Dr Matthew Gitsham∙ Professor of Business and Sustainability at Hult International Business School
Faculty Column ∙ July 9, 2025
Our thinking about an organization’s role in society has changed. Our approach to impact has to evolve too.
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As more and more organizations are putting sustainability and ESG goals into the heart of their corporate strategies, is there a need to rethink the metrics and methods we use to evaluate the impact of corporate learning and development programs?
Traditional evaluation models (like Kirkpatrick) encourage us to think about the impact of learning for the individual learner and for the organization as a whole, but should we now also be asking about impact at a third level – how impactful is the learning for society and planet?
Questions about the best methods for measuring the ROI of leadership development interventions fit with a logic of seeing the goal of organizations as maximizing profit and return on investment to shareholders.
But our ideas about the purpose of organizations have been moving on. We increasingly talk about a stakeholder model of business, where the purpose of organizations is to create value for multiple stakeholders in society, including but not only for shareholders.
In this logic, the success of an organization is evaluated by referring to multiple measures, not just profit and shareholder value. Common ESG metrics include progress in areas relating to Net Zero, biodiversity gain, circularity, human rights due diligence, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and health, safety and well-being, for example. These kinds of metrics are standardized in frameworks like the Global Reporting Initiative, the International Sustainability Standards Board by the IFRS Foundation, and European Commission directives CSRD and CSDDD.
If this is how we now think about the purpose of organizations, it also needs to be how we think about the purpose of learning.
So, how can we measure this kind of impact of learning?
The obvious place to start is to look at an organization’s ESG metrics – are they improving? If a leadership development intervention were helping build leadership capability to achieve progress in these goals, we would expect to see progress in these very same goals. This would be important to look at, but also a bit problematic: how to separate out the impact of the learning intervention from other factors that may have helped or hindered the organization from achieving its ESG goals?
So in addition to looking for a relationship between leadership development interventions and overall ESG metrics, there are two other areas we can look at – we can look for evidence of a shift in leadership behaviors, and ask learners and those they work with for their own perspectives.
If leadership development interventions were helping build the leadership capability to create value for multiple stakeholders, we might expect to be able to see senior executives engaging in particular activities.
Are they, for example:
Bringing ESG topics into conversations with their team, other colleagues, customers, investors, suppliers, and other industry partners and stakeholders? Maybe in management team meetings, other internal meetings, investor calls, customer and/or supplier events, for example?
Introducing ESG elements into team goals and KPIs?
Advocating for ESG factors to be considered alongside others when participating in investment decisions? Or perhaps during conversations about mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships?
Getting involved in innovation activities relating to ESG?
Seeking out support and advice from the central sustainability team?
Seeing evidence of senior executives exhibiting more of these kinds of behaviors would help give us some insight into the impact of leadership development interventions. And using AI to analyze meeting notes and other kinds of documents could actually enable us to track trends in ESG language and references in these kinds of settings.
As well as looking for evidence of changes in behavior like this, we can also look for insight by asking people for their perspectives. There are questions we can include in 360s, for example: Are colleagues and peers of learners seeing evidence of changed behaviors? And then we can have ask the learners themselves:
What kind of impact has the learning intervention had?
What did they take away from the experience, exploring around purpose and ESG topics specifically?
And what have they done since in relation to ESG activities that they might not otherwise have done?
All these elements have been considered in our HAPI model – where engaging the learner with wider impact questions and gathering information from multiple sources gives us a richer picture of results.
Our thinking about the purpose of organizations has moved on, and these are some of the ways we can bring that into the way we think about impact of learning.
Meet the expert
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Dr Matthew Gitsham
Professor of Business and Sustainability at Hult International Business School
Matt is Director of the Sustainability Impact Lab at Hult International Business School. He specializes in sustainable development, human rights and organizational change. Matt has led numerous research projects on business and sustainable development for over a decade at Ashridge.
Matt is a frequent contributor to Hult Ashridge L&D solutions for executive education clients and has led many courses on Business and Global Society, Sustainable Development and Human Rights themes across Hult’s postgraduate and undergraduate programs.
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