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A Proactive Approach to Strategic Learning Alignment
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 purpose of the organization and their commitment to supporting it through strategic learning. They adopted the organization’s three-year strategic planning model to draw a clear connection between the bank’s objectives, the business strategy, the learning strategy, and individual learning initiatives. The team also conducted a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to incorporate methods for leveraging strengths and opportunities and to mitigate weaknesses and threats.
The Model
Models provide frameworks to organize your approach for understanding and solving problems. In her book Strategic Learning Alignment: Make Training a Powerful Business Partner, Rita Mehegan Smith (2011) presents a simple four-step model for “understanding what is important to your business leader and how best to communicate learning processes and outcomes in business terms.” Her SLA model is shown in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1. Strategic Learning Alignment (SLA) Model
Source: Smith (2011).
We will break the model down step-by-step and use it as a framework for exploring how the bank’s learning team applied the model’s concepts to the learning solution described in the case study.
Step 1. Know the Business
A learning leader must understand the business and be able to speak the language, even though their required skill set can seem separate from the business. Instructional design, for example, follows the same basic process whether your company is a manufacturer or a hospital. And we’re all familiar with the glazed-over expressions our business leaders get when we mention “learning objectives.”
The bank’s learning team makes business acumen a priority—each team member’s annual development plan includes activities to enrich the learning practice and deepen business acumen. Team members read industry periodicals and attend training programs and conferences sponsored by the state and national banking associations. They invite business line leaders to speak at department meetings, and embed themselves in the business by visiting branch locations and by job shadowing in other departments.
To develop a deeper understanding of the bank’s skills gap issue, the learning team researched industry sources for data and information to quantify the problem and validate their solution. They interviewed business line leaders, job incumbents, and internal recruiters to learn how the problem was affecting them and what solutions they recommended. This practice had the added benefit of identifying leaders and subject matter experts (SMEs) who wanted to be involved in the project.
Actions to Take
How do you, as a learning leader, ensure that your team can speak the language of the business? You can start with your organization’s vision, mission, and values statement and the corporate objectives. Many of these internal documents can be found on your company’s intranet or posted on the wall in the break room. They provide the 30,000-foot view of what your company does, why and how it does what it does, and whom it does it for. If the company is publicly traded, read a copy of its annual report. In addition to the financials themselves, the annual report provides a summary of the business strategy and operations for shareholders.
More important, get close to the business. In some industries, you can be a customer of the business, which allows you to experience the company from a user point of view. Familiarize yourself with the products and services offered. Use the technology your company’s clients use to interact with the business or manage their relationship with it.
If it’s not practical to be a customer, try to get a more intimate view of the internal workings of the business. The human centered design (HCD) discipline offers a variety of tools for understanding the client experience. The learning function’s customers are your company’s management and workforce, and you can adapt many HCD tools to help understand them and how they do their work. Innovating for People, a handbook of HCD methods published by the Luma Institute (2012), is a rich source of tools and techniques.
Your research should help you answer questions such as:
• What is your organization’s value proposition?
• What products or services do you provide?
• Who are your customers?
• What customer segments are most important to your business now and in the future?
• What are the business goals of the specific department or team you are working with?
• How does the work of the department or team contribute to the company’s overall mission?
Step 2. Build the Business Case for Learning
How many times have you heard, “We need training,” from a business line leader experiencing performance issues? It’s far too common for L&D to react to the request only to later determine that a learning solution wasn’t the answer. Throwing a costly learning solution at a problem that needs a different fix threatens your credibility and can damage relationships with your business line partners. For this reason, a learning leader must be skilled at front-end needs analysis.
Assuming that you have conducted a thorough front-end analysis of the performance issue, step 2 in Smith’s model involves justifying why a learning program is the right solution. This is where the learning leader must show the critical links between the learning solution and the business goals and outcomes. To do this, they must think like a business leader. Using data to support an investment in resources is a convincing place to start.
The bank’s learning team created links to the business goals and objectives by cascading their learning strategy from the business strategy using an adaptation of Bersin’s Talent Management Framework.
Figure 2-2 illustrates the components of the learning strategy. By going through this exercise, they were able to prioritize their learning initiatives based on the how directly the initiative supported business strategies.
Figure 2-2. Components of the Learning Strategy
Building the business case to develop a commercial lender training program included expense data associated with sourcing candidates from the outside. Human resources provided statistics on turnover and average days to fill the role. The team also worked with their partners in the finance department to obtain hard cost data for fees paid to external recruiters as well as estimates for lost productivity while open positions went unfilled. When coupled with anecdotal evidence from field interviews, they could compare the costs of implementing a learning solution with the cost of doing nothing.
