Under the umbrella of The Learning Forum, CLO LIFT, a group of learning and development leaders, is actively addressing persistent challenges straining the industry. You can review their prologue to three upcoming whitepapers on the first three challenges here.
Tackling a total of 10 industry wide challenges three at a time—starting with the value of learning and then understanding the evolving skills-scape to surge new skills—CLO LIFT aims to elevate the role of L&D and address long-standing industry problems with practical solutions from the minds of passionate leading learning professionals and chief learning officers.
With industry leaders across organizations like Visa, Mastercard, IBM, Google and more, CLO LIFT’s governance group worked to answer the question: How can CLOs develop a sustainable governance strategy that fosters agility and cohesion across their organization? They focused on what role governance should play within an organization to elevate learning and how it’s valued.
“I get excited about governance,” says Eric Berger, global head of learning at Visa. “Historically, we have focused so much of our learning [efforts] on mastering the art of rapid response rather than really stepping back and thinking hard about how we make decisions, how we prioritize how we think about the link between work with stakeholders in our organizations and the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve.”
Growing governance
At its core, learning governance enables informed and timely decision-making. It helps L&D teams and their stakeholders make decisions that enable them to quickly align around priorities, respond in a coordinated way to shared challenges, and communicate priorities so that employees can distinguish signal from noise when assessing competing demands for their time.
With L&D in greater demand than ever due to the extensive reskilling needs facing nearly every industry, organizations are asking for more from learning than ever to confront all the changes over the last four years. “It’s an exciting time to be in learning, but it also means that resourcing and prioritization are challenging,“ Berger says.
Conversations with fellow learning leaders meant to uncover root causes to L&D governance challenges revealed a diverse set of experiences that forced them to tackle the problem from different angles and complexities.
“It just really pushes the needle; even as we were trying to get to root causes there was plenty of necessary back and forth in defining the root causes,” says Nicole Roy, former chief learning officer at Deloitte and a Learning Forum partner. “Those types of conversations were extremely valuable.”
As a CLO—and what the group has heard from many learning leaders—having all demands funneled back to the top can overwhelm capacity and lead to an increase in business-embedded learning initiatives. “Governance is an essential vehicle to address what we do when we have that proliferation of business-embedded learning,” Berger says. The group agreed that representation from these teams in the governance structures is not only important, it leads to a better development experience for employees.
It’s ultimately critical for learners to consistently feel like the organization, as a whole, is looking out for their development in a way that feels integrated and consistent. A governance council, along with clear and consistent learning policies and standards, are key to ensuring a positive learner experience – especially when learners have more pressure on their time than ever before. A council also provides an important space to assess what is or isn’t working.
The “beauty of governance is when well-defined and implemented, you can make decisions more quickly,” Roy says. While the upfront work to stand up learning governance may feel burdensome, the investment of time and energy “helps pave the road to move forward quickly.”
To move forward with a learning governance strategy, CLOs recognize the importance of engaging a broader group of stakeholders who can grapple with what should be prioritized, and why. At the end of the day, “the learner is the learner, and they don’t know nor should they care where the learning is coming from,” Berger says.
Under one tent
“It’s not one-size-fits-all. Each organization and its structure will have slight variations,” Roy says. Berger and Roy acknowledge that a successful governance strategy will look very different depending on the organization’s structure, culture and needs.
Their whitepaper also points to another sticking point for effective governance: leadership change and organizational transformation. Part of the reason successful governance can be so tricky to nail down is that CLOs tend to move on to other CLO jobs fairly frequently.
After finding common ground themselves, the group believes the broader community of CLOs can benefit from a common language with shared terminologies, concepts and ideas. A shared framework for effective learning governance will help ease the disruptions that come from CLOs cycling in and out of new roles. Iteration and comparison of governance strategies could then be more easily streamlined.
At a recent conference in March, Berger exemplified the power of this continuity by co-presenting with his successor at Citi on a program Berger initiated around agile transformation for the learning team. “As we see CLOs move around, it would be great if we could have more of those kinds of conversations and even role-to-role discussions with predecessors and successors,” he says.
That’s the gold standard, Roy says. It goes beyond saying goodbye to an organization and just leaving the next person to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it.
As organizations try to solve more problems with learning, it becomes more difficult to prioritize where to allocate resources and where to direct the attention of learners. The importance of governance only grows. “Hopefully, those of us in formal learning roles will be able to keep up,” Berger says. “But when we can’t, at least we can create a venue to come together and talk to everybody learning around us.”
As part of this challenge effort, the group hopes expanding their own tents will bring others in to help tackle these big problems.
This article is the third in a three-part series exploring the initial challenges of CLO LIFT. You can read the previous article here.
