Reporting to the Right People in the Right Way
We talk a lot in L&D about reporting to the board, about speaking the language of the business and connecting our work to strategic priorities. And that’s important; I’ve written extensively about metric chains as a way of drawing those connections from intervention to impact. But the conversation often stops there, as though the board is the only audience that matters, and I think that’s a mistake.
The reality for most L&D functions is that you don’t report directly to the board at all. You report to L&D line managers, to function leaders, to HR business partners, and to operational stakeholders who have a vested interest in what you’re doing and why. Some of those people carry your reports upward; many don’t. Your reporting, then, needs to serve multiple audiences with different questions, different priorities, and different levels of interest in the detail.
When I build a metric chain for an intervention, the full picture can be quite detailed; confidence levels, predictive models, observational data across multiple time horizons. But I don’t send all of that to everyone. If I’m reporting to the board or a senior sponsor, I’m focusing on how the intervention connects to the metrics they care about and what we expect to see over the coming months. If I’m reporting to HR, I might be drawing connections to retention, engagement, or pulse survey data, perhaps highlighting where our metric chain intersects with theirs. If I’m reporting to an operations manager, I’m probably stopping a couple of levels down the chain and focusing on what’s changed, or should be changing, in their team’s day-to-day performance.
If you’d like to learn more about metric chains, I’m running a 1.5-hour workshop as part of the Learning Network’s Data and Metrics Mastery Day.
You can learn more about the event and book your free ticket on the Learning Network’s website.
The principle is straightforward: report the right information to the right people. Just because we have data doesn’t mean everyone needs to see it. Happy sheets, for instance, are useful for refining the experience of going through an intervention, but they don’t mean much to a line manager who wants to know whether their team is performing differently. Equally, if the original business problem was about increasing sales, the question stakeholders are asking is whether sales have increased, or whether the early indicators suggest they will. Three or four additional data points are fine if they’re relevant to the person reading the report, but don’t include them simply because you collected them.
This brings me to format. In 2026, we should not be emailing spreadsheets or one-pagers in PDF. Reporting should be live and digital, ideally a dashboard that people can access whenever they need to, with views tailored to their role. A line manager clicks through and sees a line manager report. Someone at board level sees the strategic view. HR sees how the intervention connects to their metrics. This is standard practice in larger organisations using tools like Power BI, but it’s entirely achievable in smaller ones too; there are plenty of accessible, low-cost tools that make live reporting practical.
The broader shift is in thinking about reporting as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. In the same way that we advocate for learning as continuous, our reporting should be continuous too; updated as new data comes in, accessible when people want it, and focused on answering the questions that each audience is asking.
If you’d like to learn more about measuring impact and reporting it to the business, join me and Dr. Alaina Szlachta for a live one-hour webinar on February 25th at 3 pm GMT. You can sign up now over on the LinkedIn event page.
