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A good understanding of your audience is the best platform for success.
Whatever industry you’re in! But what does that look like in L&D?
Anita Anthonj, Founder and CEO at Talaera, works with lots of L&D teams and joined us to share her best lessons on getting this right.
With lessons on the difference between top-down and bottom-up initiatives, getting your message right, prioritising to deliver commercial impact and much more.
“Because depending on what it is, you're going to have to go through a different journey, right? If something is bottom up, I think that's awesome because you know there's already a hunger for something.
“Top down is a lot more challenging, because a lot of times, it might be initiatives that the employees are just not interested in.” - Anita Anthonj.
And if people don’t see the value in an initiative, it’s hard for that to be successful.
In those cases, here are some steps to follow:
“You're up against not just all the initiatives you need to push through and you need to do, but also everything else that goes on in an organisation.”
If you know where the organisation is going as a whole, that influences your messaging.
If you understand when it’s a challenging time or there are lots of internal comms going out, you’ll deliver your message in a certain moment.
When you understand existing levels of buy-in, that shapes the audiences you communicate with and how you do it.
“Where I constantly see projects get pushed through, it’s when there's really a strong understanding of where the business is headed, what's going on, and how what we want to do in learning and development maps to the business goals.”
This often means getting close to the commercial numbers and business strategy documents.
If your quarterly reports show we’re having a tough year, it’s important that we pitch the ideas that have immediate business impact.
If there’s hype around something - like AI - can we push back to understand if there’s a strategy for it? And if that aligns to overall goals?
Do we know where the budget comes from for initiatives? And who the owners of those budgets are?
These are the kind of questions that will guide your L&D efforts towards commercial impact.
“You have it all the time that somebody comes up with an awesome idea and it's a great idea.
“It's the right idea, but they're unable to map it directly with why this is going to make us money or why this is going to bring us forward.
"And I think that's super important to be able to map that and tell that story to the different stakeholders who all need to hear a different story.”
“If you have X projects, it’s about understanding does everything have to be done at this time?
“What has the highest business impact? What's the most pressing for the business right now?
“What's the most business impact in the short term, in the medium term, in the long term. And I think that's what you want to look at with different projects.”
Which can be tricky as HR and L&D teams because it often feels like everyone wants something from you.
But if you can map out the things you’re doing and want to be doing, it’ll help you prioritise what you dedicated your resources to.
And it can also act as a mechanism to stop, reflect and pause the creation process - which allows us to ask why we’re doing something and if it contributes to that impact.
“One of my favourite things is telling a potential customer, what we do is not going to work for you. And here's why.
“And a lot of times they come back and they end up working with us because we were very clear in what we cannot deliver, but because we were clear in what we cannot deliver, it became very clear what we can deliver.”
In Anita’s experience, this is because when they faced a need later, they understood that you’re the right person to solve that problem.
And HR and L&D teams can go through a similar process of building clarity around who you are as a team, and then communicating that to the rest of the business.
“It's not about what you want to say, but how the audience wants to receive the message.”
You might have the best idea in the world, but if you don’t understand how to connect someone to it, it’ll probably fall flat!
“It's so important to really understand where the other person is coming from. What are their motivations? Why should they care? And then tell the story in a way that they can receive.”
Anita’s three ingredients for getting this right? Active listening, empathy and curiosity!
“Because people will tell us all day long who they are and what they care about. Most of us have this sense of… a head of marketing does this or cares about this…
“But I would say, who is that person when they're at home and they're tired from the day, they’re in their jammies and they just want to watch Netflix? Who is that person? That's the person you need to talk to, and that's the person that needs to receive your information.”
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