Donald H Taylor: “L&D must move beyond content and courses”

As organizations face constant change, rising pressure to do more with less, and the rapid adoption of AI, one question is becoming increasingly important for business leaders: what role should Learning & Development play in business performance?

Too often, learning is still measured by activity — the number of courses delivered, participants trained or hours completed. But if learning is to matter to the business, the conversation needs to shift from training activity to business value.

I spoke with Donald H Taylor, one of the leading voices in Learning & Development, about what business leaders should expect from L&D today, how to recognize whether learning is creating value, and why managers will become even more important in the age of AI.

What should business leaders expect from L&D today — and what should they stop expecting?

Donald H Taylor: In an ideal world, business leaders should expect L&D to move from being a reactive, tactical provider of training on demand to becoming a strategic partner.

That means L&D needs to understand the business, listen to the signals coming from the organization, and proactively come up with solutions that support both short-term performance and long-term capability.

What business leaders should stop expecting is that L&D will simply produce courses on demand. L&D should not exist mainly to create content. That is not the point.

Of course, what should happen and what will happen are not always the same thing. I think we will see different types of relationships between business and L&D. In some organizations, L&D teams will want to change, but the business will not let them. In those cases, good L&D people will leave.

In other organizations, neither the business nor L&D will move fast enough, and both will continue as before — until reality catches up with them.

There will also be organizations where the business moves quickly, but L&D does not. In that case, L&D may be relegated to doing only basic training, compliance and onboarding. The more interesting and valuable work — supporting performance, building capability, using AI and other tools — will be done elsewhere, either by external partners or directly by the business.

And then there will be organizations where L&D does step up and becomes the strategic partner it should be.

How can leaders recognize whether learning is actually creating value, not just activity?

Donald H Taylor: This is exactly the right question to ask.

Someone in the organization has to be asking: what are we trying to change, how are we going to measure that change, and was it effective?

You need to establish a baseline using the KPIs that already exist in the business, and then track progress against them. These measures are usually already there: speed of response to customer queries, quality assurance, customer satisfaction, or many other indicators.

If learning is not being connected to those measures, it should be. This should be an integral part of L&D’s work.

Agnė Ignotienė: So the starting point is not “what training do we need?”, but “what change do we want to see in the business?”

Donald H Taylor: Exactly. Learning should not be separated from business performance. The question is not whether people attended a course. The question is whether something changed as a result.

What role should managers play after a training programme if they want learning to translate into performance?

Donald H Taylor: I would like managers to feel that there is nothing extra they are being asked to do that they would not already want to do.

I do not want L&D to come to managers and say: “You now need to do this.” Instead, I want managers and L&D to work together so that managers can say: “I know that if I do this, I will get better performance from my people.”

Very often, when people learn something new, there may be a short-term dip in performance before things improve. A simple example is typing. If you teach someone how to type in a better way, their speed may fall initially, but afterwards it improves. The same is true for many skills.

So managers need to encourage people to put into practice what they have learned. They need to make space for that to happen and ideally create opportunities for people to use what they have learned.

This should be done collaboratively between managers and L&D — not as something L&D pushes onto managers.

Agnė Ignotienė: That feels important, because we often say that training is organized “for employees”, but in many cases training is actually there to help managers achieve better results through their teams.

Donald H Taylor: Yes, that is exactly how it should be seen.

Many organizations are under pressure to do more with less. Where should leaders invest in learning — and what should they stop doing?

Donald H Taylor: The phrase “doing more with less” comes up a lot in the Global Sentiment Survey when people talk about their challenges.

There is a great example from Andrew Jacobs, who was once responsible for training in a London Borough. His budget was cut by 80 per cent. He lost almost all of his trainers and went from a team of eight people to just one person — himself.

In that situation, he could have said: “It is impossible for me to do my job.” Instead, he asked a more fundamental question: what do I actually need to do?

