Decipher the Signal From the Noise: L&D Leadership Today With Simon Gibson

The online conversations around leadership in L&D often differ significantly from the real-life experience.

In reality, the journey of L&D leadership is a complex one, often filled with chaos, significant effort, occasional victories, and numerous setbacks. However, it's important to acknowledge these challenges and understand that they are part of the journey.

In this article, with insights from Simon Gibson, Group Head of Learning & Development at Marks & Spencer, we explore how you can build a robust L&D team, four tips for improving your career prospects, and how to decipher the signal from the noise in the rhetoric surrounding skills.

Listen to our L&D Podcast episode: L&D Leadership Today With Simon Gibson

Building a robust L&D team

When building your L&D team, the best principle is to bring together diverse experiences, disciplines, and passions to create a well-rounded team.

Along with trying to be quite diverse in your experiences, you also need to be clear about being more data savvy, planful, and progressive and how that fits into your organization's context. From here, it’s about how you and your team can be more disciplined to remain creative and deploy learning experiences to make a difference in your business.

Also, be mindful that you don't know everything, so bring in the right people to help you understand what the team can do to solve your organization's pain points. Ideas can come from anywhere, so create an environment where the team understands your goals.

“I’m aiming for the moon, so I’ve brought in people who can help me build a good rocket, a new propulsion system, and a new spacesuit along the way,” says Simon Gibson, Group Head of Learning & Development at Marks & Spencer.

Related: Back to Basics: Impactful and Frictionless Skills-Based L&D

4 tips for improving your career prospects

For L&D professionals aiming to increase their career prospects, it is crucial to demonstrate a laser-like focus on the organization's goals and why people engage with L&D.

Here are four quick tips for making yourself look more attractive for future L&D opportunities:

1. Build a body of evidence: Be ready to show how and when you made an impact. 
2. Be curious: Try to understand as much as possible about the business, sector, or team you are considering joining. 
3. Do your homework: There are many L&D networks, such as the L&D Collective, you can tap into to discuss and discover what these hiring conversations look like. 
4. Showcase your commercial edge: Demonstrating that you understand how the company makes money, what it is trying to do, and where it’s going can significantly elevate your career prospects.

“Show passion and energy about what you are keen and eager to make an impact on, learn about, and develop,” says Simon.

Those L&D professionals who talk about pounds, pence, and business impact look radically different from those who can demonstrate that they deployed a shiny intervention, but cannot show that it had a proven and demonstrable impact.

Skills: Deciphering the signal from the noise

Despite the ongoing conversation around skills, many organizations still need to prioritize recruiting for skills.

“They are putting tools on top of tools to see if they are getting more diverse and different candidates, but from my perspective, that is not skills-led. The skills narrative would be more on an internal mobility lens,” says Simon Gibson.

For example, LinkedIn tends to have more data on employees on the platform than most L&D teams will have on their skills and experiences. This shows that many people are talking about their skills and capabilities. If L&D professionals understand that better, we could help our people with internal mobility and close our company’s skills gaps. 

The big question is that if L&D hasn’t been involved in upskilling and reskilling for the last few decades, we need to ask ourselves what we have been involved in. You don't have to look far to see why our profession has often struggled to close skills gaps when we’ve focused on the consumption of content as directly impacting competence.

There is only one metric of success that really counts: Are you increasing the size of your internal talent pool to help address your internal talent shortages?

Related: Standing on the Shoulders of L&D Giants With Mirjam Neelen

Developing your license to operate

When measuring the success of short-term learning interventions, it is critical to ensure that they positively impact the organization's progress toward its goals. 

“It might feel like a millimeter shift, but use the work to demonstrate that you are tackling complicated and difficult problems that shift your organization toward where it is trying to get to,” says Simon Gibson.

The longer term is to start showcasing that evidence, which in turn will help give you your license to operate. From here, you should notice that you are beginning to understand the lay of the land through data and analysis and are involved in conversations with stakeholders that are different from the ones you had on day one. 

In impactful learning and development, there is no substitute for the understanding and knowledge from analyzing your internal talent pool. From here, you and your team can make an impact by achieving your part in the equation, which is closing the skills gaps and reaching the talent pool. 

Explore further insights on current learning and development leadership in the episode on The L&D Podcast: L&D Leadership Today with Simon Gibson.

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