458 — What do you bench(mark)?

Hello and welcome to the 9 Tools L&D podcast, a weekly show about work, performance and learning. I'm Ross Dickey and this week we're diving into L&D maturity models, what they are and why they're useful. Here I'm happy to do that and join by Anna Barnett. Hello Anna. Hello Ross. And return guest David James, Chief Learning Officer at 360 Learning and host of the Learning and Devonment podcast. Welcome back David. Thanks Ross, it's pleasure to be back. It's good to have you with us. David, you recently released the L&D maturity model. Can you get us started by explaining what the model is and what led you to develop it? Yeah, sure. So the maturity model, like any maturity model helps those who are using it to benchmark themselves against their peers, against some standard sets of metrics that doesn't just tell them nicely where they are. You are here, but what they are able to achieve there, but also that vision of what you'd be able to achieve, where you to progress in maturity, which is the entire aim for it. So the idea was kind of just to put that stake in the ground for the times that we're in now in learning development because I'm sure you talk about it every week. It's a tumultuous time, not just in learning development, but not just in business, but the world in general. And I think that the L&D maturity probably means in practical terms, something different to what it has done before. I think that there are a great deal more expectations on not just us as professional, as learning and professionals, but on professionals in general as functions in general. And so, so L&D maturity on what we seek to define that as and achieve with it, I think he's a really important topic for us to explore as a profession. Lovely. Obviously there are other maturity models over there, so to the learning performance benchmark from my tools. What made you decide that L&D needed another one? You've kind of answered this a little bit, but the am curious on what I guess where you see the L&D maturity model fitting in the field. And so, what did you think of the L&D maturity model fitting into the sort of product landscape? I suppose that there are two sides of this campus and their roster. There are going to be those who have been knocking around in L&D for a long time, saying, "Oh my goodness, not another maturity model." And there will be others who are looking for the answers to their questions. And I think like all of us who develop these is with the best of intentions. And I think that is to help this define group of people that we come in contact with, trying to do certain things to help to nudge them along. And I think that again, like a lot of people, we saw a gap in the market, whether that's an actual gap or a perceived gap, is a completely different matter. Because I think I saw, I put a post out last year, as I started to begin this process. And I said something like in this post, as a mature profession, it's funny that we don't have a maturity model. It was the, honestly, it was the stupidest thing I've ever written on the L&D because everybody told me that there was, and shared a link to their own. And I mean there were hundreds. But the thing is, it's not. So I think that it's useful to acknowledge that every time anybody does this with any amount of due diligence, you're standing on the shoulders of giants. There's a lot of great work out there. And I think that what we're all trying to do is to recognize current levels of maturity and move things forward. And if you're moving things forward, then there's a lot of good going out into the world there. What the gap I was particularly looking for, being an L&D practitioner for 25 years, running L&D functions, and navigating this way on my own. And mainly because a lot of the time, maturity models behind paywalls back in the day when I was running L&D functions, I wanted to just stick something out into the world that was totally free, that we did all the work for you. You just needed to check your current status. And then we would give you both the insights and the path forward. So it was kind of a lower the barrier, give it away for free, but based on the practical reality. So it started off with my insights, my experience. I was working with one member of my team who was getting insights from me and a couple of other folks who were running L&D departments at the time. And she, I don't know, I'm checking, a Genevieve. She was then cadencing this down. As you know now, Ross, and you're fighting out now, Anna, getting a succinct response from me is really hard. So she was distilling this down to its very essence, which was unbelievably brilliant. And then it was just about taking that out to other people who are running L&D departments now and saying, "It does this reflect your reality." And I'm delighted to say that the more than a handful of people said, "Were you spying on me?" "You got a camera in my office right now because it was based on the actual reality of what it means to run an L&D function." And also, acknowledging and recognizing those pervasive forces that keep us where we are when we all want to move forward or try something different, but that keep us in check for wrong more than right. So that was the gap that I saw in the market there. But in no way will we think that this that indicates any other maturity model, it just came from that angle. Succeed tensors don't make fake podcasts anyway. So this is why you have a podcast there. You're a stupid eights. I guess one of the values of all of the L&D