BRIDGING THE GAP between LEADERSHIP and LEARNING

Russell Cullingworth
Jan 21
5 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

A broken bridge over a chasm between leadership and learning — How did this great divide begin - and who's to blame?

With over 15 years experience as an entrepreneur and founder in professional learning, it's become more and more obvious that there is a great divide between leadership and L&D professionals. Let's explore. In October last year, I attended the Institute for Performance and Learning (I4PL) Conference in Toronto. My goal was to listen carefully and learn more about the unspoken challenges in the L&D profession. One challenge stood out more than any other - senior leadership recognition of L&D as a strategic partner, instead of just a training provider. This message came across so loudly that I was compelled to create the "L&D Strategic Capability Scorecard" for L&D leaders to assess their value as a strategic partner. You can try it here for free. https://ld-strategic-capability.scoreapp.com/

L&D Professionals expressed the following frustrations:

Leadership doesn't take learning seriously.
L&D is not at the decision-making table - brought into the process too late.
Asked or instructed to "create training" AFTER the decision has already been made.
Not consulted on methods or approaches to address training concerns.
Asked or instructed to "create training" to fix people or problems.
Learning doesn't receive ongoing support and reinforcement by managers.
Blamed leadership for de-valuing or not recognizing the importance of their role in the organization.

On the other hand, I've had conversations with many organizational leaders, and watched their posts and comments on LinkedIn. Leadership expressed the following frustrations:

Learning costs a lot, but we're not seeing benefits or business impact.
Doubt that learners are actually completing the learning or learning anything.
Behavior doesn't change.
Complaints from employees about poor quality learning experience.
Pulls people away from "real work". Complaints about heavy demands on prime productive time for learning activities (often perceived as unnecessary).
Blamed L&D for generic, outdated, stale and boring content that "doesn't reflect how we actually work"
Learning is struggling to keep up with the pace of business - by the time training is created, the strategy or problem has already changed.

Leadership sees learning as an event. L&D sees learning as a system.

WHAT BROKE THE BRIDGE?

My personal belief is that the bridge had been showing cracks and signs of collapse for many years, cracking under the strain of increasingly accelerating pace of business. Professionals became increasingly pressured to do more with the same amount of time, as well as spending the majority of their day stuck in front of screens. In many professional industries, overtime has reached epidemic proportions and the lack of work-life balance is making it difficult to recruit young people into these professions. They are making choices where they believe they won't be expected to work 15 hour days on a regular basis.

Then came 2020 - Covid. Within months, L&D was turned upside down and this happened:

Learning broke free from place. No classrooms. No schedules. Learning had to work anywhere.
Live training lost its status. Instructor-led sessions stopped being the default, and often weren’t possible at all.
Attention became the bottleneck. Remote work and digital overload created the Age of Distracted Learning, where people could “attend” a webinar while cooking lunch, exercising, or doing the dishes. (A concept I explore in Learn to Imagine, attributed to Kristan Strate.)
Completion metrics lost credibility. Leaders realized: completion doesn’t equal readiness. It exposed the Illusion of Learning - earning completion certificates without any knowledge transfer having taken place.
Informal learning took over. People learned through peers, Slack, stories, audio, and real-time problem-solving.
Autonomy became mandatory. Employees had to self-direct learning in the middle of chaos and constant change.
Mental load became impossible to ignore. Stress, burnout, and uncertainty didn’t just affect performance; they affected whether people could learn at all.

The bridge, already fragile and cracked, unable to withstand these challenges, fell apart and disappeared.

BRIDGING THE GAP (again)

Repairing the bridge between Leadership and Learning will become the greatest challenge for L&D consultants and creative innovative solutions like ProDio.

It starts with LISTENING and hearing the concerns. If you've read this far you probably realize that both sides actually understand the frustrations of the other, but they're not talking about solutions.

I believe it's a mindset issue. As in "my mind is already set on how to do this" and not able to look at alternative and innovative solutions, such as the enormous value of BLENDED LEARNING.

Blended learning is a combination of two or more learning approaches, such as self-paced content and live interaction/support, so that learners have access to both FLEXIBILITY and INTERACTION.

I've heard it talked about a LOT, but haven't seen much evidence of successful implementation.

The way I see it, there are two types of learning: one-way information transfer and two-way interaction and engagement.

Blended learning can be designed to respects and protects learners' prime productive time. One-way information transfer doesn't require learners to be together in a room or in front of a computer (during prime productive hours), receiving information that they could listen to and absorb anytime, anywhere, even while driving, commuting, exercising or doing the dishes.

4 STEPS YOU CAN TAKE RIGHT NOW

CRITICALLY ASSESS YOUR CONTENT Evaluate which content is one-directional or can be absorbed by learners at any time, whenever it is convenient for them. Respect your intelligent and busy professionals - they don't need to sit in a room or in front of a screen and have an instructor read slides or explain content to them
TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT Realize that, whatever can be read, can be listened to. Audio is the most flexible way to learn, without a screen - professionals can learn while driving, walking or cleaning the kitchen. Think about how much of your learning actually needs to be visually presented (which adds cognitive load).
MAKE IT REAL Instead of a lecture or "content dump", write a story or scenario. People remember stories, not bullet points! Neuroscience evidence shows that listening to well-written and well told stories engages imagination, which is proven to improve engagement, enjoyment, understanding and retention. (read article https://www.prodio-learning.com/post/storytelling-a-proven-and-powerful-memorization-technique)
DRAMATICALLY REDUCE DEMANDS ON PRODUCTIVE TIME By removing the one-directional component, reduce your sessions from a 4-6 hours into a 1 hour debrief and conversation session to cement the learning and understanding.

This won't work for everything, especially technical skills training, which needs hands-on teaching and demonstration of techniques or software.

LET'S SEE WHAT YOU'VE LEARNED

Here's a scenario, based on an event from my book (Chapter 6, "Big Trouble") CardioTech CEO, Monica Duncan, receives a a formal notification from the New York State Division of Human Rights (NYSDHR), informing me of complaints received from CardioTech employees about a toxic and discriminatory work environment. CHRO Nicky asked to investigate, and is shocked to find out that the offending Director had only signed off on completing the employee manual. She'd started, but not completed the mandatory "Respectful Workplace/Anti-bullying" course and same for the "Occupational Health and Safety" course. She hadn't even started the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" course at all, which was also mandatory.

CardioTech was in big trouble.

In the comments:

“If you were advising Monica and Nicki, what would you recommend to ensure: