How To Launch Impactful Learning And Development Initiatives

Essential components of learning culture in large organizations

Establishing and maintaining a culture that values learning is critical in today’s dynamic, unpredictable, and complex business world. Organizations that are continuously learning achieve a level of adaptability that gives them a competitive advantage.

For large organizations, fostering a learning culture involves overcoming unique challenges. The legacy thinking that is common in big business often results in learning methods and programs being retained long past their expiration date. For example, many large organizations continue to hold to the notion that learning is a “training event” rather than a mindset that drives continual improvement.
 

Driving change in a large organization can be like turning a cruise ship, requiring a significant amount of energy, a lot of time, and the involvement of a lot of people. The following strategies can help those who are charged with fostering a learning culture in a large organization to launch impactful initiatives and gain meaningful momentum.

Make a Case for Innovation

An openness to try something new is critical to learning. The “same old, same old” keeps an organization stuck in place while its competition embraces new ideas and achieves new levels of success.

Organizations that want to stay relevant must adopt a growth mindset that believes abilities can be and should be cultivated and expanded. A fixed mindset assumes abilities are static, which leads an organization to avoid challenges and ignore the fact that it is falling behind in the marketplace.

I have been fortunate to work with some organizations that truly value innovation. My experience with those organizations taught me that it is important to find the “mavens” in the company who are open to new ways of doing things. Once you find those innovators, pull them into your efforts to transform the culture, making them change leaders for your initiatives. They play a crucial role in helping others get out of the “we have always done it this way and it works just fine” mindset.

Leverage Learning Evangelism

In a large organization, those who are driving learning initiatives are often far removed from those who will ultimately engage with the learning, which can make it extremely challenging to obtain buy-in. Overcoming that challenge involves empowering those who are closer to learners and respected by them to become evangelists for new learning initiatives.

HR and focused learning teams will play a role in singing the praises of a learning culture, but it is more important that people hear about the value of learning initiatives from the colleagues whom they have come to know and trust. We implemented a social learning platform to drive new and modern ways to learn. It allowed us to access knowledge from a set of ‘Thinkfluencers’ curated from across global business leaders and establish our own internal “Thinkfluencers” to create personalized content for key initiatives. This also allowed us to turn those employees into ambassadors who promoted our efforts and drove acceptance across the organization.

Meet People Where They Are

The best option for delivering learning will always be meeting people where they are. Today’s workforce is largely mobile and increasingly remote. To understand how distributed we’ve become, consider the fact that each day 300 million people participate in online meetings.

Gathering everyone in a central location to educate and inspire is not a bad idea periodically, but it is not a viable solution for continuous learning in today’s work environments. If people are spending their time on the go, then let’s provide learning on the go.

Show Value Added

Demonstrating the “what’s in it for me” component of learning initiatives is critical. When you clearly demonstrate why new programs are better, the advantages they bring, and the downsides of sticking with the status quo, you’ll have a much easier time getting both leadership and end users on board.

As you talk about benefits, focus on showing how you can save time, create more engagement, encourage active learning instead of passing learning, and generally make it a better experience for those on the receiving end. Whenever possible, provide data. Cold hard facts on things like reduced curriculum development time, increased engagement, and higher adoption rates can be powerful influencers.

In the end, the most essential component of learning culture will be transformation. You must ensure that your efforts are making a material impact on the business. Is your learning tied to business transformation or are you just “rolling out learning” for the sake of learning? Measure the impact, publicize the impact, and leverage the impact to inspire more learning, more innovation, and more growth.

Author Bio

Danielle Campbell is Senior VP of Global Enablement & Education and Head of Infor U at Infor. Danielle and her team are responsible for all aspects of learning for employees, partners and customers. She previously served as Adobe’s Head of Global Learning Strategy, where she was responsible for driving customer and partner product adoption strategy, training product development, and technical readiness for the Adobe Experience Cloud business. Prior to that she held learning leadership roles at Business Objects, Red Hat, Hortonworks and Plex.