Developing business acumen helps training professionals become trusted partners and “gain a seat at the table” by gaining knowledge and understanding of business operations. However, building business acumen can be a challenge for even seasoned learning professionals.

In the 75th episode of The Business of Learning, we spoke with Dr. Keith Keating, author of “The Trusted Learning Advisor” and chief learning and development officer at BDO Canada, to learn more about how to build business acumen as a learning leader.

Listen Now:

Additional Resources:

• Article: From Order-Taker to Trusted Partner — 10 Tips for Building Business Acumen as a Learning Leader
• Article: Communication Tips to Work Better With Stakeholders 
• Certification: The Certified Professional in Training Management (CPTM™) Program 

The CPTM program can help you strategically manage the business of learning in your organization and become a trusted business partner as a result. To learn more about the program, download the brochure below.

The transcript for this episode follows: 

[Ad]

At Training Industry, it’s our business to know what makes a great training organization. Our annual Top Training Companies Lists are developed based on extensive research and analysis of training providers operating around the world. We examine the capabilities and expertise of hundreds of learning organizations with the mission of creating a more informed learning marketplace with categories focused on segments and learning services, leadership, learning tech and more. Our Top Training Companies Lists are designed to help you find the right training partner. To view our entire suite of Top Training Companies Lists, click the link in the shownotes for this episode.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Hi, and welcome back to the Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor and chief here at Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo: And I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor. Today, we’re excited to discuss a topic that is essential in positioning training professionals and the entire training function as strategic business drivers: building business acumen. Business acumen has emerged as a key skill for learning leaders looking to gain a seat at the table and to gain buy-in and support for their programs. And although most of us aren’t born with business acumen, the good news is that, like any skill, it can be learned. So today, we’re excited to sit down with Dr. Keith Keating, author of “The Trusted Learning Advisor” and chief learning and development officer at BDO Canada, to learn more about how learning leaders can build business acumen and become trusted partners in their organizations. With that, Keith, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Keith Keating: Hello! Hello! Thank you! And excited to be guest number 75.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes, welcome, Keith. I’m super excited for this conversation today. To get things started, can you share your own definition for business acumen and touch on why business acumen is important for learning leaders today.

Dr. Keith Keating: So by saying, it’s my own, that means that I did a little research beforehand to make sure my terminology was accurate, but I will use it in my own words, too. Business acumen is having that blend of knowledge, skills and experiences that empowers you to understand the complexity of the business environment. It helps you make informed business decisions and ultimately, it drives business outcomes and successful outcomes. It’s not just about having that business savviness. But it’s more about having a deep grasp of those little nuances that influence organizational success. For learning leaders, particularly, strong business acumen is absolutely essential, because it ensures that our learning priorities are directly aligned with the business goals and challenges, and ultimately by us deeply understanding the business, we can craft our initiatives and our solutions that resonate with stakeholders and talent, ultimately with the goal of enhancing performance.

Sarah Gallo: Perfect. Now that we’ve touched on the what, and kind of dug a little bit into the why here, can you share some tips or actionable best practices on how learning leaders can actually begin to build business acumen.

