Build The Roots of A Learning Strategy To Feed Your Organization
- Adam Spacht
- Jun 28, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 14, 2024
As a leader you want year over year growth in your firm.
To see your team members develop and metrics that matter like revenue, productivity and customer satisfaction increasing steadily.
That your company carves out a competitive advantage to survive and flourish despite ever changing headwinds.
You know training is important and promote it's use inside the firm.
But if you want to develop a taproot that feeds your organization year over year, lean into building out a training strategy.
How do we set up training as a strategy?
Step one is straightforward.
Review your existing strategy.
Are your tracks taking you in the direction that you want to go?
Are you headed in a good direction in the first place?
There is no point adding training to the mix if, in fact, you're heading in the wrong direction.
Ok, then what?
Align learning with that strategy.
To have the learning deeply organically embedded with that strategy to push it forwards.
Training that infuses itself throughout the culture of the organization, from the leadership ranks all the way down to the newest, most junior employee.
Think of it watering the roots of a tree.
Continuing the analogy, the outcome of the tree, particularly if it's in an orchard, is to bear fruit, so to keep the tree growing and stabilized with strong roots.
So how do you actually build a healthy root system that aligns learning with strategy?
Let's explore 4 key steps
The first step is who owns the learning in the organization?
Is there a chief learning officer, a training advocate, in the C suite?
Without a learning champion its easy for learning to get lost in an organization.
For learning to be pulled in too many directions by too many stakeholders.
In my experience, when training is buried 15 levels down the org chart, structured as a team within a team within a team, or dispersed across multiple teams at multiple locations...learning quickly becomes a jumbled mess of duplicated, tick-the-box, compliance focused efforts
Next, is including training in organizational strategy sessions.
Is the learning team included when crafting futurevision during strategy sessions, or are they kept out & find out about new plans and initiatives along with everybody else?
Even beyond major strategy, is training naturally included in more tactical efforts like product rollouts, new sales campaigns and new initiatives inside the firm?
But first focus is including learning into overarching futurevision discussions with senior leaders.
This allows you to build training programs to support the big picture needs of the company.
Critically it focuses your training investment on what is important to the organization and long term efforts & goals.
It naturally lifts training beyond tactical & compliance needs.
It ties learning to business outcomes instead of becoming a vending machine of courses.
And it allows you to build effective metrics and milestones to evaluate whether the training is working.
The third pathway to strengthen your learning root system is rewarding learning as part of a performance review and/or compensation review process.
Is learning specifically buried as one line item out of a hundred things that are measured or is it called out specifically?
Has the individual completed the assigned learnings?
If they're up for promotion, are we going back and looking to see that people completed whatever their ongoing development courses were?
You get what you reward.
Note: Good training has evaluations and assessments built in to evaluate whether the participant not only knows the information, but has the ability to apply it so participants don't watch a bunch of videos, fast forward to the end and click yes.
Field level management teams is the fourth key step to building strong learning roots.
Are your mid level managers aligned with training as part of the firms overarching strategy?
When the times get tough, things are busy and there's a choice to be made between doing activity or taking somebody offline to do some training....
Which option they are likely to choose?
Will your manager focus on KPI of today vs investing time in the one that produces a return tomorrow?
Make sure your managers
Support learning efforts and promote them
Have KPIs that reward the use of learning tools
Measured on team's development in addition to activity or output
These are safety checks so when they feel that pressure to focus on outputs, they don't forget the inputs.
Adam, can this sort of approach actually work?
Let me tell you about a transformation project, headed by David Ketchen.
David has a long history of strategic transformation and consulting (and if you need a bit of strategic consulting & transformation support chat him up!)
The project was of national significance to convert all the old survey maps of properties, which had previously been done with pen and ruler, so you know what your boundaries were, where to put your gates and what you owned off your land.
The plan was to digitize these and move them into a database so you only needed to enter the coordinates and then the database would create the map.
A whole lot of smart surveyors were hired for the project and a government department, who specialized in mapping was given this task.
After two years, it was clear they could not do it.
So the government actually liquidated their own government department because they were having to pay penalty fees and the project was adrift.
Imagine how bad it must have been for the government to reduce its own size!
David, a member of Electronic Data Systems at the time, picked up the project and EDS was to be liable for those penalties.
The first thing he noticed?
The quality was terrible and people just didn't know how to do the job to completion.
So he chose training as part of his strategy.
By mixing everyone so that they could communicate quickly with each other they could immediately start saying, this is what you're getting wrong, and provide ad hoc training.
In order to speed up production, he created a video library of the common problems.
Soon people would be watching videos at their desk. Simple two, three minute videos, explaining the task or outlining a common issue.
And team leaders were encouraged to provide time to review videos and have team level chats to address bottlenecks.
Suddenly, the place started humming and accurate output increased significantly.
David's learning strategy lead directly to finishing the project two years ahead of schedule!
Elevating training to the strategic level isn't complicated.
These 4 steps outline a replicable path to follow so your firm builds strong roots where learning drives impact on the metrics that matter.