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So, You Want to Be Strategic?
I had a dream. I wanted to be a business partner. I wanted to work closely with business leaders, advising them on ways they could use learning and organizational effectiveness to enable their business. I wanted to work within a team of internal HR and talent consultants supporting an executive team. In short, I wanted to be strategic. It was a role I had been encouraged to do in several different organizations, and yet it always seemed just out of my grasp.
What Does It Mean to Be Strategic?
When I finally got the opportunity, I was so excited! I was working for a large global corporation within an HR business partner team that welcomed me with open arms. I thought I had finally found what I was looking for. But then, I started to receive requests to work on projects that seemed transactional and unrelated to the business.
As collaborative and collegial as the team was, I came to realize that simply having a title or being part of a senior internal consultant team doesn’t make you strategic. Therein lies the first of the challenges to being strategic. If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say, “We need HR to be more strategic” or “We need the learning function to be more strategic,” I would be a very rich person. The reality is, I don’t think the speakers knew what being strategic meant, and I don’t recall ever being given a specific process or a set of deliverables that would enable me to consult in a strategic way.
The first step in any transformation is to define the change. So that is where we begin—what does it mean for a learning professional to be strategic? I propose it means being in a role that works closely with business leaders to enable business results through learning and organizational effectiveness solutions.
We also need criteria to measure ourselves in this new role. How will we know if we are doing strategic work? I took a cue from business leaders to answer this question. Typically, the most strategic roles in an organization have the characteristics listed in the reflection box below. When I started assessing the projects I worked on against this list, it was enlightening and frankly a little humbling. I challenge you to do the same.
Reflection: How many of your projects:
• Support customer-facing roles?
• Are closely aligned to the strategic priorities of the organization?
• Have a wide scope of impact on the organization?
• Are directly affecting profit generation?
• Are as involved in the creation of business strategy as the implementation of business strategy?
• Have a clear business impact with measurable results?
• Are aligned with the future growth of the organization?
The goal is to be part of a team that is working with a business leader doing projects that meet these criteria.
What Do I Need to Be Strategic?
According to Robinson and Robinson (2011), to be successful as a strategic business partner you need three things: access, credibility, and trust (the ACT model):
• Access is being able to connect with the business leader client on a regular basis. This doesn’t guarantee the work will be strategic, but we can’t get strategic work if they never meet with us.
• Credibility is related to our expertise in learning and organizational effectiveness. We must have deep knowledge and experience in learning theory and practice. If they do not believe we can provide effective learning solutions, they will not reach out to us for help.
• Trust is essential. Without it, they will not be vulnerable or open up to us. We won’t be allowed to be part of the needs analysis. We will only be invited when they think we can provide a solution they have already selected.
This gives us a framework for creating a plan of action. For instance, when I realized that I was not getting access to the plant manager at a location, I focused on having lunch with any members of management who happened to be in the cafeteria. It started with supervisors who attended some classes I taught. Soon, I was having lunch with their managers, followed by their directors. Within a few months, I was having lunch with the plant manager. Through this I gained access.
The first time I was given a project, I worked tirelessly to learn about the business and its needs. I produced a product that far exceeded the expectations of the plant’s senior leaders. By doing this on a consistent basis, I was able to build credibility.
I also intentionally moved away from only “talking shop” and connected with people on a more personal level. I would ask about their pain points and challenges and share mine with them. Because I made the first move and was vulnerable with them, they began to open up to me. This fostered trust.
Over a long period of time, most anyone can organically gain access, credibility, and trust. But, if we act intentionally, we can considerably shorten this period. Be aware, though, that if we are only doing these things to achieve our goals, it will not work. In our heart of hearts, we must be invested in their success as much as they are. Our behaviors must be rooted in an authentic desire to help them succeed. Without authenticity, we will not be able to gain their trust.
Even with the ACT model, it is easy to fall into a transactional relationship with our clients. If we wait for them to give us projects, we can only be as strategic as they let us. We need to be proactive and put ourselves into a position where we can recommend learning solutions that we are confident are business enablers.
If we are being proactive, our role begins to look like a sales consultant who is more concerned about solving their client’s problems than making money. Our responsibility becomes learning their business, building relationships, identifying needs, and recommending solutions that meet those needs. We develop more of a collaborative exchange and are less likely to be waiting by the phone to take an order. Thinking and acting like a sales consultant creates a new paradigm for our role. We called this proactive process “learning strategy consultation.”
