How Learning and Development Pros Can Share ROI and Speak the Language of the Business
As learning and development leaders, it feels like we're always trying to get a seat at the table, but are we truly prepared to have effective conversations with our nonprofit's executives when we get there?
To get you ready, in this episode, I invited Rick Dahlseid to help us position training as a worthwhile investment. He is a nonprofit CFO with over 20 years in the sector, with expertise in financial management, operations, and governance.
You'll learn about his unique point of view on the role of training and development in a nonprofit, where your conversations about people development should start, the kind of language that will be most effective, and what you should actually focus on to get your point across.
▶️ Key Points:
00:00 Rick's mission and nonprofit financial leadership
09:49 How a seasoned nonprofit CFO views training
16:23 Define ROI for learning and development first
22:16 How to get the nonprofit to invest in your training
31:30 Focus on the outcomes and keep the end in mind
The Perception of Learning & Development
As mission-driven leaders, we are constantly striving to improve capacity, drive performance, and fuel our mission's impact. Yet, in the pursuit of these goals, Learning and Development (L&D) often finds itself stuck in a frustrating cycle: training is seen merely as a cost, an expense to be cut when budgets tighten, rather than a crucial investment in the future of the organization.
For most L&D and talent development professionals, proving the strategic value of their work and securing the necessary resources require a fundamental reframe. We must pivot from discussing training as an obligation to demonstrating its power as a strategic investment in the skills of our staff and the future outcomes of our nonprofit.
On episode 166 of the Learning for Good podcast, I sit down with Rick Dahlseid, Chief Financial Officer for Janus of Santa Cruz. This necessary mindset shift was the central theme of my discussion with Rick, a seasoned financial executive with over two decades of experience in nonprofit financial leadership. In his career, Rick has led financial transformation initiatives across various mission-driven sectors, including healthcare, human services, and affordable housing. His alternative perspective—a view not shared by many CFOs who simply aim to reduce expenses—is a roadmap for L&D professionals seeking strategic partnership.
Why Training Is an Investment
Training comes at a very real cost. Estimates to build training range from $5,000 to $15,000 on the low end, and up to $75,000 to $250,000 on the high end, depending on factors like outsourcing, travel expenses, and necessary tools. When the costs are this significant, L&D must stop talking about what they spend and start talking about what the organization gains.
To understand why training is an investment, we must adopt a different perspective on the organization itself. Rick Dahlseid views the organization not as a static entity, but as an organism that leaders have to feed and nurture to get more out of.
Nonprofits are primarily reliant on people to execute their mission—whether that mission involves helping environments, animals, or people in various sectors. This dependence on means leaders are charged with making sure their people are valued, empowered, and fully engaged.
Rick shares the principle of growth:
“If something isn’t growing, then it’s dying.”
This agricultural analogy applies directly to the workforce. Leaders have a responsibility to foster growth strategies to ensure their people are the best they can be, enabling them to be innovative and contribute back to the organization so it can help more people. This development through training and capacity building is not a nice-to-have; it is an essential function of organizational stewardship.
Stewarding Your Nonprofit’s Largest Investment
For most nonprofits, the single largest line item in the budget is the workforce. Rick highlights that in most mission-driven organizations, 80% plus of the budget is dedicated to payroll and benefits.
This means that leaders are already managing a major financial spend. Training, therefore, is not a separate, external cost; it is an act of stewardship over that major financial expenditure. If the strategic plan does not include some kind of stewardship or development plan for this 80%+ spend, it is missing an essential piece.
Training, done correctly, is how leaders responsibly increase their people's capacity and ability to do more. This capacity building is a core piece of financial stewardship.
How Training Supports Capacity Building
When discussing capacity building, the CFO’s perspective emphasizes maximizing existing resources—both human and technological—before committing to new expenses.
Rick uses the example of staff and their use of software, such as an HRIS (Human Resources Information System) or specialized applications like Excel. If staff are not fully trained on these systems, the organization may prematurely conclude that the system is failing and needs replacement, which involves a massive, unnecessary cost.
