It's 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the request is already in your inbox. A department head needs training by Friday. The solution is decided, written right there in the subject line, and your job is to produce it.
You build it. It's good. Three months later, the problem it was supposed to solve is still sitting there, and nobody links that back to the fact that training was never going to fix it.
That loop is the whole job for many L&D teams. Not because they're bad at the work, but because the system they sit in only knows how to take orders.
Tracie Cantu has spent twenty years building learning functions, including stints at Whole Foods and Meta. She thinks that loop is a design flaw, not a people flaw. RedThread Research backs her up. Only about 16% of L&D teams have a hand in business strategy, and just 28% sit in on conversations about the future of the workforce.
Read that as a profession that isn't trying, and you'll miss the point. The teams aren't lazy. They're locked out.
Pocket Casts
Above is the L&D Must Change podcast episode with Tracie Cantu, hosted by Jess Almlie. Below are my takeaways on what it actually takes to run L&D like a business, and where the idea gets harder than the slogan makes it sound.
TL;DR
- L&D's problem is the operating model, not the people working inside it.
- Governance and process give your team freedom, as long as they can still flex.
- The business is your customer and the employee is your consumer, and that order matters.
- Your most popular program is often your weakest investment.
- You earn a strategic seat by connecting people, not by waiting to be invited.
1. Your team isn't failing; your operating model is
You can outwork a bad week. You cannot outwork a bad system.
Tracie sees L&D's whole credibility problem as an operating model problem. Not a talent gap. Not an effort gap. Teams are stuck inside a structure that pays them to react, one built for a slower world where jobs didn't get rewritten every eighteen months. Jess agrees and adds operational alignment. Every other department reports on how it works, not just what it produces. Contact centers track handle times. Sales tracks pipeline. L&D usually tracks smile sheets and calls it a day.
Around 16% of L&D teams have a hand in business strategy. Only 28% sit in on future-workforce conversations. As an effort story, that looks like a profession asleep at the wheel. As a structured story, it proves that the model locks L&D out of the rooms where the work is actually decided. You can't be strategic about choices you only hear about after they're made.
Tracie's fix for working in that kind of uncertainty is a compass instead of a map. A map assumes the path holds still. A compass assumes it won't, and keeps you pointed the right way while the route shifts under you. For L&D that means you stop planning the year as a fixed catalog and start treating it as a direction you re-route toward every quarter.
The teams that earn real credibility do something unglamorous first. They hold themselves to the same operational standards as everyone else, before anyone makes them. Most L&D teams skip that step and then wonder why finance doesn't take them seriously. You can't ask for a seat at a table you won't show your numbers at.
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How to start running on a compass instead of a map:
- Separate the reactivity you chose from the reactivity built into your model by listing your last twenty requests and marking which ones you could have shaped earlier and which landed fully pre-decided. The pre-decided pile is your structural problem, and it tells you exactly which relationships to build sooner.
- Adopt the operational expectations your peer departments already live by by defining response times, review cycles, and performance standards for your team and reporting them on the same cadence finance and sales report theirs. Match their rhythm and you stop reading as a side project.
- Plan the year as a direction, not a fixed calendar by naming two or three capability outcomes the business needs and committing to re-route your roadmap toward them each quarter instead of defending a plan you built in January.
