Introduction
Learning & Development strategies are the key strategies that help in defining the ideal skill sets required by an organization to meet its organizational goals. Such organizations can accordingly prepare training programs to upskill and reskill their employees to meet the challenges in the ever-evolving business environment. An effective learning and development strategy allows employees to transform themselves to become more capable and productive in their functions and empowers the organization to encourage leadership.
Similarly, learning and development leaders who find themselves in a new challenging role should become more familiar with the critical business goals, the stakeholders involved, and the learning culture established within the organization. Doing so will make it easier for them to plan, schedule & implement their steps effortlessly. Every L&D leader going through similar situations should consider applying these three tactical steps for success in their role.
Tactical ways that mold successful L&D leaders in the corporate world
1. Understand Your Business Strategies
Before you develop or improve any learning strategy, it is crucial to define the critical business pursuits that will allow you to align all the L&D initiatives to your business goals and ensure that the program produces a significant ROI. For this, you can start by conducting specific research. Try finding whether your business organization sends any yearly mission or vision statement in emails or by holding physical meetings to communicate their business strategy.
If any recordings of previous meetings are available, watch or listen to the recordings to acquaint yourself with the organization’s current goals. Another portion of this research should include a meet-up with the industry leaders to familiarise yourself with the organization’s business strategy. Here you may also identify the key stakeholders responsible for developing these goals and conduct an informal meet-up to dig deeper and better understand key short-term and long-term business expectations.
Now that you have gathered all the information you need, it’s time to look for ways to check how these goals are measured. Usually, such metrics are traced back to KPIs, but sometimes KPIs need to be updated due to developing new business strategies. Thus, determining how to measure a goal is necessary to ensure that your learning initiatives generate a positive ROI.
After defining these critical metrics related to the business goals & objectives, you need to determine the behavioral learners required to demonstrate to meet these measurements. The area of focus will here be centered on the performance where the learning strategy will be targeted. Some ways to do this include working with the talent acquisition team to review job descriptions of employees in the organization. Alternatively, you could consult with managers, coaches, and leaders to determine the necessary behaviors to achieve the business’s performance metrics.
On identifying the information, you could further analyze and correlate these behaviors with the competencies by identifying the skills required to perform the listed behaviors. Try to think of these behaviors as the knowledge required to perform those actions crucial to the success of the business goals. Once you complete this process for all the critical goals for your organization, you will have a structure for your organization’s learning & development strategy.
It is highly recommended to consider this process for the success of your learning business as it will ensure that the learning strategies employed by your organization are tactical, generate a higher return on investment for your business and make your learning vivacious to the organization’s health.
2. Conduct a stakeholder analysis
As a learning & development leader, you must collaborate with the organization’s key stakeholders to achieve a common business goal. Similarly, another significant responsibility will include working with internal and external individuals having a vested interest in L&D at your organization. To do this, you should identify the people you need to influence, give information to, or engage in regular communication with.
Further, find the people who will be the champions of your learning business, people you will require to take approval to pull your strategies into operations, and people who could obstruct your projects from coming into action. Multiple tools are available to ease your work. The stakeholder analysis power grid helps you determine your key business stakeholder and the engagement level to work with them.
Alternatively, remember that stakeholders tend to shift throughout the year. People take up new roles or projects, or new people join, or people leave any organization altogether. Therefore, it is advisable to reassess the analysis every 6-12 months to ensure that you have a clearer picture of your stakeholders and their influence.
After you have churned out the final list of the stakeholders and found out their level of influence, you could use such information to create an effective chain of communication & collaboration plans to be put into place when you start to draft the learning strategy.
3. Evaluate the L&D strategy of your organization
Since the primary responsibility of every L&D leader is to either develop or improve the learning culture within your organization, it would be a good idea to identify the cultural gaps by analyzing the maturity of the learning business in the organization. When you analyze the maturity of the learning culture within the organization, you will be able to observe several factors to deduce the learning vision of the organization.
You will consider various factors such as whether the line of business is reactive or proactive, the number of collaborations involved, the strength of the learning business, the team or people responsible for learning results, and the short-term & long-term goals for it. Above all, you will be able to understand how learning is measured within the organization.
Further, such analysis will also give you an idea about what is going right and what needs to be changed within the organization. A higher ranking on the scale will indicate a more active & successful business, whereas a lower ranking will mean that the learning business is less reactive but more proactive. Additionally, consider inviting more perspectives from teams across the business organization to get an exact idea about how others interpret the strengths and weaknesses of the learning business.
Bottom Line
In the age of rapid technological advancements, it is indispensable for businesses to keep investing in learning & development technologies to advance themselves and survive in the fierce market competition. Nurturing an agile approach towards employee learning and development will allow you to access data & insights and turn to newer learning opportunities.
L&D leaders should learn to create learning & development strategies that align with the corporate goals & address the employee skill gaps to remain more flexible & retain the necessary human skills required to meet competition in the digital age. Hence analyzing the critical business strategies could aid in building learning strategies that align with the overall business strategy supported by the right stakeholders and drive revenues.