Learning for Organizational Development

How to Design, Deliver and Evaluate Effective L&D

Eileen Arney
Kogan Page, 2017
Also available in: Spanish
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Recommendation
This textbook on organizational development (OD) documents the history of learning and development
(L&D). Eileen Arney, who developed the master’s degree program in human resources for the UK
Open University, highlights the evolution of L&D, including teaching, course design, strategy and
facilitation. She encompasses talent management, employee engagement, strategic HR and self-
directed employee learning. Her manual doesn’t seem targeted as much to experienced OD and L&D
professionals or to those seeking descriptions of L&D processes and techniques. Instead, getAbstract
recommends it as a solid backgrounder for HR students and early-career professionals seeking a
rundown on the basics of OD, L&D and talent management theory and trends, and for practitioners
who want to reflect on trends that could affect their current deployment of L&D strategies.

In this summary, you will learn

 What the changing role of organizational development (OD) and learning and development
(L&D) demands,
 What skills and strategies HR professionals must master, and
 How the worlds of L&D, OD and HR professionals are converging to meet organizational and
individual learning goals.

Take-Aways
 Learning and development (L&D) professionals should work with organizational development
(OD), HR and other leaders to meet their company’s goals.
 They must unite to nurture an inclusive culture of learning, coaching, engagement and respect.
 L&D professionals should know the firm’s business so they can contribute to strategy.
 They need to build critical thinking skills for evaluating trends and making decisions.
 Employees and leaders no longer require much “teaching.” Instead, L&D should facilitate “self-
directed” and “peer learning.”
 To get more from your employees, do more to engage them.
 L&D should assess learning needs, develop plans, and facilitate learning using a wide range of
strategy, tactics and tools.
 Help employees “learn how to learn” and how to reflect on his or her learning.
 Guide leaders in developing individual and team learning skills so they can facilitate learning
among their teams.
 Collect and analyze data to assess and continually improve your learning initiatives.

Summary
New Times, New Needs

Organizations must develop deeper relationships with their most talented people, particularly in today’s
fast-moving, volatile workplace. Learning and development (L&D) professionals must make sure
employees have resources like online learning, peer learning and coaches. They must emphasize quick
skills and knowledge acquisition for immediate performance improvement.

“The primary role of the L&D function is to facilitate the strategic development of the organization
through enhancing and growing the capability of leadership and management.”
Professionals in L&D guide workers in their learning, but generally don’t prescribe training or lead it.
They now spend less time designing courses and running training sessions. Instead, they help leaders,
teams and employees develop their ability to master a more self-directed approach to learning and to
learn independently in the context of the company’s needs. L&D and OD professionals must think
strategically and use behavioral sciences to build a more inclusive learning culture within their
organization, considering how interventions in one place may have a cascading impact across the
organization and beyond.

The Evolution of OD and L&D

For years now, researchers and HR leaders have argued that changing management practices to be
more inclusive and to foster more individual autonomy can engage and motivate employees to achieve
higher performance. Organizational development practitioners can help drive such change in order to
build modern, engaged companies. They contribute to organizational change through L&D by applying
learning techniques that are appropriate at each stage of the change process. For example, OD can spur
greater performance among teams and employees by observing “team dynamics” and assessing
members’ various personality types to gain insight into their roles and contributions.

“Learning and development professionals need well-developed skills in critical thinking so that they
can make judgments about the value of new ideas about learning and development.”

The worlds of L&D, OD and HR professionals are converging. Now a less rigid “dialogic” approach to
OD and L&D emphasizes helping employees, teams and leaders find their own solutions. OD has an
overview of change through the lens of corporate culture, including how people do their jobs and how
corporate values can help or hinder change. Organizational development professionals should work
with line leaders and managers to communicate and socialize change, involving people throughout the
firm in shaping change and gaining buy-in.

New Approaches to Learning

Organizational development now combines with L&D to create a more agile, resilient learning
organization in which people learn how to learn so they can keep up with volatility and the pace of
change. OD and L&D professionals advocate continual learning, now sometimes in the form of “social
learning,” wherein employees learn by working with their colleagues to leverage each other’s
experience and knowledge.

