Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Credit: Creativa Images/Shutterstock Getting strategic about talent It doesn't matter who's on your team – talent is only as strong as the strategy behind it BY LIZ BERNIER It's a phrase beloved by HR departments and motivational posters the world over: "Our people are our most valuable asset." It's also undoubtedly been the argument behind many an investment in training and development, better benefits packages and employee appreciation BBQs. But Michael Couch wants you to put all that aside for a minute. "Usually, people will tell you 'People are your most important, most valuable asset…' But I'm a little bit of a contrarian," he said at a recent Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto. "is is blasphemy, typically, to an HR audience, but people are not your most valuable asset." In fact, people — no matter how talented or high-performing — actually come second to one other key consideration: Strategy. "To me, talent management has no value unless it drives strategy," said Couch, who is president of Michael Couch and Associates in Pittsburgh. And that's what Couch does — he helps to build strategy-capable organizations that can compete through their people. That's not to suggest talent management isn't important — it's critical and there's plenty of research to support that, said Couch. "ere's a lot of data out there — if you look at some great research done by the Institute for Corpo- rate Productivity… they looked at high-performing organizations versus lower-performing orga- nizations — in terms of revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction — and found that (high-performing or- ganizations) are two-and-a-half times better at performance management, they're three times better at leadership development, and three-and-a-half times better at succession planning," he said. But talent management has to connect to organizational strate- gy if it's going to be effective, said Couch. "Without strategy, what we do has no relevance. And we also need to have an effective way that we look at and understand the capability of our talent and assess talent," he said. "We're looking at assessing talent, matching it against strategy and seeing what we're doing at every level in the organization — not just the top." Pulling the right levers Every business has a differ- ent strategy, which comes with certain demands. But those de- mands are not the same for every employer — they can vary quite dramatically, said Couch. "So we need to understand what that translation of strategy and demand is," he said. "With that, we can determine just ex- actly what kind of talent manage- ment levers we can pull, what we can do to drive strategy." To do that, talent leaders need to understand the distinction be- tween "putting people first" and having a concrete strategy that drives your talent management. "When somebody tells me that 'We have a people-first strategy' in the organization, that's not a strat- egy. It's doesn't do anything to say how you're going to compete in the markets, what markets you're going to go after, those kinds of things," he said. "From a talent leader standpoint, I think it's very important for us to be business advocates first and people advo- cates second… this is the change we're seeing right now." And it's a change that's criti- cal for HR and talent leaders to be able to play a bigger and more impactful role in the overall busi- ness, said Couch. "Once we've worked on strate- gy, it's (about) translating strategy then into a picture of the organi- zation in terms of, what are some of the critical roles and what are the critical competencies, the be- haviours you need to drive?" We also need to critically ex- amine the talent processes them- selves, said Couch. "ey need to be aligned, inte- grated, and also they need to be differentiated," he said. And finally, of course, we need to have effective metrics in place. "If we don't have measures or metrics associated with what we're doing, then we're not go- ing to be able to show impactful progress." Identifying mission-critical roles A critical consideration for con- necting talent and strategy is determining which roles within the organization are "mission- critical," said Couch. "Not all jobs are the same in an organization. ey're all impor- tant, but not all of them have the same impact on driving strategic results. ere are roles — we call them the pivotal roles — that are the 'A' roles. ey have a direct strategic impact," he said. "ere are some roles I like to refer to as sort of 'enabling' kinds of roles. ey have an indirect strategic impact, they support growth and value creation, they often support an enabling process within an organization. And then we also have roles that are busi- ness assessing." is is not to suggest some jobs are not important — they're all important or we wouldn't have them, he said. "But, from our standpoint, we need to know which ones have a critical strategic value. And then we need to change and refocus and approach our business in a way to be able to address that." ere are some roles where, over time, differences in perfor- mance don't have that dramatic an impact on the bottom line — whereas there are other roles, such as sales, where performance can have a significant and direct impact on the bottom line. "From a talent leader stand- point, we have to know this, we have to know who's in these roles, we have to really emphasize how we go about building and training and developing these people," he said. Yet assessing roles as A, B and C roles is not a line of thinking HR typically follows, he said. "When you ask this in your planning process — 'Which roles should we really be thinking about that are going to help us drive our strategy?' — that's not the kind of question that HR often asks," he said. "(But) there are certain assets that will give you a greater return if you invest in them." At Google, for instance, there are specific instances where the company can trace back millions of dollars in revenue to one inno- vative idea that one person had. "ey go out of their way to find these people for critical roles," said Couch. "If we know these mission- critical processes and roles, and we know the capabilities of our talent, then we know where we should invest them to drive value." It's not always an easy discus- sion to have, but it's crucial to re- maining competitive. HR and talent leaders also need to consider what leadership be- haviours and skills they want to see that will help drive strategy. "If we don't get the competen- cies right, the rest almost doesn't matter. at means we aren't go- ing to be making the right talent decisions to be able to help drive strategy," he said. "If we don't use the same set of competencies across selection, development, performance management, pro- motion, talent assessment, then we're going to have a confused mess. So the competencies can be a way to integrate all of our pro- cesses so it's driving towards the same thing."

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