L&D Is Your Secret Weapon

These are tough times for businesses, leaders, and humans. The skyrocketing unemployment and economic downturn translate to reduced workforces and budgets, which has the potential to extend talent to the breaking point. Historically, leaders tend to cut learning and development (L&D) budgets and redirect funds to sales and operations. Decisions like these leave organizations exposed. When you choose not to invest in the people who drive your business day in and out—your greatest asset——they not only suffer the consequences, but errors increase, customer service and positive experiences fly out the window, profits diminish, and your teams recognize and remember who you were and how you behaved during the darkest times. Leaders who choose this path will witness their brand’s demise and the mass exodus of talent once the economy rebounds.
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It’s not an either-or situation. You can realign your budgets to sales and operations and L&D without breaking the bank. When you reframe your view of L&D as a cost center to a profit center that is necessary to support sales, operations, and other vital departments, you reap the rewards of the investment exponentially. Your team members can access the information, knowledge, and skills development they need to work and compete effectively in the new normal. They feel validated and supported in a learning culture that is responsive to and sustains them. They engage at their best, and you retain them and their legacy knowledge long after the crisis has abated. In short, L&D is your secret weapon, and we’re here to help you fortify and deliver on that commitment to your valued people.

Solutions Arts to the Rescue

Many organizations are up to their eyeballs putting out fires, figuring out their next steps, juggling priorities, and inventing new ways to do business. You might see yourself and your organization in one of these descriptors. And much of what we’ve been saying in our recent blog series may have spoken directly to you. We hope you found it beneficial for yourself, your teams, and your organization. If you’ve applied some of the techniques we’ve discussed and you feel that you and/or your team members may benefit from more targeted, specific training, please connect with us. We’d be happy to listen and offer solutions for your unique needs and circumstances.
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When we first set out to create our recent blog series focused on supporting and developing managers, we wanted to provide steps they could take immediately to tackle the daily onslaught of the unexpected. We knew managers would be strapped with competing priorities and might be struggling to best serve the needs of their organization, teams, and themselves. We asked people where they were struggling the most and then responded with nine articles covering the following recurring themes of how to:

• Communicate clear updates to policies, procedures, and moving forward
• Address new challenges and overcome them concerning shifting to work from home or a hybrid model to including how to instill culture, manage remote teams, and celebrate and evaluate results rather than hours clocked
• Recognize mental health issues inherent in the current crisis and strengthen and consistently demonstrate emotional intelligence
• Transform and deliver effective feedback that teams welcome and value
• Present information in the Zoom era while retaining and engaging the target audience 
• Embrace the power of vulnerability 

From now to the end of the year, we’re shifting our focus to the next set of challenges confronting leadership. Leaders and teams still face an uncertain future that stretches their ability to remain agile. Our roadmap moving forward encompasses and concentrates on strategy as well as skills development and intertwining the two:

• Executing strategies and embracing contingencies without going overboard
• Sustaining agility and change management
• Fortifying resilience through brain-based learning
• Encouraging innovation, and
• Dismantling outdated diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and replacing them with real action and subsequent results

We invite you to visit our website each month to read about these topics, gain insight, acquire some new skills and deepen existing ones, and listen in on some great interviews with experts in these areas. And, if you have a topic in mind that you’d like us to cover, drop us an email and let us know.