maturity models, I guess, is that just I think by the nature of the work that we do, working in organizational learning, it's often quite difficult to guess sense of where you sit relative to your peers. You can talk to them in communities of practice and networking events and that sort of thing, but you can't necessarily talk about the specific work that you're doing because this sensitive information. So you've got this general sense that I think we're quite good. Maybe, but are we? And so I think that's one of the benefits of doing while the L&D maturity model, like from each benchmark, is that it gives you a sense of some way of measuring where do I sit relative to my peers? And I don't think it's always comfortable either to ask some of the difficult questions to sort of, you know, we don't want to reveal that we're doing something not so great in our business. And you also doing that because that's not a nice thing to have to admit sometimes, but those are the things that you actually really want to understand. So yes, you can talk to peers and you can have, you know, join communities and have those sort of conversations. I think it's a little bit daunting. Sometimes it's nice to just look at your data, maybe compare to somebody else's and say, oh, actually, we're quite similar or perhaps we're not so similar, but what are they doing that is making the difference? And how can I replicate that or do something similar in our business? Yeah, completely. Yeah, for sure. So what are the different levels of the L&D maturity model at a fairly high level? It's difficult for you to describe it on a podcast. Podcasts are a bit of an optimal format for like describing something that on your website is quite visual, but if you could kind of talk through a succinct level. Yeah, thanks for the prompt there. I'll do it succinctly as a can. So there are five levels and what we tried to do is reflect the language that L&D people use themselves. So the first level is reactive and everybody will understand reactive because that's where there is no L&D infrastructure and requests will come. Have you got something on this? I've got a team who want to do a training course on this and really it's just a hamster wheel. And when you're in reactive mode and you're just absorbing all of these requests, you dream of being proactive and that's your navana that you'll have a shop front that everybody knows where to go. It might be branded with your with your organization's logo and and have some endless libraries of content. And so when you have that, it feels great to begin with and that is the expected requested version of learning and development right there. It is a platform, feel full of content and programs that people go to and stakeholders don't want anything else. The only problem with that and that's level two and the only problem with that really is that there is absolutely no way of demonstrating any impact beyond anecdata. So then come the questions, does this work? Is this worth the money? So we seek to impact the way we do that is do to do bespoke learning initiatives for parts of our organizations or in anticipation of different stages our employees are at. So this is the third level, which is impacted. That's where we get our tentacles into the business. We develop learning content and programs to meet those needs, but we're still responding to the to largely individuals and requests at that time and our strategy is to provide learning. But the fourth stage of the maturity model is the complete pivot point. So whilst we have all of that stuff and the tentacles being into the business have given us a profile as a leverage with influential stakeholders. utilize that leverage to align to what you're going to do. trying to do. So our strategy isn't to provide learning anymore, although we do do it. Our strategy is to line a line L&D or the possibilities of developing people to what the organizations trying to do, answering the question, how can developing our people help us with X, Y, or Z? A good example of that could be AI. It's kind of on everybody's roadmap right now, and it doesn't take a genius to work out. How can develop our people in AI help our organization to achieve X? So we are speaking the language of our organization and utilizing our expertise in order to drive the business forward, but you can't do any of that unless you've done the stuff before. Believe me, I've tried. And then the final stage is transformative, which is you're no longer in anticipation or responding to what the organization is trying to do. You're driving that. So with the skills-based learning approach, your organization is mapped with dynamic role profiles. People are assessed. They've got their own individual learning parts, which are designed to close and address distinct and specific proficiency gaps in their performance, as well as the organization's emerging skills gaps. And so you can see that L&D is an engine driving the business forward. And as you can anticipate, not many people are there. And you kind of alluded to this. When you're saying you can't do a lot of the stuff that you would do at level four, if you've not gone through the levels previously, presumably as because you haven't got buy-in to be strategic. And I actually the business doesn't see you as that strategic partner. And so you don't have the kind of agency to take that sort of approach for you're thinking, okay, where do our people sit in relation to AI? What are the kind of key skills gaps around AI? And then L&D being a driver of that