Build Workforce and Leadership Capabilities — Or Watch Your Strategy Fail

Build Workforce and Leadership Capabilities — Or Watch Your Strategy Fail

Our organizational alignment research found that workforce and leadership capabilities account for 29% of the performance difference between high and low growth companies.

Why?

Because your business strategy is only as strong as the people responsible for executing it.

Yet project postmortem data shows that too many organizations invest heavily in strategic planning retreats, team restructurings, and transformational change initiatives while underinvesting in the workforce and leadership capabilities required to make them successful.

The result?

• Ambitious strategies.
• Frustrated employees.
• Overwhelmed managers.
• Missed performance targets.

Strategies cannot fire on all cylinders when major workforce and leadership capability gaps exist.

Why Building Workforce and Leadership Capabilities Is a Strategic Imperative

The good news is that our organizational culture assessments find that the majority of leaders understand that talent must be aligned with business strategies to create a high performing culture.  The bad news is that few executives believe that their talent management strategies are keeping pace with strategic demands.

Training measurement research finds that the vast majority of organizations continue to launch leadership development training, offer extensive learning catalogs, and measure success through participation rates and satisfaction rather than improved business performance.

Why?

Most HR and training functions are afraid to be held accountable for more than training activity and accessibility of learning content.  Training without behavior and performance change is little more than an employee benefit.

Organizations need to purposefully integrate capability building with strategic priorities and everyday work to translate learning into sustained performance improvement.

If you are not developing the capabilities required to execute your strategy, your training strategy is missing the mark.

5 Ways to Build Workforce and Leadership Capabilities That Drive Results

1. Start With Strategy, Not Training
   Too many organizations begin with the wrong questions:

   — What training do our employees need?
   — What learning objectives matter most?

   Instead, ask:

   — What must our people be able to do differently to achieve our strategic objectives?
   — What will our leaders consistently model, support, and reinforce?

   If a capability does not meaningfully contribute to strategic success, challenge its utility.

2. Expose the Capability Gaps Holding Performance Back
   Generic training does not move the needle. Different strategies, cultures, teams, and leaders have different needs.

   Use proven leadership simulation assessments, performance data, 360 feedback, and business metrics to identify the critical few gaps that matter most.

   Then design customized training programs that focus on observable behaviors and measurable outcomes rather than generic competency models.

   The goal is not to develop everyone equally or to ensure that training does not take up too much of people’s time. It is to thoughtfully develop the strategic capabilities that matter most to short- and long-term success.

3. Develop Leaders Who Can Turn Strategy Into Action
   Leaders are a performance multiplier. Great leaders drive great business results. Poor leaders put them at risk.

   Leadership and management development should not be optional or something that you do in addition to your job.  It should be an integral part of becoming and remaining a high performing leader.

   Ensure that all development measurably helps leaders translate strategy into priorities, create accountability, coach performance, navigate change, and build high-functioning and high-performing teams.

   What capabilities do your leaders and managers need to master to be high performing?

4. Make Capability Building Part of the Work
   Traditional training frequently fails because learning is disconnected from execution.

   Replace isolated and generic workshops with relevant, action learning leadership development that includes real business challenges, coaching, feedback, deliberate practice, and reinforcement.

   Learning in the flow of work ensures people consistently apply what they have learned on the job.

   If your learning is not moving real work forward, you are missing the mark.

5. Measure Business Impact, Not Learning Activity
   Training completion and satisfaction rates are not evidence of success.

   Instead, establish clear connections between capability development and strategic performance indicators.

   Measure whether leaders make better decisions, teams collaborate more effectively, salespeople win more profitable business, or employees deliver better customer outcomes.  It all depends upon what matters most to business and people success.

   Then hold leaders accountable for creating the conditions that allow new capabilities to translate into sustained results.

The Bottom Line
It is difficult for strategies to outperform talent capabilities over time. People must be equipped with enough confidence and competence to deliver what your strategy promises. To build workforce and leadership capabilities that matter, align development investments with strategic priorities, close the most consequential performance gaps, and measure success through business results rather than training activity.

To learn more about how to design and deliver leadership development that makes an impact, download How to Fast Track Your Leaders with Just-in-Time Action Learning

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.