How Seasoned L&D Experts Approach Team Structure & Strategy

Does the perfect team structure exist for Learning and Development? As a leader in a new organization, or when going through a major restructure, you’d love to have a set playbook to follow. Do what’s worked in the past, rinse, and repeat. 

But modern organizations are too agile and too dynamic for this mindset to make sense. Every scenario is new, and every L&D team requires a fresh approach. So where do you start?

I recently met with Lisa Christensen, Christopher Lind, and Hillary Miller to explore their experience and deep expertise in L&D strategy and team structures. All three are leading lights in Learning and Development, and have built and led L&D teams at some of the largest companies in the world. 

Keep reading for five valuable insights from our conversation. 

Listen: L&D Podcast Live: Strategy & Structures

About the experts

• Lisa Christensen leads McKinsey and Company's Learning Design and Development Center of Excellence, the global team of design experts, designing and building the learning that develops McKinsey Partners and professionals, enabling them to deliver incredible client impact. Lisa founded and leads McKinsey's Learning Research and Innovation lab and sits on the global learning leadership team.
• Christopher Lind is a dynamic leader at the intersection of business, technology, and human experience, serving as an executive advisor and AI ethicist. As a former Chief Learning Officer for ChenMed and GE Healthcare, Christopher has led transformative learning strategies that enhance workforce capability and business performance. Christopher continues to shape the future of work through insightful analysis, strategic guidance, and a commitment to ethical AI adoption in corporate learning.
• Hillary Miller is a seasoned Learning & Development leader currently heading L&D at HCA Healthcare. With a passion for driving workforce capability and business impact, she brings extensive experience in healthcare education and leadership development. As Chief Learning Officer at Penn State Health, Hillary led enterprise-wide learning strategies, fostering a culture of continuous development and innovation.

There is no perfect L&D team structure

It would be nice to have a simple playbook to structuring Learning and Development within an organization. But as is so often the case in business and life, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. 

We can broadly think of L&D structures under two main headings: 

• Centralized—a single unit governs the whole organization
• Decentralized—L&D embedded in specific regions or aligned with certain business units

There are advantages and disadvantages to both centralized and decentralized L&D structures. Centralized structures offer efficiency and unified tech stacks, but can face resistance from team leads. They also tend to lack customization, and it becomes harder to respond to nuanced individual needs. 

Decentralized structures allow for customization and more precise learning interventions. But they’re very often inefficient, and it can be harder for executive leadership to see the true value. 

The truth is, very few L&D teams are fully centralized or decentralized. We always land somewhere in the middle. And as Lisa Christensen explains, it’s best not to get bogged down in this binary: 

“I'm trying to create an organization that's strategically aligned with the business. I'm trying to create an organization that's very agile, that makes deliberate choices about prioritization. So where do I need accountability mechanisms? Where do I want budgets to sit and live, who's going to make decisions? Some pieces of the organization are very centralized and others very decentralized, and you think about where reporting lines and accountability sit.” 

L&D leadership means meeting the organization where it is and bringing people forward. Instead of obsessing over rigid structures, prioritize having the right people, skills, and communication processes in place. Be realistic and pragmatic, rather than ideological.

How to approach L&D structure in a new organization

Despite the previous section, team structure is in fact important. And particularly when you come into a new organization as an L&D executive, you need to ensure that your department is set up for success. 

But too many leaders focus on the wrong aspects. They want a clear org chart and reporting lines from day one, with perfectly defined metrics for success. And that’s just not realistic. 

As Hillary Miller explains, “I think we can get really hung up on the hierarchy of things and miss out on where we are headed within the business. When you come into an organization and you're immediately going after the structure of the team and the hierarchical reporting, you're not connecting with the business, and you don't know what the needs are. 

“You should have clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations. You’ve got to know who your players are, their strengths, and what we’re trying to do in the business. Do we have strong assessment capabilities? Do we have great critical thinking? Do we know how to engage a subject-matter expert in a way that helps facilitate a productive conversation?” 

In recent years, Christopher Lind has structured L&D more like a product team. “I want people focused on what they do best. In my design team, I want incredible design skills where they can connect the dots between the problem and the solution. My delivery team specializes in that delivery ops side of things. I've invested heavily in the digital spectrum, making sure that I have specialists who understand system architecture and digital solutions. And I always have a data analyst to make sense of things.”

