Everything, everywhere, all at once

The title of this blog post is borrowed from Deloitte’s summary of the priorities of C-suite executives (which in turn is borrowed from the Daniels).

Why the Green Dot chose this phrase to represent their findings is clear:

“When asked to choose their focus areas among the 10 core business priorities broadly categorized across growth, purpose, people, process, and technology, more than 60 percent of the executives surveyed chose seven or more priorities, and 25 percent chose all 10.”

This is no surprise to me. Over my years in the Learning & Development sector, I’ve seen a similar approach to capability frameworks. Which among the 17 (or more) are the priorities? The answer is almost always all of them.

However, when everything’s a priority, nothing is.

As a business we need to recognise the difference between prioritisation and importance. Yes it’s important – that’s why it’s in the framework and why we’ll support it.

The next question is which ones will drive the greatest improvement, for us, right now? They’re the few we’ll double down on.

Playing by numbers

The theme of last week’s Learning Cafe in Sydney was How to Win Friends and Influence Learning Stakeholders.

Among the stakeholders considered was the “C-Level & Leadership”. This got me thinking, do the C-suite and lower rung managers expect different things from L&D?

There’s no shortage of advice out there telling us to learn the language of finance, because that’s what the CEO speaks. And that makes sense to me.

While some of my peers shudder at the term ROI, for example, I consider it perfectly reasonable for the one who’s footing the bill to demand something in return.

Show me the money.

But I also dare to suggest that the managers who occupy the lower levels of the organisational chart don’t give a flying fox about all that.

Of course they “care” about revenue, costs and savings – and they would vigorously say so if asked! – but it’s not what motivates them day to day. What they really care about is their team’s performance stats.

I’m referring to metrics such as:

• Number of widgets produced per hour
• Number of defects per thousand opportunities
• Number of policy renewals
• Number of new write-ups

In other words, whatever is on their dashboard. That’s what they are ultimately accountable for, so that’s what immediately concerns them.

The business savvy L&D consultant understands this dynamic and uses it to his or her advantage.

He or she appreciates the difference between what the client says they want, and what they really need.

He or she realises the client isn’t invested in the training activity, but rather in the outcome.

He or she doesn’t start with the solution (“How about a team-building workshop?”), but rather with the performance variable (“I see your conversion rate has fallen short of the target over the last 3 months”).

He or she knows that the numbers that really matter don’t necessarily have dollar signs in front of them.