Businesses are transforming. People across the enterprise need to change their behavior. Execution needs to happen in the trenches. Wasteful spending needs to stop. Learning leaders see how these maxims play out in their organizations, and as a result, they have to adapt to the internal forces at play within their organization and engage their team to adapt and rally to drive the business forward.
Since the economy reset itself five years ago, many roles within the organization have changed. For example, salespeople have to sell higher. Marketers need to become more relevant to buyers. IT leaders need to provide higher levels of service to the business leaders they support, and finance is looking for more visibility into day-to-day activities.
The question is, how has the role of learning leader changed?
I have a lot of discussions with learning leaders at the director level and above. Across a variety of different industries, these learning leaders are working hard to turn information into actionable knowledge. While some are focused on driving efficiency and costs out of the learning function, others are focused on providing more valuable services to the front line. A handful of leaders are building truly adaptive learning functions that help their CEOs bridge the gap between strategy and execution.
For the most part, learning leaders are falling into two camps as they cope with complexity and respond to changes in their market and organization. They’re either evolving into firelighters or they are becoming firefighters (see the table below). The question is, which are you?
