Compass Staff |
When an HR leader took over learning-and-development (L&D) for the pharmacy-operations division of a major healthcare organization, she inherited a department in crisis. Executives no longer saw L&D as a business driver, and the team had suffered layoffs as a result.
“The business did not feel supported by learning … and learning wasn’t close enough to operations to actually make an impact,” she told us.
So, she set out to rebuild L&D as a strategic function — one that could demonstrate value, earn trust, and deliver measurable results.
This leader’s story exemplifies a key finding from Guild research: CHROs and L&D leaders who align learning with their organization’s top priorities are significantly more likely to drive results. In healthcare, the highest-performing leaders connected learning initiatives to quality of care, patient satisfaction, and regulatory compliance — core drivers of organizational performance.
“It’s not going to be ‘butts in seats’ and 3.5 out of 4 ratings. It’s going to be: Here’s how we made a difference to your line of business.”
The following case study brings these insights to life, showing how one healthcare L&D leader rebuilt her function to align tightly with business needs, earn executive trust, and deliver measurable results across retention, mobility, and operational performance.
Building L&D for impact
Her first move was structural. She replaced outdated annual planning with quarterly prioritization meetings designed to reflect real-time business needs. She introduced biannual portfolio reviews and routine touchpoints with business leaders to maintain strategic alignment.
“I told the learning managers, we’re going to immediately stop annual planning,” she shared. “The business moves too fast.”
But building a performance-driven L&D engine required data. She led the development of a learning data lake on Microsoft Azure, integrating hundreds of data sources across quality, operations, and workforce analytics. This critical move meant that she wasn’t dependent on another function to track the impact of their work. While building this data lake took nearly two years of persistence, she now can measure impact with urgency.
To power this transformation, she made a bold and uncommon move in L&D: hiring a dedicated data engineer. This role, often found in product or analytics teams, became central to the function’s success. She also hired someone skilled in data visualization to ensure that the data she gathered could be presented to executive stakeholders in dashboards and digests that were easy to understand. She customized her reporting by stakeholder level. Executives got high-level summaries tied to outcomes, while frontline managers got detailed metrics and dashboards specific to their teams.
The data engineer built the architecture to bring together disparate sources into one accessible ecosystem. This enabled her team to report on performance, spot trends, and tie learning directly to operational outcomes.
“This is the first time I’ve had data that lets me go to a VP and say: we’ve burned through 9,000 hours with only 7,500 available. We need to backfill,” she said.
This ecosystem now runs on Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate, fully integrated with their learning and content management systems.
“We needed to see how learning impacts our metrics,” she said. “We needed to see how learning matters for the business — like, is it going to save us money? Is it going to improve things?”
This perspective is increasingly shared by top healthcare L&D leaders. In the Guild study, leaders who aligned L&D with business priorities were 122% more likely to meet or exceed their top performance metrics. In healthcare, these included improvements in retention, internal mobility, engagement, productivity, and leadership readiness. Onboarding programs helped reduce early attrition, while certification pathways and role-specific training accelerated upskilling and advancement. When employees saw a clear path to growth, engagement surged — by more than 25% in some cases — and targeted learning efforts translated into real operational gains.
These results mirror a pattern seen across high-impact organizations Guild studied — what we define as the “4 I’s” of HR leadership: Integration, Influence, Internal Mobility, and Impact. These four behaviors consistently distinguish leaders who move beyond execution to shape business strategy through learning.
Internal Mobility
She rebuilt L&D on the belief that internal talent development is a strategic growth lever. She did this by aligning learning initiatives to the most critical operational goals and targeting the root causes of performance gaps. This helped create new career pathways.
“You have to think about what are the issues that are plaguing people in the particular role, and how can I help them fix those problems," she said.
Integration
Rather than operate on the margins, she integrated L&D directly into the business. By shifting away from annual planning cycles and building strong relationships with operations leaders, she made sure that learning priorities were tightly aligned with the company’s evolving needs.
“I report into operations — not HR — because we needed to be closer to where business strategy happens,” she said.
Influence
To earn credibility at the executive level, she focused relentlessly on value creation — making their work visible, measurable, and aligned with what decision-makers care about most.
“The people that care about business impact and ROI are vice presidents who are in charge of profitability," she said. "These are the people I have to convince, and these are the people who really care that we’re making a difference.”
Impact
She transformed how her organization measures learning by focusing on what matters most to the business. From A/B testing to role-specific dashboards to hiring a data engineer, her data-driven approach makes it possible to show — with clarity — how learning improves operational results.
“If I teach one group a new process and compare their results to those who didn’t get the training, the performance improvement — assuming nothing else changed — is attributable to training," she said.
Measuring what matters
Her approach to metrics was expressly designed for business decision-makers. Instead of focusing on participation or satisfaction scores, she prioritized metrics tied directly to business value.
Before starting any L&D initiative, she asks her team which business outcome they believe they will impact with their project. She also ties L&D to key operational goals — like reducing the cost per prescription fill — and uses A/B testing and historical comparisons to isolate the impact of a learning initiative.
Despite her hard work, she knew that the value she created had to be visible. She built a robust internal marketing strategy that included:
Quarterly summaries of completed and upcoming L&D work
Biannual metrics calls with each business line
An annual performance report paired with a short executive video
“If nobody knows you did it, it doesn’t matter that you did it,” she noted.
The visibility paid off. When a VP hesitated to approve a backfill, she sent a one-pager summarizing her team’s contributions. The role was approved immediately.
“It’s not going to be ‘butts in seats’ and 3.5 out of 4 ratings,” she said. “It’s going to be: here’s how we made a difference to your line of business.”
