Lead with Learning & Development

It’s Time to Let Learning & Development lead your Human Resource Department (and

while you’re at it, rebrand it to People Centers).

If you’re an organization whose HR Department is still a traditional structure with a focus

on transactions, compliance and policy, it’s time for a change—and I hope it’s not too late.

I’m stepping out on my soapbox with a bold idea: to eliminate our HR departments as they

exist today, and work to develop People Centers instead—led by your Learning &

Development (L&D) leadership.

What might be different, you ask? Everything.

Hear me out on this one. I bet your L&D function already uses employee experience as a

metric of success. Hopefully, they own your employee onboarding experience, in addition

to ongoing skill development and leadership development. Add in mentoring and coaching

and your L&D area knows your people better than anyone.

Now, what if you had L&D lead areas such as benefits and compensation? Talent

acquisition and retention? Community outreach? How might the approach to those areas

change if you focused on employee experience and development vs. transactions?

When L&D gets discussed, it’s always within the context of making L&D a function of HR.

What I’m suggesting is that we shift the concept of an HR department completely to focus

primarily on the development of employees, with the other functions of HR—talent

acquisition, payroll, benefits, compliance—under the People Center umbrella.

The difference between People Development and Human Resources

Human resource management is typically defined as the strategic approach to the

effective and efficient management of a company’s employees to help the organization

gain a competitive advantage. Human resources are all about maximizing employee

performance to improve the company and meet its strategic objectives.

People development, on the other hand, refers to the continuous development that’s

implemented to improve the performance and engagement of those working in the

organization.

A subtle shift, but a meaningful one. People development focuses on the performance of

individuals—knowing that the time they put into skills development, knowledge

enhancement, and increasing the competency and engagement of staff will pay dividends

for the organization in the long run.

How People Centers can power the organizations of the future

In HR, they often focus on risk mitigation as its central function. This does our HR teams a

disservice—they have the potential for So. Much. More. The pandemic underscored the

need for a more dynamic talent and work model—one that, as McKinsey says, focuses on

identity, agility, and scalability. The firm goes on to say that Chief Human Resource

Officers and other leaders should “do nothing less than reimagine the basic tenets of the

organization.”

This can start with reimagining the function. We already know there’s an ever-increasing

number of high-skill jobs—and not enough workers with the skills to get those jobs. People

Center functions, led by L&D, can lead the charge to reskill and upskill current employees,

blending traditional learning with more nontraditional tactics like mentoring, coaching,

and peer learning networks.

A solid People Development strategy leads to talent acquisition and retention

People Development is a way to increase retention, too. Let’s say you’ve hired a marketing

manager at your organization. They go through onboarding, and as they continue to move

through their role, they receive guidance from their manager as they learn their role. As

they continue their career, they realize that what they really want to do is build out a

digital marketing team. There’s a clear need for it at your company, but there are key skills

they need to build, and they’ve never managed a team before.

Through your People Development function, you set this team member up with a

mentor—someone at your company that’s also built a team from scratch—and a

combination of internal leadership training and external coaching.

Six months later, they make their first hire. A year later, they have a team of five and they

are driving digital campaigns that increase revenue. Because they’ve been given an opportunity to gain those skills and be supported in their journey, they’re more likely to

feel a sense of psychological safety—and company loyalty.

Now What?

I know that shifting the focus of an entire HR department is not easy—and it takes time.

However, if you know you’d like to reframe your HR department through the lens of L&D,

I have a few suggestions for how you could approach it:

Audit your current HR and L&D talent

Begin this process by a thoughtful assessment of the talent in your HR and L&D

departments, and ask yourself these questions:

• How is your department currently led and staffed?

• What are their skills and where do they shine?

• How do they interact with the various areas of the organization?

• How is information within HR and L&D currently shared (or not)?

• How does that information flow and influence priorities across the organization? (This can begin to shape the new organizational structure within the department.)

• What are the current job descriptions and organizational structure and how might each evolve?

If you get stuck, a professional consultant who knows HR can help ask these

questions and more—and can get a feel for where the skeletons might be hiding.

Map out your employee experience

Instead of auditing your business processes, map the current and future state

employee experiences and create programming to address the gaps. From

candidate experience to exit/retirement (and everything in between), what would

your employees say about their experience? Let’s capture it so we see the gap

between the current reality and what you wish it to be.

Engaging your staff (and former staff) in these conversations reinforces that

positive change is coming and that the focus is on them, and again—having an

outside facilitator and consultant leading those conversations will bring forward

more honest feedback.

Rebrand HR and align the change with a solid communication strategy

By now, some of your employees have seen a few small changes—employee focus

groups assembled to collect feedback, HR vacancies being staffed differently, and your executive leadership queuing up the concept in their “State of the Company”

address or annual setting of strategic priorities. However, you’ll still want to have a

clear communications strategy that rolls out what’s changing in the organization

and why. This, with internal branding support from marketing, will ensure that once

you “announce,” your team members will see the changes happening.

What are your thoughts about changing HR? Do you believe that organizations need

more People Development and less Human Resources? I’d love to hear from you.