Eight questions to position your L&D team
Most L&D teams are treated as order-takers because they can't answer eight basic questions about their own work. Here they are.
Ask a marketing team what they do and you’ll get a sharp answer. Ask a finance team and you’ll get a sharper one. Ask an L&D team and you’ll often get a list of activities: courses built, sessions run, completion rates hit. That’s not a position. That’s a timesheet.
The difference matters because a team that can’t say what it does, clearly, in a way the business recognises, gets told what to do. It becomes an order-taker. “Build me a course on X” arrives, the course gets built, nothing changes, and the cycle repeats. The team is busy and invisible at the same time.
Positioning is the cure, and it’s less mysterious than it sounds. It’s the ability to answer eight questions about your own work without flinching. Most teams have never sat down and answered them on purpose. When they do, two things happen: the easy questions turn out to be harder than expected, and the answers stop sounding like everyone else’s.
The eight questions
Work through these in order. Each one builds on the last, and the gaps are as informative as the answers. If you get stuck on one, that’s not a failure of the exercise. It’s the finding.
Why the order matters
The first three questions define the offer: who, what value, what you actually do. The middle two force honesty about the alternatives, and the most dangerous competitor is almost never another team. It’s doing nothing, the manager who “just shows them on the job,” and the platform someone bought that nobody opens. If your differentiation can’t beat those, a competitor team is the least of your problems.
The last three are about credibility. Proof the business recognises, not the proof L&D likes to cite. A promise narrow enough that you can keep it every single time. And a next step, because a position that doesn’t end in an action is just a nicely worded paragraph.
A team that can answer these eight questions stops being briefed and starts being consulted. That’s the whole game.
What to do with the answers
Don’t turn this into a forty-slide strategy deck. The output is a single page: eight questions, eight honest answers, shared with the people who commission your work. The value isn’t the document. It’s the conversation it forces, and the moment a stakeholder reads it and says “I didn’t realise that’s what you do.”
If your team can’t get to clear, shared answers on its own, that’s usually the real engagement. It’s not a content problem or a tooling problem. It’s a positioning problem, and it’s the most leveraged thing an L&D team can fix.