The One Skill That Changes Everything for L&D
Working as a strategic business partner starts here.
There is one skill that, when learned, can immediately uplevel an L&D team. It improves their credibility, lays the foundation for strategic and proactive work, increases alignment with the business, and makes measuring business outcomes easier and clearer. All of that leads to L&D working as strategic business partners and not order takers.
Here’s the spoiler alert: it’s not using AI.
It’s business acumen.
What Business Acumen Really Means
Business acumen, quite simply, is a robust understanding of the organization where the L&D team does its work. It includes knowing:
Why the organization exists: purpose, vision, mission
Who the organization serves: typical customers
What the organization provides: products and/or services
What the organization is working to achieve: goals and strategic initiatives
What environment drives the work: culture, values, acronyms, maturity, behavioral norms
How the work gets done: organizational structure, product or service flow, work cadence
How the organization measures success: revenue, expenses, key metrics
How the organization fits into the world: industry, competitors
Why Business Acumen Matters
Historically, L&D has shown up ready to provide learning solutions. We have leaned into our learning expertise, and we are darn good at it.
We create fantastic training, leadership development programs, work simulations, mentoring programs, coaching environments, team development, etc. If it involves developing people, we can build it and deliver it to a high quality.
Before we go any further, yes, we do still need to create great learning solutions! That expertise remains the backbone of our work and our expertise. We aren’t talking about sacrificing high-quality work here. But great learning solutions alone aren’t enough.
When we spend most of our time perfecting our learning products in a vacuum, we remain dependent on the rest of the organization to tell us when we are needed and why. This keeps us working reactively, as order-takers.
The problem is that our stakeholders are not experts in determining when training is needed and when it isn’t. They are not experts in what learning can solve, what it cannot solve, or which approaches will create the greatest impact. Thus, working only from their requests, even when we deliver a fantastic product, keeps us small and often ineffective.
We are essentially saying, “You diagnose the problem. You decide the solution. Call us when you need training.”
There isn’t any need to include L&D in strategic conversations when our value is primarily delivered on a reactive basis. What’s more, this reactive model allows us to ignore most of the context in which we do our work and context is defined through business acumen.
What Strategic L&D Teams Do Differently
In my research, I interviewed dozens of learning leaders about their ability to work as strategic business partners inside their organizations.
The leaders who consistently operated as strategic business partners shared one especially important belief: Business improvement was the most important factor in their day-to-day work.
Business improvement was more important than creating a great learning product, securing and using the best LMS, designing an engaging team-building retreat, running an impressive leadership development program, and more.
They saw their role as enabling business improvement by equipping and developing needed skills and expertise in the organization’s people. That distinction is important. Because once business improvement becomes the goal, learning is no longer automatically the answer. To focus on business improvement, business acumen is essential. It provides the information needed to determine where the business needs to improve and thus, where L&D can step in.
Business Colleagues First
The strongest strategic business partners I interviewed had a robust understanding of their organizations. This knowledge, this business acumen, allowed them to walk into conversations as business colleagues first and learning experts second.
Yes, they wore their figurative L&D backpacks into every room, full of all the tools, approaches, and learning best practices. But they didn’t pull these out first, and sometimes they didn’t pull it out at all.
Instead, they walked in talking the same language as the stakeholders. They thought in terms of what was best for the business. They understood what the organization was trying to accomplish and what was holding it back from doing so. They kept the big picture goals and strategic initiatives in mind. They worked with stakeholders as equal partners in solving problems.
And because they understood the business so well, they often made recommendations before requests for training ever came their way. They could see where capability gaps might interfere with a strategic initiative. They could identify where learning could help move the business forward. And just as importantly, they could recognize where training would not solve the problem.
That is very different from waiting for someone to ask for a course.
Business Acumen Changes Everything
Strong business acumen changes how others see L&D. It increases credibility. It allows L&D professionals to contribute to conversations beyond learning, It makes proactive work possible because we understand enough about the business to anticipate where learning may be needed. It helps us prioritize the work based on what matters most to the organization. And it makes measurement clearer because success can be connected to business outcomes, not just learning activity.
Most importantly, business acumen changes how we see our role.
We stop asking, “What learning solution should we build and how should we build it?” And we start asking, “What does the business need to achieve and how can we partner to make that happen?”
That shift is foundational to becoming a strategic business partner. Business acumen doesn’t replace our learning expertise. But it does make that expertise far more valuable.
For an L&D team trying to work more strategically, proactively, and credibly, it may be the most important skill to build first.
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