What does Strategy have to do with HR?

Remember the movie, Finding Nemo?  What a great father, son adventure with so many highs and lows it is hard to remember them all.  However, one climactic scene stands out to me.  Nemo is caught in a fisherman's net along with thousands of other fish.  Rather than finding a way out to his father, he commits to saving all the fish.  Through directions he gets all the fish to swim straight down, eventually breaking them all free.  His selflessness almost costs him his life, but in the end, all is well.

The idea of strategy is that understand where you are, what your situation is, and you want to be somewhere else.  A picture of a different reality emerges for the future, and a plan is made to create this new reality, and is implemented.  In a nutshell, know where you are, where you are going, and how to get there.

An individual department manager in an organization can see how the reports he or she has are capable of accomplishing a task, as well as have a feeling of how many different things they might do to advance the company.  As you move up the ladder of an organization, however, it is very difficult to see each person's strengths and weaknesses, and have a picture of capabilities to reach a new level of performance.

Most often the goal of a company involves going somewhere they have never been before.  The ability to predict how people will perform, and identify gaps that must be filled for success, is a great way for an HR team to contribute to the success of the total organization.  Your ability to pull together the information about people from their supervisors, assess capabilities for future needs, and create specifications for those people needed to fill the gaps is critical to a successful strategy implementation.

Who are the best types of people to sell and service what you have now and will have in the future?  What kinds of creative thinking is needed?  Where are you going with your technology?  HR Strategic thinking is the ability to get the fish swimming together, and in the right direction.  Our role is to help you seek out the info you need in your organization in order to accomplish this.