Strategic Assessments (10)
Master Sun: “Assess the advantages in taking advice, then structure your forces accordingly, to supplement extraordinary tactics. Forces are to be structured strategically, based on what is advantageous.”
Cao Cao: “Structure depends on strategy: strategy is determined according to events.”
Adaptation: Do not form your assessments in a vacuum. While it is important to keep your own counsel and reserve decision making to the appropriate parties in the chain of command, it is nonetheless imperative to avoid groupthink by placing your assessments before disinterested subject matter experts who can give you an objective evaluation of your assessments.
Application: Don’t fall into the organizational structure trap. Just because there has always been a central recruiting function doesn’t mean that the central recruiting approach is the right solution for staffing a division in preparation for a spin-off from the corporation.
Allow the structure of the recruiting organization to flow from its objectives and from congruity with the strategic goals established by senior management. Then you can assume a tactical position in accordance with the requirements to be met and undertake operations that will yield the desired result. You achieve all of this while enjoying the financial support and constructive political engagement of senior management because your plan is based on their vision and the fulfillment of their requirements.
One way of understanding the idea of structuring forces strategically is to view the elements of strategy, tactics and operations as temporal dimensions, or time zones, if you prefer. Strategy is far-reaching or it isn’t strategy. Strategy is what may be known as the long view, one’s vision of the horizon line (3-5 years).
Tactics and tactical considerations are within reach or near at hand, they unfold in the easily foreseeable future. Tactics may be thought of as the short view (6-18 months).
Operations are what happens right now, routinely, or all the time. In other words, operations are what happen immediately. Think about the things you or your boss can cause to happen immediately and you have an interesting yardstick against which to measure the real responsiveness of your operations.
If you structure your recruiting team based on what is happening now, or on what has always happened, then you will not be able to keep up with a competitor who is systematically building a strategic position with a vision of where they want to be in five years.
Another way of approaching strategic structure of your employment team is to ask where you want to be in three years (strategic position) and then ask how you will get there from where you are now (tactics and operations.) When you understand what it will take to get from here to there (how to bridge the gap) you will have an appreciation of the logistical requirements and the changes in operations that will have to be undertaken and sustained in order to achieve your objective.
The idea of supplementing extraordinary tactics assumes you have the capacity to move swiftly in executing against commands or capturing opportunities. If a competitor were to begin a lay-off of valuable people tomorrow afternoon, how long would it take you to secure the approvals required to travel to the facility to interview people in the outplacement program?
24 hours? 72 hours? 2 weeks?
You see where this is going. A component of meaningful strategic structure of forces is that the recruiting leadership is entrusted with a high degree of autonomy by senior management in exchange for a corresponding level of responsiveness from the recruiting team.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under The Art of War for Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
As a wise man said to me, several years ago, it’s all about relationships — that high degree of autonomy will only happen when senior management trusts the recruiting team to act both tactically and strategically, and that trust has to be both given and earned.