Chapter 6
A Call to Action
for Learning Leaders
This book began with a self-assessment of your strategic alignment of the learning function with your business. This assessment typically creates a deeper awareness of the components of strategic learning alignment. The intent is that creating upfront awareness would guide your learning and action planning as you engaged with this book in the pages and exercises that followed.
Professionals involved in successful learning functions understand the components of alignment and combine them into a systematic process. In this book, the best practices for building business alignment with the learning function have been organized into an actionable system for learning leaders just like you.
The Strategic Learning Alignment (SLA) Model integrates the components of a four-step process of knowing your business, building the business case for learning, engaging stakeholders in key learning activities, and communicating your business results into a framework to help you create sustainable alignment with your business partners. This framework is based on the beliefs that learning is a business process and that learning professionals are both learning and business professionals.
Reflect for a moment on what the strategic alignment of the learning function with business goals could mean for your activities and position as a learning professional:
- A seat at the table for strategic business discussions and implications for learning—not an 11th-hour afterthought.
- Business leaders who articulate the value of learning in helping to achieve their business goals rather than constantly challenging their investment in learning.
- Business leaders who regard their engagement in the learning function’s governing, designing, and teaching activities as a positive opportunity to ensure that learning is highly relevant to their business needs rather than a duty to avoid.
- Being regarded by your company as a mission-critical, business-credible function rather than as a cyclical expense.
- Participants who know that your learning solutions are relevant to the business and will involve valuable interaction with senior leaders, rather than participants viewing themselves as learning hostages.
- A transparent, business-leader-driven learning priority process that buffers you from constant bombardment with multiple training needs.
- Being externally recognized for your learning function as forming an integral part of your business rather than sitting on the learning sidelines.
These reflections are not fantasy or attainable by only a small handful of learning leaders. Any professionals involved in the learning function can make this a reality.
You may work in a company where the top leaders view learning as a “nice to have” and a ready target for budget cuts. However, even in this environment, you can make progress by beginning with step 1 of the SLA Model, Knowing Your Business. When you truly understand how your business makes money and tracks performance, you have cracked opened the door to the executive boardroom. You are able to articulate how learning can help your business leaders achieve their goals. You are, therefore, more likely to catch their attention and interest. Using your stakeholder analysis information, you can target specific business leaders and work to address their corresponding business issues. Start with those stakeholders who will be more receptive to your efforts. There is a multiplicative effect in gaining the support of even a handful of business leaders. What business leader would not want the learning function to generate a positive return on their investment by being aligned with their business needs?
You may have cracked open the boardroom door, but how do you move from a handful of generally receptive business leaders to earn the respect of your company’s financial leaders? Step 2 of the SLA Model, Building the Business Case for Learning, helps you present your function as the provider of a value-added business process. By using this SLA step, you can co-create a strategic learning plan and funding requests with your business leaders and present them in the language and analytics used by your financial leaders. Financial leaders will thus begin to view your learning function in a different light. And when these financial leaders understand learning’s business value and trust your financial management of learning, you will have succeeded in stepping through the boardroom threshold.
This is definitely progress. But how do you move to a true seat at the boardroom table? You can accomplish this with step 3 of the SLA Model, Engaging Leaders in Key Learning Activities. By engaging your business leaders in the governance of the learning function, in the development of learning solutions, and in serving as teachers, you will create learning that is aligned with business priorities. You are inviting your business leaders into your learning function to share the ownership and impact of the learning solutions. This approach allows you to engage a broad base of leaders who will likely become advocates for the value and business relevance of your learning function. Entering an executive boardroom with a financial leader’s support and a business leader as your advocate earns you an invitation to sit at and participate at the boardroom table.
To sustain your seat at the boardroom table, you will need to consistently maintain your business leaders’ mindshare in the value of learning. By following step 4 of the SLA Model, Communicating Your Business Results, you can achieve this. Building on your knowledge of the business, operating with the financial language and tools of business, and creating business-owned learning functions set the stage to communicate your business results. Using an integrated communication plan helps you target specific stakeholders with business-relevant messaging. In addition, by ensuring that you have two-way communication, you can gather feedback from the critical voices of your business customers. This feedback will enable you to continually improve the learning solutions, processes, and impact you provide to your business.