Reflection: How proactive are you?
How to Pursue a Learning Strategy Consultation Process
We have already determined that the word strategy is vague and undefined, and adding the word learning to the front doesn’t really help. Consider this definition:
A learning strategy is a process that enhances the organization’s ability to accomplish tasks or activities that are mission critical; requires a depth of knowledge, skills, and experience; affects multiple parts of the business; and addresses significant competency and organizational effectiveness gaps.
Reflection: Take a minute to read that definition and note key words or phrases that jump out at you. For example:
• Process. It is not just a document or deliverable—it is a set of steps we take. It starts before we meet with business leaders, includes a needs analysis and selection and implementation of learning solutions, and concludes with an evaluation of impact. It continues until we deliver the expected impact to the business.
• Enhances the organization’s ability. The activities should have a clear link to what will affect the organization’s ability to perform.
• Mission critical. We need to prioritize our activities around the most important strategies of the business.
• Knowledge, skills, and experience. Our solutions should be a 70-20-10 blended approach (experience, exposure, and education).
• Multiple parts of the business. The focus of the learning strategy would typically have the broadest scope possible, rather than the needs of an individual or small group of employees.
• Competency and organization effectiveness gaps. Not only do we address skill and training needs, we also take a holistic approach considering all things that influence organizational performance.
Creating a learning strategy has three benefits:
• It is a disciplined approach to solving capability challenges, ensuring that we are addressing root causes and key contributing factors.
• It focuses development resources on the activities with the highest influence.
• It is a structured, planned approach that accelerates organizational change.
The learning strategy consultation process identifies the business strategy and aligns learning solutions to enable the execution of the strategy.
In his book Flawless Consulting, Peter Block (2005) outlines a process for engaging internal or external clients, ensuring that you are working on things that are either solving the root cause of the problems they experienced or creating enablers for the opportunities they sought. It is this model, with some modifications, that the learning strategy consultation process is based on.
To be clear, we will always be asked to do ad hoc, transactional work that may or may not be enabling business strategy. Also, even if we create a learning strategy, there will be many tactical and transactional aspects of implementing it. Let’s face it, if we asked a CEO—who is possibly the most strategic person in your organization—to describe their weekly activities, I think we would all be surprised by how much tactical and transactional work they really do. When implemented correctly, the learning strategy consultation process ensures that the bulk of our work serves the organization’s strategy.
The process is similar to a typical sales entry and account development process, which adheres to the typical timeline a salesperson might experience (Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1. Learning Strategy Consultation Process
The phases of this process include:
• Preparation. These are the things we do, gather, and review before meeting with the client. They may include researching the organization, making plans, and selecting approaches. This is about gaining insights via existing data from company reports, quarterly business review presentations, strategy documents, and so forth; engaging the key stakeholders; and making plans to initiate data gathering and analysis.
• Data gathering and needs analysis. Next, we meet with business leadership to get their input on the organizational strategies and challenges. This can be conducted in several ways, but it is best to get input from the entire leadership team in some way. We have found that the most common and effective method is through structured interviews. This process is about gathering and analyzing qualitative data.
• Link the learning solution to the business need. In this step, we determine the key issues that need to be addressed based on the data we collected. This involves selecting priority needs and relevant solutions and then proposing and gaining agreement on them from the business leader. This can be a very collaborative approach, involve working more independently, or fall somewhere in between depending on the relationship with your key stakeholders.
• Project planning. This is a typical project planning approach to executing the agreed-upon solutions. It involves defining objectives, scope, timelines, budget, and a plan for evaluating impact. It also involves the change management aspects of our solution.
• Project management. This is creating a regular cadence of revisiting the plan, addressing slippage, and updating stakeholders on progress.
• Evaluation. Using the information gathered from our evaluation plan, we will create and present a learning brief for our consultant partner and client.
Each phase of the process has a purpose, steps to do, tools to support implementation, and expected deliverables to be completed. At the end of each phase is a project gate. Before passing through each gate, a document or tool summarizes the work done, decisions made, or output of that phase. These documents ensure consistency in following the phase steps before passing through the gate. Figure 4-2 shows the gates and corresponding deliverables for the learning strategy consultation process.
