Strategic Alignment of Skills and Organizational Objectives

How to Bridge the Capabilities Gap through the Strategic Alignment of Skills and Organizational Objectives
We know from training needs assessment data that most organizations struggle to ensure that their workforce has the skills and motivation to achieve strategic objectives in a way that makes sense to the people AND the business. Yet, our organizational alignment research found that the alignment of strategy and talent accounts for 60% of the difference between high and low performing companies. The strategic alignment of skills and organizational objectives is pivotal for driving revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

What Is the Strategic Alignment of Skills and Organizational Objectives
At its core, strategic alignment is about a clear line of sight that ensures individual roles and responsibilities directly support the company’s goals. For example, a company looking to lead in artificial intelligence as part of its go to market strategy must invest in ensuring that its engineers, product managers, marketing, and sales teams possess cutting-edge AI knowledge, skills, and resources. This alignment is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of evaluating and realigning resources to meet evolving market demands and business priorities.

5 Steps to Achieve Strategic Alignment

1. Define Organizational Objectives Clearly
   Strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing companies. To be effective, talent management strategies must be anchored by clear, believable, and implementable business objectives that company teams understand and commit to execute. Employees must believe the plans will help the organization to be successful in the future and trust senior leaders to lead the organization to future success.

   Are people committed enough to the game plan for success?

2. Ensure that “Ways of Working and Thinking” Are Aligned with Your Strategy
   Once your strategy is clear enough to act, the next step is to ensure that your workplace culture — how people think, behave, and act — is purposefully aligned with your strategy. We know from organizational culture assessment data that strategies must go through cultures to be successfully implemented. The right skills are no match for misaligned business practices or belief systems.

   Is your culture helping or hindering the achievement of your strategic objectives?

3. Be Clear About the Talent and Skills Required to Succeed: Both Now and In the Future
   Once your strategy and culture are clear enough and aligned enough, your next step is to identify the talent, roles, and skills you need to successfully execute your short- and long-term plans.— Use organizational talent reviews to assess an employee’s performance and potential in order to plan for the future growth of both the individual and the organization. Talent reviews are fundamental to assessing gaps and strengths in your talent pipeline.

   Use skills assessment tools like skills simulation assessments, people manager assessment centers, training needs assessments, learning aptitude and orientation tests, and 360 degree feedback to identify gaps between existing skill sets and what is needed to achieve strategic goals.

   Have you prioritized what roles and skills matter most for current and future success?

4. Develop Targeted Training Programs Tied to Personal and Professional Objectives
   We know from training measurement data that effective learning solution must be highly relevant to three key stakeholders:

   (1) The Target Audience
   (2) Their Bosses
   (3) The Business/Executive Team

   We call this 3×3 Relevance – without it learning leaders often struggle to get professional development initiatives off the ground or fully implemented. Once your business and learning objectives have been agreed upon by key stakeholders, bridge identified skill gaps through highly targeted and customized training programs, action learning leadership development, 1×1 coaching, microlearning, and individual development plans tailored to address specific needs.

   Are your taking a consistent, comprehensive, and performance-based approach to talent development?

5. Foster and Reinforce a Culture of Continuous Learning
   Employees want to work for companies that encourage learning at work. From an employee perspective, a culture of continuous learning helps ensure that employees find their job interesting, can utilize their strengths, and see professional growth and career development opportunities to stay engaged and relevant. From a company perspective, a workplace culture that values employee learning and development ensures that the workforce remains agile enough to tackle future challenges. Just remember, to sustain a learning advantage, the desired skills and behaviors must be consistently modeled, monitored, and rewarded.

   Are you continuously enhancing your people’s capability to adapt, grow, and thrive based upon where the company is headed?

The Top 10 Training Best Practices to Overcome Common Challenges
Achieving strategic alignment is not without its hurdles. Resistance to change, inadequate communication, and limited resources are common barriers. Even though US corporations spend over $100 billion on employee development, our research found that only 1-in-5 employees change their on-the-job behavior and performance from stand-alone training events — regardless of how well they are designed. Organizations can get more value from talent development investments by:

1. Taking a change management approach to learning.
2. Treating all training requests differently based upon the desired outcomes.
3. Taking a systemic, company-wide approach to learning and development initiatives to ensure a cohesive and strategic learning narrative.
4. Focusing on outcomes, stakeholder needs, experiential designs, reinforcement mechanisms, and business contributions.
5. Partnering with external experts to access best practices and to fill knowledge, skill, and bandwidth gaps.
6. Prioritizing training initiatives based upon the needs of the target audience, their bosses, and the business as whole.
7. Having clear and proactive training strategies, structures, governance systems, scope, and plans based upon business and people priorities.
8. Making training relevant and focused on getting real work done while learning.
9. Measuring skill adoption, behavior change, performance improvement, and business impact.
10. Knowing that behavior change takes practice, coaching, reinforcement, and cultural alignment.

The Bottom Line
Talent alignment is a dynamic process that requires constant adjustment. When designed properly, the strategic alignment of skills with organizational objectives can be a critical driver of business AND people success. By continuously assessing and updating workforce capabilities with strategic priorities, companies can achieve their unique goals while fostering a motivated and highly agile workforce.

To learn more about the strategic alignment of skills and organizational objectives, download The Top 5 Training Strategies and Key Mistakes to Avoid