Why do L&D strategies fail sometime?

Deploying an L&D strategy is something critical for all organizations. Despite having a world-class curriculum, a wonderful L&D team and a great online learning platform I noticed some organizations were unable to create the much-needed pull from their associates(employees). 

While I loved facilitating behavioural interventions for my clients as part of my consulting journey, I can’t deny the fact that some exciting transformational HR projects which I helped execute were the most memorable ones.

Note, I prefer to use the term Associates over Employees, as an HR professional we believe that everyone working in the organization irrespective of her/his position is an associate in the growth and well-being of an organization.

Getting back, I’ve been approached a few times with requests like, our associates are not using the learning options available, we spent a lot of money hiring some well renowned training consulting firms, coaches, but people don’t seem to value the resources provided, sessions are sometimes running with skeletal attendance and the queries went on.

So, I worked with the leadership teams and deployed some measures which helped the HR teams transform L&D from being perceived as a cost centre into a value generator. I’d like to share what was commonly missing when it comes to deploying the L&D strategy and why some L&D initiatives were stagnant.

1.      Communication – I found a big opportunity in the way L&D and HR as a whole were communicating the strategy. Most of the organizations believed once the learning calendar was made available it only required periodic awareness mailers and teasers to remind people about the need to consider choosing the offerings. So, it was like, here is the learning calendar, please nominate yourselves and make the best use of it. Nobody spoke about the importance of LEARNING as a habit in the organization. There was no noise about LEARNING being a part and parcel of everyday work. Managers never spoke about LEARNING as a basic requirement for teams’ success. Induction programs never emphasized the point that LEARNING is a critical entity in growth and development. All hands meets rarely touched on the LEARNING aspect, it was more of business numbers, profits and future plans. So, what changes did we recommend? We said, every performance discussion between an associate and manager must involve a status review on what the person is learning on the job, what is his knowledge gap and how he plans to bridge that. We asked the hiring team to consider hiring people who possessed a decent level of LEARING AGILITY. We equipped the teams with screening methods to do the same. We engaged with HRBP’s and helped them modify the approach towards business. We influenced them to use data and analytics to show the learning status in each function, provide recommendations and tie in L&D to get real time TNA. We reached out to the leadership and requested them to make LEARNING an must have agenda in all they skip level meetings. We asked them to be sponsor’s of certain learning initiatives. We engaged with the L&D function and asked them to develop testimonials of how people used the learning opportunities, we asked them to use technology to ensure these testimonials were reaching everybody, we also helped L&D develop an audience based communication strategy, how you approach a fresher is different from how you approach a slightly experience person and more different when you approach somebody having a reporting team. In effect we said, you have to communicate your strategy in different ways in different platforms with different people at different times.

2.      Manager Accountability – hard to digest in the beginning, but all efforts start with some pain. We found that the L&D mandate and its success almost always rested with the L&D team and L&D head. They were answerable for every damn thing that happened with L&D. We said, we must break this culture.  As we know, the manager is the face of the organization for associates. What she says and does is what impacts the associates’ morale and belief in a big way. So we said, managers must be held accountable for the learning journey of their team members. We said, every manager must have a performance metric closely tied to competency-development of each of her reportee’s. We enabled the managers with methods to engage with the teams, understand their learning needs, collaborate with L&D and build a LEARNING PLAN for the team. We told the managers to own it and L&D to only remain back-stage.

3.      Recognition – recognition models in most of these organizations centred about business growth or customer delight. Achieving learning objectives never found a place in recognition models. It takes some nerves of steel for a CEO and CHRO to put down their foot and say we will recognize people who achieve their learning objectives. We got maximum resistance to this recommendation, but we persisted. We said, lets make a start. We asked L&D to put in place a method to identify star learners. We pushed them to allocate a budget to create some solid noise around this. We enabled them with methods to do it. Slowly we started asking the business functions to nominate STAR learners, we helped codify certain shortlisting criteria. In about 8 months we found people wanting to top the charts when it comes to their learning plan adherence. We got the management to approve a special award for any line manager who goes above and beyond expectations to ensure learning objectives of his team is met. We got this to be made a big-ticket item in All Hands Meets.

You can have a multi-million dollar Learning platform in place, a great bunch of certified L&D experts and a 2000 SQFT plus learning library in your premises, but all these will end up being your liabilities if you don’t deploy your L&D strategy effectively.

I hope this reading helped you and can enable you to start making those incrementation changes. Good luck! If you need support to ensure your L&D strategy works as per plan feel free to contact us - dazil@ enableursuccess.com: Contact +91 917 783 8099.