Three steps every new L&D leader should take: A tactical guide

Learning and development leaders who find themselves in a new role should take time to become well-acquainted with the business goals, stakeholders and learning culture within their new organization. Doing so will allow them to plan and operationalize their next steps seamlessly.

If you find yourself in this situation, prepare for success with these three strategic steps.

Identify the business strategy

Before developing or enhancing an organizationwide learning strategy, it is imperative to determine your new organization’s business objectives. Doing so will enable you to align all L&D initiatives to business goals and ensure that your learning program generates a respectable ROI.

To do this, you will need to conduct some research. First, determine if your company sends out a yearly or bi-yearly mission and vision statement. Many organizations will send this in the form of an email or will hold town halls or an all-hands meeting to communicate their strategy. If a meeting recording is available, watch or listen to become familiar with the organization’s current business goals.

Part of this research should include meeting with business leaders to learn more about the organization’s business strategy. Determine the key players and stakeholders developing these goals and set up a time to interview them. This can be an informal conversation, but the goal is to get a deeper understanding of what the business hopes to achieve, both long- and short-term.

Once you arm yourself with this vital information, you must next identify how the business goals are measured. Often, you can trace these metrics back to KPIs. However, KPIs may not be updated if your organization has developed a new business strategy. Determining how the goal is measured is essential to ensure your learning initiatives generate a positive ROI.

Now that you have defined the metrics associated with the business goals and objectives, you should map out the behaviors learners will need to demonstrate to meet these measurements. This area of focus is centered around performance, which is where you will target your learning strategy. There are various ways to do this, and an excellent place to start is to work with talent acquisition to review the job descriptions of employees within the organization. Frequently, job descriptions will provide enough information for you to identify behaviors that translate to success on the job. You should also consult with managers, coaches and leaders to determine the necessary behaviors to achieve the business’s performance metrics.

Once you have identified this information, you will take this analysis further and correlate these behaviors to competencies. To do this, identify the skills necessary to perform the listed behaviors. Think of these as the knowledge needed to perform the actions that are pivotal to the success of the business goals. The table below illustrates a sample alignment from an impact map for a health insurance company. 

Once you have completed this process for all of your organization’s business goals, you will have the framework for your organizationwide learning strategy.
 
This process is critical to the success of your learning business. It will ensure your learning initiatives are strategic, generating an ROI for the organization and making your learning business vital to the organization’s health.

Conduct a stakeholder analysis

As a learning leader, a significant part of your role will be to work cross-functionally with organizational stakeholders to achieve a common goal. Part of this work includes gaining buy-in and approval from internal and external individuals who hold a vested interest in L&D at your organization. To do this, you must know whom you need to influence, keep informed or communicate with regularly. Determine who will be champions of your learning business, whom you need approval from to operationalize your strategies and who could potentially roadblock your projects.

There are many tools out there to assist you in this process. Using a tool like a stakeholder analysis power grid is a helpful way to identify your stakeholders and determine how closely you should work with them.

Since you are new to the organization, you should work with a team of people who can help you develop your grid. Ask your hiring manager who you should work with to do this vital task.

Keep in mind that it is natural for your stakeholders to shift throughout the year. People will take on new roles or projects within the company, new people will join the company or individuals will leave the organization altogether. Therefore, it is recommended that you reassess your analysis once every six to 12 months to ensure you have an accurate view of who your stakeholders are and how much influence they have.

Once you have mapped out your stakeholders and determined their level of influence, you can use this information to create a communication and collaboration plan to put into place when you begin to draft the learning strategy. 

Assess the maturity of the L&D organization

Your primary role as a learning leader will be to build or enhance the learning culture within your organization. You can determine the cultural gaps by evaluating the maturity of your learning business.

Analyzing the maturity of your learning organization will indicate if a clear vision for learning exists. It will inform you if the learning line of business is reactive or proactive. As a result, you will be able to determine the strength of the learning business, including how collaborative it is, who is responsible for learning results, and what goals there are for it. Through this evaluation, you will be able to determine how learning is measured within the organization.

Your analysis will give you a clear view of the work ahead of you. The higher your organization ranks on the scale, the more functional your learning business is. If you find that your learning business ranks lower on the scale, you likely have the opportunity to make your learning business less reactive and more proactive.

As you did with your impact mapping and stakeholder analysis power grid, you should work with a team to rank your learning business. Bring in perspectives from across the company to get an accurate picture of how others view the strengths and weaknesses of the learning business.

By analyzing your learning business, you can create a learning strategy that aligns with the business strategy, is supported by the right stakeholders and drives profits.