Strategy and Agility
A 2008 HBR article on Strategy offered that “most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.” It’s a challenging statement, certainly, and a powerful reminder that employees will become frustrated and resources wasted when no clear strategy exists for a company or its lines of business. Many companies look to M Squared Consulting when faced with this dilemma. With guiding expertise, clients can develop a well-understood statement of strategy that aligns employee behaviors with business goals.
In a related editorial on talent strategy, Dr. John Sullivan, a well-known thought leader in HR, offers that an agile talent management strategy can be the perfect model for today’s economy.
An excerpt:
“As the general business environment has become more turbulent, and technology combined with consumer demand has driven significant shortening of most product lifecycles, the complexities of delivering really strategic impact through talent management have ballooned. While competency management systems, career path planning, and multi-year development cycles may have made sense decades ago, that simply is not the case today.
Organizational agility is something the majority of human resource functions are not designed to enable or support. In fact, most traditional HR systems, including those in talent acquisition, hinder agility by imposing rigid control structures with process cycles that take months and even years to execute.
You can’t hit a moving target that changes location unpredictably every six months using processes that take 18 months to execute!
Examples of Agile Talent Management
A key characteristic of organizational agility is the ability to rapidly shift idle resources. Like most airlines, Southwest Airlines was affected significantly by the most recent downturn in the U.S. economy. While competitors were busy slashing payrolls, Southwest instead cut back on hiring and temporally redeployed idle recruiters (more than 80 of them) into other areas of the business where work needed to get done, in line with the recruiter’s abilities. The shift enabled Southwest to maintain access to the talent it would need when hiring demand ticked up and simultaneously enabled the organization to catch up on project work elsewhere that added value in the current economic state.
While using idle recruiters to accomplish work elsewhere in the organization was a new trend this downturn, it by no means is a stellar example of organizational agility.
Enterprise-wide efforts that are emerging include:
- Temporary redeployment of top performers into development roles where the primary mandate is knowledge-sharing and collaborative solution development to emerging issues (Numerous companies)
- Creation of flexible talent pools that grant temporary project-based access to top talent by managers without budget or need for permanent hires (Coors)
- Business unit/team prioritization schemas that enable simultaneous investment/cost-containment efforts across the enterprise (HP)
- Counter-cyclical process execution, i.e. taking advantage of economic cycles by executing growth-mode processes during downturns and vice versa (Slide-College Hiring)
- Redefinition of labor needs to allow for extensive use of contingent and alternative labor types that aid real time increases/decreases in labor cost (Google)
The unifying theme in these examples is that firms need a strategy that allows them to respond rapidly with a customized solution, whenever something in the business environment changes.”
So, what both HBR and Dr. Sullivan are reinforcing is that the value of a clear, agile strategy cannot be underestimated. It will energize and empower employees, and raise the long-term financial performance of your organization. Contact M Squared Consulting to learn more.
