How Legacy L&D Keeps Reproducing Itself
If we want to break the cycle, we need to intentionally develop our own to do so.
Why can’t we seem to break this cycle of L&D as transactional order takers? The legacy seems to follow us around no matter which direction we go and despite our desire to change.
Sure, some of it might be due to how the organization sees us and expects to work with us, but why is that expectation generally transactional? If you’ve read my book, L&D Order Taker No More!I share multiple reasons. The theme is that many of these reasons we are stuck have to do not with how others work with us, but how we show up and run our own function.
For example, there’s this idea of history repeating in our organizations. (If you have the song from the Propellerheads in your head now, you’re welcome.) You know the drill, a manager who was micromanaged often becomes a micromanager. Leaders who were never coached rarely become effective coaches. Without intentional development, people tend to repeat the approaches they’ve seen modeled.
Is L&D any different?
Your L&D Career
Learning and Talent Development is one of those professions that often finds people before people find it. Check out this recent post where I asked people to share their L&D origin story and you will see all the examples and stories (p.s. feel free to add yours!). Like those who commented here, I’m pretty sure most of us didn't grow up dreaming of a career L&D (or even knowing this type of career existed). I know I didn’t! We discovered it while working in an organization, noticing someone else doing the work, or being told we were now responsible for training others.
Quite simply, we were strong performers who enjoyed helping others, and therefore, became the go-to person for training others on the team.
There are certainly great benefits to this approach. These individuals bring business knowledge, credibility, and a passion for helping others succeed. They are usually good at breaking down complex concepts and making them easier to understand.
These are valuable strengths and a great foundation for L&D professionals. But they aren’t enough. At least, not if we want our profession to advance and change.
The Profession We Inherited
Most L&D teams I’ve met are swamped with work and feel understaffed. The requests come in at breakneck pace, the training is needed ASAP, and we don’t have time to come up for air, let alone shift how we work.
As a result, we often onboard and develop new L&D team members to their new role with the only time we can squeeze out of our busy days. If we’re lucky and the budget allows, we might share the opportunity to attend a conference or take a certification course.
But for the most part, L&D embodies the classic story of the cobbler’s children who have no shoes or the chef’s family eating meals of frozen pizza and boxed mac and cheese. We spend our careers onboarding and developing others while investing very little in developing ourselves.
If we want to move the profession forward, one of the first things we need to improve is how we develop our own people.
The Leadership Parallel
Consider what happens when organizations promote employees into leadership positions because they’re great at their current job. Most of us in L&D see the flaws in this approach immediately. We know the skill sets between an operational execution role and a leadership role are completely different. It’s one of the reasons we are often called in to develop high potentials, emerging leaders, or new managers.
Without this development, leaders tend to fall back on the patterns they’ve seen and experienced themselves. We like to think we are different in L&D, but are we?
History Repeating: Legacy L&D Creates More Legacy L&D
Many L&D professionals make a similar transition. They move from an operational role into training because they're patient, helpful, and good at explaining things. They're the person everyone sends new employees to for help. Someone notices, an opportunity opens up, and suddenly they're on the L&D team.
They're given facilitator guides, shown the LMS, maybe allowed to shadow someone for a few weeks, and then they're off and running. Like the leadership parallel above, we assume (intentionally or not) their natural abilities and a little onboarding are enough to make them successful in their new role.
And maybe they are successful. But what kind of L&D professional are they becoming? If the assumption that their natural abilities are enough is intact and they aren't given intentional development for the role, most people simply replicate what they've seen.
Traditional training remains traditional training. Transactional order-taking remains transactional order-taking. Slide decks get updated, courses get delivered, and requests get completed, but the underlying approach doesn't change.
The profession continues to operate the way it always has because that's all people have been shown. If we want different outcomes, we must develop people to think and approach their work differently.
Ideas to Develop the L&D Team (On a Budget)
Building stronger L&D professionals doesn't always require a large budget or loads of time. Rather, you can start today with some lower-cost, simple approaches that won’t break the bank. A few ideas:
Team book clubs focused on L&D books, articles, podcasts, and research, with discussion centered on application.
Regular idea-sharing sessions where team members teach one another what they're learning (even a snippet of a team meeting helps).
Membership in professional associations such as ATD to expand networks and perspectives.
Coaching and mentoring from experienced L&D leaders who model modern, non-legacy approaches.
The goal isn't simply to make people better at today's work. It's to help them rethink how the work should be done.
The SME Trap
But there's another challenge that often appears when we hire subject matter experts into L&D roles.
At first, it feels like a huge win (speaking from experience here). SMEs on the L&D team bring deep expertise, real-world stories, credibility, and firsthand knowledge of what works and what doesn't. They can train processes, workflows, and technical skills with their eyes closed.
This means L&D can be less dependent on operational teams for such expertise and the business leaders appreciate fewer interruptions to production. Everyone feels like they've found the perfect solution.
But the honeymoon doesn't last forever. Soon enough, gaps and misses begin to appear. The problem? As soon as a SME leaves their operations role, their expertise starts aging. Meanwhile, the business keeps moving.
Processes change. Systems evolve. Teams adapt. New challenges emerge. Lessons are learned. The operational team continues improving, but the former SME is no longer part of that feedback loop.
Their knowledge becomes frozen at the point they left and over time, the gap between current reality and training content begins to widen.
Preventing Knowledge Stagnation
This means, not only do we need to continue to develop former SMEs into L&D professionals, but we need to put systems in place to maintain continuous alignment with operational teams. We need feedback loops and iteration notifications. We need new stories and examples.
Ideas to combat SME turned L&D stagnation:
Have L&D professionals regularly return to the work queues for short periods or shadow current team members.
Schedule regular sync meetings with stakeholders and SMEs to discuss changes.
Including L&D team members in operational meetings where updates and changes are discussed.
Ensure L&D receives and reviews operational communications.
Establish strong measurement and feedback loops that identify when training is losing relevance or becoming inaccurate.
The goal is continuous connection, not occasional updates.
We Should Be the Example
If we want this profession to remain relevant and increase its impact, we can't keep doing what we've always done.
We can't assume new team members will naturally discover more effective ways of working or figure out on their own how to work differently than what they have seen in the past. We can't rely indefinitely on expertise acquired years ago. And we can't expect the profession to evolve if we're not intentionally developing the people responsible for leading that evolution.
L&D should be the model for continuous learning, adaptation, and growth. Not the exception.
If we want stakeholders to work with us differently, we need to start modeling what that looks like. We can't do that if we don't spend the time to take our own advice and intentionally develop the skills and expertise we need within L&D to do this type of work.
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To learn more about how we might work together, including assessing your team’s current status with the L&D Strategic Business Partner Team Assessment and corresponding Team Development Roadmap, contact Jess today.