Dr. Keith Keating: I think it starts with one of the most important words for us to continuously come back to — and that’s value. The goal of L&D ultimately is the same goal that our stakeholders share, and that’s to create value. The most important thing you can do when you’re trying to build that business acumen is understanding how your organization and your stakeholders seek to create value. But I think what’s important here is [that] a lot of the work that we do, or most of the work that we do, is contextualized to our organization. So it’s important to understand what that value proposition [of L&D] is for both your organization, your stakeholders. So [there’s] a couple of tactical things that you can do. One, understand the business model: How does your business actually operate? What are the different revenue streams who are the core customers that you’re supporting? It sounds pretty basic, but a lot of times people, particularly in L&D, may not actually have this understanding of these two questions [about] revenue streams and our core customers. So one, understand your business model. Two, engage with the business. Regularly, you should be interacting with key stakeholders and business leaders across all of the various departments in the organization. Not just one, not just two, but I look at [L&D] as the nucleus. I look at us as the center of our organizations and our companies, because we are one of the few business units or organizations, whatever the word you want to use, in our companies that can look holistically across the entire organization. And we can be those connectors. So engage with the business. Now, not just your key stakeholders or your business leaders. You should also be talking with front-line workers. Those are the “doers.” Those are the people that actually get stuff done. What happens is the higher you go up in the organization, the further away they are from actually what’s being done and the people that are getting the work done. Those are ultimately the ones that have some of the richest information. Talk to these people. They can provide extremely great insights into current challenges [and] different strategic priorities. So again, one, understand the business model. Two, engage with the business. Three, speak their language. Don’t just speak our language. One of the mistakes that L&D [professionals] often makes is we use our own vocabulary and acronyms: LMS, LXP, MOOC. No one outside of us knows really what those are or cares about those acronyms. So one of the most important things we can do is learn their language. Look at the mission vision value statements. Ask for the last. I don’t know, five or 10 PowerPoint decks that your business partners have created. Ask for their strategies. Ask for acronym guides/definition guides. These are a great way for you to learn their vocabulary and start to speak their language. It’s really important to remember to kind of switch off that L&D speak and speak in their tone. It helps them see you as a business partner. And then I would say, for the last one, stay informed of industry trends.

So everything I’ve talked about so far is looking internal at your organization to build business acumen. You can also look external. So Training Industry [is a] great resource. McKinsey Global Institute, World Economic Forum, Google Scholar, Gemini, all of these different tools will help you get insight into different aspects about your industry and different economic trends that could impact your industry, and being informed helps you anticipate these changes and adapt your strategy accordingly. So quick recap: understand the business model, engage with the business, speak their language and stay informed of industry trends by using external resources like World Economic Forum, McKinsey Global Institute [and] Training Industry. I can go on and on, but I’ll stop there.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Love, that those are some great tips that you touched on there. And I love what you had mentioned earlier around L&D is really the nucleus of the organization, and they’re the connectors, and they can create that alignment. Such good insights there. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your own experience with building business acumen and becoming a trusted business partner.

Dr. Keith Keating: Luckily, very early in my career one of my first jobs was as a consultant, and that helped me build the foundation for the concept of the book, the trusted learning advisor. It’s stayed with me throughout my career of this idea of, “I want to be a strategic business partner. I want to be a consultant. I want to be an advisor.” And it taught me very early on that building business acumen and building relationships is the most important activity that you can do. It’s the most important thing that you can do. So [if] there’s anything you take away from this podcast today, it’s you need to develop your business acumen, and you need to develop the relationships in the business and specifically on this concept of being a trusted advisor. Being a trusted learning advisor, you don’t ever arrive and you don’t ever finish. It’s a skill, and it’s a mindset that we have to constantly be striving to achieve. So when I’m in a new situation like I am right now, at BDO where I’ve only been here for the last four months, my goal right now is just to listen and learn. That’s it. What’s interesting is, I have a lot of stakeholders who are coming to me say, “Hey, what’s your strategy? What are we doing?” My response is right now, I’m just listening. Because if I came in today and I laid out a strategy that’s a strategy based off of my previous experience and other organizations. It needs to be contextualized for my current organization. So I just need to listen. I need to understand the language of BDO, and that includes, sometimes I have to take some orders at the beginning to build up that credibility and trust. So I’m just repeating that business acumen and relationships is important. I learned that very early on. The last piece I would share is [around building] credibility and trust. Those were important skills for me to develop. Because when you demonstrate a clear understanding of the business and the way they operate, or their metrics, or the industry dynamics, all of these pieces. You earn credibility among your peers and your leaders, and credibility is the cornerstone of trust, and that is absolutely essential for any type of advisor role. And you need that to build that business acumen. And so, if your stakeholders trust that you grasp those nuances of the business, they’re really more likely to rely on you for your recommendations and involve you earlier in your strategic discussions.

