How to Build a Learning Organisation with Influence (step by step guide)

1?? Step 1 - The bee - go outside your “learning bubble”

Be like the bee, move around from plant to plant and take in your surroundings.?

Colleagues are not plants, but you get the idea. You need to be an ear around the business, and go around like a bee pollinating from plant to plant.?

How? By meeting with people, talking to them about their plans, looking at commercials, asking for access to dashboards, regular leadership check ins, using the People Partners’ /HRBPs’ insights.?

Pro tip - go outside the HR/learning bubble. Don’t get me wrong, HR/People orgs are amazing but sometimes isolated from wider issues in the org. You need to be able to have a comprehensive understanding of each dept, exec and what matters to them.?

For most teams, "the bubble" is a very real thing. To get influential, you need to be going to all key depts in your business. You need to find out what's going on with them, and how you can help.

This is also about your brand for learning, whether you train employees, partners or customers. If these key depts do not see how you can add value to their business problems, you have some work to do.

To demonstrate why the above is true, I read recently from Chief Learning Officer that 90 percent of CEOs believe that learning is a business solution, but only 8 percent report that training is impacting the business.

This is the root cause of why the may want to cut your learning budget. Whilst they see value, they cannot quantify it, and in these times, anything that is not quantified is in danger.

Step 2 - The Consultant - Becoming the trusted ear around your business

Having worked with over 100 learning teams in the past 5 years, there is not a lack of business problems lying around. There is just a lack of learning teams uncovering them, and embedding them into your learning strategy.

Too often, learning teams (especially L&D on internal side) are stuck outside the sphere of influence. To get inside the “influence zone”, you need to understand what moves the needle.

Here, imagine you are an external consultant hired to find out the key issues within the org. Go interview people and don’t quit until you know issues and the root-causes of them. A surface-level understanding of issues will not suffice.

There is a lot of issues across the org. But the critical part here is finding out what issues make the biggest difference/moves the needle.?

Here, you can build a spreadsheet with every issue, and you can ask everyone to rank them 1-10. Tabulate the scores, and find out the top 3 or 4 things that are common denominators. This is your key issues to solve, and your lens of solving them is through learning.?

3?? Step 3 - The Map?

Form your learning strategy around key issues. Focus on the ones that are most important to the business, either via your scoring system from step 2 or from your conversations with C-Level execs.?

? Learning teams aren't going deep enough here. Engagement, adoption or enablement are subjective metrics, not business KPIs.

? Talent retention, revenue attainment, or net revenue retention are quantifiable metrics. Leaders want to know how learning is impacting bottom line, not just engagement in itself.

Example of a Learning team with influence:

The Revenue team struggles with rep attrition and the development of sellers. John, CRO stated that this is hurting their ability to reach quota and negatively impacts bottom line. John identifies that learning can be a catalyst here to change this.        

Together, we surveyed our sellers, 67% of which stated that development was very important to them in 2023. By keeping and developing our sellers, we project we can grow revenue by X/deal size by Y,? reduce deal cycle by Z etc.        

Similar examples could come from HR with attrition, customer success with client retention, IT with system consolidation to save money and so forth.

4?? Step 4: The Toolbox?

Resource your team with the right skills, tools and technology.

For learning teams, you need the following in your toolbox:

• 1) Platform
• 2) Content
• 3) Change Management .

Platform -

?? The engine room of any project is the tech powering it. The platform is the heartbeat of any program, and you need your tech to be future-proofed, fit-for-purpose and tailor to your project goals.

??A lot of systems do a lot of things really well. Heck, there's 700+ systems on the market. You need to clearly define what matters to you, and ensure the platform of your choice covers these areas well.

?? To define your criteria, start with your learners. Who are they and what is their...

- Industry, role, seniority

- Where are they learning? Access to devices, computers etc

-Preferences or Blockers

2) Content -

?? A great platform without great content will not be utilised. Content needs to be varied and engaging, to add variation and richness to the social learning experience.

??Typically, this consists of

i) authored content / ii) off she shelf content library / iii) "wider web", crawling in content from relevant sources / iv) social/collaborative learning content created and shared by peers

3) Change/learning success/technical management

Stellar tech and content is not purposeful if not utilised purposefully.

For each of these below, you need an expert "coach" from the vendor

?? Change management - "project coach",

?? Personnel - linking in project team + C-Suite

?? Processes - linking learning to the business

??Cultural shifts in an organisation - building a learning culture and changing perspectives.

?? Learning success management - "learning coach"

??The implementation, marketing and continuous improvement of your program

?? Tying platform + content together

?? Learning resource management

?? Technical management - "technical coach"

?? Gives you efficiency, technical skills, advice and support on all things technical for your project.

?? Guides you on topics like APIs, CSS, HTML, Single Sign-on, or more complex topics like embedding learning platform into external systems or which data sources to use for learning measurement.?

Step 5 - The Speaker?

Communicate communicate communicate.?

With your team, with your executives and with a wider community of peers.?

Share your plans far and wide, in different formats, at different times, on different channels.?

Engage people and leaders in them.?

Build a cadence around this and how you’ll constantly verify you’re working on the right things.

If you can speak about learning in the context of solving key issues, they see the learning budget as a component of bigger investments they need to double down on during these uncertain times.

The key here is that execs do not to see learning in isolation, but in conjunction with solving key business issues. We need people like John the CRO from Step 3 here on your team.

You are the catalyst to solving key issues, and as such, your influence is paramount to the success of your business in the next year.

If the C-Suite believes learning is key to business growth, you will earn a seat at their table.

Step 6 - The Captain?

Steer the ship, even in rough waters.?

Be ready to change direction at any time

Priorities change, businesses change, people and sponsors change.?

The steps here are not a one-off, they are cyclical. You need to keep at them continuously to gain and retain your influence.??

Be agile in your approach to partnering so you can flex and evolve your plans. Change is constant, don’t fight it.

i) Work jointly with your sponsors - if learning is a vehicle to achieve revenue goals, you need to ensure you are helping that to take place. If your sponsor fails, so do you.

ii) Demonstrate impact and ROI to the issues you are solving. This is constant with your sponsor, and needs to be done concurrently (ideally month or quarter-specific metrics).

iii) Become an effective storyteller with data - learning data is great but your ability to provide causation and subsequently translate this into the language of your sponsor and your execs is vital. If they don't constantly see your value, your influence diminishes.

Thanks for joining me this week. I would love any feedback on the article here, especially from practitioners. Are the above steps helpful? Are you implementing them today or will you consider doing it in the future??

Stay curious??

-Harald