What L&D Pros Need to Know About Business
It’s time to amp up our business acumen game.
L&D, It's time to amp up our business acumen game. If we want to move from a place where our work is transactional, where we take and deliver training orders, to one where we are working in partnership with our business colleagues, then we need to do better. We need to know more. We need to be business partners with learning expertise.
Business partners with learning expertise.
Most L&D pros didn't end up in this profession based on our love of business. We did it because we love learning and the development of people. We love the light bulbs that signify an “aha” moment more than we love the dollar signs.
But business (or the organization) provides the context and foundation for everything that gets done in a day, a week, a month, a quarter, a year, etc. It is the grounding, the framework, and the reason why our work exists in the first place.
Intentional or not, whenever we give ourselves a pass on learning more about the business, we hold ourselves back from becoming a Strategic Business Partner. We can only gather half the pieces to the puzzle (the learning pieces). We leave out the context for problems and our solutions. Let's think about this logically with a few intentionally redundant questions:
How can we partner within the business, at a strategic level, without understanding that business?
How can we truly help to solve the talent challenges in our organizations, if we don’t understand the environment where those talent challenges have emerged?
As a business leader, why would you trust someone to work with you as a strategic partner who has no idea as to the strategy you are collectively attempting to fulfill?
It's time to increase our business knowledge. But, where to begin?
Business Basics for L&D Professionals
If you can gain a basic understanding of the following six components of the business where you work, you will be off to a good start in working as a business partner. The goal isn't to know everything to the teensiest detail, but to get a few levels deeper than the description you give your aunt at the next family reunion. You need to dig a bit below the surface.
I recommend starting with the biggest picture items as those ground the rest of the work, and then diving into more details along the way.
Vision, Mission, Purpose: Why the company exists. Often the easiest to find as these items are on the company internet or intranet pages.
Primary Customers: Who the company is serving. Aim for a detailed persona if possible. Sales and marketing teams are generally keepers of this information.
Products/Services: What the company offers to customers. Learn about the primary products/services and why customers need them. It can also be helpful to learn if there is a product/service lifecycle.
Goals and/or Strategic Initiatives. What the company is working towards. Generally, there will be overall goals, objectives, and/or initiatives that cascade to multiple teams. They are too big for any one team to do alone.
Basic Functional/Operational Knowledge. How the work gets done and who does each portion of the work as well as how the company makes money and whether there is a predictable work cadence (times that are busier than others). Also look at which metrics are monitored.
Company Culture and Maturity. The landscape of unwritten rules where the work gets done. Working counter to the culture or at an inappropriate level of maturity will increase the chances of failure for any project.
If you can get the basics for each of these areas, you will have a good foundational knowledge of the business where you work. The next challenge is to see where and how each of the learning projects you are working on relates or fits. Are they advancing the goals, improving the customer experience, increasing performance, and designed in a way that compliments operational and cultural aspects? Once you begin to answer these types of questions, you will see how the learning function is one aspect of the overall business. Then, you can begin to function more like a true partner.
Business knowledge, even the business basics, provides the context for the work of L&D and the foundation for partnership.
