1. Engaging leaders to integrate learning in organisational strategy
Performance transformation starts at the top. Senior leaders must champion a performance-based culture, role-modelling the behaviours that focus on growth and accountability. By integrating learning into organisational strategy, senior teams set an example that cascades throughout the organisation, creating a culture that prioritises development.
Learning teams must influence senior leaders to embed learning in organisational strategy and prioritise people development as a primary means to create a high-performance culture.
2. Defining clear performance expectations
It starts with the end in mind. Organisations must clearly define how performance improvements are defined at both team and individual levels. Without clear success measures as the destination, learning interventions risk becoming mere activities rather than strategic enablers of growth, development, and sustained performance improvement.
Learning teams must collaborate with managers and staff to set clear, measurable performance outcomes to ensure real impact.
3. Leveraging data and insights
Though we can rely on it, when it comes to driving performance, gut instinct is not enough. Organisations must use data to prioritise and link learning interventions with needs and outcomes. Nowadays, we can track real-time metrics, the things that show how well the organisation is performing, to shape and adjust learning.
Learning teams must determine the important organisational impact measures, where they are recorded and how to leverage them to drive a true performance culture.
4. Empowering learning in the moment of need
Courses in isolation rarely drive performance; effective organisations integrate learning into daily work and on-demand solutions at the point of need. This responsive approach allows staff to develop skills and apply knowledge in the flow of work, in real-time, real-world scenarios, with measurable outcomes.
Learning teams must make embedding learning into workflows for on-the-job application a priority.
5. Ensuring management ownership to embed a performance culture
A performance culture is primarily embedded by managers not the L&D team. Managers must champion staff development, coach, provide feedback, support the transfer of learning in work and facilitate staff development on a daily basis. When managers prioritise their team’s development then performance rises through a culture of continuous improvement.
Learning teams must equip managers to drive development by providing practical tools and support to embed daily learning.
6. Valuing performance not attendance
Traditionally, learning success has been measured in terms of participation indicators; tracking attendance, satisfaction scores, minutes spent on online platforms, or the number of resource clicks. The focus has been on engagement rather than impact, sidestepping the vital question of whether or not learning is leading to improved performance.
Learning teams must focus success measures to evidence performance improvement or time to proficiency of skills, not course completions or content clicks.
7. Fostering psychological safety and feedback
For employees to develop, they need a safe environment to try out new things and learn from failure without criticism. Organisations that encourage experimentation, reflection and feedback create the foundations for high performance. That requires managers to lead by example, encouraging open conversations, and viewing mistakes as opportunities for learning.
Learning teams must work with managers to create psychological safety, promote experimentation and reflection, embrace mistakes, and deliver constructive feedback for a positive and supportive high-performance culture.
Driving Performance Culture Through Learning Leadership
So, effective learning teams play a central role in driving performance by advocating for learning to be at the heart of organisational strategy. They connect learning with performance outcomes and use organisational data to measure impact, integrating development opportunities into everyday tasks and moments of need.
They engage managers at all levels to focus on continuous improvement and shift to measuring tangible work results instead of course completions, to better demonstrate value. Finally, by championing experimentation and reflection as vital to the learning process, they position themselves at the heart of the transformational shift toward a high-performance culture.
Peter Senge, the renowned systems thinker and author of The Fifth Discipline, which revolutionised people development and performance through the concept of the "learning organisation" emphasised:
"Over the long run, superior performance depends on superior learning."
To that end, the time for learning teams to step up and transform performance is now!
