Leadership in L&D

In a couple of months time, I’ve been invited to talk to the New Zealand Association of Training and Development conference (relax I’m speaking virtually not travelling to the other side of the world!). I’m going to be talking about leadership in L&D. Here are my early thoughts on what I’ll be discussing.

If you have a leadership role (whatever that might look like) you are a business leader just as much as any other part of the business. Often, we hear that L&D (or HR for that matter) is just a cost to the business because we don’t earn our salary back in generating revenue. This narrative can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy – we seek out and fulfil work that has high face value, but not necessarily doing things of real business value. The business experiences this, and therefore asks for the same – recognising they’re getting something, and accepting the solution because a workshop or an e-learning sounds like a good solution.

But where I’ve experienced L&D bringing about genuine business value is when we’re involved in systemic work. That systemic work is often over a longer period of time, may not be driven by any traditional form of learning delivery (course, workshop, e-learning), and could involve many other aspects of HR and business operations. That approach and thinking helps the business to see we’re pulling together insights and thinking they may not see themselves.

As well as this systemic level of work, I think being an L&D leader means we have far more of a role to play when it comes to services and product design. We don’t have to be experts in service operation or product management, but we have the collaborative skills and facilitation capability to bring people together to do that work – be it through sprints, project management or delegated responsibilities. In a previous role I worked with a tech leadership team where they were discussing working practices. I didn’t know about their working practices, and together over two days we were able to arrive at improved ways of working. They could have got there themselves, and my involvement enabled that to happen sooner than later.

We have many teams and business leaders who can help us do our work better. Internal Comms can help us to engage the workforce in our solutions. The Tech team can help us find a solution that works with other internal systems. The Finance team can help us to understand business commercials. The Product team can help us to identify knowledge and learning needs we might miss. We don’t have to be experts in all areas of the business, and as leaders we will always achieve more in finding the right people to collaborate with at the right time for the right work.

The technology we use and bring into an organisation has to emulate the philosophy we want the organisation to experience. If we’re charged with compliance and mandatory learning, that’s only ever one part of the learning solutions we can provide. But if that’s the key focus, the technology we’re likely to introduce will only fulfil that element without a consideration for the potential of learning technology. There are many systems that can integrate with each other which improves the learning experience, and many experienced professionals who can help use that technology really well.

And then there’s the self-as-instrument understanding and practice. An OD practice, self-as-instrument brings with it a deep level of practice. Your own experience and your own practice informs how you are with the organisation. If you want people to experience you as a leader, how you show up, how you think, how you speak, how you influence, how you provide direction (and many more things), all demonstrate to others what you are capable of and what you want to see happen.

Lastly, we have to be aware of how we bring a focus to inclusion and diversity in the work we do. L&D isn’t alone in perpetuating systemic bias in an organisation. If the examples you use in programmes, if the images you use in slide decks, if the language you communicate with, if all these things don’t show and demonstrate inclusion and diversity we are reinforcing stereotypes, biases and prejudices. This doesn’t mean we have to be I&D experts in the work we do, but it does mean we have to do our homework to ensure we’re not letting ourselves be ignorant. There is no business reason, design reason or any other reason for why we can’t be focused on inclusion and diversity in the design and delivery of our solutions.