There may be stormy times ahead making it more important than ever for learning leaders to get close to the business. Nigel Paine passes on some golden advice on how to make L&D more relevant than ever for businesses battling for their survival.

In a week when Lehman Brothers bit the dust, and Merryl Lynch put itself up for sale at a fraction of its market value, it is hard to argue that everything is rosy on the corporate front line.

I would not like to be the learning leader at Merryl's asking the CEO if it is business as usual for learning. Those pleas for mercy may fall on deaf ears! But for most of us it is not quite so dramatic or traumatic. The environment has got tougher, budgets are tight and an expansionist view of the world does not seem quite so appropriate.

"At this time, a learning leader has to move fast into a new kind of role if he or she is not already there. Make that work in tough times, and you will be well positioned for the upturn and beyond."

Big new ideas do not receive the ready reception they once did and the watch word has become caution. And 'soft costs' are being hacked at. At this time, a learning leader has to move fast into a new kind of role if he or she is not already there. Make that work in tough times, and you will be well positioned for the upturn and beyond.

Here are five critical behaviours that will make life easier for you and your team, and change the relationship between learning and the organisation you work for. It will take you on a trajectory that you would want to move along anyway, but there is an added incentive to get this right, quickly.

The first is: talk the language of business. If you don't already, then now is the time to start. Everything you do should be related to the overall business targets and objectives. If they change so do you. Plunging on regardless will make learning look disconnected and a 'soft' cost that can be safely cut.

Change your approach: get away from how many people will participate and define what quantifiable value you will add. Do not register enjoyment but register impact. In changing times, change what you say, but also what you do. A bank's learning leader switched the main focus of the learning programmes to a range of support strategies to help managers break bad news. They concentrated upon managing decreasing expectations and dealing with redundancy and loss of resources. Coaching opportunities were dramatically increased, induction programmes and compliance training cut back. All the new opportunities were managed within the existing budget with a promise of efficiency gains to come.

The general view was that the learning operation had made a significant contribution to easing the transition for the company.

It is always a good idea to offer up some budget sacrifices rather than fight the inevitable by fair means or foul. The faster you do this, the more kudos you get and the more you look like a team player; an insider. If you prioritise your programmes by business impact, you can let someone else draw the line for you. The money is saved but opportunities are lost, that is a bigger call than, perhaps, you should make on your own. The emphasis should be on cash saved against benefits lost and some of those benefits will be vital but intangible ones like continuing staff good will; maintaining optimum performance; creating a sense of resilience about the place.

When CISCO had to lose almost half its staff during the dot.com bust, the CEO, John Chambers, actually increased the learning budget. His logic was that the remaining staff had to pull CISCO back to profitability and market confidence and therefore he had to invest in them to make sure that they believed in CISCO and had the best possible advantage when they went into the marketplace. It was partly about increasing knowledge and skills and partly about galvanising his diminished workforce to perform better.

When an organisation is realigning its business strategies, no learning operation should be pulling out its old plan and drawing red lines through parts of it. The realignment requires a new engagement and if that is made a team process it helps everyone see what the future might hold, and feel that their contribution is relevant and valued.
When a government department started to absorb a range of functions that had been handled elsewhere, the chief learning officer presented the executive board with a totally new approach to learning, focussing on getting the new organisation functioning as a single unit in the fastest possible time. This unprompted activity brought the learning operation on the inside of change rather than being its victim. Alter what you do in the light of where you now find yourself.

Ironically this is the very time to get close to the business. Working along side teams under pressure, understanding what it is like at the sharp end of change, and getting a clear understanding of what is important, and where the needs and opportunities lie, is at the heart of a successful learning team. When everyone else is building the barricades, the networker stands out.

Really start to motor on evaluating the business impact of everything you do. If you can quantify that in bottom line terms so much the better, but the fact that this is complex does not mean you should be avoiding a wide view. It may be about skills or competence, and you may be able to work out the cost of non-compliance or failure; but it could equally be about attitude, encouragement and sharing of insights and knowledge. A report that defines the impact helps define the role of learning, and illustrates that it can add value when times are good, and when times are bad.

If you move forward on all five fronts, the most difficult group to take with you can often be your own team. They need to understand clearly what your strategy is and you need to get them on your side. If you talk the right language and convince the right people and your team is clearly not playing ball, you might as well as not have bothered. Everything you say and do needs to be backed in depth by the rest of the team who will have a lot of new work to do. They are the proof of the pudding. All of this may not save your budget, but you will get a huge amount out of the process.
Good luck!

Nigel Paine is a former head of training and development at the BBC and now runs his own company, Nigel Paine.Com which focuses on people, learning and technology. For more information visit his website at www.nigelpaine.com

Read his Spotlight

Please note, this article was first published in September 2008.