Actions to Take
Building the business case for learning begins long before any training solutions are developed. As described, alignment with the business requires a well-thought-out learning strategy that cascades from business objectives. You might consider using Rich Horwath’s Goals Objectives Strategy Tactic (GOST) model to frame your learning strategy. This model is designed to help managers bring clarity to the planning process by differentiating among each of those planning terms.
Use these stop and think questions to help prepare your mindset for building a business case for your learning initiative:
• Have we clearly articulated our learning strategy with direct connections to business objectives, goals, and tactics?
• How does our learning strategy contribute to achieving business objectives?
• Which learning initiatives have the highest priority? Why?
• How are we allocating our resources toward our highest-priority initiatives?
• Are we fully leveraging front-end analysis to properly diagnose training-related performance issues?
• What business problems are we helping to solve?
• How might we obtain data to support our proposal?
Step 3. Engage Leaders in Key Learning Activities
To gain alignment with the business strategy, business unit leaders must be involved in learning design and development. Your design team can tailor the solution to meet the needs of the participants and ensure maximum relevance and effectiveness. Involving business leaders provides valuable sponsorship for the project, which is essential for communicating the program’s importance.
Because of the complexity of the commercial banker training program, the bank’s learning team started project planning by creating a framework to help them organize each component they needed to include. This framework was anchored by a governance structure made up of key stakeholders who had a vested interest in the project’s success. The governing interests included executive sponsors, a project owner, a steering committee, a curriculum review team, and mentors. A core team, made up of the instructional designer and business line SMEs, was added to play a key role in designing the career progression for the trainees. They also completed a stakeholder analysis map to identify every leader or team that would have some interest in or influence on the project. This served as the basis of the project communication plan.
The key pillars of the framework were candidate selection, curriculum development, participant engagement, and program evaluation. Each pillar outlined strategies for maximizing the final component of the program: candidate retention.
Actions to Take
Partnering with the business line to design, develop, and deliver key learning activities is a major success factor for driving alignment. Business line leaders can be engaged in sponsoring, communicating, and, ideally, leading learning initiatives. They can also provide invaluable insights into the nuances of the business unit’s culture, business model, clients, and so forth. This enables the learning design team to ensure the context of the learning solution resonates with the target audience.
To maximize alignment by engaging key leaders in learning activities, use these questions to guide your strategies:
• Which leaders have the most to gain from this initiative?
• Who are the influencers associated with this project?
• Who are the other stakeholders in this project? What is their level
of interest or influence?
• How do we need to frame this project to meet the learning objectives?
• What business realities must we design around, such as geography,
time zones, and staffing?
Step 4. Communicate Your Business Results
Strategic alignment results from helping your organization achieve business results through learning. Many business leaders see value in learning. However, unlike learning leaders, who believe implicitly in the value of learning to the business, not all business leaders are able to make the connection. It’s not enough to report learning metrics, such as evaluation scores, on your company’s intranet. To be viewed as a true business partner, you must have a communication plan that ensures business line leaders are aware of the value your learning function contributes to the organization.
In step 3, you used a stakeholder analysis map to identify all interests in the project and align a specific learning project to the business needs. You can also extrapolate this concept and apply it to your learning function as a whole—the map helps identify individuals or groups with influence on and interest in the learning function. It is important to enroll these entities early in the process and regularly communicate results.
Your communication plan should match the frequency and delivery method of communication to the influence and interest level of the stakeholder groups. For example, the bank’s executives had a strategic interest in the project, so they received an annual high-level update. Business line leaders, on the other hand, had a more vested interest in the project’s success, so they received more frequent and detailed updates to assist them with budget and staffing plans.
Measuring the business impact of learning is one of the most challenging aspects of leading the learning function. As mentioned earlier, research conducted by ATD (2019a) indicates that less than 20 percent of organizations measure the business impact of learning to a high extent. Why is this number so low? Many factors contribute to successful business outcomes—product differentiation, effective pricing and marketing, and geographic advantages, to name a few. According to the same study, the top barrier to measurement is the difficulty of isolating the effects of learning from other factors, followed by a lack of tools for measurement and the inability to extract the right data from the learning management system.
