Aligning Strategy and Human Capital

Organizations from every industry and of every size spend significant time and resources developing strategies to facilitate growth and competitive advantage. They look two, three or five years into the future (sometimes further), choosing specific areas of priority and focus. While defining priorities can be a difficult task that requires thoughtful and informed deliberation and planning, it can all be for naught if the organization cannot execute against the selected strategies. Asked why they were not able to execute against their strategies, you will often hear executives mention things such as unforeseen changes in the marketplace, breakthrough technologies that rendered their strategies useless, or the inability to align their people and get them to execute against the plan.

Many organizations today utilize the insights gathered through the Denison Organizational Culture assessment to create alignment between their human capital and the strategies they have developed. Those strategies often target a range of performance issues such as Growth, Profitability, Innovation, Quality, Employee and Customer Satisfaction – the very same performance metrics that have been linked to the traits captured by the Denison Model and diagnostics. Understanding the current strengths and weaknesses of your human capital allows you to craft thoughtful, informed strategies and to target your development activities on those areas that will support the execution of those strategies.

Today we partner with organizations seeking Strategy and Human Capital Alignment Solutions, who:

• Recognize culture as a critical business issue that they must understand and manage in order to successfully execute against their strategies
• Conduct a culture assessment at the front end of their annual planning cycle to inform their planning
• Utilize culture data to inform their strategies and to focus their development activities
• Look for those areas of the culture that are a ‘green light’ – meaning they have the skills and capabilities to execute, and those areas that are a ‘yellow or red light’ – meaning they must proceed with caution and/or take steps to build the internal capacity in order to execute