Appendix B

L&D Alignment Diagnostic

The proactive charge of the L&D function is to drive and develop performance within. To fulfill this charge, we provide a diagnostic tool to determine the level of alignment of the L&D function.

L&D Alignment Diagnostic

This diagnostic questionnaire lists the L&D skills and behaviors identified as most critical to the strategic alignment and contributions of L&D and has been validated by some 500 L&D practitioners and experts with a wide range of expertise and levels of experience. You may choose to use this questionnaire to conduct a self-assessment of your ongoing progress in improving the strategic alignment of your work. You may also choose to give this questionnaire to your stakeholders to assess improvements in stakeholders’ perceptions of the strategic alignment of your work.

How to Use the Tool

The tool can be administered to internal and external L&D stakeholders. Specifically, you can use it to gain an understanding of L&D members’ own perceptions of strategic alignment, as well as to organizational members, whom the L&D function supports. This perception of alignment matters, as it can have an impact on commitment to and sustainability of L&D efforts. Therefore, this tool is meant to provide you with data on the perceptions of strategic alignment, which you can use to clearly measure gaps between desired versus current levels of strategic alignment and allow you to identify gaps.

The items that reveal the biggest gaps could be used to trigger an analysis of the barriers to higher scores, and in turn, to select specific actions to help improve those scores. For example, if particularly low scores are observed in “Gap analysis is performed to inform the design and delivery of strategic interventions,” you can initiate an analysis that helps you determine why the L&D team is not carrying out (or being perceived as not carrying out) gap analyses. You might find that this expectation has not been clearly communicated to L&D team members or linked to their performance evaluations. You may find that they don’t know how to conduct a performance-based gap analysis, because their education and experience has been limited to an instructional or training-based gap analysis, or they simply may not have the confidence to engage in such a process with line managers.

Whatever the barriers, they will inform what actions you should take to enhance L&D’s contributions in those areas. The tool would be administered periodically (perhaps annually) to determine trends in the strategic alignment of the L&D function, somewhat similar to an annual strategic alignment score card.

The tool could also be adapted to serve as the basis for recruiting, hiring, and developing L&D staff. The L&D function is undergoing a paradigm shift from providing preferred or familiar learning solutions to delivering measurable results that contribute to the organization’s strategic objectives. This requires an expanded focus for L&D professionals who must have expertise and experience with more than learning sciences, methods and technologies. They must now also competently apply a broad range of improvement sciences and practices in the pursuit of supporting the execution of strategic objectives.

Scoring and Interpretation

One simple logic for scoring the results of the tool is to assign the point value illustrated for each response option (1-5). That is, each item could be scored at a maximum of 5 points, and a minimum of 1 point. Based on the maximum possible points per item, an ideal scenario would be for the total L&D Strategic Alignment score to be 75 (5 point x 15 items). The target score you choose for your L&D function may be lower than that, and ultimately, your L&D leadership, with input from others, will have the responsibility for setting the targets.

Your gaps would then be estimated by comparing the actual average score to the ideal score, in which your actual average is calculated by estimating the average score earned from the group of respondents.

It may also be useful to differentiate your average score between two groups: internal L&D team, on the one hand, and the other functions L&D serves, on the other. Understanding the differences between the perceptions of these groups could help identify miscommunication and missed expectations. For example, the L&D team may think it is operating strategically, but its clients may as a group have a much lower perception of their strategic alignment and contributions.

The same logic could be used to understand how well you are meeting the strategic execution needs of various organizational functions, divisions, and geographic locations.

There are many categories you could use to drill down on the data and understand the specific perceptions of stakeholder groups. Your L&D function should discuss and determine your particular decision-making needs, which will inform how you want to disaggregate the data.