People strategy is business strategy: aligning talent with growth

Guest post by Tom Emery who is a performance coach, founder of people performance consultancy HEX and author of People People: Reach Your Full Potential as a Chief HR Officer

I thought I knew what HR was for. I didn’t. Sitting at the executive table, I realised that a lot of what HR was doing was solving the wrong problems.

Organisations talk a lot about their people strategies. They’re often boiled down to a few priority areas like employee experience, capability, and culture. They’re sometimes aligned to the business’s goals, but frequently, They’re abstract. They’re esoteric. They don’t speak to the leaders who deliver business priorities, or to the people in their teams.

People strategy is business strategy

My (possibly controversial) advice, is to rip up the people strategy. Throw it in the bin. Or out of the window. I doubt it’s providing you with the impact you need it to.

HR leaders are fluent in the language of HR. Frameworks. Programmes. Best practice. The problem is, they talk to the business about what HR is doing, rather than asking what the business is trying to achieve and building a response around that.

The result is a people strategy that describes HR activity rather than drives business outcomes. It’s busy and well-intentioned. But it’s largely disconnected from growth.

There’s also a problem of identity. I work with several high-impact and high-status Chief People Officers and Chief HR Officers. They’re seen as heavy hitters. They perceive themselves as having high levels of commerciality and pragmatism. But I’m not sure that their self-assessment is completely accurate.

In some, pragmatism is actually avoidance. Being commercial is actually people-pleasing. This isn’t strategic, it’s just delivering. It’s operational. High quality, but little more than that.

Whether a people strategy is impactful is linked to this. If it’s based solely on service to the organisation, it’s not going to drive the behaviours and change that organisations will need to demonstrate to stay relevant. If HR leaders aren’t mirroring back their observations of the organisation effectively, aren’t asking the right questions, and aren’t courageous enough to challenge what they find, then the people strategy is developed in isolation.

Real alignment

Recently, I worked with a great Chief People Officer in an engineering company. He was excellent at the core people agenda. His focus on the people metrics was second to none, but without the curiosity to dig further into where growth in the business was coming from, his insights were less useful.

He knew all about the people data. But he didn’t know about the growth story. And without that, he couldn’t align his talent decisions to the business priorities that really mattered.

The move from HR fluency to commercial curiosity is core to understanding which people levers to pull. HR leaders need to move from leading with solutions to leading with intent. From proving HR’s value, to creating it where it’s needed.

It’s about making business human. This isn’t being nice, or just creating a pleasant environment. It means understanding that behind the growth targets, there are people who need to believe in it. They need to be capable of delivering it. They need to trust the organisation enough to give their best. This is what great organisations and great leaders are able to do.

Honest conversations

I made a controversial request earlier in this article: to rip up your people strategy. I was probably being a little dramatic (or perhaps a little flippant). I’ll let you decide.

What I am sure of, is that organisations and their talent thrive or die on how people talk to each other.

This is relevant at all levels in the organisation. In good times and bad. Leader to leader, leader to employee, employee to leader.

It starts at the top. Often, we see dysfunctional c-suite teams where egos have taken over. They’re not able to have the conversations they need to. There are many reasons for this: maybe they don’t have the language, maybe they’re tied up in right and wrong, maybe they’re under pressure and suffering from a scarcity mindset. Whatever it is, it seeps out of the executive team and through the rest of the organisation.

It also seeps into talent decisions. Who gets the promotion. Who gets the development. Who receives honest feedback about their performance and who doesn’t. C-suite dysfunction doesn’t stay at the top. It dictates how talented people feel below it.

A key priority for any organisation therefore is making sure the top team trusts each other, and is able to talk honestly.

The top team is just the start. Teach your organisation to have more honest conversations, and the business results will follow.

Bad news will travel upward before it becomes a crisis. Less will be wasted. Less time in meetings where nobody says what they actually think. Less money on restructures that could have been avoided if someone had said the difficult thing eighteen months earlier.

Align your talent to growth

We need to move away from people strategies and focus on growth strategies.

The growth ambitions that organisations have often don’t match the reality they face in terms of attracting and retaining talent. This isn’t a resourcing problem; it’s a trust problem. Organisations that have built genuine trust (where people feel safe, valued, and told the truth) attract and keep the people they need. Those that haven’t find themselves panic recruiting for skills they should have developed or retained.

And where honest conversations aren’t present, talent will first engage in quiet quitting, then they’ll just leave. They have options, even in tight labour markets.

Organisations need to ask what their growth strategies demand of their people. Then work out how they get what they need.

People strategy only becomes business strategy when HR leaders stop describing what they do and start asking what the organisation genuinely needs. Then they need to have the courage to say what they find.

Aligning talent to growth goes further than planning. It’s leadership behaviour. It’s the conversations leaders are willing to have, the feedback they’re willing to give, and the honesty they’re willing to bring to decisions about people.

Get that right, and growth takes care of itself.

Tom Emery is a performance coach, founder of people performance consultancy HEX and author of People People: Reach Your Full Potential as a Chief HR Officer

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