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Obelisk was a guest on the ZIGZAG HR podcast
Lesley of #ZigZagHR sat down with Anouck Van Couter and Helen Goovaerts of Obelisk.
L&D often wants to be at the strategic table, but too often remains stuck in an executive role. Your plans are good, evidence-based, forward-looking and yet you don't get support or management pushes aside learning investments with arguments like "not now" or "not a priority.
In this episode, we help you make the leap from training planner to strategic partner. We discuss five common pitfalls for L&D teams and show you how to avoid them through stronger stakeholder management.
- How do you speak the language of business?
- How do you turn stakeholders into allies?
- How do you figure out the real learning need?
- How do you anchor learning as change?
- How do you prove impact that counts?
Lesley zoomed in on these questions with Obelisk
- How do you make L&D more aligned with the language and priorities of the business?
- How do you win the trust of management and finance in your learning initiatives?
- How do you involve stakeholders early enough so that they become allies?
- How do you recognize an L&D partnership in practice?
- How do you recognize if a learning need is really about learning or about something else?
- How do you avoid L&D shooting into training mode with every problem?
- How do you address learning projects as full-fledged change processes?
- How do you build support for a new course among leaders and teams?
- How do you show the difference between satisfaction and real impact?
- How do you measure whether behavior and performance change effectively through a learning program?
- How can L&D take inspiration from fields such as sales, finance or marketing to become stronger?
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These were the answers from our experts:
- Think like an entrepreneur: link learning paths explicitly to margins, growth and utilization rates-and speak the CFO language with them. (02:57-12:20)
- Translate your proposal into hard KPIs and timing realities (cash flow!); show how the plan contributes to the multi-year plan. (6:50-11:20)
- Use a light design-thinking approach: empathize & define first with operations/finance included, then build. (13:58-16:44)
- Stakeholders come up with info themselves, ask for your critical eye and proactively share MT decisions. (17:33-18:51; 19:02-21:02 )
- Start with a strategic gap analysis and behavioral definition; sometimes the solution is structure/policy instead of a classroom. (22:21-26:07)
- Be the professional opposing voice: test question, context and desired behavior change before selecting "solutions." (21:16-22:15; 26:33-27:13)
- See impact = quality × acceptance: plan communication and anchoring as carefully as the training itself. (27:29-33:10)
- Combine multiple channels, repeat, and have the sponsor link the "why" to the long-term strategy. (33:10-36:22; 36:22-37:16)
- Happy sheets ≠ behavior change: show what people do differently in the workplace. (37:29-38:24)
- Use Talheimer logic: from attendance/participation to application and effect. Preferably with a simple before/after measurement. (38:53-43:14)
Download the strategic L&D toolkit here
The toolkit you use:
- To test your learning initiatives against your organization's strategic goals
- As a conversation starter with stakeholders and management
- To quickly identify pitfalls in your L&D approach
- As a checklist when setting up new pathways
- To position your L&D team more strongly as a partner of the business
Download L&D toolkit
Learn more about Mapwave
Within learning programs from Obelisk, Mapwave is a valuable partner for strong baseline measurement, completely in line with what we discussed in the podcast: measuring impact from the get-go.
Mapwave】 Strengthens organizations in making better decisions by measuring behavior and predicting outcomes. Their tools and analytics - both customized and off-the-shelf - give HR a more strategic role and create measurable impact.
