People strategies are unnecessary noise
I have a confession to make. I hate “People Strategies” with a passion that comes close to my reaction to mushrooms, or people eating bananas anywhere close to me.
Yes, that bad.
The last couple of decades have seen the profession become obsessed with being strategic to the point that every student coming out of their CIPD training thinks that unless they’re doing something “strategic” they’re somehow falling behind their peers. The result of this is that across sectors, throughout organisations, hours and hours and spent and wasted on creating unnecessary presentations and documents outlining pointless stuff that no-one remembers and will never get done. Combine that with another pet peeve of mine, departmental mission statements and values, and you’ve probably identified one of the main reasons for a lack of productivity in the country.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been asked to develop people strategies in the past. The conversation usually goes something like this:
“We need a people strategy”
“To deliver what?”
“We want to be an employer of choice”
“For whom?”
“We need to attract and retain the best talent”
“What do you mean by best?”
To using a sporting analogy, it’s akin to saying “we want to win the cup” without understanding what the sport you’re playing is, when you want to win it and what resources you have at your disposal.
But let me be really clear, this doesn’t mean that I don’t think people aren’t an integral part of strategically driving the organisation forward, quite the opposite. I think they’re so integral that they shouldn’t be looked at in isolation of all the other elements of organisational strategy, they should be consider a fundamental part that’s discussed by everyone around the executive table rather than looked at by a particular team.
There is only one strategy, the organisational one. There is only one vision, the organisational one. And there is only one set of values, the organisational one.
Our job as leaders, regardless of where we work, is to help our teams to understand how the work that they do aligns to this, how they contribute to organisational success, to bring to life the vision in a way that makes that work feel valuable and to make sure that the values across the organisation are clear, coherent and lived every week.
Everything else is unnecessary noise.