For our final episode, we’re excited to welcome Darlene Weghorst, Director of Sales Training & Enablement at Relias!
Darlene shares her insights on aligning Learning & Development with corporate strategy, the role of business acumen in L&D leadership, and how to foster collaboration with business stakeholders. From navigating shifting priorities to leveraging customer feedback, Darlene explains how L&D professionals can drive measurable impact and stay connected to the bigger organizational picture.
Key Topics:
- The importance of business strategy in L&D
- Building strong partnerships with marketing and sales
- Measuring the impact of enablement programs
- The future of LMS systems and AI-driven workflows
Find Leading L&D anywhere you listen to podcasts, including Apple and Spotify, where you’ll be able to find our past conversations with learning leaders.
Here’s a full playlist:
Summary
Darlene Weghorst, Director of Enablement at Relias, discusses the importance of aligning L&D with corporate strategy. Darlene shares how her MBA education enhanced her ability to communicate with business leaders and align training initiatives with organizational goals. She emphasizes the importance of understanding business concepts to effectively demonstrate L&D’s value. Key topics include working with marketing teams, managing product portfolios, handling strategic pivots, and measuring L&D success. Darlene explains how she navigates relationships with different stakeholders, particularly in sales enablement, and discusses the future of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in corporate environments. Throughout the conversation, she stresses the importance of staying connected to business objectives while delivering effective learning solutions.
Highlights
The Value of Business Education in L&D Leadership
Darlene explains how her MBA helped her better communicate with business leaders and demonstrate L&D’s value. She emphasizes the importance of being able to discuss training in terms of business outcomes, sales effectiveness, and resource allocation. The conversation highlights how business acumen helps L&D professionals better serve their organizations and communicate with stakeholders across different global markets.
Aligning L&D with Corporate Strategy
Darlene discusses starting with executive messaging and understanding organizational vision. She describes how Relias focuses on healthcare training, emphasizing the importance of adapting technology to meet user needs (like mobile learning for healthcare workers). She identifies marketing as a key ally in strategic alignment and discusses the challenges of managing multiple product priorities within a portfolio.
Managing Strategic Relationships and Change
The discussion covers how to handle strategic pivots, especially during events like COVID-19. Darlene details the challenges of balancing resources between established products and new initiatives. She emphasizes the importance of open dialogue with stakeholders and maintaining clear communication about resource allocation decisions.
Measuring L&D Success and Impact
Darlene addresses the complex challenge of measuring L&D’s impact on business outcomes. She explains how different metrics apply to different functions – such as support center efficiency versus sales performance. While direct sales correlations are difficult to establish, she describes how L&D can demonstrate value through customer satisfaction, support efficiency, and overall business performance indicators.
Future of Learning Technology
The interview concludes with Darlene’s vision for future Learning Management Systems (LMS). She advocates for integrated systems that connect with workflow tools and utilize AI for just-in-time learning. She emphasizes the need for LMS to be part of the broader organizational technology stack rather than standalone systems, enabling better integration with HR systems and certification tracking.
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Exactly how I’ve told stories has changed through the years, going from writing college basketball analysis in the pages of a newspaper to now, telling the stories of the people of TimelyText. Nowadays, that means helping a talented technical writer land a new gig by laying out their skills, or even a quick blog post about a neat project one of our instructional designers is finishing in pharma.
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