Learning Leadership Summit 2009 – Recap and looking ahead.

by J Hruby, Director of Marketing

Fredrickson Communications held the third-annual Learning Leadership Summit on July 16 at Travelers in St. Paul. We founded this event to provide a gathering specifically for the leaders of corporate learning organization throughout the Midwest.

This year we had a terrific turnout with more than 70 learning leaders from companies all over the Twin Cities in attendance. The theme of this year’s Summit was “Danger! Economic recovery ahead,” and our discussion centered on the role of the learning organization in the coming economic recovery. It’s impossible to capture all of the thoughtful and interesting discussion points that came from this event, but I’ll summarize a few points that I thought were especially interesting.

As part of the introduction, we conducted some audience polling. I’ve posted the complete results of the polling, but I wanted to focus one thought that emerged from the poll.

We asked the attendees if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “My learning group is currently seen as a strategic business partner within our organization.” 74.3% of the participants either strongly agreed or agreed with this statement. During the discussion, one member asked a very pointed question: “If we asked non-training representatives from the business, would they give the same answer?” I think this was an important observation, the view from the inside of the learning organization looking outward could be significantly different from the view the business has of the learning organization. The relationship between the learning organization and the business was certainly a topic of keen interest that was expressed many times during the Summit.

A suggestion that was made during the group discussion was that learning organizations would benefit from forming a business advisory committee. This advisory committee would be composed of both business and learning leaders in the organization and the purpose would be to help the learning organization become aligned and stay aligned with the business needs.

This concept was discussed in very general terms and its implementation would be different in every organization, but the idea certainly struck a chord with the attendees. This concept would certainly be helpful to many learning groups as a way to align, or stay aligned, and to be recognized by the business leadership as being in-touch, relevant, and focused on current concerns.

The topic of the relationship (or in some cases, the lack thereof) between learning, organizational development, and HR was also discussed. It emerged that in some (perhaps even many?) organizations, these are three separate functions and they are often not aligned or even in regular communication with each other. In a way, this is both quite surprising and yet not surprising at all, but the dynamics of the relationship between these functions certainly could be a discussion in its own right.

Several learning leaders voiced the concern that event though their learning organizations produced and maintained many training programs and other valuable learning assets, the existence of these courses, their content, and how they fit together is often unknown to the business audience they were supposed to help. In other words, there is no “internal Google” function within most companies where one can search the organization’s learning library. There is also no clear organization of existing training courses so they can be assembled in a logical order according to the user’s role and development needs.

These are just a few of the interesting discussion points that I thought were worth sharing. In the coming weeks, other Fredrickson Communications leaders that attended the event will be sharing more of their thoughts as well.

Would you or your colleagues like to join us at next year’s Summit? Contact us for information about being added to the invitation list for the 2010 Learning Leadership Summit.