As a Chief People Officer and leader of human resources, you play a critical role in fulfilling the strategic direction of your company by acquiring talent that will deliver upon those strategic objectives. A misaligned, or mismatched, talent strategy and corporate strategy will result in significant execution problems. Successfully connecting the dots between talent strategy and execution is imperative.
As an executive, your success depends upon architecting a clear talent strategy that aligns with the overall goals and objectives of the entire organization. While strategic planning is necessary and worthwhile, it is no longer good enough. Truly effective and transformative leaders balance strategic planning and execution to maximize results.
To provide evidence of HR’s impact across the company you need to effectively drive the execution of the strategy that you’ve established. More importantly, you need to ensure that your team is executing that strategy in alignment with the overall corporate strategy to drive maximum impact. You must effectively connect the dots between strategy and execution to drive results, but where do you start? Let’s begin with defining some terms.
Download the Connecting the Dots Between Talent Strategy and Execution Questionnaire to thoroughly identify the talent your team will need to acquire, the types of performance management frameworks to deploy, and the tools, metrics, and systems to utilize for your team and your stakeholders.
What is Strategy?
If your organization’s mission defines what you will achieve, your strategy defines how resources (time, talent, money) will be deployed to accomplish the mission. Talent strategy is where the direction for the company’s talent acquisition department is determined and aligned with the strategic objectives of the broader organization. It supports the talent needs of the other revenue-generating functions – Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Customer Experience. In summary, a well-executed Talent Strategy assesses, recruits, on-boards, develops and retains the people required to execute the functional strategies.
What is Execution?
While it’s imperative that HR leaders develop a sound talent strategy, it’s meaningless if you can’t follow through with execution. Implementing a talent strategy means leaders will have confidence that their teams can execute the go-to-market strategy and positively impact the bottom line. You must be able to break down the broader strategic vision into actionable steps, establish plans with key milestones, develop metrics and KPIs to track progress, involve the right stakeholders to ensure cross-functional alignment and success, and create methodologies to address challenges or adjustments to priorities along the way.
This article further defines the differences between strategy and execution.
How Do Leaders Connect Strategy and Execution?
- Develop the Strategy
- Acquire the Right Talent
- Manage Performance
- Support the Business
- Monitor and Adapt
To get started, we’ve developed this brief questionnaire to help you uncover the elements that you’ll need to connect the dots between talent strategy and execution.
Download the Connecting the Dots Between Talent Strategy and Execution Questionnaire to thoroughly identify the talent your team will need to acquire, the types of performance management frameworks to deploy, and the tools, metrics, and systems to utilize for your team and your stakeholders.
For more tips and best practices, read this insightful case study about how BlackRock put their talent strategy to work.
How SBI Can Help
Toggling between strategy and execution does not come naturally. Leaders usually excel at one and not the other. Leaders who can both define a strategic vision and generate results through operational execution are transformative. Download this brief questionnaire to get start connecting the dots between talent strategy and execution. For more insights about talent strategies, download our latest research report. Finally, for more information about how to get the most out of your organization’s human resources, leverage SBI’s new Talent Strategy.
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