If your learning and development (L&D) team operates like an internal order-taking service, this will be a familiar scenario: A business unit leader encounters an issue in their team’s performance, walks over to your desk and asks for a two-hour course. Rather than trying to understand the barriers to performance or which key performance indicators (KPIs) need improvement, you move to action. You assign your team to build it, launch it and drive toward completions, because the executive wants everyone to take the course.

Then come the results. Over 90% of the target population completes the required training; however, performance has remained flat since the intervention began. The business sees this training as a failure, which further reinforces its view of training as overhead rather than a driver of real capability.

Breaking this cycle of unaligned initiatives requires governance. Not bureaucracy or endless steering committees, but a common-sense decision-making process that connects dollars and resources with actual business priorities.

When stepping into new roles, we’ve both faced the same issue: existing or new requests that weren’t aligned to business strategy, a lack of clearly defined KPIs, business problems or barriers to performance and non-existent or weak executive sponsorship. This situation gave us the perfect opportunity to quickly establish credibility and value by helping leadership understand how to use governance to maximize the organization’s investment in L&D.

Build the Business Case for L&D Governance

Typically, our first step is dismantling the “course catalog” mindset. In our experience, many performance problems brought to L&D are not training issues at all. They typically stem from a lack of appropriate incentives, poor processes or workflows, poor leadership or technology issues. Putting a training program on these gaps only produces learning scrap: content that is consumed, forgotten and entirely disconnected from operational outcomes. This directly impacts L&D credibility when nothing happens.

To build support for governance, show executives what the current approach is costing the organization. Connect poorly prioritized training requests to wasted resources, competing business priorities and the inability to demonstrate measurable results.

One of us, as a new L&D leader, inherited a $12 million budget and analyzed more than 200 courses developed over a two-year period. About 25% of these requests were never finished due to changing priorities, 25% were canceled before starting and the remaining 50% were delivered with no measurable KPIs and questionable impact. More than 95% of courses had no executive sponsorship or awareness.

This information was instrumental in encouraging key executives to invest their time in governance; in fact, they provided unanimous support. One year later, the executive committee approved fewer than 30 mission-critical initiatives with their full sponsorship, with subsequent savings in vendor and deployment expenses.

Importantly, we were not asking executives to review slide decks or instructional models. That is our job, not theirs. Their role is to define which business KPIs must move and by how much, agree on the performance barriers that need to be addressed, provide executive sponsorship and establish shared accountability for results.

Build an L&D Governance Process

Setting up a functioning council comes down to several intentional shifts in how you operate:

• Get the right decision-makers at the table. You need senior line-of-business executives, the chief human resources officer (CHRO) and the head of HR business partnering. If the people in the room cannot assign resources or say “no” to their own direct reports’ pet projects, it is not a governance board.
• Retool your internal team into performance consultants. Before an intake request ever reaches executive review, your team must diagnose whether the problem is a skill gap, a process issue or a systems failure. If it isn’t a true learning need, document it, share it with the committee and route it elsewhere for resolution.
• Create an intake process. Build a simple rubric to prioritize requests. Consider asking:
  • • How does this project support the organization’s top three strategic goals this year?
    • What KPIs will be moved, and by how much?
    • Who is the executive sponsor?
    • What are non-training issues that must be addressed?
• Create a change plan. Change management is critical to the success of enterprise initiatives. Generate a RACI document so everyone knows their role on the project and what they are expected to do.
• Define and drive shared accountability. Do not let the business impact fall solely on L&D. Discuss how accountability will be shared and what that will look like.
• Deprioritize: If an initiative lacks a sponsor or measurable KPIs, it gets deprioritized.

Run an Effective L&D Governance Meeting

Keep the board’s meetings focused on a tight agenda published in advance. Have the approved scoping documents outline the request from a business perspective, including the sponsoring executive, anticipated KPI movement, shared accountability structure, line manager support requirements and the time associates need to complete the training. Include an estimate of required L&D resources with a running total of all hours against available hours to show what can be done overall.

Also include non-training factors that must be addressed to ensure performance barriers can be identified and successfully removed.  Use your team for deep diagnostic performance consulting work, but present the board with clear trade-offs, straightforward prioritization decisions and unambiguous progress against agreed-upon metrics. You want to leave with clarity on where limited resources will be spent.

Use Governance to Strengthen L&D’s Business Role

L&D builds influence by leading the organization in treating capability building as a serious, co-owned business investment. Set up the structure, hold leaders to their side of the agreement and let the business’s shared results speak for themselves.