Karen Gatnisky

Karen Ganitsky is SIBG Global Sales L&D Senior Manager at 3M, where she leads global sales training strategy for the company's Safety and Industrial Business Group (SIBG), representing roughly half of 3M's total sales. Her team became a distinct function in late 2023, and she has led its transformation from a training-and-onboarding group into a strategic partner to the business in the years since.

Turning a Training Team Into a Strategic Function in Under Three Years

Karen's path to leading global sales training at 3M ran through several adjacent roles within the company, including Manager of Customer Engagement & Events, Manager of Channel Development, and a stint as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt for the Industrial and Safety Markets Center. She has spoken publicly about taking her team through a learning strategy maturity assessment covering six dimensions (strategy, governance, technology, content, measurement, and culture) and using the results to avoid trying to fix everything at once: rather than tackling governance across all of 3M, she started by clarifying decision rights within her own team and its closest business partners first, then expanding outward. She credits much of her team's transformation, from being seen as an "onboarding organization" to becoming recognized as a change agent for the business, to bringing a concrete proposal forward at the right moment rather than waiting to be asked.

Topics Karen speaks on

• Turning a training team into a strategic business function
• Applying a learning strategy maturity model without trying to fix everything at once
• Global sales training strategy for industrial and manufacturing businesses
• Applying Lean Six Sigma discipline to L&D design
• Building team buy-in through fast, values-led change management

Sessions with Achieve

Karen is a featured panelist on the Achieve webcast "What 100+ L&D Leaders Reveal About Learning Strategy Maturity & What We're Doing About It" (February 11, 2026), presented in partnership with WeLearn Learning Services alongside Loren Sanders, Roberta Gogos of Lighthouse Research and Advisory, and Jennifer Myers of the Center for Internet Security. In it, she describes her team's biggest maturity gaps (governance and long-term strategy) and how she used the assessment results to prioritize what to tackle first rather than trying to solve everything across all of 3M at once.

Connect

• Karen Ganitsky on LinkedIn
• WeLearn Interview with Karen Ganitsky

Want more on what it takes to run L&D as a genuine business function, not a support function? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.