Full Report PDF & Overview: Evolving Talent to Drive Impact at Scale
See the full PDF of “People Matter: Evolving Talent to Drive Impact at Scale” here.
“How much time does your leadership team spend on culture and people? Are these topics on the agenda of your management meetings?”
These are questions that Maryana Iskander, CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, encourages scaling organizations to ask themselves. She strongly believes that the work of defining culture and growing people ultimately drives every other performance metric in the organization — from strategy and partnerships to operational success and delivery.
But what are the key talent-related topics and questions that management teams need to add to the agenda as they work to achieve impact at scale? Hint: they are not the same ones that the organization tackled during start-up and validation. As we spoke with social enterprise leaders, we found that their stories and advice on this talent evolution fell into three major categories:
1. Build the Team: Define and Fill Key Roles for Scale.
Assembling the right mix of talent might mean evolving your team — shifting to more differentiated roles from a place where everyone wears multiple hats. It could mean hiring more local and diverse talent and/or leveraging partners and volunteers to extend your own team’s capacity. Whichever avenues you pursue, assembling the right team is critical to scale your impact effectively.
2. Create the Infrastructure: Evolve Systems and Structures to Empower Talent.
Even with the best people and partners in place, you will need more organizational structures and systems to manage and empower that talent and help it succeed. Do you centralize or decentralize control and decision-making? Do you evolve your board? How do you manage dispersed teams — whether those teams are internal or external to the organization?
3. Power the Journey: Cultivate, Motivate, and Retain Your Talent.
As you and your team navigate the bumpy road to scale, it’s critical to cultivate and motivate your talent to evolve with you and stay the journey. By intentionally updating and formalizing talent development, incentives, and culture, you can help your talent stay motivated and driven toward impact. Interviewees stressed that although culture is the underlying connective tissue that drives people, impact, and operations, it is too often ignored or poorly managed.
Within each of these categories, the social enterprises we interviewed shared tactical strategies they have applied in their work — or learned through the wisdom of hindsight. We highlight these insights in a series of standalone articles, each of which calls out tactics, tips, and advice from the field to help inform your own enterprise’s discussion and decisions.
“We’re nothing but our people. If we were created to succeed on a mission, the people who come into the organization are everything, truly. We can focus on process; we can focus on target; we can focus on supply chains. But if we are going to succeed in upending the unjust equilibrium for which we were founded, then our team has to feel it — to feel connected to each other and to have that shared sense of purpose, from day one.” — Ella Gudwin, CEO, VisionSpring
Read next: Shift from a Lean Team of Doers to Differentiated Roles, ‘You Hired me as a Ballerina and Now Want Me to be a Basketball Player’: Hard Truths About Evolving Talent at Scale — NextBillion, or return to see all articles in People Power.
This article was written by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin, and released in July 2019. See the full PDF of “People Matter: Evolving Talent to Drive Impact at Scale” here.