Sarah Gallo: Perfect thanks for sharing a little more about your own experience with business acumen, and it sounds like that started pretty early on for you, which probably set you up for success throughout your career. I do want to switch gears for a minute to touch on what you mentioned before around building those key relationships with stakeholders. Which specific skills do learning and development leaders need to really work effectively with stakeholders, and how can they develop them?

Dr. Keith Keating: We need a lot of skills, and it can feel overwhelming. But ultimately our goal is to be trusted learning advisors, and to [go] beyond that journey means that you have the skills that your stakeholders need. So I could list off 20 or 30. I’m going to pick probably the top 5. The first is communication skills; that is again foundation of all relationships being able to communicate, so to practice that we should be regularly engaging in activities that require us to present ideas. So if you’re newer in your career, this might be an area that you haven’t developed as such. What you can do is in team meetings, offer to run a team meeting, offer to facilitate a team meeting, or think about conferences, attending conferences and volunteering to speak at conferences, like Training Industry’s. Doing so helps you to create the skill of being concise and sharing your message. And so communication [is the first skill]. And then the sub-skill of that is your conciseness in your ability to communicate. And one thing you can do along the way as you’re building, that is, you can seek feedback. Feedback is ultimately a gift. And there’s two ways: You can give feedback, or you can receive feedback. And you can ask for feedback. So you should be asking for feedback, seek constructive feedback from your peers and your mentors on your communication style, and then try to adapt it based on their insights. So communication skills is number one and part of that, and the subset, I said, was being concise. I would say the second subset of that is listening. As a trusted advisor, you should be doing 70% listening, 20% asking more questions to help uncover more information and then probably 10% problem-solving or responding to what you’re hearing, but 70% is about listening. So you should be practicing active listening exercises. Think about mindfulness, mindfulness is a great way to practice being present in the moment and staying focused during conversations because it’s so easy for us when we hear something and we want to respond to it. Then we just focus on. Okay, I’m going to wait till they take a break, and then I’m going to respond. And we miss everything else that they’re sharing with us. So one tip that I like to do is I always keep pen and paper handy, and I’ll write down my quick note that I want to talk about, and that way I can get back to focusing on the conversation ahead. So mindfulness is a great tool for listening. And then even role playing. You can role play with individuals in your team, and then practice out scenarios where attentive listening or responding to different diverse viewpoints could come into play. And then I would say, empathy is a really important skill for us. As we’re building business acumen building our advisor skills because we need to have empathy for our stakeholders, for our learners. Our learners are the ones that are having these challenges. Our stakeholders are often under pressure to maybe solve those challenges. Ultimately our goal as trusted advisors is to make our stakeholders the heroes of their own story — to make our stakeholder the hero of their own story — and so to do that, we often play a supporting role instead of a leading role. Empathy is a great skill to have to be able to be successful in supporting your stakeholders, and then two other ones. Influence, influence, influence. A lot of what we do in our role is required by influence because we don’t often have a lot of authority. We don’t often have a lot of power, but we can get our power back when we’re in those order. Taking roles through the power of influence, role-play practice, create scenario-based activities that give you and your team the ability to practice responding to difficult situations. It doesn’t matter what role you are, what your title is. I’ve been every role from a trainer through designer, through performance consultant through CLO and every single role [in-between], including being a CLO. I am faced with difficult conversations with stakeholders, and I often have to influence them. The tactic that I always go back to is I role play role-play. I want to practice helping influence ideas and outcomes, but I don’t want my conversation with my stakeholder to be the first time that that’s happening. So the best way to get comfortable and familiar with that is to role-play. So you want to practice influence, and then problem-solving. Ultimately, what we’re doing at the end of the day is, we are problem solvers. We just happened to use L&D as our medium, as our vehicle for solutioning. But problem-solving is ultimately what we exist for. So it’s our job to build the biggest toolkit possible as trusted learning advisors, and part of that is having an awareness of the different problem, solving tools that exist. If you want one takeaway, design thinking should be a problem-solving tool in your toolkit, Agile … Those are some other methodologies. So quick recap: one, communication skills, listening, empathy, influence and ultimately, problem-solving.

