The journey to trusted advisor: reframing the role of L&D consultant from reluctant overhead to strategic imperative

All successful businesses need experts to help drive progress – in learning and development (L&D), every bit as much as in product design or sales and marketing.

But they also need people capable of taking on broader responsibilities: trusted advisors who know how to apply their expertise in context, building the relationships and behaviours that help organisations to navigate complex challenges and realise their goals.

From order taker to co-creator

The role of L&D is shifting – and not before time. Rather than inhabiting the role of ‘order taker’ – someone who delivers training by request – L&D professionals are increasingly being seen as trusted advisors, capable of collaborating with managers across departments to recommend effective solutions to operational and performance requirements. It’s this co-creative process that unlocks lasting achievement; the point at which internal customers stop seeing L&D as on-demand providers and instead realise that there’s more mileage in jointly focusing on outcomes, learning needs, impact and ROI.

In fact, while companies often fall back on the reassurance of external consultants, it almost always makes better sense to more purposefully resource in-house L&D to become the trusted advisors that can guide businesses through challenging times. With commitment, these L&D teams can develop the mechanisms needed to support business growth and build resilience – creating succession pathways or more successfully recruiting and retaining talent, for example.

Rising above the transactional

There’s no magic formula to forging this next-level internal client-advisor relationship, but, as a rule-of-thumb, you will require:

• Buy-in and support from your HR leadership team
• Buy-in from your executive or SLT
• The right skills and capability in both HR Business Partnering teams and the L&D function

With time, patience and commitment, these activities will coalesce into something altogether more powerful and transformative – moving from the transactional to the strategic, becoming a value-adding partner and providing an amazing internal service. With this transition you’ll become the wisest source of advice on key decisions, the one who adds value beyond your remit, the visionary who’s looking a step or two ahead and smoothing out the bumps.

Becoming the strategic partner and trusted advisor

Growing a partnership like this isn’t complicated but it does require clarity, focus and application. Communicating with honesty and transparency is crucial, too, as it inculcates the respect that will ultimately elevate the relationship to a new, more deeply embedded level.

Knowing and asking the right (and sometimes hard) questions, being unafraid to challenge, showing empathy for your leaders and the tough job they have and recognising the importance of stakeholder engagement and management is in part how you get there.

How can you, as an L&D function, become the strategic partner and trusted advisor?

1. Work closely with your HR Business Partner colleagues, ask to tag along to meetings and spend time understanding the needs, goals and realities for their customers. This means you can spot solutions and support the change needed with your colleague. Co-create solutions with your HR colleagues and your internal customers.
2. Calculate the content you need alongside the content you may create. Which learning needs can be handled by your off-the-shelf content versus a more bespoke requirement.
3. Talk to your L&D and HR colleagues – what trends are they seeing across the organisation? Work out if it’s something that needs tackling at an organisational rather than local level and create the business case to make change happen – including those all-important metrics that show the value of implementation.
4. Keep your knowledge and own personal learning up to date, talk about the insights you are getting from this with your internal customers and colleagues.
5. Be commercial! Know the organisation’s numbers, read the annual report, understand the metrics which drive performance and know the worth of your programmes! Pair up with your finance team and ask for help on proving the impact you’ve had.
6. Team up with amazing external partners (like us!) who will operate as an extension of your L&D team and support your internal customers with great solutions.

Growing together

Trusted advisors don’t define themselves as solutions providers; they focus, instead, on creating a response that guides internal clients towards successful outcomes. Change can’t happen without disruption; constructively challenging accepted norms doesn’t always feel comfortable but often leads to the most rewarding results.

Consistency is the key to establishing mutually beneficial long-term relationships. Delivering confidently against agreed targets not only consolidates your reputation for reliability but also builds the credibility you need to cement enduring trust.