“The culture of the organization, nation, industry and perhaps even function has a fundamental impact
on the effectiveness of leadership or managerial behavior.”

A more open office design facilitates collaborative learning, as does “action learning,” in which
employees form teams to solve problems. New social platforms can connect workers digitally across
geographies to facilitate knowledge sharing. OD and L&D staff can use meetings, workshops,
conferences and communities of practice to bring workers together physically or virtually for social
forms of learning.

Coaching, Mentoring and Facilitating

Learning and development professionals need to understand coaching, mentoring and facilitating.
These tools fit the notion that adults should get support for their learning – along with time to reflect –
rather than just being taught. Mentors share lessons from their experience and form long-term
relationships with their protégés. Coaches perform time-defined interventions and avoid offering advice
or opinion. “Executive coaching” describes having high-level – often external – coaches come in to
work with senior leaders. Everyday coaching means that managers and other leaders guide team
members using feedback, skills development and motivation.

“Workplace culture which affirms the value of all members of the organization can support creativity
and innovation.”

L&D professionals who have facilitation skills can guide informal meetings as well as conduct formal
training. Those who master expert facilitation can add value by helping learners reflect on their
experiences and bringing people together for fruitful discussion. Facilitators care about learners, but
they don’t teach. They support learners, especially in “experiential learning,” self-directed learning and
reflection on such learning.

“Talent is wasted when individuals are barred from making a full contribution for irrelevant reasons.”

Facilitators can make a profound difference when they help learners develop “critical reflection”
capabilities so they can place their learning into the context of their other knowledge and build
connections between new and past learning. This “double-loop” calls for helping learners think about
what they’ve experienced, including how their assumptions and biases affect how they perceive their
experience and what they draw from it. Learning professionals also should build their own critical
thinking skills to evaluate new ideas and techniques better. For instance, facilitators should be able to
watch group dynamics – including unspoken language and moods – to assess and intervene as needed.

Facilitating Learning Sessions

Much of today’s organizational learning happens in facilitated meetings and designated or implicit
learning sessions. Try to set goals and time frames for any learning sessions you facilitate. Speak with
your participants to determine their expectations. Send foundational information ahead of time, and
prepare yourself mentally. In meetings, set the ground rules for participants, share the agenda and use
opening exercises to get people talking. With virtual groups, build engagement by using longer
introductions and explanations.

“In a labor market where highly skilled workers are in short supply, employers are drawing on
marketing techniques to create their own employer brand to attract and retain employees.”

Offer feedback throughout to keep the group within the rules and on task based on the session’s goals.
Agree on post-session steps such as formulating and executing an action plan based on the ideas from
the session and the participants’ commitments to further action. Appropriately trained facilitators might
use assessments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to gauge team members’ personalities and share
them with the group so everyone better understands their colleagues.

Talent Development
One crucial goal for OD and L&D professionals is to help build leaders’ and managers’ leadership
awareness and skills. These professionals must intimately understand their company’s business so they
are equipped to align talent development with its goals. Conversely, they can help drive corporate
strategy through the lens and tools of learning.

“Organizational development is the name given to a body of processes and techniques drawn from the
behavioral sciences and applied to organizations to improve their effectiveness.”

Selecting the right interventions to use to develop your organization’s talent depends, first, on how it
defines talent. Some firms see only leaders and high-potential future leaders as talent worth managing;
others bring most or all of their employees into the mix. Some managers fail to spot talent or potential
talent among their people. And, some HR professionals believe people have innate talents, while others
believe that developing new capabilities demands long practice.

“The purpose of learning and development as practiced in business is essentially to enhance

competitiveness.”

Organizations often construct complex “competency frameworks” to define the talents and skills that
are relevant to their needs. Once your company defines the talent it needs, HR can better manage it
through acquisition, onboarding, engagement initiatives, learning, retention, better deployments and
measurement – all components of the integrated strategic process that falls under the heading “talent
management.” Effective talent management uses aligned and “cascading” goals to make sure that
people work toward the right achievements and receive rewards and performance assessments when
they reach their goals. Managers should work with L&D to assess employees’ progress and to assess
their skills and competencies so they can identify areas for additional learning.

