What Does Senior Management Need?

If levels 4 and 5 data are of interest at the Mid layer of your audience, will this same information satisfy your Senior managers? At this stage of business maturity for the WLP profession, the answer is yes and no. Many Senior managers are very interested in ROI numbers , but ultimately Senior managers are looking for something more. They are looking for a true business partner who can help them set visions and drive the success of the entire organization.

On the one hand, many Senior managers have never had the opportunity to understand how ROI numbers can be reliably gathered and calculated within their organizations. Such an understanding would give Senior managers critical insights into what the norms are for their organization and what the potential payoffs might be from additional WLP investments versus other possible investments. Senior managers intuitively know that learning and performance improvement pays off. They simply have never been able to validate by how much or for how long. They have had to rely on guesses and gut feelings, which could be wildly off the mark. They cannot risk the future of the organization on such unreliable guesses and opinions . For many Senior managers, gaining a better understanding of how they can measure and control the ROI from WLP interventions is an untapped need, or as discussed in chapter 8, it is an unknown expectation. Satisfying an unknown expectation creates a condition of delight.

On the other hand, once their need to know how to measure and control WLP ROI is satisfied, then it rapidly becomes a given that the WLP professional will provide interventions that make a difference to the bottom line.

Important ‚  

Before you demonstrated that you were providing great value all along, Senior managers were unsure if they were getting any value at all or enough value to sustain the investment. This led them to keep increasing the pressure for you to demonstrate your value until they got the type of information they were looking for. Once they are assured that the value is there, however, then proving a positive ROI is no longer enough. Senior managers will then ask themselves what else was the WLP professional hired for?

In the long run, you can ‚ t satisfy a Senior-level executive by proving results or ROI. You can only dissatisfy them if you don ‚ t. So if a Senior manager is looking for a true business partner, what does a Senior level manager need to hear when you are communicating your value? Take a look at figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2: Value and Senior management expectations.