Instead, leaders must ask: Are we providing opportunities for staff to upskill and become the onsite experts or super users of the systems we already own? Are we working in the system to squeeze every nickel and dime out of it to ensure it is performing as it should?
If employees can increase their capacity and extract maximum value from existing resources through targeted training, it benefits the organization greatly. This focus on efficiency and getting the most out of current investments resonates deeply in the finance world.
Measuring Training’s Return on Investment (ROI)
L&D professionals often struggle to quantify the ROI for training, especially soft skills like leadership development. To connect training to finance, we must first achieve a shared agreement on what ROI means. While there is a traditional financial calculation, when dealing with people, we must have “a little bit more grace and patience.”
The critical mistake L&D makes when reporting value is focusing on outputs rather than outcomes:
Outputs are easy to measure but fail to prove value. These include metrics like, "We trained 69 hours last month" or "satisfaction scores were high."
Outcomes are the measurable accomplishments and results that directly benefit the mission and the bottom line.
Rick stresses that L&D must emphasize the outcomes, the accomplishment, and the resulting benefit to the organization.
How to Quantify Training Outcomes
To secure funding and strategic partnership, L&D must speak in terms of outcomes that a CFO can easily understand and value:
Efficiency Gains: Instead of reporting the number of people who attended a class, report the resulting time savings. For example: "Sally took this class and now gets her work done that used to take her four hours in two hours." This is a tangible reduction in time spent on a task.
Retention Rates and Attrition Slowdown: One of the most controllable costs in any organization is employee replacement. The cost to replace a single employee is estimated at one to two times the salary of the person leaving. Investing in leadership development and professional growth helps maintain people and directly slows down attrition. By demonstrating how training is reducing these massive replacement costs, L&D proves a substantial ROI.
Future Leadership Development: Training is key to internal career advancement, which is a powerful retention tool. L&D can work with managers to create development plans—for instance, detailing the extra technical and soft skills needed to progress from a staff accountant to a senior accountant. This structured advancement, facilitated by training, is a clear organizational benefit that fills future leadership gaps caused by inevitable attrition.
Speaking the Language of the Business and the Nonprofit Executive
Rick shares that L&D professionals often struggle to show up as strategic partners because they go into conversations "speaking learning," while the executive team is speaking "finance" or "strategy. "This creates a mismatch of language and a barrier to discussion.
Rick notes that every profession has its jargon—its acronyms and internal terms—which can break the momentum and cadence of a discussion.
To overcome this, L&D professionals must adopt a crucial communication principle:
“We have to translate and speak in the receiver’s tongue.”
Leaders should consider how they would want to hear the information if they were in the CFO's shoes—clear, concise, and without technical jargon. This means avoiding L&D terms (like even "L&D" itself, which can be misheard as "labor and delivery" or confused with "development" in the fundraising sense) and instead communicating in terms of:
Strategic Alignment: Showing how the training ties back to the organization’s overarching strategic plan and goals for talent development.
Risk Mitigation: Framing training as a way to eliminate things that are "falling through the cracks."
Accomplishment: Focusing solely on the tangible results and successes achieved through the money spent.
Rick offers a final piece of critical advice: do not get hung up on the word "investment." While the mindset shift is helpful, the emphasis should always be on the outcomes. Just like in a 401k, what truly matters is the return achieved—the outcome—not simply the fact that money was put in.
Key Lessons for Learning & Development Pros
To position training as a strategic, mission-critical investment, L&D must become masters of the performance diagnostic and the outcome report.
We must always keep the end in mind. We must start every initiative by knowing what success looks like and then peeling back the layers to solve that problem and achieve that outcome. By focusing on the accomplishment that results from the dollars spent, L&D transforms its role from a cost center to a vital growth engine, ensuring the people driving the mission are nurtured and continuously growing.
To learn more about speaking the language of the nonprofit executive, tune into episode 165 of the Learning for Good podcast.
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