Sarah Gallo: So many great skills in there. I especially love the one about influence, as I know a lot of our listeners may not yet have that seat at the table, so that definitely is huge for them. We’ll be right back after a brief message from our sponsor.

[Ad]

The Certified Professional and Training Management Credential or CPTM is designed to convey the essential competencies you need to manage a training organization. When you become a CPTM, you gain access to alumni resources like monthly peer round tables, and a full registration to the Training Industry conference and expo. If you start today, you can earn the CPTM credential in as little as two months. To learn more, visit cptm.trainingindustry.com.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: We know that gaining a seat at the table isn’t easy, especially for learning leaders. We publish so much content on this topic alone here at Training Industry, because it’s such a hot topic, and it’s extremely difficult to achieve, but the good news is that we really are seeing more businesses starting to view L&D as a strategic business function. So for listeners who already do have a seat at the table, how can they make the most of that see and drive impact in their organizations?

Dr. Keith Keating: I am envious of who those people are, because they are the minority, not the majority. But I think this message holds true for those that are still striving to get there. You know, if a group has a seat at the table they should give themselves that pat on the back. It took me about 18 years before I was in an organization where we were allowed in the room. But if you’re already there, here’s some things to consider. One, of you’ve got their ear, you should be advocating for a learning culture. The fact that you’re in the room means that there is some appetite there to strengthen one. A lot of people will make statements like, “We don’t have a learning culture,” but even the absence of a learning culture is still, technically a learning culture, just a really bad one. You should be championing for the development of a learning culture that encourages continuous improvement and innovation, knowledge sharing. And this can be through promoting policies that support ongoing education, tuition reimbursement, tuition assistance, recognizing and rewarding these types of learning achievements and embedding learning opportunities into everyday work processes and ultimately striving to achieve equitable access to learning opportunities. I’ve both experienced this and also I’ve seen it in other organizations where they’ll make statements like, “Yes, we have learning culture. We have leadership programs.” And then you double click on that. And you say, “Well, who has access to that?”; “Oh, you know, 3, 3 to 5% of the company.” That’s not equitable. So [if] you’ve got that seat at the table, advocate for a stronger learning culture. Our success truly hinges on the existence of a learning culture. If we do not have a strong learning culture, we cannot ultimately be successful. So that’s number one. Number two, make sure that you continue. If you’re not already doing so, this aligning L&D with ultimate business goals, you want to ensure that all your L&D initiatives are tightly aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. And this means understanding [true needs], not just those immediate training needs that we get asked to do. But how those initiatives support long-term business goals we tend to look at today, tomorrow, maybe the quarter and not look at what does this look like? How does this play a role six months, 12 months, 18 months down the line? So, we have to balance a lot in our role. And part of that balancing act is balancing. How do we respond to what’s needed today? But also plan for what’s needed in the future? You want to regularly communicate also on how L. And D. Contributes to achieving these objectives. What I mean by that is, I don’t think we do a good enough job of celebrating our wins and our successes. We tend to keep that to ourselves. We’ll celebrate that among our teams. Maybe we’ll send out an email and whatnot, [but] share that with your key stakeholders. If you’re in the room, share that with those in the room, I try to do this on a quarterly basis, “I want share out our quarterly wins.” So that there’s this constant cycle of successes that we’re having in the organization. So the first point is, continue to advocate for learning culture. The second is [to] make sure L&D is aligned with your business goals, and the third is continue fostering strong stakeholder relationships. Relationships, relationships, relationships. We’ve got to continuously cultivate and maintain these relationships across the business. And this means that we need to have regular updates and discussions about progress, about the outcomes, about what’s working well, and what’s not working well. We, I think, tend to shy away from that part of the conversation. But that’s one of the things that I ask my stakeholder when we meet quarterly is, what can we be doing better? What didn’t work the last quarter? What should we do differently? The goal ultimately is to keep that line of communication open, to be gathering feedback and adjust your programs along the way. And I’ll just repeat one last time: Communicate your successes. Not just on your team, but also with your stakeholders, also in the executive room, also on LinkedIn. Write out industry articles, publish them, but continue making sure that your business knows of these successes.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Well, those are such great tips. Getting that seat and keeping that seat at the table is so challenging. So thank you for breaking all that down. We’ve covered a lot of ground here today, and I’ve been actively taking notes on to everything you’ve been saying here. But before we wrap up, what’s one step our listeners can take after today’s episode to begin building business acumen.

