Is your learning and development department transactional, taking orders and ensuring compliance? Or does it focus on building capability with targeted initiatives that have support from the senior team?

In this week's GoodPractice Podcast, GP Strategies' Barbara Thompson (formerly of BP and PA Consulting) joins Ross G and Owen to share her insights working both internally and externally.

We discuss the challenges to transforming learning functions, the role of technology and how coaching techniques can help gain the support of senior colleagues.

If you'd like to share your thoughts on the show, you can find us on Twitter @RossGarnerGP, @OwenFerguson and @BarbaraThompson. This week we had production support from our own @Ross__Dickie.

To find out more about GoodPractice, visit goodpractice.com or tweet us @GoodPractice or @GoodPracticeAus.

Barbara was too modest to plug anything, but blogs at: https://medium.com/@ba_thompson

Barbara recently shared her advice as a female leader in the business world at: https://www.stratxcorporate.com/industry-insights/how-to-rise-the-ranks-advice-from-a-female-leader-on-making-it-to-the-top?hs_amp=true

Deloitte's 2014 summary on learning transformation is online at: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/HumanCapital/gx-cons-hc-learning-transformation-placemat.pdf

The Towards Maturity 2019 benchmark is a great place to get started if you're interested in this topic, with guidance on what top performing L&D teams are doing differently. Their latest benchmark, The Transformation Journey, came out in February and is available online at: https://towardsmaturity.org/2019/02/14/the-transformation-journey-2019-annual-research-report/

And for something completely frivolous, you can find out the actors who have made the most money at the US box office at: https://www.businessinsider.com/actors-with-highest-box-office-2016-9?r=US&IR=T This list is heavily skewed by how many films the actors have been in, and how many of those films were produced by Marvel.

Owen wanted to point out that this list is not adjusted for inflation.