Build Your Learning Culture Around a Data-driven Framework

Well, hello again. It’s been a while. Thank you for your patience as I refreshed and rebranded my website. It’s been a transformational process—truly a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly. I am reminded that nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Change is an incremental process—and it starts within YOU—an inside job (I’ll share more on that later).

I am excited to announce the official launch of my consulting business, “Rel8 Positively with Debbie.” I plan to resume my blog posts on a myriad of personal and professional topics, but feel free to contact me if you want to learn more about my services. Today, I’ll share some tips on how intentional, data-driven strategies align Talent Development leaders more succinctly with the goals of their stakeholders and customers.

Last May, I had the opportunity through ATD Nebraska’s Learning Leaders Community of Practice (COP) to share my journey with Heritage Communities. With 17 fellow professionals in attendance from both Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, we talked about how agreeing upon key business metrics early on sets the tone and pace for establishing a solid learning culture. When we speak a common language and schedule consistent check-ins with our business partners, we will meet success more readily.

Today, I want to share a quick overview of the 10 best practices that have worked for me in establishing a solid foundation for leadership advocacy of learning and development of frontline managers and associates.

1. Begin with the end in mind. What is the vision of your leaders? At Heritage, it was to provide tactical learning opportunity for their frontline manager and directors to clearly understand their role and purpose in leading their teams. Leadership turnover was a concern (and still is ;)), so understanding the current pain points and state of practice was critical in developing the vision for th desired future state of leadership skills and strengths to focus on.

2. But first, relationships. Meet and build rapport with your main stakeholders. Getting to know your core people that need to see the results and impact of the programming you implement is paramount. At Heritage, I started by scheduling one-on-one interviews with each of my key stakeholders to understand what their concerns and observations were. I also took time to get to know them as humans, developing a common ground for future collaborations.

3. Know your available data sources. Once you know your people, you will understand what platforms and systems they are accessing: Human Resources Information System (HRIS), Learning Management System (LMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System, Communication Platforms (Email, Intranet, Instant Messaging, Meeting Cadences), ticketing systems for work orders, technology support, and so on. From there, you can build your repertoire of current reporting and identify what gaps exist in obtaining the needed data to tell the story and set your baseline results.

4. Identify key business metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What are you trying to measure? What will help tell the story in numbers next week, next month, each quarter, annually? Is it turnover numbers, retention, engagement survey feedback, training completion, compliance percentages, number of talent development resources compared to your total number of employees? The possibilities are endless. Find out what numbers your stakeholder are monitoring and are challenged with, and start there. If there aren’t any, recommend some—or at least one. As talent development professionals, we must remember we are not order takers, but we are the subject matter experts in organizational learning approaches and adult learning needs and related theories. Take the opportunity to educate your stakeholders where needed. My favorite references are the Six Boxes of Performance Thinking and Transfer of Training research done by Broad and Newstrom.

5. Brainstorm the top metric that needs immediate attention and impact. From this groundwork, you can more easily identify the lowest hanging fruit (metric) and where you can scope out the project and primary audience to positively influence the baseline number. If it’s turnover, identify a way to measure your baseline and create your control group versus your cohort of learners and measure the progress. Educating your customers on the TIME needed to observe and measure is critical at this stage as well. We must continually level set expectations. We know human change is incremental and based on one’s ability to embrace a desire for betterment or enhancement of their strengths. Also decide when and how often you will report on this metric. At Heritage, it was through quarterly updates presented to the senior leadership team.

That’s all for now. Next blog post I’ll dive into the second five best practices I recommend for data-driven strategies to build your learning culture. Under next time… be YOU!

Questions to consider as you strengthen your business relationships:

1. Who are your key stakeholders? What are their business goals?

2. How does or can learning data positively impact those goals?

3. What are some key learning metrics to measure?

4. What are the levels of evaluation and what metrics are associated with each one?

5. What are the ways you can educate your stakeholders and managers?