L&D and OD professionals who attended the recent Think Tank event held by Beyond Performance found themselves in the middle of an exercise in Design Thinking focused on exploring the value of ROI and ROE (Return on Expectation) metrics.

A quick overview - the situation:

You are the newly appointed Head of Capability, Learning, Culture, Values and Performance reporting into the GMHR at Profecta Ltd.

Profecta delivers multiple infrastructure resources to its customers – electricity, gas, broadband, telephone and more. The business has 480 employees, locations in Auckland NZ with regional offices in Wellington and Christchurch plus international offices in Sydney, Perth, Chicago, Vancouver and London.

The company has been around for 25 years. Four years ago they got into financial difficulty when the business failed to keep up with new technologies and competitors in the market which saw a large drop in both market share and profits. This crisis led to a change in CEO and Board members. The CEO that lead the company to financial security has recently stepped down after successfully reaching the goals set by the market and a new CEO, Damian, came on board 6 months ago. Damian has set out his vision for growing the company through investment in new technologies and focusing on leadership and employee engagement to deliver exceptional customer experience.

Your engagement and culture surveys show significant feedback that your employees rate leadership in the organisation poorly. This has been verified by your turnover stats and exit interview data - all of which points to ineffective leadership and management practices.

Desired outcomes:

• Lift the leadership capability in the organisation
  • Deliver using an external partner
  • Have global coverage
  • Use new learning technology to support the learning

The Resolution:

Think Tank attendees spent time with each of the three executives exploring their needs and motivations around the leadership development programme and unearthed some valuable information that would add great value to the business case.

The key learning was that each of the execs not only had their own view of what they needed from the business case but that they also had a personal investment in the process and outcomes.

In order to make the business case truly compelling, it was critical that the teams understood and connected with this personal investment.

Jake’s perspective, GM Human Resources: for Jake it was important that the business case clearly demonstrated the change in approach that would result from a leadership development programme. It was about culture change and engaging the hearts and minds of both the senior team and the employees as part of the journey. He trusted that his team would be able to produce the appropriate supporting data to underline the necessity of the programme and he also wanted them to really focus on the manner in which the case was presented as a representation of the future state.

Ian’s perspective, CFO: For Ian it was critical that the project delivered what it said it would from a numbers perspective. He trusted that Jake and his team knew their area of expertise and would deliver an appropriate solution, but he needed to know that there would be an identifiable and measurable dollar value outcome from the investment of $250,000.

Damian’s perspective, CEO: For Damian it was vital to balance a return on investment with a clear return on expectation through changes in the organisational culture coupled with consistent, clear leadership. Damian wanted to inspire innovation and new thinking. Being new in the job, it was critical for Damian to prove his worth and show that he’s capable of leading the organisation in a way that builds on the positive momentum set in motion by his predecessor.

As L&D professionals we should all be comfortable understanding and connecting with different stakeholders in our organisations. We design content to cover all learning styles and communicate with people in different ways as part of our daily role. When putting together a business case, the skill of the practitioner lies in being able to step into the shoes of the various stakeholders and blend the resulting approach in a way that addresses all points of view.

Demonstrating results: The ROI-ROE continuum

Results can be demonstrated in a number of ways. If we view this as a continuum with ROI at one end and ROE at the other, you can see a range of different quantitative and qualitative metrics that can be adopted to meet the needs of business stakeholders.

To find out more about our approach to design thinking, just contact the Beyond Performance team