Strategy is a part of talent development

“You talk about talent development and strategy in the same sentence; what does strategy have to do with it?” -is a question I get asked quite often. It has a lot to do with talent development.

Let me explain. Often, when created correctly (and not too vaguely, copycatting every other company in the industry), strategy is a roadmap to reach a certain destination, a new point that will give the company for example a better competitive edge. You, as a company, want to be better than your competitor, offer better customer value and thus a better customer experience for your clients. We all know that a good customer experience goes hand in hand with a good employee experience — right?

In order to create a better customer experience, the word better already explains that we need to do things differently today and tomorrow compared to yesterday. Synonyms for better are exceeding, more valuable, more useful, sharpened, to name a few. If you pause for a moment to think about these words, you will realize that all of them point to doing something or everything better than before.

Being able to exceed and to be more useful, means you need to pay attention to what you are doing currently, how much time and effort it takes and so on.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there manual steps within the process that could be automated?
• Are there new technologies that need to be learnt?
• Is the customer entering into markets that need to be studied in order to support their business or to offer them better products?
• Am I receiving feedback that suggests I have some room for improvement?

As an employee and employer, you need to stop, take a step back and reflect.

• What is your current skill set?
• What is required in the future to be able to create the competitive edge and thus deliver a better customer experience?
• How to overcome the skill gap and in what time?

With Talbit, the planning of strategy implementation is tightly tied into the employee development. Making the strategic objectives transparent to all employees, allowing the employees to create a personal development plan linking personal goals to strategic objectives and following the strategy progress from a visual dashboard are at the core.

Collecting continuous feedback from customers will help the company reflect on whether they are progressing into the right direction and delivering a better customer value. When employees see how they can get involved in taking the strategy forward, being able to develop their skills and create a better customer experience, their employee experience exceeds.

That’s why strategy is in the core and part of talent development.

Kaisa Savola
Founder & CEO of Talbit
kaisa.savola@talbit.fi
https://twitter.com/kaisa_savola