As you can see, creating strategic learning alignment is a process and not an event. As with any business process, creating and sustaining strategic alignment requires ongoing planning, execution, management, and time. With the proverbial seat at the boardroom table as your target, your efforts can deliver highly valuable outcomes. Given the ongoing nature of strategic learning alignment, every learning leader who reads this book still has work to do.
Using the SLA Model self-assessment and framework, what work will you do to create unparalleled alignment with your business leaders? As you put this book down, what is your most important, immediate first step to create unprecedented alignment of learning with your business partners?
Key Steps—One Person’s Perspective
Your first step could be to increase your understanding of how your business makes money. This was my first step. At the time, I was a learning professional in the airline industry. It is important to note here that I was a liberal arts major whose previous knowledge of the airlines was winter trips to Florida. I obviously had a lot to learn. First, I completed some background research on the airline industry to understand key concepts, like “load factor” (the percentage of available seats filled) and “aircraft utilization” (the average number of hours an aircraft flies in a 24-hour period). Despite the fact that the flight attendants often voiced pleasure at a light number of customers to serve, I learned that it was important for the airline to have full planes with every available seat filled. An empty seat is considered waste and generates no revenue. I also learned that anytime an aircraft is on the ground, this expensive equipment is not making money for the company. I sought out seasoned pilots and the corporate finance managers to better understand the airline industry. I was far from an expert, but I was gaining a business view of why the learning function existed at this airline company.
I will never forget one of my first executive-level presentations to the airline business leaders when I was presenting a request for training funds. I delivered my request in the language of the airline business. I was able to link the recommended learning solutions to decreasing open seats on flights and how to decrease the “turn time” (the time it takes to deplane passengers, service the plan, and enplane new passengers) for aircraft parked at the terminal gates. When I completed my presentation, there was a pause, and then heads nodded in approval. Although this occurred many years ago, I will never forget their slightly surprised reaction. They were pleasantly surprised that I could speak their language— the language of business. And so my journey began.
Over the years, I obtained an MBA, something I never would have considered before starting my quest to understand the business world around me. Through years of networking, I found other learning professionals who also sought alignment with their business leaders through understanding and using the language of business. I spent many years trying to identify and replicate the best practices I witnessed from these other business-centered learning functions. The Strategic Learning Alignment Model introduced in this book captures these best practices in one place and provides you with a systematic way to create a powerful strategic partnership with your business leaders. By investing your time in reading this book, you’ve already accelerated your understanding of business. In the language of business, put this knowledge to work today to ensure that you get a good return on your investment.
Tips From Chief Learning Officers
Finally, here are inspiring first-person tips from successful chief learning officers:
A clear understanding of the value proposition learning brings to our company is critical for our sustained success. At Yum! University, our value proposition is focused on building people capability across our system in three clearly defined areas: cultural excellence, leadership excellence, and functional excellence. We know that real value is defined not by our perception but instead through the eyes of our partners, regardless of where they may be in our system. As a result, we continually seek feedback from our partners on how effectively we are adding value. We stop doing things when it is clear that our customers don’t value it—regardless of how great an “idea” we might think it is. Each Yum! University learning professional is focused on ensuring that what they do brings our value proposition to life. Our goal is that the partners we serve can clearly see the value we provide their business.
—Rob Lauber, chief learning officer, YUM! Brands
I’m fortunate. I am welcomed into 20 or 30 organizations each year. When I visit, almost always it is at the invitation of the learning organization and its leadership. Often, we speak of how important it is for learning people to be riveted by the nature of their business, whatever that business is. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single disagreement with the tenet that learning people need to know what business they are in, at a level that goes beyond bumper stickers, and that they must act on that knowledge in ways that are frequent and meaningful.
