Over the past 25 years executives have become fervent advocates of learning, calling it an imperative, career insurance, and the only source of competitive advantage. That enthusiasm is warranted: Today the development of new skills, knowledge, and mindsets is critical to most businesses’ key strategic efforts—from navigating global crises and unprecedented industry change, addressing the rise of generative AI, and driving innovation, to attracting and retaining talent, building inclusive workplaces, and making a positive difference in society.

Indeed, more and more business leaders are moved to make a bold promise: that their company is not just a machine to deliver profit but also a community devoted to social impact and its members’ well-being. Learning is key to fulfilling that promise, especially in an age when talent flocks to organizations that offer to upskill employees and support their development. A commitment to learning is critical to making organizations both more efficient and more humane.

The growing importance of learning has heralded the arrival of a new breed of senior leaders—people I call leaders of learning. They may be chief learning officers, heads of learning and development, heads of talent and organizational development, and in some companies, chief human resources or chief people officers. They advocate for and organize learning, developing learning strategies and implementing learning initiatives for the enterprise and its employees.

But many of their efforts are going awry. Academic studies reveal mixed evidence on whether such initiatives produce lasting individual or organizational change. Despite their public commitment to learning, in private many executives I meet express skepticism about the quality and effectiveness of it in their workplace. “How do I know this has any impact on my company’s transformation?” I often hear. And there’s skepticism from employees as well: “My boss doesn’t actually care about my learning, just about results” is a common complaint.

Throughout my career I’ve taught, coached, and collaborated closely with leaders of learning. I’ve watched their excitement turn to frustration as their efforts were met with ambivalence and resistance or failed to deliver after raising much hope. To find out why so many are stymied—and what can be done about it—I teamed up with Annie Peshkam, a learning researcher and coach, to interview leaders of learning at 69 multinational firms across industries and continents.

One of our key findings is that companies begin to stifle learning when executives assume that there’s a single right way to do it that will serve all the organization’s needs. That’s simply not the case. We found that there are three distinct ways to lead learning—as a custodian, a challenger, or a connector—all of which can be successful in the right context. The methods used by leaders with the three approaches don’t vary much; they all involve a combination of formal workshops, on-the-job learning, cases, speakers, 360-degree feedback, and so on. But how and why leaders deploy them differs dramatically. And we found that too often the intent of learning was unclear in organizations, resulting in a mismatch between the learning approach and current company needs. That caused friction and frustration and derailed efforts to improve learning.

Understanding the three approaches and the differing goals they serve can help executives select, develop, partner with, and be better leaders of learning for their companies.

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Custodians

Custodians see learning as instrumental to executing an organization’s strategy and strengthening its culture. In their view learning is a tool to help employees perform their roles better (and get better roles). While learning helps employees succeed and advance, the ultimate beneficiary is the organization, and any learning that doesn’t provide a concrete advantage to the company is probably useless.

Custodians embrace this view because they see themselves primarily as stewards of the business. For them, alignment with senior leadership is a top priority; they create value by bringing others on board with the top team’s agenda. Indeed, many custodians we spoke to were business leaders in other areas before they came to learning, and most noted how much they had in common with their C-suite peers.

Instrumental learning gets people to converge toward a norm, be it a cultural framework or a competency framework. Employees are assessed against a clear model and then get assignments meant to fill any gaps identified and build cultural cohesion. (A major concern of a custodian is thus picking the right people for the right learning at the right time.)

Custodians prefer centrally developed boot-camp-type learning that facilitates the deliberate acquisition and practice of new skills. Courses replicate the actual workplace, offer employees timely feedback on their practice attempts, and allow them to try again. The goal is for people to efficiently gain facility with new or difficult skills. Learning experiences are explicitly connected to the company’s strategy and culture, since custodians disdain initiatives that are “too academic,” or too distant from immediate application in the company. In the right contexts programs designed like this help participants strengthen their skills and rise up the ranks and help the company grow.

A classic example of the custodian approach is Apple University. Aware that the company was growing fast and that he would soon let go of its reins, Steve Jobs hired Joel Podolny, then the dean of the Yale School of Management, to develop a bespoke curriculum to socialize employees in Apple’s unique ways of making decisions, communicating, and building products—and teach them the fundamental principles of simplicity, usefulness, and intuitiveness that Jobs held dear.

The custodians we spoke with were most successful and most satisfied in companies where there was a pressing need for alignment—for example, following the launch of a new strategy or after a period of fast growth that had strained coordination across the firm. In such circumstances custodians can bring much-needed standardization and strengthen the common culture through their approach to learning. But we have seen custodians suddenly be fired, too—for example, when a new CEO determines that the company’s learning approach is too rigid, stifling innovation or overlooking talent whose views might benefit the organization.

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Whether you’re hiring a new learning leader or trying to understand the dynamics of the one your company has in place now, ask yourself: What is your organization trying to accomplish? Does your team (or division or organization) need to execute on a clear vision, or does it need to forge a broader one? Is the learning required to make progress more instrumental or more humanistic? What is needed to promote the right combination of those approaches for your organization? Answering those questions might help you find the learning leadership that can bring that vision to life.