How do L&D leaders decide where to spend their time? Who gets access to their budget? How do we deal with those colleagues where we have to say: 'No, that's not a priority'. In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G is chatting L&D governance with a panel of L&D pros: From Phoenix Group, Carl Akintola-Davies; from Mitie, Dolly Ogundimu and Marc Harvey; and, from Merlin Entertainments, James Clemence. We discuss: How to prioritize inbound requests and seek out opportunities How to work with business stakeholders to shape their needs How to measure the value that L&D teams bring to their organizations. During the discussion, a recurring refrain was the word ‘boondoggle’. We also referenced learner surveys. For more on this, see our episode with Dr Will Thalheimer. In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Carl discussed a paper on ‘zombie leadership’ from Professor Alex Haslam. It’s not published yet, but you can get some insight into the topic in this video. Dolly discussed the value of benchmarking. Marc discussed work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. For more from Merlin Entertainments, check out their: YouTube channel Instagram Podcast For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  You can also contact [email protected]. Connect with our speakers  If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers: Ross Garner Carl Akintola-Davies Dolly Ogundimu Marc Harvey James Clemence