3 ideas to reposition strategically your Learning and Development function

Like it or not, fulfilling human potential is not the purpose of HR.

The department of the nice to have’s?

Although I believe companies do have an important role in the social landscape, I do not think this role, and by extension HR’s, is to create opportunities for people to fulfil their potential.

This positivist narrative has been very popular among HR in the twenty years I’ve been learning this trade, fuelled mainly by corporate education vendors and the need of the function to find an ultimate purpose. By focusing on the pursuit of individual potential rather than value to the business, in many cases it led L&D to a reputation as “the department of the nice to have’s”.

This is a pity, because the strategic potential of L&D is, to say the least, transformative in terms of the role of the HR function itself.

A link between L&D initiatives, business strategy and P&L results

In a previous article, “A practical way to help your HR managers become better strategic partners to their business” (https://t.ly/RTQFX), I described how local HR managers can earn a seat at the market’s strategy table by taking the lead of an additional step in the business planning process, the development of the capabilities of the organisation.

This approach includes both what Dave Ulrich in his work defined both as the organisation’s core competencies, the functional and technical expertise, and its capability, what the organisation as a body is good at, from collaboration to innovation to leadership.

From this framework three ideas stem out that could help repositioning strategically your learning and development department and create a clear, easy to communicate link between L&D initiatives, business strategy and P&L results.

1. Make L&D your workforce planning department (from reactive to proactive)

Cost vs investment

The intent and the assumptions behind what we used to call “need analysis” was almost idealistic and a bit naive. It assumed that the people manager and the functional lead had a clear idea of (and the expertise to define) the learning needs of the teams, that there could be well defined, meaningful development plans for each individual, and that “sending someone to a training” was a reward of some sort.

Worst of all, it put the L&D team in an impossible position because no matter how nonsensical the request received, it became automatically an expectation.

Lists of expectations were met with lists of training course available, the infamous “catalogue”, that existed until it was the first voice of the budget to be cut at the need of the CFO.

The approach to Learning and Development simply cannot be reactive. Reactive is a cost. Developing people is an investment, and investments must be planned.

Learning is a business activity

Workforce planning is an HR capability originating from the scientific management methodologies of the industrial era, but it is not in contradiction with the idea that HR should be more about Human and less about Resources.

What it is in contradiction with is the idea that employees and their managers should be in charge of their individual development and that, if given freedom, resources and opportunities they will be ready with the competencies and skills the company needs, when it needs them. In the majority of cases this? does not happen.

To acquire skills and develop competencies is not up to individual curiosity but part of the job, and as such it must be directed by the company and considered part of individual performance.

A business plan to achieve a certain result in a number of year requires to have an idea of how the organisation will look like in that moment. While for industrial and retail this is straightforward, because for a line of production to work or for a new store to be opened I know in advance how many people, organised in what way and with what skills and competencies I will need, in other businesses this is often managed only within the realm of the separate functional strategies.

From provider to planner

As long as capability planning is maintained in separate functional strategies, HR will continue receiving requests for recruiting new talents, designing new organisations, develop new managers and deploy new competencies when the need is already there, which means too late.

While recruiting talent and designing organisations can still be done in a span of a few months, developing leadership and competencies takes much longer and necessarily requires a strategic planning approach.

Among all HR functions, L&D is therefore the one that has a compelling reason to take the lead and coordination, in close collaboration with the functional HR business partners, of long term workforce planning.

Instead of the desk being inundated with fragmented short-term expectations from various departments, L&D (in larger organisations, with support from a specialised role within Talent Management) can assume responsibility for translating strategic business and functional objectives into talent needs estimates and development plans.

This includes nurturing managers, leaders, and specialists in emerging fields aligned with the strategic goals of both the functions and the overall business and identifying outdated skill sets and devising re-skilling plans.

2. Change its focus (from individual to organizational)

Competency gaps and business impact

The main difference I see between managing the competency gap of an individual and of an organization is in the way you can measure these gaps.

