Nonprofit talent development host shares how learning leaders can be more strategic

Does your L&D team spend most of its time responding to urgent training requests instead of shaping strategy?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Mark Nilles and Scot Vessell, two experienced learning and development leaders, to discuss what it actually takes for nonprofit L&D to operate as a strategic lever.

We argue that becoming a strategic partner starts with an internal shift, from seeing yourself as a learning designer who produces training to seeing yourself as a change agent who helps solve organizational problems.

▶️ Key Points:

00:00 Becoming a Strategic Partner in Nonprofit L&D

04:25 Meet the Panel: Nonprofit L&D Leaders on Strategic Partnership

08:05 Why Nonprofit L&D Teams Get Stuck in Reactive Mode

14:24 The Risk of L&D Staying a Reactive Training Factory

18:03 What Strategic Learning and Development Looks Like

22:30 Reframing the Conversation Around Nonprofit Training and Behavior Change

29:46 Practical Advice for Becoming a More Strategic Nonprofit L&D Partner

Why Nonprofit Learning Teams Default to Reactive Work

It’s tempting to assume reactive mode is just a resourcing problem: too few people, too many requests.

But I recently sat down with two veteran learning leaders, Mark Nilles and Scot Vessell, and we explored some alternative view points on episode 105 of the Learning for Good podcast.

Mark who has spent 15 years supporting international development organizations described it as a kind of success trap. When an L&D function delivers strong well-designed, well-facilitated, well-received training, colleagues take note. And because a classroom-style training experience is familiar to most people from their own schooling, it becomes the go-to answer whenever a gap shows up. The better you are at training, the more training requests you get, whether or not training is actually the right lever. And this reinforces a reactive environment where training requests come in, regardless of whether training is the right solution.

There’s also a timing problem. As Mark put it, L&D usually isn’t looped in until a decision has already been made: leadership has identified the problem, decided training is the fix, and now needs it built. By the time the request reaches your desk, the opportunity to ask “is training even the right solution here?” has sometimes already closed.

Scot, who has spent nearly three decades across public and private sector L&D, added a third layer: expectations that were set long before you arrived. If an organization has always treated its L&D team as a service function, that’s the relationship you’re inheriting, and it won’t shift on its own. As Scot put it, leaders aren’t going to care how much you know until they know how much you care, which means understanding their pain points and their language before you can reposition the role.

The Real Cost of Reactive Learning

What’s actually at stake when you stay reactive?

You keep delivering training that doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

And what happens then?

L&D gets blamed. And more resources get thrown at the problem.

Your expertise doesn’t shine, and the organization isn’t able to steward their resources—people, time, finances, etc.—in the most effective way.

How Learning Leaders Can Become More Strategic

A few practical tips from Mark and Scot:

Build relationships with other leaders.
Show up with a point of view.
Overdeliver on the right things.

Scot shared an example from earlier in his career that captures this well. A large organization kept requesting more policy training because compliance issues persisted. Nobody had ever asked a basic question: were people actually attending?

So Scot started measuring without being asked. Attendance. How long people stayed. Basic engagement signals. Then he compared attendance against how many people were even eligible for the training and shared those numbers internally.

The reaction was immediate. Leaders who had no idea their teams were sitting around 18% attendance started paying attention. Engagement climbed. And something else happened: leadership started asking L&D questions in L&D’s own language. Are we tracking level two? Can we get to a level three evaluation on this? Nobody had asked Scot to build that measurement layer. He gave it to them anyway, and it’s what shifted the relationship from vendor to partner.

The Internal Shift for Every Learning Leader

Every tactic on this list—the relationship building, the reframed conversations, the proactive measurement—depends on one internal shift that’s easy to skip past: how you see your own role.

If you show up thinking of yourself as a learning designer, your instinct is to produce learning. If you show up thinking of yourself as a change agent, you start asking different questions before you ever open a course-authoring tool. That identity shift isn’t semantic. It changes what you notice, what you push back on, and what you offer before anyone asks.

It also puts the responsibility for change where it actually belongs: with you, not with the organization. Waiting to be invited to the table, waiting for leadership to see L&D differently, waiting for a title change, all of that is action you’re handing off to someone else. Building the relationships, reframing the conversation, and bringing a point of view even when it’s not your lane, that’s action you can own.

To learn more about how learning can be more strategic (and you can too), tune into episode 195 of the Learning for Good podcast.

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