“Instead of worrying about my learning ROI, if I can show a business leader where to impact behaviors to add $1.4MM to their net profit, it gets their attention.”

Andy Webb, Director of Training, Applied Industrial Technologies

The single biggest piece of learning impact advice we found in our literature review and in our conversations with leaders was to ensure a link between what L&D functions were doing and measuring and overall business goals.

Granted, we know of exactly no L&D functions that intentionally work against business goals. Most are cognizant of business objectives and do their best to fulfill them. The difference between the average organizations and the more evolved organizations appears to be how they prioritize. Average L&D functions tend to triage based on squeakiest wheel or easiest fix, generally driven by priorities of individual business units. Evolved L&D functions are much more thoughtful with their priorities: they develop strategies to impact overall business goals and move the strategy forward. How do they do it? There tends to be three things they understand:

The overall direction of the larger organization.

Not surprisingly, it’s difficult to have a positive impact on the direction of the organization if you don’t understand the direction the organization is moving. Evolved L&D functions tend to be tied into the rest of the organization, its challenges, and its overall goals. Understanding these things puts them in a better place to ensure the right kind of employee development is happening in order to ensure the skills and knowledge necessary to meet the challenges.

This isn’t always easy. L&D has long been seen as a cost center rather than a competitive advantage, and as such, are not often considered crucial to those conversations. However, instead of worrying about their credibility or getting the proverbial “seat at the table,” more evolved L&D functions actively join the conversation.

How success is being measured.

Evolved L&D functions don’t just understand their own metrics, but the key performance indicators (KPIs) used by the larger organization. Understanding the general direction and challenges the organization faces is one thing; understanding how those things are being measured is another.

Understanding the metrics that are important to other business functions will (or at least, should) affect the metrics that L&D functions use. For example, if customer satisfaction is a goal for the organization or business unit, L&D functions will likely focus on improving those scores.

One organization we spoke with told us that they were approached by a business unit that was trying to promote the sale of a particular product by their inhouse sales team. The measure that the sales department was using was how many of the products were sold through the inhouse sales team.

L&D put together a short program teaching the team about the product and administered an assessment to ensure that the team had the knowledge to deliver. But the numbers didn’t improve. However, their understanding of how success was being measured and the product knowledge of the team helped them find the root cause of the failure: another department was offering a bigger incentive to sell something else instead. (As it turns out, the sales function was measuring the wrong thing: instead of measuring sales, they should have been measuring times that the product was offered).

Getting other businesses to share information on KPIs is often also more difficult than it sounds. A few of the organizations we spoke with told us that leaders of other business functions were often reticent to even discuss KPIs. They were not seen as a consequential or influential part of the business and were worried about their data being mishandled. But some are figuring it out.

The need for collaboration.

Evolved L&D functions understand that learning and development isn’t just their job; it’s everyone’s job – from senior leadership down to individual contributors – and they tend to do a better job at collaborating than their average counterparts.

Notice that we said “collaborate” and not “serve.” While many L&D functions see their customers and clients as internal (the business units and their leaders or the employees), evolved organizations put themselves on equal footing with leaders of other functions and work with them to come up with solutions that can move the business forward.

Tying to business results is not just the first and most prevalent pattern we saw among organizations where learning has an impact; it’s also the most important – the holy grail if you will. As organizations continuously rely on data to make good decisions, L&D functions cannot afford to be left behind. Starting with understanding the goals that all business functions are working toward gives them a target and a direction for their efforts.