#LT24UK #T4S4 Showing the value of L&D – moving from the transactional to strategic alignment.
This is a summary from the Learning impact strand chaired by Anthony Williams with Alice Thompson, Fran Butler and Tayn Pavelic speaking; 18th April 2024. I'm on the social media team for the conference.
?Anthony welcomed us to the session with his unique comic style and introduced Tayn from IHG, a company with 19 iconic hotel brands, over 6000 hotels and more opening. The organisation doesn’t own the hotels – they are franchised - but has over 350,000 learners globally who access the IHG University. In the past, the focus was not on impact but on completion and box ticking. This changed 2 years ago to focus on the audience. It has 4 schools which focus on owners, managers, hospitality and business performance.
Fran then took over. She looked for an external partner who could look at best practice and knew theory, could be practical and could offer a road map. Measurement was in 4 parts:
·?????? Standard language and terminology used
·?????? Baseline check on where they were and where they wanted to be
·?????? Action plan to move from current to future state
·?????? Purposeful pilots in parallel with strategy development, to ensure stakeholder buy-in
Her purpose statement is to Prove and Improve. The framework (jargon free) covers efficiency, effectiveness and business impact. If your learning is not demonstrating impact, you need to keep the context in mind. Start with ‘what is the business impact you want to achieve’ and ‘is learning the solution’? If stakeholders are unclear as to what the impact should be, measurement is very difficult!
Remember you can’t measure everything so need to look at what the Exec Committee will sponsor, what will have the biggest impact. Measurement included learning transfer/application. One effort is looking at elite, high-performing hotels and analysing their behaviours. Need to be clear on how you’re using the data you’re collecting, as it shapes the learning strategy.
?Another aspect is building a community of practice, identifying champions in the business to come and have performance consulting conversations. They also use dynamic dashboards to report on progress and activity. The LMS data is useful but needs to sit alongside business performance data. What next? Insight projects, aligning to operational performance, building capacity through capability development and having the performance consulting conversations.?
Next up, Alice Thompson from M&S.
Alice approaches work with curiosity. She compared strategic with tactical as terms (using Copilot). The former is a long-term plan, with purpose and focus. In contrast, tactical is immediate and short term; it’s about how to execute the strategy effectively. L&D is like a one-night stand till you find your long-term partner. There is a time and a place for tactical interventions.
·?????? One approach to use is the technique ‘Yes, and…’. Take control of the conversation asking if you can create communication skills training: you need to ask what the challenges are.
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·?????? The ladder of abstraction is another (Danny Seals: The insightful innovator). Start with a problem statement then go up the ladder first to go broader then down as you dig deeper. (Not the other way round!) You may need more than one scoping session.
·?????? Killer questions are useful: what if we did nothing? What are you doing right now? How do you know this is a challenge? How will we know it’s changed? Who in your team is doing well? What’s the difference between him/her/them and others who are doing badly?
·?????? Are you willing to ‘kill the butterfly’? (This is the idea that the stakeholder has an idea about what you want me to do – are you willing to squash that idea and explore other options with me?)
We (the audience) proposed some killer questions of our own: what would you wish for if you had a magic wand? Do we have this already? Do the learners think this is a problem/the same problem? The ‘so what’ question.
Next question is Have the skills transferred to the job? Go back to the discussion on challenges – have any changes been noticed? Are they the right changes? What’s the impact on the team? What else can we explore? However, don’t get too hung up on data. Use it as a milestone checker. Use it to identify and document the story around it. Then note that ‘you must choose but choose wisely’! (Credit: Indiana Jones!) If what you’re doing is working, you’ll be in demand and must learn to say no.
A final thought: it’s privilege to advise the best minds and broaden their perspective, so make the most of that, expand your curiosity and go where the energy is. Figure out what you can do differently, to change the dial.
Connect with the chair and speakers:
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