How To Understand L&D’s Perception & Align To Your Business

Struggling to shift L&D’s perception in the business?

Want to align your efforts to the company's wider goals?

You’re not alone!

Thankfully, Danielle Dziurun is here to help ??

Danielle joined us on L&D Disrupt to share her best advice and proven tactics for understanding current perception, shifting it, and aligning to business goals.

If you want the confidence and skills to improve L&D perception and impact, you can check out the full episode below and keep reading for the key takeaways.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts .
• Listen or watch on Spotify .
• Watch it on YouTube .

Five lessons on aligning L&D with your business

1. Interview stakeholders across the business, using consistent questions

When you’re new to a business, you need to learn as much as you can, pretty damn fast!

• What does the business do?
• What’s the context of the space it works in?
• How do the people and the culture work?

Danielle did this by speaking to as many people, at various levels of the business, using a consistent set of questions.

“These were really about figuring out how people perceived L&D, their place in the organisation, what challenges they were facing, what current L&D activity was going on…?

“And this helped me to really build up a picture of what people wanted and what they expected from L&D, and maybe redirect a little bit if the expectations were unrealistic, what their aspirations were and what their pain points were.”

Check out Danielle's list of questions here

2. Then map out what you learn to spot common pain points and quick wins

“I used Miro, but you could do it in any way. You could use Excel, you could use Word, whatever works for you.?

“And it just helped me to start identifying the patterns and spot the common needs and concerns and priorities and really start to identify some quick wins as well for L&D.

“Because you want to start building up that identity and start serving people's needs while in the background, you're laying some of that longer-term strategic foundation.”

3. Funnel what you’ve learned into your short and long-term plans

“The mapping exercise that I did and the insights I gained through that whole exercise were just invaluable because they were basically my compass.?

“They pointed me in the right direction and I used them to validate and add depth to the results of a preliminary learning needs analysis survey that I ran, and this exercise also started to help me build up a stakeholder map for L&D.”

This gave Danielle a platform to start forming key relationships and connections to internal experts, as well as the colleagues and leaders that had a passion for learning.

And both the pain point and stakeholder mapping make it far easier to get buy-in and support from people, and align leadership with your L&D vision.

4. Ensure development is connected to core company values

Consulting is a knowledge-driven world, one that requires constant learning and adaptability.

Hence why curiosity is one of DT Consulting’s core values, and why L&D was built around the idea of cultivating curiosity.

“It was extremely important for our leadership team that our core values, which for DT, are excellence, integrity, empathy, belonging, and curiosity, that they were woven into the fabric of what it means to do well within our organisation.”

“One of my first significant pieces of work at DT was to spearhead the development of a capability framework to outline what high performance looks like and to support our people's development and career progression.”

“Building and sharing knowledge and developing oneself and others are essential performance expectations within our framework and they’re key milestones for advancement at every level of a person's career with us.”

5. Here’s how L&D can build a commercial understanding of the business

“To do this effectively, you just need to develop a really deep understanding of the business that you're operating in.

"How it makes its money, its internal and external environments… find out which areas are profitable and which offer those growth opportunities.”

This will help you connect your L&D efforts to revenue generation and the overall business goals.

And when you’re having conversations with leaders, it’ll help you connect and build credibility, because you can show that you understand their business priorities and can help support them in achieving their business goals.

“Start by engaging in conversations about business drivers and identifying key dependencies on people and their capabilities to execute that business strategy.

"And this is a big thing!?To engage business leaders effectively, you need to talk about competence gaps and needs, not training.”

Get more great lessons from L&D Disrupt guests

A quick reminder that if you haven't already downloaded it, you can get 37 Lessons For A Winning L&D Strategy completely free, right here .