transformation rather than that request coming from somewhere else in the business, which is what we see quite a lot of, which is they owe any training on AI. And then L&D fulfills their order. That's right. Yeah, so you just imagined you've got your shop front, you've got your brand's bank, your new platform. As I said, it's all branded, it's filled full of content. And everybody knows you as the place where you go for training requests. Imagine sitting down with the CFO, who's just asked you for a bit of time while he tells you what training you've done. And you say, what business problems are you trying to solve with this? And honestly, it's laughable. I mean, what in what way do you think that that is the natural progression? It really isn't. You have to earn the right in order to have that conversation. You do that over time by speaking the language of the business, by listening more than more than talking, by forging the opportunities to be there when somebody's keenly experiencing pain as a department, as a, and the more influential that leader is the, then the better, so that you can earn your stripes, you can prove that you are worthy of having those types of conversations. And those people that you've delivered in Pat 4 are willing to be your sponsors to open more doors for you. Now, I did this a Disney over the period of eight years. And so when you are in the business and you are able to build that portfolio and that, and you can build that energy around you and your team, then it's not a surprise when, when you're asked for training and they look at you and they say, you're not going to let me get away with that. Are you going to say, no, I'm not. Shall I continue my questions? And then you, because, and then you're a force of nature. You have to be, you have to relentlessly push back against this expected and requested version all at this time. And then the, and the only way to stop that is by putting in governance, which again, is a, is a, is a, is a much higher level maturity initiative or, or, or activity than it is lesser. I mean, what, what are you governing down and proactive? Like really? Like, you, like, how do you go up the more guardrails you need to put around making sure that that things run in as efficient and consistent way as possible and a way that brings the organization along with you, because too, too often, and you will have seen this as well is that you have a force of nature head of L&D who leaves the organization and they revert right back to the expected and requested version, tumbling down the steps of maturity, almost to the bottom, because that's what the organization feels really comfortable in engaging in both as leaders asking for development and employees, then attending programs or passively consuming content. We are working with an organization at the moment and we do have our learning performance benchmark that Ross has mentioned and that has been, it's been in existence in about 2003. So it was set up a really long time ago, well before I was here. However, we've continued working on it because we collected so much data in that time that we've looked at, you know, all sorts of behaviors and how they contribute to outcomes and what that looks like in businesses. And over time, we've refined ourselves a model that very similar to yours, David, you know, and that's right because we're singing from the same Himchie, which is absolutely right. Looking at all the rights, all sorts of behaviors and all the areas and all the things that, yeah, essentially have the desired levels of impact that businesses want. And obviously over time, there's some changes as, you know, the world moves on. The business that we're working with at the moment has quite an interesting problem and it's not so much that, well, they came to us, not sure whether they have a problem with impact measurement or if they have a problem with strategic and business alignment. And so they work with us to try and unpack this, they go through the benchmark, they actually put, they're a massive organization, so they put through more than 60 learning and development leaders across the globe through our benchmarks, a huge amount of data, which is great. And we were able to look at them in comparison to other organizations to understand actually where the problem is. But we didn't only collect data from them, so we also collected data from their business leaders because we realise, of course, this is one of the, I guess, the concerns about collecting the self-reported data is that you only get one perspective. And so by opening that up a little bit, you can sometimes find what the real problems are. And this example really revealed it. So essentially, they thought they weren't doing a very good job of measuring impact and they weren't having that strategic impact that they wanted to have. The problem they actually have is all to do visibility. So they were actually excellent at collecting the right sorts of data, looking in the right places, measuring KPIs, doing all the things that they should be doing, well above how other organizations are performing at that level. So they're top performing and they're better than other top performers. And what were you found when we spoke to business leaders? Was that actually the business leaders had no idea this was going on? They weren't seeing it. It wasn't being visible enough for them to realise that this was a thing. So they didn't respect the L&D team in the way they should or have that level of relationship on that strategic level because they didn't