Busy doesn’t mean strategic.
Being needed doesn’t mean being valuable.
And if you’ve ever watched your calendar become inundated with seemingly harmless “quick trainings,” you may have already been forced to come to grips with an uncomfortable truth: being busy feels good, but it is no match for being impactful.
Order-taking can feel like the right thing to do. Seductive, even. People thank you for taking orders. Stakeholders stop by your desk (or shoot you a chat message littered with the right kind of emojis) when you get things done. All that positive attention can leave you feeling indispensable and highly valued.
Which is exactly how it can quietly derail your credibility.
That metaphoric record scratch in perspective was the central theme of Tracie Cantu’s recent webinar, Stop Taking Orders, Start Driving Strategy: The Learning Operations Model.
Why order-taking becomes a trap (even when your intentions are good).
When someone asks for “a quick training,” their request is usually laced with urgency and certainty. The problem seems obvious. The solution has already been decided. And in a world where L&D is routinely pressured to prove its value, it’s tempting to say yes just to stay relevant.
But there’s a catch: when L&D becomes a fulfillment center, the business starts evaluating it like one.
That means the scoreboard wrongly shifts toward volume. The number of courses launched, the number of learners enrolled, the number of completions, and the average satisfaction score.
Those metrics can be useful—but if they aren’t tied to business outcomes, they become evidence of effort, not value. And when budgets tighten, effort is rarely what gets funded.
The more you make every request a priority, the more you unintentionally teach stakeholders that “priority” simply means “someone asked.” Eventually, everything is urgent, your team is exhausted, and it’s hard to prioritize—or even identify—the work that’s actually important.
The real issue isn’t talent. It’s the operating model.
Many L&D teams are staffed with smart, capable professionals producing high-quality work. But they’re still treated like an expendable cost center. That misrepresentation usually isn’t a content problem or an effort problem—it’s evidence that there’s a problem with the way we work.
Other business functions operate with visible discipline, like intake processes, prioritization criteria, decision rights, service expectations, and governance. L&D often operates with… a shared inbox and good intentions.
If you want to be seen as strategic, you need an operating model that makes strategic behavior the default—not the exception.
A practical model for running L&D like a business (without becoming robotic).
A modern L&D function balances four forces. If one gets weak, the whole system wobbles:
1) Business alignment: Are we building what the business needs to win?
Business alignment starts with a simple but powerful filter: can you clearly connect the request to an actual business priority and a measurable outcome?
If you can’t, it may still be a worthwhile effort—but it’s not strategic. That distinction matters because pretending everything is strategic will eventually backfire. Leaders don’t fund “nice-to-haves.” They fund outcomes.
Try swapping one question immediately. Instead of “What training do you need?” Ask: “What business outcome are you trying to achieve?”
2) Operational efficiency: Can we execute without all the drama?
Strategy without execution is just a slide deck, folks. At some point, you have to actually do the work. And when you do, you want to keep work moving in the right direction even when conditions aren’t ideal. Develop a clear intake process. Define what “done” looks like. Established expectations for the function, complete with reusable templates, and fewer reinventions of repeated efforts, like onboarding.
Try this mantra: simplify → automate → self-serve. If you can’t automate a process, design it so stakeholders can self-serve parts of it, freeing your team from constant, tactical, mind-numbing churn.
3) High customer value: Can we prove we improved outcomes?
Many teams measure what’s easiest to track. Things like completions, attendance, and quiz scores, otherwise known as smile sheets, are easy to note, but the reality is that easy measurement rarely aligns with executive decision-making.
Outcome measurement takes partnership, especially with teams that own the data (finance, talent acquisition, sales ops, risk, compliance). The goal is not to create perfect attribution, but instead, to tell real, human stories that combine quantitative signals with real proof.
To start, pick one metric you already track and make it better. Combine onboarding engagement with 90-day turnover, speed-to-productivity, or time-to-readiness, for example.
4) Positive consumer experience: Does learning fit the way people actually work?
The learner’s experience matters—deeply. But there’s a trap. You can build a wildly popular learning ecosystem that’ll still get cut if it isn’t tied to business priorities.
Here’s a helpful distinction: the customer is the business (the one funding the work), and the consumer is the employee (the one experiencing it). You have to serve both, but sequence matters. Business alignment earns the credibility needed to invest in better experiences.
The business should be first, but always keep the learner in mind.
The consulting shift: stop prescribing before you diagnose.
The moment L&D becomes truly strategic is the moment it behaves like an internal consulting function. That doesn’t require a reorg. It requires that you ask better questions consistently.
Use prompts like:
- “Help me understand what good looks like.”
- “What happens if we do nothing?”
- “What have you already tried?”
- “What’s getting in the way of performance/skills/incentives/tools/process/leadership?”
Questions like these do two things: #1, they turn the stakeholder conversation into a thought exercise (which changes how people experience working with you), and #2, they prevent you from building training for problems that training can’t fix.
The power move that doesn’t feel like a power move: “Yes, if…”
It may be risky to say no. And it might not always be possible. So, try a tradeoff conversation instead.
“Yes, we can build that—if we confirm the goal it supports and how success will be measured.”
“Yes, if we can delay X by three weeks, if we start this next month.”
“Yes, if we add contractor support, or your team owns the first draft using our templates.”
“Yes, if…” protects trust by anchoring decisions in capacity, priorities, and outcomes—not personal preference.
Where ELB Learning can help you make the shift stick
If you’re ready to move from order-taker to outcome-driver, ELB Learning® can help you build an operating model that can shift the culture in your organization. Our learning strategy services can help you clarify business alignment, establish intake and prioritization, define governance and measurement, and design solutions that improve performance—not just participation.
Watch the webinar recording below to dive deeper into the frameworks and practical language that can help you earn influence.
Click here to learn more about ELB Learning’s learning strategy services.
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Disclaimer: The ideas, perspectives, and strategies shared in this article reflect the expertise of our featured speaker, Tracie Cantu. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn to explore more of her insights.