“Evaluation can assess how efficient and effective learning and development has been as well as
supporting evidence-based choice for new programs and interventions.”

One component of talent management – succession planning – involves identifying and preparing
people for senior positions. It includes developing extra-contractual relationships with employees,
including the connections, respect, trust and autonomy that lead to engagement, “discretionary effort,”
higher performance and eventual advancement. Talent management also means designing an inclusive
workplace in which people receive respect and fair treatment.

Learning Needs

Companies must identify their organizational and individual learning needs. To discover organizational
needs, L&D must compare the competencies the company needs with those on hand and develop plans
to close the gaps. For individuals, focus on the gap between their current skills and the ideal skills they
need to do their jobs. Various tools, such as formal assessments and tests and 360-degree feedback, can
help HR determine the need for both organizational and individual learning. Professionals can draw on
a variety of resources – such as technology, coaching and experiential learning – to build formal
training programs, peer learning and communities of practice. L&D includes the fast-growing world of
online learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering nearly unlimited learning.

Leader Development
Define leadership internally, and then design and develop initiatives and measures around it. In
defining leaders, consider every activity that calls for thinking about the firm’s overall direction and
strategy. In defining managers and their roles, look into the structure of positions that call for
supervising other people as they execute complex tasks in a coordinated manner.

“There is still a place for a structured approach to training…but this is very much the smallest part now
of the work of learning and development professionals.”

Use carefully chosen experiential learning to identify and develop promising managers for leadership
roles. Great leaders tend to emerge according to the situations they face. They aren’t necessarily
smarter than everyone else and they may not have consistent or predictable traits. In fact, they’ll come
in all types. You may face barriers that hinder what your HR efforts can do in leadership development.
For example, the misplaced notion that leaders are “born, not made” – though rarely admitted –
pervades many firms.

“Learning has to be, most of the time, the responsibility of the learner, with the learning and
development practitioner providing support.”

L&D can play a broader and more involved role in leadership development in organizations that
conscientiously foster future leaders. For example, the most common style of leadership involves
leaders who pursue one-to-one relationships with their subordinates. Unfortunately, these leaders often
fall into the “leader-member exchange” trap. They – with awareness or not – tend to assess staffers and
classify them into favored and disfavored groups. This tends to generate higher performance in those
who get more attention, but to lead to lower results in the group that is out of favor. L&D should help
leaders appreciate the differences among their subordinates and help them leverage those differences to
build better relationships and higher productivity for everyone.

“There is an increased emphasis on individuals’ responsibility for managing their own learning and
recognition of the personalized nature of the knowledge and understanding needed in different
contexts.”

Generally, leaders fall into one of two camps. The traditional camp pursues a “transactional”
command-and-control relationship with employees, but the modern leader uses a “transformational”
approach that seeks engagement and commitment. That approach leads to far better results. L&D
should teach transactional leaders the benefits of modern talent management and of strong, trusting,
social relationships. Help leaders develop a range of self-directed learning skills including the use of
online resources, job rotations and stretch assignments.

Measuring the Impact of Learning

When you set out to evaluate your learning program’s effectiveness and impact, decide which metrics
to use. Identify the goals of the evaluation. Outline the data and information you’ll need and how you’ll
collect it. For example, will you use benchmark data or data from surveys, interviews and focus
groups? Decide who should join your evaluation team.

“The extent to which learning can be drawn from reflection depends on the level of reflection the
learner is able to achieve.”
Your evaluation should test your learning program’s alignments with your organization’s values,
culture and strategy. Assess whether HR’s specific interventions have led to teams and individuals
learning new skills – and the correct skills – and to whether the returns from those initiatives outweigh
the costs. Evaluate each program based on whether learning took place and if learners are satisfied.
Examine the business impact of the learning you’ve facilitated. Compare the results of pre-and post-
program tests. Assess if and how learning changed behavior and performance. Much of the value of
learning remains intangible. If you quantify some benefits, you can accept the others on faith.

About the Author

Eileen Arney is the teaching director of masters programs at the United Kingdom’s Open University
Business School. She is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), has
taught level-7 CIPD programs and is an executive coach.