Organizations

Your operating model needs a Brand Strategy

October 3, 2019| Organizations, Systems|

A winning brand strategy is essential for a successful business strategy. Done right, the brand strategy clearly articulates the customer value proposition – why our customers pick us over the competition. Leaders know this and strive for the clarity of purpose a winning brand strategy provides. A simple and compelling brand strategy can focus everyone’s attention on a very small number of strategic priorities that define strategic success, providing a “true north” to focus on.

Yet when it comes to implementing the brand strategy through the operating model, that same sense of clarity and purpose is often lost. An enormous amount of complexity has to be addressed to bring it to life in the areas of organization design, staffing, developing capabilities, goal setting, accountability for performance, operational excellence, and so much more. That complexity is why organizations struggle with many aspects of strategy execution.

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Deploy a Strategic Human Capital Operating Model to Build Critical Org Capability

September 24, 2019| Organizations, People|

We live in a world of constantly evolving technology and ways to organize work. This means that people are in constant threat of their skills becoming less relevant or even obsolete. At the same time, organizations face the challenge of building new capabilities internally to take advantage of new technologies that will transform what they produce and how they produce it.

Organizations today take two different approaches to align their employees’ developmental needs with the business’ human capital needs: the laissez faire model and the planning model. Here I propose a third way, the strategic human capital operating model. It is currently used in a rare number of cases, and should become the standard all large companies strive to meet. It can reduce turnover and adoption costs for new technology, while improving employee morale, engagement and productivity.

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Systems diagnostics are essential to create high performance

December 18, 2017| Organizations, Systems|

I have spent the better part of two decades helping organizations solve big, complex challenges that hold back performance and create problems with strategy execution. The problems have varied from talent to teams to the operating model and workforce management. And the solutions have ranged from compensation, to communication, to work redesign, matrix decision making, leadership behaviors, and much more. But the one thing that has been a critical part of the diagnosis and finding solutions in all cases has been systems thinking.

Systems thinking has roots that trace back over six decades ago to Kurt Lewin (1951), and include approaches promoted by prominent authors including Leavitt (1965), Galbraith (1977), Tichy (1983), and many more. At its most fundamental, this approach demands that we look at the entire organizational system when diagnosing the sources of performance problems to identify solutions that work.

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Benchmarking engagement and spans only is not strategic

February 15, 2016| Organizations, People, Systems|

Key insights:

  • Benchmarking employee engagement, survey data, and spans of control is not strategic
  • You have to embed that data in the larger context of work design and what drives organizational performance to truly understand what’s actionable and where you need more info to drive change in the right direction

Leaders love to benchmark, which is how they evaluate operational performance. So benchmark data play a central role in a lot of analytics carried out both in the business and by HR. (more…)

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HR Perfect Processes are the Enemy of What’s Good for the Business

August 21, 2015| Organizations, People, Systems|

(a.k.a. Are You Helping to Improve Strategy Execution Where It’s Most Needed?)

For decades HR has been searching for the right ways to make strategic contributions to the business. I have my own opinions about how HR can do that, some of which are detailed below and in previous posts (for example, on HR scorecards and on measuring ROI). But even more important than what it should do is what it should not do. HR needs to stop obsessing over making HR processes world class.

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