know that these things were happening. And actually when you then break it down to some really like sort of easy practical types of behaviours that allows L&D teams to do this better, you can kind of actually say it's not that difficult. You could actually improve things quite considerably by just focusing on like a few key areas, like having some internal case studies of where impact is being demonstrated and having real voices of people where they've been touch or felt by, you know, a level of learning actually reveals to the business internally and we supported organizations on doing that as well. But it was just really interesting because I thought it was, they came to us very sure that their problem was something much greater, you know, something that's going to take a really long time to fix. And actually just by collecting that little X-Layer data and looking at it in parallel, we realised no, you've not got as big a problem as you think you've got. We've got something that we can help support. So I just signed it fast now when you're looking at data sometimes it's more revealing having this like the benchmark on its side because it allows you to that chance to say, you know, or challenge even, you know, these misconceptions sometimes. I love that because there's so much commonality in that. You see across the board and again, Ross, you would have seen this over the years as well, that the L&D pride themselves on doing a good job. And then when you see that the impact, you shout only so far, what you're talking about there, Anna, is about controlling the narrative. So L&D people feel almost shy about shouting to the world and maybe inferior because they're influential business people that they've got to shout these two. So maybe there's some kind of peck in order. But if you don't join the dots, as you're saying there, that you can't grow your influence so you can't get neither the credit or the resources continue to do the good work. So it's not about being brazen. It's about controlling the narrative for the greater ends of the profession of you represented the profession in your organization. But it's just so not spoken about quite often. We talk about it in hours around L&D strategy and leadership perception that if you don't just develop your strategy in isolation, but you build that in conjunction with your leaders, then you're able to share it at the beginning, get them, then they're important to refine it. So you say, this is what we're going to work on. You use the opportunities to go back to them and say, this is what we say we're going to work on and this is the progress. And at the end of it, when you've achieved what you've wanted to or you've made significant progress, you go back again. You say, this is what we say we were going to do. This is what we've done last time. And this is where we're going. But you're not shouting about that for some kind of, to serve your ego, that is a key role of any leader to gain influence and control via control in the narrative. That's a great example, Anna. Yeah, I think it's also good to be brave when things go wrong as well. you haven't had the level of impact in your data actually showing that things haven't worked how you expected them to because actually from a business leader perspective they'll listen to that. That'll be quite insight, you know, you'd be quite proud of someone to have the confidence to come to you and say, you know what, that thing that we spent all that money on and that thing that we thought was going to go really, really well actually didn't have the outcome that we wanted to, but this is what we can do to change it because we understand the data and we've collected the data when we can now make changes that are going to have the impact. I just think that then is another avenue that kind of allows business leaders to say, okay, clearly they know what they're doing, they have a grasp on this and they have an understanding that gives them confidence in you as a team and isn't as a leader as well. Yeah, you need to be super brave to do that, but I think I think it's also interesting in the example you're describing it, it's as if there may be at the end David's model strategic-ish level, maybe even they see the order, they would be kind of transformative, but the business doesn't see them in that way because they're not asking for that impact data. It sounds like they have impact data, but the business isn't really expecting it from them, but maybe actually the business is just expecting them to deliver training and what they're looking at is our spend and, you know, of course, is completed or course is developed and that's her thing. So you need to get that, I mean, this is what L&D is always talking about, this is the seat of the table, you know, it's the Deweyk Center, L&D involved in these conversations or in driving business transformation. If someone's listening to this and they're maybe more likely at level one or level two, so the reactive or proactive, probably some of the like kind of small things that they can do to start moving up the levels and building that credibility within their organization. So it's relationships and visibility, those are the absolute key because what I mentioned before pro-activacy is expected and requested, it's still really low, but you've really got a shop front and you're leaning heavily on having a comprehensive suite of solutions, but you've got to admit to yourself that that is a very, very limited as well as low level maturity, L&D model, and the vision has got to be that