The majority of learning organizations today are faced with several key challenges in the ever-changing learning solutions market. These key challenges include providing learning at or faster than the speed of change, closing the gap between talent and business goals, and transforming themselves from order-takers to business partners that drive organizational culture and influence strategy at the C-level all the way down to the trenches.
With the last financial crisis six years behind a slowly growing economy, business leaders are pressed more than ever to deliver economic value through specific business goals. As a result, they turn to their learning organizations for answers. Understanding these business goals and how to translate them to talent goals and vice versa is a critical must-have for talent managers today.
Traditionally, learning organizations crafted a learning and development plan and after a lot of negotiation citing regulatory requirements, peer pressure, competition and other external forces as needs for learning, they were able to ‘pass’ it for funding and implement. Today, this is no longer working nor is it effective. There has to be a collaborative effort and communication between the line of business manager and the chief learning officer to craft a collective solution, even a partnership. By transforming itself first, the CLO and the learning organization changes the narrative and becomes a business partner rather than an ornery cost center. A transformed learning organization becomes a collaborative partner in the business strategy, a trusted adviser in cultural change and a number cruncher leveraging big data to help drive strategy and create economic value.
Learning organizations must transform themselves first to be able to walk the walk of change with their lines of business. But, where and how do you begin this transformation? One effective methodology is to adopt and adapt LEAN process improvement practices.
While LEAN began in organizations like Motorola, Toyota and GE, services organizations across industries and functions including finance, healthcare, hospitality, travel, and OD/ HR have all successfully implemented LEAN throughout the past 20 years. Learning organizations have an opportunity to implement LEAN to re-engineer cumbersome and paper-based processes and metrics around their activities. For example, L&D can build a competencies database accessible to lines of business, provide skills assessments for divisions and individuals, identify skills gaps by division and by individual, map learning solutions, glean metrics and tie dollars around each of these and more. LEAN provides the opportunity to build new or re-engineer existing processes around the type of information they can gather from lines of business, analyze the information, define metrics for the learning organization, and provide talent metrics for lines of business and individuals. More importantly, LEAN can deliver the communications framework to begin and maintain a partnering dialogue with the C-suite and lines of business.
Most confuse LEAN with six sigma. LEAN focuses on removing waste in a process, while six-sigma focuses on eliminating variation in process. Six sigma projects are a big undertaking. They are complex, rigorous and can become cumbersome both on your budget and your time. On the other hand, LEAN projects are simpler, easier and faster to implement. Although it is recommended, they don’t require LEAN certified project managers to run them. With LEAN, process improvement organizations can punch in a minimum of 15 percent improvement in their L&D process (more revenue, less time and cost) overnight. L&D teams can map existing processes, identify what are value added activities and eliminate the rest. That should get the attention of line of business managers.
L&D organizations that can efficiently crunch employee competencies, identify skill gaps against business goals, and partner with business to help them move towards those goals can change the narrative and become drivers in the conversation of learning at the speed of change and create economic value.
