15 questions to help guide Learning & Performance strategy

Over the last several years, as I’ve moved from individual contributor to manager and director-level roles, I’ve had to think more strategically about what learning and performance mean in the context of overall organizational growth. These ideas have been forged in the last five years in late-stage, high growth startups. In these companies, L & P strategy is often an afterthought, or “something that HR does.”

The following is a condensed list of my strategic planning questions:

1. What would a 1% increase in Sales productivity (or customer retention) mean to your bottom line? 2%? 5%?
2. Do you know whether your investment in learning is paying off? How do you (or would you) know?
3. What’s the best way to invest your limited L & P budget?
4. How do you measure the 90% of learning that happens outside formal e-Learning, virtual and classroom events?
5. How are you embedding learning into individual work streams?
6. Are you asking the right questions in your course evaluation surveys?
7. What is the shelf-life of your e-Learning content? How are you updating and maintaining it?
8. Do you have a learning content governance model? What is the value-add of quick access to accurate content?
9. Do you have a job-role competency model? Is it used across recruitment, talent management, performance and learning systems?
10. Which stages of ADDIE do you skip or gloss over?
11. What are your top performers doing better, differently, more of or less of than average performers?
12. Do you use proficiency levels and rubrics to guide both assessment and development of individuals?
13. How is performance improvement built into your organization’s day to day work?
14. How are you leveraging your learning resources for content marketing?
15. How is your L & P strategy aligned with overall company goals and objectives?
16. Is training part of your product development, go to market and commercialization planning?

In following posts I’ll tackle some of these questions in more depth, to get at the critical considerations for each and their relationship and cross-dependencies.