Your Team Is Doing Great Work. Here’s Why Nobody Upstairs Can See It.

In a recent article here at The Learning Stack we talked about the CFO conversation — and how to walk into a budget renewal with something better than a completion rate.

Previously in my role as a learning leader I have had a similar challenge at a micro level too:

“The issue isn’t just me. It’s my whole team. My designer thinks a five-star satisfaction score proves the course works. My trainer tracks attendance like it’s a trophy. I know the work is good, but nobody knows how to prove it.”

That’s the piece I want to pull on today.

Here is what nobody tells you when you step into a learning leadership role.

Your team probably learned to measure their work the same way you did. They use the tools the platform gave them and the feedback forms that were easiest to distribute.

Completion rates. Satisfaction scores. Attendance numbers.

These aren’t vanity metrics because your team is lazy. They are vanity metrics because nobody ever gave them a better question to answer.

Will Guidara — the restaurateur I referenced in a previous newsletter — makes a point that’s been sitting with me.

He says the things that matter most are almost always the hardest to measure. The reason we don’t measure them isn’t that we don’t care. It’s that nobody handed us the right instrument.

Your designer cares deeply about whether their course works. They just don’t have an instrument that reaches beyond the “Exit” button.

Your trainer knows when a session has landed. They can feel it in the room. They just don’t have a way to translate that feeling into the language a CFO respects.

It’s down to you to provide that translation layer.

These aren’t performance reviews. They are reframes. One conversation per role.

The Instructional Designer: Start by honouring what they already do well. A high satisfaction score tells you the experience wasn’t a UX disaster. That matters.

But then, ask them this:

“When you designed this course, what did you hope someone would do differently on Monday morning?”

That question produces a specific answer — their real metric — or a vague one, which tells you the project brief wasn’t sharp enough.

The new quality standard: “What should a manager notice their team member doing differently two weeks after this course?”

The Training Instructor: Your trainer knows more about whether their sessions work than any spreadsheet. They just don’t know that knowledge counts as “data.”

Ask them: “Tell me about a session where you knew, in the room, that something had clicked. What did you actually see?”

They’ll tell you about a question that landed differently, or the moment a resistant learner finally leaned in.

Help them build a simple Observation Record. Not a feedback form, but a 60-second log of two or three specific behaviours they noticed that suggested the skill was being transferred.

Here is why this matters beyond your next 1:1.

When your designer can say “every project brief now includes a defined behavioural outcome,” that is a quality standard.

When your trainer can say “I followed up on six sessions and here is what three managers reported,” that is field evidence.

The completion rate doesn’t disappear. It just stops being the headline. It becomes the background noise that tells you the infrastructure worked.

The number that earns the budget is the one that says: Something changed.

Will Guidara didn’t build the number one restaurant in the world by measuring “table turns.”

He built it by caring about things that are hard to count — and then finding ways to make that care visible.

Your team already cares. They got into this work because they believe learning changes people.

Your job isn’t to make them care more. It’s to give them the instruments to prove what they already know is true.