Strategic Human Capital Insights

As IT leaders, we are responsible for enabling and driving innovation while at the same time maintaining service levels, ensuring security, and controlling costs. Let’s discuss how successful IT leaders are stepping up with bold leadership management strategies for growing the business through the innovative use of technology. Innovation must be targeted toward a clearly defined, value-creation focus such as:

• Top-line growth – innovation activities that primarily generate revenue
• Bottom-line optimization growth – innovation activities that yield profit
• Shareholder value growth – innovation activities that increase the value of the company

How do you currently address these questions? How do you share your experience in delivering innovation to your organization and provide ways to leverage innovation to help drive business results?  As seen below, finding the right balance can be challenging.

Would You Rehire Your Current Team of People? 

I first asked this question to an audience when speaking at a conference of HR professionals.  I was more surprised than expected by the very noisy response from the audience.  It was like that question was the ‘elephant in the room’!  A show of hands suggested that over 60% of the audience indicated that it was questionable if their current team of senior managers would be hired again. 

That is a very ‘big’ response to a very simple, and what should be an obvious, question.  Not expecting a high degree of verbal honesty, I asked the same question of VPs when speaking at an IT Conference, and the response was in the same range.  This reaction led to a deeper dig into the topic.  I continued to ask that question of every leader and manager I met, and the reaction was the same.   These responses suggest simultaneously occurring trends that I have not experienced, to such a high degree, in my 30+ years of leadership and organization development experience.

We are excited to announce that we have launched a strategic partnership with Phoenix Group International (PGI), an executive recruiting firm with over 30 years of experience, to help companies around the globe.

We work with clients to assess the strategic alignment of human capital with business initiatives focused on value creation, and help determine focused performance benchmarks to include role definition and associated competencies. In our proprietary assessment process and human capital gap analysis, we will often see the need for additional professionals to fill key strategic roles. At that point, we will work together with PGI on these professional placements. This collaboration works so well because, holistically, we understand not only the position, but the culture of the client organization, and we can then evaluate the cultural ‘fit’ of the professional for the position.

In the past, I have written extensively about How to Make a Great Presentation.  There are many do’s and don’ts on the topic.  Recently, I attended a 3-day conference, (or attempted to try to make it through a 3-day conference).  Sitting in the audience, I was continually reminded about everything that went wrong with the presentation process I was witnessing.  So, I felt compelled to share the experience and some of my observations, hoping you don’t make any of these mistakes in your presentation.  Always remember that humans are sitting in the audience.  Don’t make them think twice about staying for your presentation.

1. Plan the Conference Daily Agenda with People in Mind: Each day ran for 12 hours – yes, you’re reading this correctly – 12 hours!  What were they thinking?  Who can keep 300 people engaged for that long?  You have to think highly of yourself to think you can be that interesting for 12 hours! 
   
   

Our world, at every level, WILL BE disrupted. The McKinsey Global Institute defines disruptive technologies as new emerging technologies that unexpectedly displace established ones and shake up the industry. Some disruptors will be easy to spot. Others will come from the most unexpected places. Organizations must consciously and continually focus on the outside horizon to anticipate disruption and deal with it as quickly as possible.

1. Disruption and Disruptive Technologies – The New Normal

• Living with Disruption as the Norm. BAU and the Steady State are a Thing of the Past: Change has become the norm, and business as usual (BAU), formally the goal, will become a subset of Change, Transformation, and Transition Management. Prepare to accept the fact that as soon as the steady state of BAU is achieved, disruption will shake things up again.  
  
  
• Welcome to the VUCA World (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity): This disruptive state will require new skills that have yet to be part of mainstream learning and development.   At every level of the organization, these skills will need significant investment capital to ''upskill'' current employees to function effectively in the VUCA world. We are facing a workforce talent crisis of epic proportions, and VUCA skills are leading the talent deficit. 
  
  

To truly embrace the new VUCA work reality, it's time to rethink all the old organizational structures, roles, and competencies. To help you rethink and re-evaluate your organization, we have compiled a checklist to see if your structures, functions, and competencies have expired in the VUCA work reality related to sales and business development.

Are we clinging to the old ways of doing things, hoping they will be relevant for the present and future work demands? Please read through our 2-part VUCA and business development checklist to understand your team or organization's strengths and potential weaknesses so you can accurately prepare to speed up your growth this year.

How do you maximize every sales effort? How do you ensure that every sales activity – starting right now – has rigorous analysis, thought, and planning behind it? The sales function is the growth engine that will make strategic initiatives a reality, or not! Business strategy is determined for the business year. You don’t have the luxury of waiting a month or quarter to start generating sales results. So, what can sales managers do to ensure that every salesperson hits the ground running with the right equipment and the right roadmap? That roadmap is the operating guide to the year ahead, and the basis of that operating guide is The Client Business Plan. Let's review the four pillars of the complex selling process.

Business Acumen can create a business synergy that can and does drive efficiency and profits.

How many employees are encouraged and/or motivated to take the time, or are guided by their manager, to learn the business beyond their own function?  With everyone so busy doing their ‘day jobs,’ that mentality is more often the exception rather than the rule. 

The Need for Business Acumen Is Critical

It’s Time to Take the Business Acumen Leadership Challenge
Rate your employees on their business acumen. And you can’t say that their job isn’t important enough. Every employee, in every position, should understand the business of your business. Your employees come to work every day. They sit at their desks or workstations and look busy. That’s the way it should be, right? Has ‘busyness’ become the new performance metric?