Figure 4-2. Project Gates and Deliverables
As you can see in the figure, there are a few different types of deliverables:
• Strategy document. This summarizes the process followed, the identified business needs, agreed-upon solutions, the budget, and high-level timelines. It is the proposal delivered to clients. Essentially, if the strategy document is complete, all the steps of the preparation and needs analysis process were followed.
• Learning charter. For each solution or learning initiative, a project charter is completed. This outlines the purpose, description, people involved, and plan for evaluating the impact. This is like charters used for project management.
• Project plan. The project plan takes the road map outlined in the proposal and the information from the charter and converts them into a more detailed list of actions, due dates, and people responsible. It can be stored in whichever tool you have access to. There should be enough detail that there are tasks to complete and report on nearly every week.
• Quarterly business review scorecard. Each solution or learning initiative is reported on using a quarterly business review with the client and consultant partner. A consistent, weekly project management check-in cadence will ensure progress is maintained.
• Learning brief. Assuming SMART goals were used, and an impact evaluation plan was created in the project charter, you can easily create a learning brief. This will consist of the original project charter and the results of the project.
Preparation Phase
This may include researching the organization, making plans, selecting approaches, and so forth. You will need to gather quantitative data, engage any internal consultant partners, and make plans to initiate data gathering and analysis. This process occurs during the first 30 days, or as soon as the client is assigned.
The key players are the business leader, any other internal consultants or partners, and your team. During the preparation phase you’ll get to know them and their business, as well as share your process and how you will work with them.
Be sure to gather relevant business, talent, and people data before you meet with them; this will give you a preliminary view of their organization. You should gather data about the mission and purpose of the organization: What do they make or do? What are they known for? Explore their organization, structure, leadership, and culture. How are they currently performing? What are their sales? What is their current employee engagement?
The time that clients can give you will be limited, no matter how committed they are to learning. The research you do up front not only allows you to get more quickly to the strategic needs of the business; it also demonstrates to them that you have understand their business and are invested in them. These actions will help you build credibility and trust.
Hint: If you work within a team of internal consultants, fostering a productive and collaborative partnership is critical to the success of your consultation. Prior to engaging the client, meet with your consultant partner to get to know them, agree on how you will work together, plan your approach to the learning strategy consultation, and come to an agreement regarding access to any relevant information.
Reflection: What can get in the way of a productive relationship with internal consultant partners?
Data Gathering Approach
A successful preparation phase will result in agreement between the client, the consultant partner, and your team to conduct some form of data gathering and needs analysis. The more the leadership team participates in the needs analysis process, the more accurate the outcomes will be. In addition, they will be more engaged and therefore implementation will be more successful. The two approaches I have found most effective are a team-facilitated experience or individual structured interviews.
Team-Facilitated Experience
The team-facilitated experience involves bringing the leadership team together and moving them through a process of discovery (Figure 4-3).
Figure 4-3. Process of Discovery
For example, my team used four activities to guide our client through the learning strategy consultation. The mission activity explored what the current and future mission and vision of the organization was. The SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) activity facilitated a discussion around how prepared the organization was to deliver on that mission. From the SWOT, we identified business implications that had to be put into place to enable the mission. Finally, from the business implications, we could identify learning solutions that would enable those implications.
Instructions for developing a mission statement and conducting a SWOT are available on the Internet. The business and solution implication activities can be more freeform, pulling findings from the SWOT activity. For instance, the team might agree that one business implication from the SWOT activity was to increase sales using a more consultative sales approach. The solution implication might be consultative sales training, interpersonal skills training, and having less experienced sales people ride along with more tenured ones.
Individual Structured Interviews
Structured interviews are one-on-one conversations with clients. They are called “structured” because we ask the same questions of every business leader. This allows us to easily find key themes that are common to all or at least most of the leadership team. If we conducted more open-ended interviews, we could quite easily find ourselves having to compare apples to oranges to bicycles to fish. The questions we ask in our structured interviews fall into the categories shown in Figure 4-4.
