How can I involve staff in developing a global business strategy?
Article Type: Q&A From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 1
Leading industry experts answer your strategic HR queries
Lesley UrenLesley Uren is chief executive of Jackson Samuel.
I assume that your business genuinely wants to gain input to its global business strategy, rather than seek comment on plans that have already been made. This assumption is important, because there are a number of obstacles to be overcome if a global community is to be successfully engaged and this will only be accomplished by starting out with the right mindset – that is that your people might really have the answers to whatever challenges your business is facing. The two most significant obstacles are:
- 1.
how you craft a global strategy for a collection of widely different markets; and
- 2.
how you truly engage your people in the solution.
Crafting a global strategy
Although the individual organizations within a global business may share many common characteristics (brand, products, history/heritage, values), they do not share market conditions. It is highly likely that there are parts of your business that compete in a mature market and parts that compete in start up or even a turnaround situation. Finding some common ground among these widely diverging market conditions is often difficult. As Figure 1 shows, the key strategic question that each part of your global organization will need to answer will vary hugely depending on its level of maturity and whether it is a purely local business or structured to support multiple geographies.
So, if you are hoping to get collective engagement behind a single ambition,you will need to reduce the complexities of your overall business strategy to the simplest possible picture, and one that is relevant regardless of local market conditions. You can do this by asking two very simple questions:
- 1.
What is it that we are really good at, that is distinctive and different from the rest of the market – the “magic” of our local business?
- 2.
If you were one of our competitors, and you wanted to put us out of business, what would you do?
These two questions will enable you to deal with both your ambition and your competitive response, and from the answers you will be able to craft a high level global strategy that is relevant regardless of the local market conditions. To ensure you get people’s attention, you will also need to engage them around the question of what the organization would need to do differently, and how their work life would change if your ambition were to be realized. Many employees become truly engaged with an organization’s ambition or vision when they start to understand how it will impact their work experience. This becomes truer the deeper down the organization you go, so helping people to think through how the strategy might change their world is key.
Engaging your people
Think about the communication and engagement tools that you have at your disposal as a continuum, with those that support “tell” situations at one end, and those that support “commitment” and “engagement”at the other. At the tell end, you would use “low touch” tools such as email, memos and short briefing sessions. At the commitment end, you would use “high touch” techniques like focus groups and networking.
This subject really lends itself to a high touch approach, which in this case probably means small groups in local markets. You will need some consistency across the business though, so one approach you might want to consider is to create a single strategy team, drawn from representatives of the local markets,and give them the job of holding small (seven to ten people) focus groups around the business to gather market based input on the questions suggested earlier. As delegates of your executive team, they could also be responsible for summarizing the outcomes and proposing the key planks of the strategy. Setting up the engagement process this way would enable you to create some positive “noise”and interest in the overall activity.
If you currently do employee surveys and know the parts of your organization that are most engaged currently, you might want to start with them to help you build momentum. Remember also that some people will not want to get involved,and that is ok. Lastly, and most importantly, you will need to demonstrate you have truly listened by taking action based upon employee input. This will signal to those involved that their views really do make a difference.
About the author
Lesley Uren is chief executive of Jackson Samuel, which specializes in the identification, development, deployment and overall management of leadership talent. She has over 20 years’ experience in senior HR roles across a variety of sectors and geographic regions. She can be contacted at: lesley.uren@jacksonsamuel.com
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