Even with right tools and data, measuring the business impact of learning is difficult, time intensive, and expensive. The bank’s learning team had to learn to be more intentional in how they focused their measurement efforts. In terms of establishing strategic alignment, they selected a method and level of measurement on a project-by-project basis. The team tried to match the level of evaluation to the project objectives and complexity. If training was necessary, for example, to meet compliance requirements, Kirkpatrick’s Level 1 (Reaction) or 2 (Learning) evaluation may be sufficient. However, if the project was high stakes, high profile, or mission critical, they might employ more rigorous measurement standards. They also found that by involving business leaders in the learning design, they could capture their definition of learning success and focus on delivering the return on expectations the business leaders had for the program.
Measuring the impact of the commercial lender training program will take several years. In the program design, the team engaged job role incumbents and their leadership to identify key learning objectives and evaluation criteria for each phase of the program. Early in the program, much of the evaluation was at the learning level. As the participants transitioned from learning to performing, the evaluation level will move to behavior and results.
Actions to Take
Communicating learning’s impact on business results is the ultimate outcome of strategic alignment. The skilled learning leader treats communication as an intentional tactic for achieving strategic alignment, and weaves it throughout learning design. It can’t be left as an afterthought or you risk misidentifying the most relevant metrics for measuring success.
Your strategic communication plan might include answers to these questions:
• Who has influence on and interest in advancing the earning function?
• What level of communication do our stakeholder groups need?
• What communication channels should we use?
• How can we demonstrate learning’s impact on the business?
• How can we measure learning impact more intentionally?
One More Tool to Consider
Another tool Smith recommends for understanding how the business unit creates value for the organization is the business model canvas (Figure 2-3). This is a one-page template for summarizing nine essential business drivers: key partners, key activities, key resources, value provided, customers, customer relationships, channels, costs, and revenue. Learning leaders may find it to be a useful and easy tool for creating links between the business and learning services.
Figure 2-3. The Business Model Canvas
Summary
Today’s learning leaders have a lot on their plate. In the vast majority of organizations our role is expanding to include other aspects of talent management, such as leadership development, performance management, change management, and succession planning (ATD 2017a). As our duties expand, so does our influence and our ability to affect business results. By undergoing an intentional process for building strategic alignment, we can prioritize our learning initiatives to support the organization’s most important objectives.
In this chapter, you were introduced to four steps for achieving strategic learning alignment: knowing the business, building the business case for learning, engaging leaders in key learning activities, and communicating business results. You can apply these steps at the organizational, department, or project level, depending on your organization’s structure, size, or culture. This gives you the flexibility of determining the most appropriate opportunity for demonstrating the ability of your learning function to be a strategic enabler, not merely a cost center.
The first two steps of building alignment—knowing the business and building the business case for learning—require you to understand the organization’s purpose and value proposition and how it measures results. You must be able to express, in business terms, how your learning solution equates to improved business results. Would you buy a car from someone who couldn’t answer basic questions about gas mileage and safety? Of course you wouldn’t. So why would a business manager be convinced to engage your learning solution if you can’t demonstrate an understanding of their business?
Your critical source for designing and developing the best-fit learning solution is the business leaders themselves. They can fill multiple roles and serve many purposes. As part of the governance structure, business leaders lend vital legitimacy to and endorsement of the project or function as a whole. Their support sends a strong message that learning is critical to the organization’s success. Business leaders can be more directly involved in learning by participating as course facilitators and providing access to SMEs. Finally, business leaders who are vested in the learning solution will hold their business units accountable for applying their new skills on the job.
The final step for building learning alignment is to communicate the value that learning contributes to the organization. One of the rules of sales management is “No anonymous giving.” There is no shame in making sure the influencers in your organization know how your learning function influences business results. In fact, it is imperative if you want to earn valuable currency in the competition for scarce resources.
Key Takeaways
There is a gap between how learning and business leaders view the value of learning to the business. Learning leaders are significantly more likely to see learning as a strategic enabler rather than a cost center.
To close the gap, learning leaders should think and manage their units like business managers. In an aligned organization, the main filter for sorting and prioritizing learning initiatives is business impact.
Learning leaders should seek to achieve alignment at as many organizational levels as practical, given the size and complexity of the organization. This requires a structured approach and intimate knowledge of the business.
Involving business leaders in learning and communicating business results are two highly effective ways to ensure that learning initiatives have the support of senior management and are designed for business impact.
Questions for Reflection and Further Action
1. How might you use these tools in your organization?
2. What adaptations do you need to make for these tools to fit your culture and meet your alignment needs?
3. What opportunities are there for operationalizing strategic learning alignment in your learning organization?
4. How might you leverage your networks to learn “best practices” for learning alignment?
5. What internal support or sponsorship for learning alignment is available?