He created a system where managers could create courses for their own people without him being directly involved. He also used the resources that already existed, such as libraries, where people could access books for free to improve their skills.

The key thing was that when people came to him asking for a course, he often had to say: “I cannot do that for you.” But the interesting thing was that managers became more satisfied with the new approach, because it was more directly connected to their work and helped them do their jobs better.

So the fundamental question is this: how are we helping individuals and managers with short-term performance and long-term capability? Anything that supports that should be done. Anything that does not support that should be stopped.

Agnė Ignotienė: To me, this is also a very good illustration of the changing role of L&D. L&D does not need to be a one-person orchestra. It can become the orchestrator — the function that creates the system and enables others to solve real business problems.

Donald H Taylor: Yes. And when you help people solve their own problems, you put them in the driving seat. You support them, but you also build credibility, because you are seen as being much more in tune with the business.

How is AI changing the skills leaders and teams will need in the next few years?

Donald H Taylor: There is one tactical point and one bigger-picture point.

The tactical point is about managers. In the past, managers often existed within a hierarchy of information sharing. Their job was to control the work of six or eight people and pass information about what those people were doing up the chain.

With AI, a lot of that information flow can be managed without the need for a manager to compile and pass everything on. Information can be pulled together much more easily, giving senior leaders a view across the organization.

Does that mean the manager’s role becomes redundant? I do not think so.

The manager’s role becomes more focused on the key human aspects of management: supporting and motivating the team, providing vision, explaining where the organization is going, understanding individuals and what motivates them, and also having difficult conversations when needed.

If people are not doing their job, they need to know that. That is a human thing that machines will not be able to do in the same way.

Agnė Ignotienė: So, in a way, human skills become even more important in the AI age. They will define who is a good manager and who is not.

Donald H Taylor: Much more so than in the past. Historically, managers were often people who had done their previous job well. In the future, managers will need to be people who can actually manage well.

And a big part of managing is understanding and caring about the people you are responsible for and supporting their development. People should want to work under a particular manager because they know that manager will help them progress in their career.

That is not always how we have seen management in the past, but it will be what is required in the future.

If a CEO asked you why L&D should matter to the business agenda, what would you say?

Donald H Taylor: Most of the value of an organization today is intangible. In the past, the majority of organizational value was tangible — buildings, equipment, physical assets. Today, a much larger part of value is intangible.

That includes intellectual property, patents and other things, but a crucial part of it is people: what they know and what they can do.

The thing that differentiates your organization almost certainly exists in the heads of your people. That needs to be sustained, kept up to date and grown.

If you do not do that, it is like running a fleet of trucks but not maintaining them. I am not saying people are machines, but this is a comparison business leaders understand. If you do not fuel and maintain your assets, they will not perform.

The difference is that people can develop. They can get better. That is an incredible resource.

So look after your people and help them grow, because they are the key to your future success.

Final thought

Thank you to Donald H. Taylor for the conversation and for sharing his thoughts on how learning can create value in organizations.

After this conversation, I keep coming back to an idea that was also central to the conference “Leading Learning: from learning events to impact”. The value of learning does not begin with choosing a training topic, format, or provider. It begins with a clear agreement on the change we want to create. What should people do differently after the learning experience? Which team result should it improve? Which business challenge should it help solve?

And L&D cannot answer these questions alone. Leaders need to be involved, because they are the ones who see the real work of the team, the everyday challenges, and where learning can create the greatest value.

Because the path from learning events to impact does not start in the training room. It starts in a leadership conversation about what needs to change.

The author of the interview, Agnė Ignotienė, is an e-learning developer, training effectiveness consultant, and lecturer. She works with organizations that seek to turn learning and development into tangible value: from learning strategy and competency logic to e-learning solutions, processes, and effectiveness evaluation. Agnė is the initiator of the annual study “Training Plans and Priorities in Lithuania” (“Training Plans and Priorities in Lithuania”).