What leaders still want from their L&D team and budget

"The first law of bad management: if something isn't working, do more of it."

Tom DeMarco

There's still a fascinating gap between the post COVID / post hybrid working / post 'great resignation' realities and the role and focus of workplace learning. 

Despite these three seismic impacts on business models, value creation, employee contribution and workplace culture, most leaders choose to stick with the same detached approach to 'learning'.

Whether implicitly or explicitly, senior leaders' expectations of their L&D team and annual L&D budget remain stuck around:

Developing training 'solutions' aligned to 'hot topics'

Investing in new (cheaper) tools and tactics with which to develop and scale training solutions

Prioritising access to training solutions over enabling performance improvement

Distracting colleagues from their work to 'engage' with 'training solutions'

Tracking 'engagement' with training solutions; (to reinforce the need to maintain the status quo).

Of course, there are increasingly diminishing returns from this reductive, control based approach. The only apparent benefit of continuing to accept that this is a) enough and, b) good enough, seems to be that it allows both parties to double down and stay the same - in a world that has already moved on.