Merging Strategic Planning and Workforce Planning
A frequent and appropriate concern in strategic planning is whether the resources needed to fund the plan are available: Is our financial plan adequately supportive of our strategic plan? Another concern is whether the human capital needed to implement the plan will be on-board and ready to go: Stated differently, is our workforce planning aligned with our strategic planning? (The financial plan and the workforce plan should be components of the strategic plan, either in the main body or as annexes).
There’s a push-pull between the development of a strategic plan and available financial and human resources. On the one hand, strategic planning which simply assumes the resource status quo can become constrained and unimaginative, tending to recite the way things are rather than the way things should be. On the other hand, a pie-in-the-sky plan quickly degenerates into a bookshelf ornament, breeding cynicism at best and fear-and-loathing at worst.
Achieving consensus concerning our resource assumptions allows us to create a workable strategic plan—doable by “stretching” ourselves to implement it. But would you want a strategic plan that wasn’t ambitious? You may be lucky and have the financial and human resources needed to create an ideal strategic plan right from the start, but most of us do ambitious strategic planning with the proviso that the plan will need to be adjusted iteratively in view of real financial and human resource constraints. Getting this right is a balancing act: Oddly, we must sometimes put the cart before the horse for a time before we can correctly position the cart after the horse. This process may need to be repeated once or twice until goodness of fit among all plan components has been achieved.
A comprehensive strategic plan aligns strategy with both systems and structure, organized solidly around vision, mission, goals and objectives. Systems refer not only to electronic systems but to defined core processes. Structure refers not only to the organizational configuration of talent, but also to needed capabilities and capacities. Capabilities are the skill sets and talent competency levels needed to implement the plan and perform the work. Capacities are the required amount of a given capability at relevant levels of mastery, expressed in person-hours or person-years. Correct specification of capabilities and capacities is central to effective workforce planning.
Effective workforce planning answers this pivotal question: If the strategic plan expresses what we intend to accomplish, then what is the mix of present and future talent that will be required to implement the plan and how will this mix be cultivated? Peter Drucker said it best, “Plans are nothing until they degenerate into work.”
If we are going to have a plan, then we’d best have the talent needed to implement it successfully. Otherwise, a strategic plan without a workforce plan could end up being just a cart without a horse.
Matrix Teams: Getting Past the Chanting Stage
Matrix teams can be especially useful as part of a renewal initiative. For a couple of decades, the mantra in organizations has been “we need to break down the silos,” but such renewal initiatives too rarely get past the chanting stage. Matrix teams are cross-functional teams which pursue shared objectives using shared resources. Such teams break down the silos by placing staff drawn from different disciplines shoulder-to-shoulder, either physically and/or virtually, with one another to pursue a common objective.
A constant theme throughout my book, Matrix Management Success: Method Not Magic, is that today’s organizational problems are complex and daunting. The problems are multidisciplinary in nature and multidisciplinary approaches are essential to meeting the challenge—not just at the top of the organization, but also at the middle and at the front-line level.
We would still be waiting for many of the beneficial drugs that make life better today were it not for the use of multi-disciplinary drug development teams by global pharmaceutical companies Beyond the pharmaceutical companies, many other household-name organizations use matrix teams to achieve important benefits, including companies such as ExxonMobil, Boeing, and Parsons Engineering.
Public sector organizations are also using matrix teams to great advantage, including the US Navy Bureau of Medicine, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Food and Drug Administration Center for Radiological Devices, and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, to name a few. There are some emerging examples of both private and public sector organizations which are linking their matrix teams to the matrix teams of other strategic partners; this is the next frontier in creating breakthrough global networks of organizations that don’t just cooperate on paper, but which also collaborate day-to-day at the working level to get work done. It’s another way to make renewal a viral phenomenon.
Many traditional, vertical hierarchies are simply out of breath as they grapple with multidisciplinary challenges. Vertical organizations are structured perfectly to solve one-dimensional problems but the bad news is that virtually all of the one-dimensional problems in the modern world have already been solved! Squeezing traditional hierarchies harder is not the pathway to progress; you may increase your engine speed RPM, with accompanying employee fatigue and burnout, but the squeeze doesn’t increase your ground speed, to use an automotive analogy. Such approaches lead to head scratching: “How can our employees work so hard and such long days and make so little progress?”
It’s time for organizational structures to catch up to reality. Catching up to reality is one way to describe necessary renewal. Unleashing the power of the horizontal organization using cross-functional matrix teams is a proven way to renew your organization by releasing talent to conquer complexity, increasing speed and agility while ensuring the highest-and-best use of all of your assets.
Cross-functional teams have been around for more than sixty years, but recent improvements in communications and information technology along with increases in employee education and sophistication levels have fueled its wider use. It takes care and due diligence to make them work, but when they work well they are powerhouses of innovation and productivity and a vital pathway to organizational renewal.
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