When Learning Uncut works with L&D teams on strategy, alignment with business goals always comes up. The teams that truly succeed aren’t just better at understanding business strategy. They’re three times more likely to have stakeholders who share their vision for organisational learning.[i]
The gap isn’t about comprehension. It’s about collaboration.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
A Different Question Changes Everything
When Marie Daniels joined a global eye care company to lead Commercial L&D across APAC in early 2022, she found a function focused predominantly on training events. Success was measured by attendance numbers and feedback forms, with limited connection to business results.
Rather than trying to prove L&D’s value through traditional learning metrics, Marie took a different approach. For high-value programmes, she created metrics dashboards listing business indicators that the organisation already tracked. Then she did something crucial: she sat down with senior leaders and asked, “What impact do you want this initiative to have?”
Together, they selected the most meaningful metrics to monitor.
She established twice-yearly calibration sessions where sales managers reviewed real sales calls together, aligning on what ‘good’ looked like for specific selling skills. These sessions created a feedback loop that continually improved both the learning initiatives and sales performance.
Over three years, business leaders became more engaged, recognising L&D as a critical partner in achieving their goals. Marie’s insight?
“The key is to stop looking for the perfect metric and start looking at what already exists. The business tracks so much data. When you collaborate with leaders to connect learning to the metrics they care about, suddenly L&D isn’t just an add-on, it’s a driver of real impact.”
I interviewed Marie for The L&D Leader, the book I recently co-authored with Laura Overton. Her approach exemplifies a principle that emerged from Laura’s 20 years of research into what distinguishes high-performing L&D teams: they don’t just align with business strategy, they align together with their stakeholders.
What ‘Aligning Together’ Really Means
High-performing L&D teams achieve 94% alignment with business strategy.[ii] But here’s the more revealing insight from Laura’s research: they’re three times more likely to have stakeholders who share a common vision for learning.
Marie sat with leaders and asked what impact they wanted. She created ongoing connection through calibration sessions. They were partners.
The phrase ‘Aligning Together’ captures something that ‘alignment’ alone misses. True alignment is co-created, and it happens in two connected ways.
First, you establish a common direction together.
You can’t set the destination alone. Sometimes the connection to business priorities is obvious. Sometimes you need to dig deeper to understand what strategic priorities really mean for capability. Either way, the emphasis is on ‘together.’
Second, you collaborate to define success.
Marie’s question exemplifies this: “What impact do you want this initiative to have?” When we’re performing at our best, we analyse problems with stakeholders before jumping to solutions. This includes using business indicators that already matter to leaders. It also means creating ongoing feedback loops.
Alignment is about relationships, an ongoing connection with what matters to your business stakeholders.
What Stops Us From Aligning Together
Here are some of the things that typically get in our way.
We haven’t opened the necessary conversations. Reading strategy documents isn’t the same as exploring priorities with business leaders. Marie didn’t wait for an invitation, she opened conversations with the people who owned business strategy.
We see ourselves as experts rather than explorers. When stakeholders come to us with requests, our instinct may be to demonstrate our expertise and provide answers. However, rushing to solutions means we miss the opportunity to understand what success really looks like from our stakeholders’ perspectives.
We create alignment once instead of maintaining ongoing connection. Alignment is not a once-and-done activity. Organisations are living systems. Priorities change. Skills gaps shift. Technologies evolve. Continuous connection helps us detect and explore shifts, revealing what needs adjustment.
We wait to be asked instead of spotting opportunities. When we position ourselves as a service provider responding to requests, we miss chances to proactively support business priorities. What if you reviewed your organisation’s strategic priorities and identified where learning could make a difference, then initiated conversations about how you might help?
We measure what’s easy for us rather than what matters to them. Measuring completion rates, satisfaction scores, or hours of training may feel easier and safer than connecting to business outcomes. However, these measures don’t answer the question business leaders actually care about: “Is this making a difference to our results?” The fundamental difference? Marie didn’t try to align TO the business. She aligned WITH business leaders, jointly identifying success measures and monitoring progress together.
Your Path to Aligning Together
Start with one initiative and try an experiment.
Begin with the conversation. Pick a current or upcoming initiative. Before you plan anything or take your next step, sit down with a key stakeholder and ask: “What impact do you want this initiative to have?” Listen for what matters most to them.
Look for what already exists. Ask your stakeholder: “What are you already tracking that would help us monitor how well this is working?” Business leaders keep an eye on all sorts of data from performance metrics to quality indicators and customer feedback. Connect to what they’re already monitoring.
Create ongoing touchpoints. What would your version of Marie’s calibration sessions look like? Perhaps it’s quarterly reviews with business leaders to discuss what’s working and what needs adjustment. How about brief monthly check-ins to sense shifts in priorities?
Shift how you see your role. Do you more naturally see yourself as a knowledgeable expert providing answers and solutions, or an empathetic explorer prioritising active listening and discovery alongside stakeholders? While both have their place, alignment happens more naturally when we approach our role as an explorer.
Choose one initiative this month. Have the conversation. Jointly identify success measures. Create one feedback loop. Notice what changes.
Partners in Creating Impact
Marie transformed L&D’s impact by asking a different question and inviting collaboration. She discovered that alignment isn’t something we do TO the business. It’s something we create WITH our business stakeholders. It’s about relationships.
When stakeholders share your vision, you become partners in moving toward real business value.
High performers aren’t three times better at understanding business strategy. They’re three times better at creating shared vision with their stakeholders. That’s something you can move towards, one conversation at a time.
What conversation will you start this week?
Ready to strengthen how you align together with stakeholders? Explore Strategic Coaching with Learning Uncut’s experienced Learning and Organisational Development consultants, where we help you build the mindset, practices and relationships that create lasting strategic partnership.
Marie Daniels’ story and the ‘Aligning Together’ principle are drawn from The L&D Leader, co-authored by Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers. The principle emerged from Laura’s 20 years of research into the practices of high-performing L&D teams.
[i] Learning Performance Benchmark research, as reported in Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers (2025) The L&D Leader, Kogan Page, London.
[ii] ibid