Here I’m making a direct reference to Dave Ulrich model of Individual competence and organisation capability.

Considering competency at individual level, the level of social and technical skills and knowledge owned by a single employee can only be assessed against two sets of expectations, the manager’s and the role JD.

Let’s set aside the potential subjectivity of such evaluation and the difficulty in defining and managing competency models.

Even repeating this assessment for each employee, we obtain a number of individual evaluations which do not give us any information about the actual extent of the ability of the organization as a whole to achieve its targets and objectives.

In other words, thinking of competency only at individual level does not allow HR to derive any link between learning and development initiatives and their impact on business performance.

Performance and competence are an emerging phenomenon

This is not to say that investing in individual managerial skills and technical knowledge is not necessary, but this investments should be part of a plan aimed at filling the competency gap of the organization.

Considering competency at organizational level allows to include in our understanding the fact that in any organizational domain performance and competence are an emerging phenomenon and not an individual ability.

Let’s take as an example, the objective to up-trade the sales mix increasing the company’s average contribution margin by 10% year-on-year.

In a situation where L&D has been focusing on individual competency, the only option available is to deploy a sales training that can address the different competency levels of each individual to ensure that all team members have the required knowledge and skills.

Even in the ideal scenario where the training has been deployed with a 100% participation and individual coaching follow-up sessions, there is no way that HR can claim this training contributed to any extent to the ability of the company to reach that objective.

Laser focus to what the business requires

Let’s instead consider the scenario where L&D focused on the organization’s competency gap.

With this approach, the different competency gaps of each individual person become only one, clearly stated and specific. The organization need to be able to up-trade the sales mix compared to last year.

The requirement of a general solution that could address all the many different individual needs is replaced by a multitude of angles the single problem can be addressed from, at the same time.

Using the lever of talent, L&D can involve the best performing younger AM and the more experienced SM in a mentoring round-table specifically focused on sales-mix.

Using the lever of organization, L&D can collaborate with the functional HR partner to design a way to incentivise the transfer of knowledge or even collaboration among teams.

And, of course, using the lever of competencies, L&D can collaborate with the sales managers to identify the 20% skills that bring the 80% competence in the specific domain of up-trading the sales mix, and address that specific gap.

Whatever the solutions devised, the point is there is a clear link between those solutions and what the organization needs to achieve. This way the work of L&D is aimed with laser focus to what the business requires today.

3. Turn back people processes into competencies (from how to what)

You reap what you sow

In the recent years HR has been investing heavily on ERP-like systems concerting people management competencies into processes to increase its reach and enforce a minimum standard of execution .

With different degrees of success, performance management, people development, talent management, recruitment have been converted into fields of a form to be filled page after page.

The intent was surely noble and in many cases this allowed, at least, to stop HR from chasing people managers and begging them to fill what was not so different, Excel forms.

Even if this allowed to guarantee completion, however it did not make people manager better at managing people.

Aiming at 100% process completion, that’s everything we got. People managers have learned to complete those (often long and complicated) forms in the quickest and most economic way, becoming more expert in How rather than What the process aims at.

So not only HR converted people management competencies into processes, we also turned the focus our people managers on completion rates. The negative effect on the perceived role of L&D was inevitable.

A strategic need for HR, an opportunity for L&D

Honestly, how can you consider a function strategic after its core product gets commoditised and reduced into a workflow?

The point is obviously not only to re-establish a strategic role for L&D, but also the credibility and the effectiveness of people management capabilities.

To make sure that performance would be managed, we went too far, and we need to turn people capabilities back from processes into competencies, paired with light processes that should have the purpose to “make things happen”, rather than being forms to be filled in every part for the sake of a short-lived feeling of control.

To enable our organizations to govern complexity we need to focus on developing competency, and trust that the competent managers will fulfil their role in the way they will see fit according to the person, the situation and the context.

The need to turn back people processes into what they are supposed to be, competencies, is strategic for the whole HR function. And it is an opportunity for L&D to re-establish its role.