Simply Skills bite: Translating strategy into skills
Skills gaps are bad news at every level, which is why we’ve launched Skills Bite: bite-sized insights and learnings on how to close skills gaps and future-proof your workforce.
Skills hold the key to translating strategic goals into achievable actions – and to aligning employee development efforts to business performance targets.
But how do you go about joining the dots from strategy to action, from enterprise goals to individual needs?
Percentage of well-formulated strategies that failed due to poor execution.
In 2016, it was estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies failed due to poor execution (1); the top reason being senior leadership were unprepared for the strategic challenges they faced. Now in 2021, many companies have revised or refreshed their business and people strategies to adapt to an unprecedented degree of change. As a senior HR or business leader, the chances are you have new strategic goals to translate into action, and limited time to do so.
So, with the odds stacked against your success, how can you change the game in your own favour – increase your ability to translate strategy into action and emerge as a hero from the current turmoil?
Connecting the dots between strategy, capabilities and skills
Most business leaders would hesitate to make an investment decision – such as acquiring a competitor, launching a new product, or adopting a new technology – without first confirming they have the capabilities to successfully execute this strategy.
All too frequently though, strategy is ‘thrown over the wall’ to HR and line management, who often lack the tools to translate strategic goals into the capabilities and skills required on the ground.
Executing your business strategy requires a map from each business goal to the workforce capabilities required to deliver it. If you can make this connection, it becomes far easier to prioritise action at an enterprise, leadership and individual level.
Your strategy to skills map
Key capabilities help translate strategy into skills.
It is normally too big a leap to jump from strategic goals to the underlying skills – but the use of ‘key capabilities’ can really help.
A note on terminology – terms such as capabilities, competencies and skills are often used interchangeably – so here are some definitions to work with:
Strategic Goal: a tangible business objective – ‘What do we want to achieve?’
Capability: the power to achieve an outcome – ‘How will we achieve this goal?’
Skill: the ability to do something well – ‘what skills will we need to deliver this?’
Mapping strategy to capabilities
Strategies and strategic goals can vary in quality and clarity. Lofty or vague strategic ambitions such as ‘digital-first’, ‘agile’, or ‘customer-centric’ are just not specific enough to be put into action. But this can be improved by unpacking how the goals will be achieved and what capabilities will be required.
Your aim should be to unearth assumptions and replace them with clear statements of intent, and shared understanding of what is required. You can use logic to break the strategy into its component parts: if we want to achieve X… then we will need to be good at Y.
Role model comparators can be very helpful here: which companies are doing something similar – in your industry or others – what are they doing, and what key capabilities make this possible? For example, Salesforce.com found transparency and building customer trust were the key capabilities required to be a truly ‘digital-first’ business (2). They found that 92% of customers are more likely to trust businesses with data if they’re given control over what information is collected, and 91% of customers will trust a company more if the business is transparent about how customer information will be used. So, for Salesforce the strategy of ‘digital-first growth’ required capabilities of trust and transparency.
Mapping capabilities to skills
Capabilities are made up of bundles of skills. Here are three steps to identify the critical skills required to build your key capabilities and deliver your strategy.
Use a skills taxonomy. Skills taxonomies are organised frameworks that group and categorise skills, breaking capabilities into their component skills, down to the most granular level of detail. Some professional bodies publish vocational skills taxonomies, and tools like Simply Navigate™ include market-aligned skills taxonomies that keep up to date with latest skills trends and even provide skills forecasts to ensure you are truly future-focussed.
Benchmark against competitors, leaders and innovators. Just as you can learn from market leaders in terms of their capabilities, so you can learn about the skills being used by others. Labour market data is the most powerful source of insight, where the demand for skills is scraped from thousands of corporate websites and job boards, so you compare yourself to competitors and can drill into the innovative practices of others.
Estimate your current skills and capabilities. To judge whether your company has the skills and capabilities required to execute your strategy, you don’t need to know the specific skill level of every person in your business today. Such skills claim exercises are notoriously time-consuming and poorly completed; and they go out of date very quickly.
Instead, you can estimate the current skill and capability level across your workforce by mapping your internal job titles via a role/skill taxonomy to current labour market data. This will tell you what skills are most often associated with the roles you currently employ, as defined by thousands (sometimes millions) of job postings and profiles out in the market.
A strategy to skills map translates strategic goals into achievable actions.
Conclusions and learnings to take back to your company
A strategy to skills map translates strategic goals into achievable actions.
Strategy must be broken into smaller parts to be actionable. Benchmarking against role model companies helps you learn from leading practices and new innovations. You can use a skills taxonomy to break strategic goals into key capabilities and underlying skills. And you can estimate the current capabilities in your business by mapping your roles to external labour market data.
More forward-thinking leaders are realising there are new, faster, better ways to translate strategy into action, using analytical tools and market insight to replace outdated, manual, time-consuming efforts.
SIMPLY NAVIGATE is the AI platform to close skills gaps and future-proof your workforce. Simply connects your workforce to the world’s leading sources of labour market insight, providing decision-support for senior leaders and easy-to-use tools for HR practitioners. Learn more here, follow Simply here or get in touch at info@simplygetresults.com to discuss your needs and book a demo.
Citations
(1) Harvard Business Review. Nov 2017. Executives fail to execute strategy because they are too internally focussed.
(2) Forbes. Oct 2019. Why an effective digital first strategy puts technology second.