Throughout my learning and development career, one memory still stands out like it happened yesterday: It is a fall morning, and I am full of excitement. Months before, our company introduced a new role to drive stronger relationships with the business. The goal was to build impactful training programs. I was one of the fortunate six new members to take on this role. I had spent many years as a facilitator, and a few years in a lead facilitator role working on coaching and developing new trainers and managers all within the care space of this company.
I was eager for a change and the skills this new role could give me. The six of us were sitting around the table, excited about our new assignments and new responsibilities. As the meeting ended, our director mentioned each of our new assignments and stakeholders were based on superpowers she felt we all possessed. When my assignment came to me, I was a little surprised. My new assignment was in business sales working with innovative technology and products. My superpower was “curiosity.”
Fast forward 13 years of successful experiences within that role and many others. I have met amazing stakeholders, been involved in unique strategies and have managed to sprinkle in a little learning theory everywhere along the way. Throughout all these experiences one thing remains constant: Each organization cared about its employees and understood the importance of supporting their learning and career growth.
I know all of us want to partner with our business stakeholders to develop meaningful training experiences. I want to share some additional tips I have learned on my journey to become a trusted partner in creating meaningful L&D programs that drive true outcomes.
Teammate first
There is a tendency in the L&D space to forget we are part of a larger ecosystem. This forgetfulness leads to going it alone and we risk not taking advantage of the full power of a learning organization. Slowing down to go fast is a wonderful way to help the business reach its goals and help the whole organization be more mindful of what is happening in the business space.
Our stakeholders move fast. In my previous role 13 years ago, our stakeholder worked exclusively with others to make sure his team was able to sell and position these new IoT offerings to help meet their outcomes. Before being involved, this stakeholder would go forward and develop sales skills using the common method for presenting information and would just produce product specs on a SharePoint site. The training was effective but did not deliver the intended outcome because of the confusion.
In my time working in the customer care organization, we relied on a central database to contain all methods and procedure information. My connection and experience, led me to demo and show how we could put their sales policy and procedures along with key product information, and what it looks like in the training content we built. This approach quickly allowed information to be more transparent and elevate the learning outcomes and consistent messages to our customers. It was amazing to see the transformation and we were able to get executives to build this as a standard for those within the sales organization.
Sharing information within your organization is also important throughout the process. Whether in a large, medium, or small learning organization, the speed at which we move does not prepare nor allow for other teams to take advantage of the work done that may benefit others.
At every company and position I have held, there are countless examples of this need. The majority of these come from the actual design and building process of content. Because of methodologies like ADDIE and SAM, there is an assembly line approach that, if tapped into, creates training at a bolstering pace. However, many leaders and organizations do not design to transfer experiences or processes to other teams. In my last role as a senior program manager working to establish a curriculum to connect to our main team and to the HR organization, we developed templates that could be used interchangeably with diverse groups and could provide a consistent experience regardless of who used this content.
Having a team approach to challenges will help you ensure you are partnering on the right things, help you understand what matters to your stakeholders and work to improve the knowledge across the learning and development organization.
Show off your expertise
Stakeholders may not always show it, but they do appreciate having an L&D professional partnering with their organization and supporting their needs. A lot of stakeholders from the business feel because they are experts in their content and an experienced learner, there may be a vision of what the final product will be from training. It is okay as you build trust to not be afraid to show off your expertise and the value your organization can provide. This may have to start slowly at first, especially if a new relationship.
There are other opportunities to partner with stakeholders when a full-fledged training program may not be the best path forward. Sometimes, developing assets or strategies to help learners when they need support is key. I have become a fan of Crystal Kadakia and Lisa Owen’s strategy around “designing for modern learning,” which focuses on building assets surrounding your learner and knowing the persona of your audience and how they are adjusting to the speed and metric-driven world we are in today.
These simple ways can help you pick up quick wins to show your value as an L&D professional. It continues to bring them and continue to evolve and develop sustainable training efforts.
Include the right voices at your stakeholder table
Sometimes those who have a seat at your stakeholder table may not always provide the right perspective for those consuming the content. From supporting both sales enablement and customer care portions of an organization, there are two groups stakeholders fall into: The one removed from the day-to-day strategy teams and the overzealous voice of the field advocate.
A strategy team is a great partner for building toward outcomes because they have a great understanding of product direction and relevance. However, they may not have a good grasp on supporting or selling to customers. There is a tendency to not understand or use the theory around presenting vs. the actual environment. You need to understand the realities to help drive the outcome of campaigns.
Your field advocates may be frontline leaders supporting customers with new products or those who are savvy top performers doing the job day in and day out. Both groups provide great context and support for the real world. These individuals can help you provide real-world scenarios and context to help make sure new processes or products are implemented quickly and can become fixtures in an organization.
I can only think of one time in my career when the voice of the field outnumbered those supporting the strategic goals of an organization. When I was supporting our care organizations, we had several stakeholders who were very enthusiastic and helped us create a durable training program for the field. We added more hands-on activities and quicker time to the floor. These all sound wonderful, however, long term we discovered a disconnect between our contractor sites in the larger mission of our company and created a very disconnected perspective of the brand. We quickly worked to elevate the content and connect to a larger ecosystem.
In the organizations I have been a part of in my career, those strategy teams can quickly become a blocker to landing the right mix of training content and outcome. In a large organization I worked at, we were supporting an executive-sponsored shift in how we position and work with customers. It was a new methodology with many different layers.
What quickly became apparent was while we had a clear understanding of how the methodology would work and fit into the motion for our sales teams, there were many challenges due to the team supporting the launch. The first challenge was there was no clear understanding of how the floor and regions worked, and second, there was no true partnership with those in the various product groups during the initial rollout. There was a clear opportunity to influence and bring in members from those regions, product groups and more to the table. We do not need a whole army when building a program, but we do need to have the right mixture of experience.
As you become a teammate, I encourage you to be open and willing to expand who gets a seat at the table and use focus groups, pilots and build contributor programs to help evolve your training programs and create a sustainable model for the organizations we support.
Knowledge + skill = power
A mistake many of us experienced L&D professionals make is becoming too academic for our workforce. I have met many peers who will provide a list of what cannot be done, or what does not fit their skilling strategy. We become obsessed with satisfaction scores and immediate sentiment and aren’t involved in how our training programs evolve or need to evolve. We become too obsessed with a comprehensive business needs analysis and a complementary learning needs analysis. This helps provide a perception of being slow, complex and disconnected to the company and vision. We must become obsessed with showing how skills like negotiating, listening and coaching with how-to’s and discussions.
A powerful tool many large organizations are providing is a learning-as-a-service approach. This approach gives stakeholders an opportunity to build content and get the opportunity to partner with L&D professionals.
In my current role, I have the pleasure of bringing this type of service to our stakeholders.’ While some content development teams may look down upon this type of content because much of it may fall into helping package how-to information into a course. Our secret power is being able to deliver just-in-time content to the field while helping us teach our stakeholders the importance of our L&D organization. We are less than a year in, but we are seeing stakeholders starting to come early to the table to work on content and partner with our larger ecosystem. It also has become a way for us to elevate and educate a learn-it-all mindset and learner-first mentality as we teach stakeholders about order some adult theory and more.
L&D is such an amazing field and I hope these ideas help make you more outcome-minded as you work with your business partners. Happy growing!
