding back the organization from thriving. Think of it more akin to an apprenticeship model than a "consumption equates to competence" model. For starters, we all know that exposure to content does not lead to skill and role competence. Despite the investment and expense of training programs and online learning platforms filled with generic content, talented employees remain in roles for too long and organizations spend vast sums on external hires. So instead of perpetuating this unsuccessful model, we should work on the premise that a role can be broken down into:
• Background knowledge
• Performing the role and its cumulative tasks
• The experience that builds confidence and reduces risks
Then, we can ask how each of these can be accounted for, experienced and witnessed.
Ideally, employees will be given the opportunity to grow as apprentices, supported by the collective experience of those who have come before them and been successful in the same role. Employees will learn collaboratively with technical know-how linked to the context of the organization, department and team. In this scenario, the measures of success are internal mobility metrics that show to what extent the organization develops and relies on internal hiring rather than over-relying on external candidates.
In this case, the learning and development department would no longer anxiously wonder if it makes a valuable impact; instead, this is a given. Additionally, the organization goes a long way to making the best use of its assets.
But, as mentioned above, nobody is asking this of L&D because expectations are much lower. It’s up to us to lead from here and do the hard work now for a more fulfilling and successful impact for us all.
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