If there is no disagreement, why isn’t it typical? I think it goes to clarity of expectations first and metrics second.
First, expectations. Has learning leadership said that it is expected? Have they said what it would look like? Do they themselves manifest knowledge of the business, strategy, competitors? When decisions are made, do they link those decisions to the nature of the business and to metrics that particularly matter to a financial services company versus a manufacturer versus the professional development arm within a community college system? The learning organization develops its people on topics related to learning and performance. Do they do the same for the business of their business? What do they expect to be different as a result of journal subscriptions, podcasts, or conference attendance?
Then there is metrics. What are the metrics that will matter most to the business? Have they been discussed? Are they designed into systems? Are they captured? Are they used? Does learning leadership point to efforts that have been particularly meaningful in their organization, say, retention in the community colleges or repeat business in financial services? Metrics must matter, and that matteringness hails from one source: congruence with the essence of the business.
—Allison Rossett, professor emerita, San Diego State University
Communicating my learning group’s impact on the business is an ongoing process. We regularly create learning impact studies to share with our hospital’s leadership. A best practice for us in communicating our impact is to start with our executives’ definition of success and set targets—priorities for development are based on the strategic plan and the annual operating plan. Then we specifically determine outcomes expected for learners and customers (patients and families). We confirm the directed investment in education with the Education Steering Committee. We also determine generic and customized reports by discussing the audience and purpose for those reports, such as certification, compliance, performance, strategic plan progress, training catalog content management, application of learning on the job, cost benefit, and return on investment. Several mechanisms are used to communicate results and outcomes enterprisewide: monthly dashboard, quarterly progress report, and at regular presentations to the (internal) Education Steering Committee and the (community and executive) Education Committee of the Board of Trustees. There will always be opportunities to reuse your data. Reports and presentations include the link to training purpose (remember those definitions of success and targets), progress over time (use run charts), and recommendations for next steps, new targets, or new goals. We have aligned expectations and shared appreciation of cumulative (long-term) effects of learning and development.
—Rebecca Phillips, vice president, education and learning, and associate professor, Division of General and Community Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Education and training are key to our continued success at Oracle. With more than 60 acquisitions in the last five years, it is critical to onboard all the new employees rapidly. A key component is “field readiness,” where we train, track, and certify our sales, consulting, and field engineering teams to be prepared for new product releases. Working closely with each business unit, we craft development and training plans customized to each geography in the world. A strong learning governance structure lets us maximize our lean infrastructure for maximum return.
—John L. Hall, senior vice president, Oracle University
There is a strong case for engaging business leaders in the strategic governance of your corporate university. Research conducted via CorpU with our member companies continues to point to governance as a major lever in creating strategic alignment of learning with the business. A best practice in learning governance is to create a structure that maximizes efficiencies across common critical programs, methods, processes, and technologies and leaves to business units those programs that are specific to their requirements.
—Ed Skonecki, vice president, Corporate University Xchange
As the chief human resources officer of Darden, I have the learning function in my portfolio. Understanding business is core to creating and delivering valued learning and development solutions to enable our business success. Learning professionals need to understand the business strategy, how the business makes money, key business metrics, industry dynamics, workforce dynamics, and how people play in the equation of business success. One of the best examples of learning professionals applying understanding of business is the development of our “Manager in Training Program”— where the team needs to design a program that can replicate the real restaurant environment and scenario. In addition, the team is capable to articulate and quantify the impact to our bottom line—including the acceleration of leadership readiness—time to market.
—Daisy Ng, senior vice president and chief human resources officer, Darden Restaurants, Inc.
For decades, we have been saying training must be run like a business. How can you run a successful business without knowing your client’s problems, language, culture, and top priorities? In this new normal environment, businesses must add value to their clients to achieve client satisfaction and retention. This is also true for training and learning. You need to be at the table when the business uses its strategy tools and processes to determine the company’s product, services, goals, and performance issues. If you are not at their table, you could wind up on their menu.