Dr. Keith Keating: Besides reading “The Trusted Learning Advisor,” a practical and immediate step that you can start to take today is to conduct qualitative interviews. If that sounds too fancy, conduct empathy research. If that still is not resonating, just go out and talk to people and understand their perspective, understand their situation, learn about your stakeholders and your learners directly. So if you want to break that down to something actionable, here’s how they approach it. One, identify a leader in your organization. Maybe somebody that you don’t already have a relationship with. Pick a leader that has a strategic role of some sort and maybe is known for a strong business acumen ideally, somebody in different departments, you know. It could be finance. It could be strategy. It could be operations. Set up an interview with them. Reach out to them and request, you know, maybe a 30 minute informational interview. Explain that you’re looking to just build your relationship. You’re looking to just build some business acumen. You want to understand their experience with learning and development, their challenges, and you’d appreciate their insights. And then three, before you show up to that meeting, prepare thoughtful questions. So prepare lists that can help you understand the business better. Some questions could be: What do you see as the biggest challenge your business is currently facing? Or, how do departmental strategies align with overall business goals? Or, can you share examples of how understanding and business metrics has influenced your decision-making? Use ChatGPT, that’s what I did. Come up with some questions to ask your stakeholders that are engaging, but help you understand their business better. Conduct the interview. Make sure you’re focused. You’re listening. You’re taking notes. If you can, record it to help you run a transcript afterwards. Reflect after and apply the learnings. You can share that feedback with your other L&D practitioners. You could write up a summary of what you learned are, going to take away how you’re going to apply and share that back to your stakeholder that lets you really lets them really see that you understood. Listen to them. And you’re looking to apply what you’ve learned, and then I would rinse and repeat that. So right now, what I’m doing because I’m new is, I am conducting qualitative research with all of the senior leadership team across video. Then, I’m also meeting with front-line workers. And I learned so much richness from those frontline workers. You don’t have to be a leader in your organization to have these conversations, these can be informal conversations. But the point is, you just want to be out there in the business building relationships. This helps you not only build business acumen, but it also positions you as a proactive and strategic thinker in your organization. And really what it does. It increases your visibility, and we need to stay visible because we’re so often in the shadows. And as an afterthought, I want us to continue to evolve, to be in a forethought. And one of the ways we can do that is, by having these relationships and conversations.

Sarah Gallo: I completely agree, that kind of information gathering and reflection and building those relationships is such a foundational great place to start. So I love that we ended today’s conversation there. On that note, thank you for speaking on the podcast with us today Keith, and we’re looking forward to your keynote “Evolve. Or Else. The Path to Becoming Trusted Learning Advisors,” at this year’s Training Industry Conference & Expo this June in Raleigh, N.C.  How can our listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to reach out after today’s episode?

Dr. Keith Keating: LinkedIn is the best way.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: For more resources on building business acumen and on similar topics. Visit the shownotes for this episode at TrainingIndustry.com/TrainingIndustryPodcast.

Sarah Gallo: And if you enjoyed this episode, let us know rate and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time.