Figure 4-4. Questions for Structured Interviews
Once all the interviews are completed, we (and often our consultant partner) lock ourselves in a room and analyze the data. We typically use an affinity sort activity in which we review our notes from all the interviews and write each bit of data on a separate sticky note. We then stick them to a whiteboard and begin collating sticky notes with common bits of data on them. Then we review each group and identify the common theme it represents. These common themes become our business implications. Instructions for this activity can be found on the Internet.
Figure 4-5 shows the before and after of an affinity sort activity.
Figure 4-5. An Affinity Sort Activity, Before and After
As with the facilitated team experience, you would identify the solution implications based on the business implications that emerged from the affinity sort.
There are many ways to analyze data, and the affinity sort is only one of them. Whether it is a facilitated team experience or structured interview approach, using an objective method of analysis helps the team come to a data-based decision about not only the needs of the business, but also their root causes. It also helps you avoid treating the symptoms without curing the disease. If your approach was successful, you should now have a list of business implications linked to learning solutions.
Now you are ready to provide feedback to the client. Your presentation should include a summary of the business strategy, business needs, roles critical to those needs, and any gaps or opportunities they shared with you. Once you confirm that they agree with your summary of their current state, you can share the learning or organizational effectiveness solution that you have determined corresponds to each of their needs.
It is important that they confirm and agree to what their needs are before you propose any solutions. This allows them to see the thread that starts with their mission, passes through their current needs, and connects to your proposed solutions. If you were to simply propose your solution without connecting it to their stated needs, you are more likely to experience unnecessary objections or resistance.
Project Planning and Management
The project planning and project management phases are simply the application of basic project management practices. The most important aspect is the weekly cadence of reviewing the project plan and identifying the tasks that will move the project forward that week. We are all very busy and juggle multiple priorities, and these sorts of projects are typically long term (lasting between 18 months and five years). Putting out the fires of any given day or week can easily push these projects to the bottom of the priority list. Also, because learning is what Stephen Covey would call “important but not urgent,” you may find yourself very far behind in your projects by the time the client remembers to ask for a status update.
Evaluation
There are many ways to measure the success of a learning project. I like to use Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation to create an evaluation plan. My group typically measures to Level 3 (application of skills) or 4 (business impact). If we are evaluating to Level 4, it is standard practice to measure the three levels that lead up to it. For instance, if we claimed that our training increased sales by 25 percent (Level 4), but participants said they hated the training (Level 1), could not demonstrate mastery of skills (Level 2), and never applied them when making sales calls (Level 3), it’s very unlikely that our training was responsible for the sales increase.
Whatever we are measuring, it should align with the outcomes identified with the client and consultant partner before the project began.
The evaluation plan should list the evaluation level, the metrics you will measure, and the measurement methods used. Figure 4-6 shows an evaluation plan with examples of what the typical metrics and measurement methods might be.
Figure 4-6. Sample Evaluation Plan Showing the Four Kirkpatrick Levels
Summary
Being strategic is a relatively simple concept, but it is very challenging to achieve. It requires sound technical skills in the learning and organizational effectiveness domain. We must balance that with relationship-building skills. Finally, we must use an effective, disciplined, and repeatable process to achieve results that enable business success. This requires a unique combination of hard and soft skills, as well as the ability to be both flexible and structured to be strategic. It is a formidable challenge indeed, but one that is worth taking on.
Key Takeaways
Having a title or role that sounds strategic does not guarantee that the projects you receive will be strategic. You need to be proactive in seeking out relationships and projects that influence the business in the most strategic way.
Being proactive means shifting your mindset from being an order-taking salesperson to being like a sales consultant. Learn about the business, build relationships, understand their pain points, and recommend the most effective solutions.
Using the ACT model (access, credibility, and trust) will guide where you should focus when building relationships and your own capabilities to support the business leader’s needs.
Using a disciplined process will increase the likelihood that you are working on root causes, selecting effective solutions targeted at the most important needs of the business, implementing lasting change, and measuring impact.
Working on strategic projects is no guarantee you will never be doing ad hoc, transactional work. However, if you apply the disciplined, consultative process, you can be confident that you are achieving the highest possible value for that work.
Questions for Reflection and Further Action
1. In what ways can you be more strategic within your environment and context?
2. What skills do you need to improve or build to be more strategic?
3. In what ways would changing how you view your role help make you more strategic?
4. How can you begin your journey to be more strategic? What are the first three steps you need to take? When and how will you take them?