The 'Head of Learning & Development'

"The most common leadership failure stems from attempting to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges."

Ron Heifetz 

The 'Head of Learning & Development' job persists and it's easy to be confused. In reality it's not just one job, it's at least five:

Program management: The core work of planning, coordinating, communicating and reporting on a set of formal learning collateral. This is inevitably process oriented, 'governance' oriented, and administration heavy.

IT systems management: This is the work of procuring, testing, deploying, and maintaining the choice of 'learning technology(ies)' that enable access to the formal learning offer.   

Mandatory learning management: This is the work of developing, maintaining, tracking, and reporting 'completions' of an annual circular program of 'mandatory learning'.

'Marketing' management: This is the work of broadcasting the content in the program to encourage people to comply with the wishes of the Learning & Development team. This work focuses on finding ways to defend the need for people to set aside time from their own work to 'come and learn'.

'Forward planning': This is the work of taking requests from senior leaders, converting these requests into 'topics' and creating new training content. (This work is key as it feeds and perpetuates the 'Program management' work described above). 

When we reflect on the typical priorities and expectations of this role, it exposes the status quo. The 'Head of Learning and Development' typically isn't a 'leadership' role because the focus is defaulted to working in the current system - with no expectation to enable that system to change.