Leveling Up Learning and Development Motivation

The Challenge:

One of the Learning and Development (L&D) teams at a Fortune 5 Company was de-motivated and in chaos through dullness. They asked me to come and see if I could breathe some new life into the team.

Observe:

For the first couple of weeks, I had coffee or lunch with every single person on the team. After these conversations, I would jot down notes and cross-reference them with notes from other meetings to corroborate the story. I even ran my notes through a word cloud generator to evaluate the sentiment of the team.

In talking with the team, I discovered their story. The team’s director had brought them over from another company, so they could only justify their existence through politics rather than with data on learning efficacy. But their director was planning to retire and they were concerned for the team’s future. They didn’t know how effective their work was because a system of evaluation had not been implemented. They didn’t follow up on their training, nor did they systematically use what little feedback they received.

Connect:

Talking with the team, I appealed to their desire to be effective as L&D instructors. I also proposed using better metrics and feedback.

Implement:

I brought the team up to speed on some programs such as effective smile sheets, stakeholder interviews, regular SME check ins, polling, and sample size. I also implemented Qualtrics. In doing so, I closed the learner loop and improved the efficacy and speed of training development.

Improve:

The team was glad to see qualitative and quantitative feedback and metrics in response to their work. Now they had tangible feedback to improve their training.