Birchwood Foods

Imagine walking into a diner. Everybody orders from the server, who quickly gives the orders to the short-order cook. The cook quickly and efficiently makes every meal according to everybody’s desires. The diners are satisfied, so they leave a good tip. The server is happy, the cook is happy, and it’s a successful transaction.

Now imagine a Learning and Development (L&D) leader walking into a meeting with IT, operations, HR, safety and sales. Each group shares the training they need to be developed quickly because their needs are all urgent. The L&D leader shares the projects with the L&D team, who delivers them on time and on budget. This seems like a successful transaction, but after analyzing the training data and only half of the content has been delivered; the other half did not have explicit connection to achieving business outcomes. Now it is time for performance reviews, and you have little more to show for it than an overwhelmed L&D team and an executive team that does not see the value in the L&D department.

In order to ensure the long-term viability of L&D teams and their abilities to have an impact on the organization, it is absolutely critical that L&D teams are aligned with business goals. When teams are misaligned or act as short-order cooks for operations/outside teams, our value is not maximized. In fact, our value can be put into question whether we are worth the investment. When L&D teams are split in too many directions, lacking focus on business needs, taking short orders from every department that can get a meeting, they no longer impact on business outcomes. we cannot tell the story of our value.

Therefore, every choice that a learning department makes when determining which projects to support must be explicitly aligned with business goals. If teams requesting training cannot explicitly connect what they want with impact, L&D teams cannot spend their time on such an endeavor. However, it is also critical for L&D teams to work with requestors to identify the project scope, goals and outcomes because many times the goals are just not able to be articulated by the requestor. This is our chance to shine. These meetings should be a chance to dig into departmental needs and to highlight the myriad of ways L&D can help that team make gains. This can include and should include ways to improve outcomes for all levels of the business.

Another crucial area for L&D to support teams is to develop programs for employees at every level of the organization. Sometimes requestors have blind spots for those who actually need development. It can be easy to highlight the need for customer service or sales to need development, but organizations need to ask if the data support that those are the true areas of need. Here are a few questions we need to ask when identifying L&D needs:

1. What is being identified in internal surveys?

Surveys can be formal or informal, developed by HR, safety, operations, etc, depending  on your organization and your industry.

2. What problems keep coming up in management calls?

When leadership teams are spending the majority of their time solving the same few  problems, a root cause analysis can help identify the true problem(s) and L&D should be on the team to identify counteractions needed from a training perspective.

One example of an overlooked employee group from my industry—meat manufacturing and processing—is frontline supervisors. The need for their professional development and growth has been identified in our internal surveys, as well as trade industry surveys. However, the focus of L&D efforts across the industry has been with frontline team members. We are now seeing that when frontline leaders are not receiving the training and support that they need, the entire organization suffers. Some of the negative effects include high turnover rate of supervisory staff, high turnover rate of frontline staff, low engagement and repeated mistakes on the plant floor.

L&D has a responsibility to work with cross-disciplinary teams to identify needs that will solve organizational problems, such as high turnover and low engagement. Rather than take requests from all departments, L&D leaders need to problem solve with other business leaders to ensure that L&D efforts are supporting business goals and supporting employees at all levels.