you've got to grow your influence in order to leverage that influence in order to align later, but that middle part is doing work for influential leaders where you have an opportunity to show what you can do to push them for impact and then change the conversation. So you will still be delivering learn, you might be delivering a sales academy to the revenue teams, you might be doing a customer service program for the customer services teams, you might be doing some AI awareness training for some broader teams. So he's still providing learning without really being able to draw a line between that spend and ROI or impact, but at least you're in there and then when you're there, you build those relationships by asking them how he's business, don't tell them about learning. If you're talking about learning, you're missing the biggest opportunity you will ever have to learn about what's keeping them up at night. So my tip would be speak to them only about business and when they say to you what the problem is, see whether you can fix that without translating that into a topic that you're familiar with. So that's how you do that. You've got to realize you need time in the game to do this. This might take you two years to spread enough influence via those relationships for you then to say to them at some point can I show you my L&D strategy? I think you'll be interested because it aligns with what you're trying to achieve. Now two years after talking to them and having a bit of banter and rapport around what they're trying to achieve is a logical next step. So you've always, as you've got to have your mind, your eye on, I'm going to present to them one day an aligned L&D strategy. It will also always help if it's via the HR strategy. So if the HR strategy says we are going to help the organization to achieve X by and there's a line that says by developing people we are going to, this is what we're going to achieve. But in the absence of that you've got to go that alone. Then the relationships you need to foster for that are with the HR business partners to give you the access to invite you in in the first place to be your advocates when you're not in the room. The steam through each leader, their first team as well. So they're saying good things about you and what you, how you work and what you deliver for them when you're not in the room as well. And as well as then the support around you. And you've got to create that firm balance between being available and trustworthy and being valuable and impactful. And there's sometimes you win that and sometimes you won't. Sometimes strategically and for the sake of the long game you'll get drawn into something that you and your team shouldn't have because it won't lead to enough value but it might be a stepping stone to to great the things via the influence that you've gained as a result. So it's too and fro but you've got to play the long game. And the biggest thing I think the learning and development don't see or the opportunity they miss is seeing that every stage of maturity is significantly different from the other. And if you're just trying to make what you're doing better, you're probably not going to a strong enough vision for yourself and your team that's going to drive you forward. Yeah, just when you were speaking there, or maybe we had JD Dylan on the podcast, well we had him on recently, but also I had him on last year and for another Disney alum. He had this point about it's kind of what you were saying. It's like if you are the lower level and you don't have that reputation for delivering impact or as a strategic partner, it's fulfilling that order to build trust because you need the stakeholders in the business to know that you're on their side and you're going to deliver for them so that they meet the expectations they've been selling them. But also around that finding a lot of opportunities to experiment and do the thing that you think and it's not going to cost you a lot or take you a lot of extra time, but maybe if they insist that it's got to be a course and it's got to have this all this language and it also maybe do like a nice little sort of like performance support resource that can people can have afterwards or you know a checklist or something that then gradually over time starts to deliver kind of more impact or is more sort of performance focused and then it takes a while, but you sort of slowly start to position yourself as that kind of people start thinking, oh actually we want kind of more of this because this was really useful. JD News, what does everybody's talking about there? But that last phrase that you said there is the key to it all, when your stakeholder presents something back as their idea that you presented to in the first place, that's where you win. That's where they have to let go of the ego. Love it when you say we could do all of that, but we're just we're just that this part here, just trust me, I think this will work and they come back to you to say as you just said there, we should do more of this stuff. You don't go that's what I said. I told you. Great idea. And then you see that as a win because you know what that is, that influence. And we've got to see that we earned that influence and that influence manifest is them saying to us what we shared to them in the first place and then you walk away going yes next. Right, so no bruise de goes nothing just that influence. Yeah, 100%. Great. I think that's a good place to wrap up. David, where can people find out more about the work that you do and the on-dematurity