Build your Strategic Skills through Understanding and Learning
“I have no idea, where this company is heading towards!”
“Our Strategy is only for the Sales team, others are not affected.”
“I have a training budget that I can use to my own choice, I would like to use it for something strategically smart but it’s difficult since I don’t know the company’s strategy.”
These are comments collected in a personal development -study and interview carried out in April 2017 in several Finnish companies as part of my Aalto EE MBA Business project. These comments plus a “small” irritation of poor strategy implementation experiences made me think to find better ways in succeeding in strategy implementation. From top to bottom and bottom to top.
The success factor lies in the ability to ensure that all employees
- understand the strategy/vision and
2. build own competences, continuously to support and carry forward the strategy
Right?
Let me give some examples of how I see this - please note that I am simplifying things, for a reason:
Strategy: Grow 20% by 2020
This may be a more of a Sales strategy, involving only Sales but if you take a moment and dig a bit deeper, you’ll realize that it involves the whole organization, also those working in the support functions. These could be the potential goals:
HR — support the strategy by ensuring individual employees’ good well-being in the growth phase
HR — ensure the growth by supporting the need of finding new employees
IT — support the strategy by ensuring well-functioning Order to cash and reporting -systems for closing deals
FI — support the strategy by offering on-time analytics
Strategy: For tomorrow’s growth
It’s easier for me to understand Volkswagen’s strategy, when I drill into the vision: To become a world-leading provider of sustainable mobility. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/group/strategy.html
Potential goals could be:
HR — ensure the availability of different learning mechanisms for employees to grow their understanding in what sustainability and mobility mean
Procurement — create a definition of what sustainability means in car parts and ensure that all buyers understand this and execute it in purchasing behavior.
Talbit uses the OKR framework in creating the Individual development paths and links the personal development to company’s strategic development. By putting the individual into the focus, we can create personal development paths, which allow the individual, team and organization to grow and develop, towards the common goal; a talented workplace that takes the strategy forward, step by step in a focused matter.
Kaisa Savola
Founder & CEO of Talbit
kaisa.savola@talbit.fi
https://twitter.com/kaisa_savola
Talbit is a cloud-based service designed to capture and visualize employee development plans and goals. It builds motivation and helps individuals to reach their goals and develop into talents. For organisations it enables a way to create a better employee experience.
