Best Practices for Getting Your Stakeholders on Board
Hey, My name is Bruce.
As an IT professional, I understand how difficult it can be to get business leaders on board with learning and development practices. Most stakeholders don’t see the value of learning and development practices but they are essential to the success of your organization. Here are a few best practices to get your stakeholders on board with learning and development at your organization.
Step 1. Act like a consultancy
It’s important to act like a business partner and adopt a consultancy mindset to gain the support of leaders and decision-makers in your organization. Understand the intricacies of different departments and their quarterly goals. It’s also essential to help them address their key challenges through learning and development efforts and connect your learning and development programs with your employees’ ROI.
Step 2. Provide a clear decision-making process
Before you embark on building the case for learning internally and rolling out a new learning program or technology, you should first fully understand your company’s decision-making process. Understand how major decisions are made and align priorities across departments. It’s also important to know where your budget is coming from and to create a working timeline for your learning and development practices.
Step 3. Assemble your team
Creating a sort of ‘dream team’ will make it much easier to get budget and buy-in from stakeholders. Find employees who are already engaged in learning and align priorities across all departments as early as possible. This will show the benefit of learning and development activities for everyone and help integrate your practices with all facets of the business.
Step 4. Develop your business case
With referrals, benchmark data, and creating metrics, you’ll be able to provide a serious case for your learning and development initiatives. You need to show stakeholders how your initiatives will improve efficiency and productivity, and even provide cost savings.
Step 5. Show good use cases
You’ll want to pick good use cases and easy wins so you can quickly prove the return on investment for your program. Be agile with your programs and manage realistic expectations and results. When you provide structure and guidance to your learning and development practices, you’ll be able to easily show the necessity for your initiatives.
Now that you know a few best practices for getting stakeholders on board with your initiatives, you’re ready to implement more learning and development practices, company-wide.
If you want to learn more about the best practices for getting your stakeholders on board, click the link below for more information.