model? So the on-dematurity model, they'll find on the the 360 learning website at 360Learning.com/materity-model. They will also find me on LinkedIn as well as on Azure, where you kindly mentioned earlier Ross the learning and development podcast. Lovely. We'll put some likes in the show notes as well, because we like to dive through the show notes. Okay, so move on now to a regular feature while they're in this week where each year or something we picked up over the past seven days Anna, you got to get us started. I am unsurprisingly going to talk a little bit about my recent holiday. So I've just returned from the Dolomites in Italy. We had two weeks of walking which were absolutely magical. And yeah, the thing that I learned was actually about via forators. So are you guys familiar with via forators? Some sort of some sort of path or street. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, I don't know if for us, it means. Well, essentially in the Dolomites they have these incredible sort of really massive rock structures that come out of the grounds. They're mountains, but they're so unusual and jagged and very difficult to climb. And so they actually have all of these kind of metal poles, spikes, railings, things that you can clip on to help you kind of navigate them. So it's like almost the step between walking, scrambling and then like rock climbing. It's kind of somewhere in the middle of all those things. And there are various of levels that you can do. So when you go out for these walks, you can, you know, go from one that's quite easy where you don't really need to clip on. You can just hold on to like a railing or you can go to the more advanced stuff where you're kind of cleaning on, you know, a face for dear life. And so we did various levels of these and it was a lot of fun. But what I didn't realise was actually that they were put in during World War One. So we went on a walk and as we were wandering through, we ended up fending ourselves in World War One trenches, which was incredible, right? The foot. of these amazing mountains. And you could see all the original sort of little hideouts, the little caves they'd built in the actual dolomites themselves. It was fantastic. However, I was obviously googling and interested. So it turns out that all of these original metal poles and hooks and handles and all the rest of it actually came from World War I where they troops would use them to navigate and get around and carry equipment from one place to the other without having to use the valleys themselves and therefore risk being attacked. They were just sort of nimbly wander across. I haven't yet found a figure on how many died during that because I suspect that when you see them, some of them you think, my goodness, how would you ever carry anything along the face on a little metal pole? But it was so interesting. I just had no idea. I just assumed because the dolomites are such popular walk in place now that people have put them in relatively recently to aid walkers. But actually they have this amazing history that dates all the way back to the war. So yeah, if I was really cool, so how's that? That's cool. Very good. David, what did you learn this week? So I learned this week that caterpillars don't transform. They dissolve. Did you know that? So I found some caterpillars underneath my radish leaves. And that's a completely different story. Maybe invite me on to the podcast. They're talking to you all about these. But it led me down a rabbit path of trying to figure out, I mean, who doesn't love a butterfly? So I found out that when a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it doesn't just grow wings. It completely digests itself. So enzymes break down its tissues into a soup, literally, a caterpillar smoothie. Almost all of what it made at a caterpillar dissolves. But here's the twist. Inside the soup are, I think, for anybody who knows the, the say, the, had to pronounce this, I apologize, imaginal discs, tiny classes of cells that had always been there, dormant, waiting for the right moment to activate. These discs contain the blueprint for wings and tan-eye eyes, everything needed to become a butterfly. Wow. Very cool. That is amazing. Post-art of myself was an imaginal disc just winked at my moment. My word in this week is AI-related, boo, AI. I was in Chicago recently visiting my wife's family. As I've mentioned on the podcast, we have a young son. My cousin's husband is a big fan of rap music. And he came up with a nickname, Little Dribs, for our son, which I thought was really interesting. And I was joking, next time we're here, you need to come up with a full rap. And then I thought, well, actually, let's see what Chech-GPT can do. So I got Chech-GPT to write a rap, sent it to my friend Ray. And then he put it into this tool called Merika. I don't know if I was pronounced, but Merika.ai, it's one of these music generating AI services, made it into a song that is actually pretty good, though, he's been stuck in my head. So I'll pop a link to this show if anybody is interested in listening to some babies' feelings. I'm definitely interested in the music. Yeah. Shoot me so tricky if you don't-- that rap doesn't see us out at the end of this interview. Maybe the outro. Yes, amazing. Yeah. And that's all from us for this week. Because I'm sure if that was anything we said in the show, you can find us all on LinkedIn from work from us. Head to mindtools.com/business. Thanks for listening. And bye for-- [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]