All of our experts agree that building an L&D team is highly contextual and requires close attention to the organization’s key goals and trajectory. 

Prioritize strategic alignment with business goals

Proving the impact of L&D has always been an Achilles’ heel in our profession. We can deeply believe in and see the clear change we’re making on both individual employees and teams, but if we can’t tell this story to leadership, we’ll never have the resources or buy-in we need. 

Real impact comes when you have influence—when Learning and Development drives serious organizational change and leads to better business outcomes. 

For Lisa, the key is in using the right data to tell your story. “So many of the things that are easy for us to measure in learning—like engagement or completion—nobody cares about that. Pushing beyond those vanity metrics that learning professionals enjoy so much is really important.”

Sometimes, this can even require re-educating the executives you’re trying to convince. “There are times when I've had leaders who care about those things,” says Christopher. “I wish they didn't care about how many butts were in the seats, or how many people complete courses. If that's what you care about, I'm not going to argue with you. But the goal is to try and influence through it.”

The best is when L&D’s analytics align with other teams’. “I want to speak the language of the business, not have the business speak the language of L&D. I always tell [stakeholders], ‘our metrics are your metrics,’” says Hillary Miller. “I think you can get overly complicated really quickly. But you don't have to be super fancy with your measurement sources. Hone in on one KPI that the business says matters, and then showcase how the things that you do align to that.

Flexibility and responsiveness are critical

As noted above, rigidly sticking to a specific team structure can be problematic. Just because something has worked for you in a previous role, that doesn’t mean it will fit well in the next. 

And even where you’re well established and experienced in a role, agility is a vital asset. No organization or L&D team is static, and we are always responding.

“I work in an organization with a rotational leadership model,” says Lisa. “All of our business units get new leadership every few years, and everybody wants to change everything. It’s really helpful for us to have some flexibility, some project-based structure, and some ways to build teams to respond to problems that don't require us to completely overhaul the organization every time this leadership cycle starts again.

“I'm anti-rigidity. This idea that ‘we've got really well-thought-out processes, and this is the way we do things,’—there's a rigidity in that that I just don't think serves us. I like an expertise-based model: who has what expertise in an organization, and how can I pull those different pieces together into project teams that get work done. That lets me be super responsive.”

Our aim as L&D should be responding to each new context, understanding our organizations and leaders' needs, and building on our teams’ biggest strengths.

Relationships and humility are your secret weapons

As Learning and Development becomes increasingly data-driven, it’s easy to overlook perhaps the defining characteristic of our profession: relationships. 

Even going back to the concept of structuring your L&D program, it only makes sense as it relates to the wider business. As Hillary says, “it's all about the relationships I can build and the interaction I have with other leaders, and how I can get my teams functioning with their teams. At the end of the day, structure is relational.”

For Christopher, “this is all about people. Even going back to the measurement conversation, it’s about data, but it's really about what do the people you're working with care about? Figure out what they care about and then lean on that. Because it's really about influence and getting their buy-in, and then you figure out how you move and adjust things to accomplish the outcomes that you know are important.”

For some L&D leaders, this requires humility and the ability to put your own ego aside. If you don’t get the structure, the resources, and the influence you desire from day one, can you work with others to move there eventually? Or just as vitally, can you be flexible enough to try a different approach? 

“If you're in the business of empire-building, you're not going to be effective,” says Christopher. “There have been times where I've thought, ‘if this resource sits over there, they have better access to budget and influence.’ But ultimately, I care about influence and serving the organization. So if moving that resource there gives me a better way to pull that off, fine. It looks like a loss, but really it's a win.”

Strive for more relational, responsive Learning and Development structures

As is abundantly clear, there is no one-size-fits-all L&D structure. The key is to align learning strategies with business goals, while staying flexible and responsive to change. 

Instead of rigid frameworks, L&D teams should embrace adaptability, ensuring their approach evolves with the organization’s needs. Success isn’t just about processes—it’s about building strong relationships and leading with humility. 

By staying connected to stakeholders and open to new ideas, L&D professionals can drive real impact. 

Listen to our conversation in full: L&D Podcast Live: Strategy & Structures