Role of CEO in Learning & Development

Here is a question to all CEOs. What is your level of involvement and contribution to defining the direction and goals for the Learning and Development in your Organization?

While being part of Pragati Leadership for the last six years, I have encountered very few instances where I saw active on-going involvement from Top Management in the L&D direction and prioritization.

L&D, like any other function / initiative in an Organization needs to be aligned with the Business Goals. Typically for a business enterprise, the business goals are linked to Business Growth (Topline, Bottom-line, Market share…), Customer satisfaction and People Motivation. There may be several additional goals that are enabling goals for the primary business goals.

It is important to drive the L&D initiatives that will directly or indirectly contribute to the achievement of the above three primary areas or the enabling areas. Carrying out L&D initiatives without such conscious and visible correlation is not worth investing in.

If I were to map the business goals to L&D programs, I would think of the following areas:

The above mapping is not exhaustive and is only aimed at triggering your thought process in this direction. We can also extend the idea by adding an expected outcome for each of the programs. For example, the outcome from Negotiation Skills program could be – To provide tools and techniques to Sales and Procurement teams to get more profitable deals for the Organization. If an Organization has such a clear mapping, the Leadership is clear and confident that the L&D investments are worthwhile and are directly contributing to business success.

I will be extremely happy to receive your thoughts on this subject.