Discover how organizations can accelerate strategy realization by integrating capability creation, talent flow, and leadership development, ensuring alignment with corporate culture and business objectives for long-term growth and success.
Corporates are facing ever increasing opportunities and challenges when formulating new strategies. A world of opportunities is available, with rapidly advancing technological solutions offering limitless potential for business growth and the enhancement of existing operations. The AI-theme is naturally one of the trendiest top themes but there are plenty of areas of interest: renewable energy sector, sustainability business, food production, defence sector and the space industry.
As corporates pursue these opportunities and craft ambitious visions and strategies, they must also take a deep dive into the core factors that drive their success. How can we succeed to realize a chosen strategy and even more, how can we multiply the probability to succeed in strategy realization? A great opportunity is to speed up the three superpowers of strategy realization – corporate capability creation, talent flow and corporate capability driven leadership development.
Corporates should break down the process of unleashing these superpowers into three main steps, while simultaneously deepening their understanding of the current corporate culture. Target is to understand the current leadership development landscape and how it should be developed to secure success in utilizing corporates’ full potential. Many corporates are well aware of their current culture. At the outset of this journey, it is essential to assess the current cultural landscape and conduct a straightforward reality check and target-state identification with key leaders and stakeholders. Then move to renewal track.
Three Steps to Unlocking Organisational Superpowers
Step 1: Capability Creation
Key questions include: Do we share a common understanding of the corporate capabilities required to fully realise our strategy? Where do we currently stand? Are we clear about the development activities needed within our organisation? What does capability creation entail for the leadership team and across different organisational levels? The questions may seem simple, but the answers can be surprising.
Corporates should assess the current stage of their capability creation and set future targets across two dimensions: identifying the essential enabling corporate capabilities and the most critical operational business capabilities. Enabling capabilities are competencies, processes, systems and tools and governance and principles. Operational business capabilities can be divided to operational, development, renewal, organisation and business leadership. Leadership teams and board of directors should have a clear and precise vision of what are the relevant corporate capabilities and what type of actions are needed to develop those in time to secure strategy realization. Capability creation vision and insight should then be divided into concrete projects and tasks to chosen organisational layers and key roles to get the job done.
Step 2: Talent Flow
Traditionally corporates have done significant management activities to ensure that they have the best talent and leaders to ensure business growth and the best employee and customer experience. Typically, talent and leadership development processes are justified by strategy realization, but corporates do not have sufficient understanding of the strategy realization’s true key drivers. What is the corporate capability development that we need to foster? How we should develop, hunt and lead the key talents who are the best ones to reach the vision and business targets?
When corporates have clarity regarding the capability creation, they should focus on themes in Talent Flow depending on their business lifecycle status and chosen capability creation scheme. Talent flow should include Talent Mapping to increase talent market possibilities understanding compared to corporate capability creation and strategy realization. Talent Review is necessary to ensure a solid inhouse talent development. Leadership Review to increase awareness of leadership development potential and potentially Management Audits when initiating M&A activities or when increasing power to post merger processes.
Step 3: Focused Leadership Development
Corporates have invested significantly in leadership development on corporate, leadership team and on individual levels. This has been the norm for a while. Various high-class operators like well-known universities, a wide range of international and local training companies, and organisations have supported these leadership development efforts. Corporates have reached success, and at the same time there is a growing need to develop more value for corporates when reaching new leadership development heights with individual top-notch leaders. The key is then to succeed and creating more value (from a business perspective) all while maintaining a feeling of importance within the leaders.
Highly effective strategy-driven Leadership Development should be aligned with corporate capability creation and key leadership roles and teams to ensure success. This approach provides a more concrete and actionable leadership development journey than previous programmes. More value to corporate and owners and at the same time more benefits and inspiration on leadership team and individual level. Development should not be treated as a one-off programme. Ideally, it is a continuous and systematic approach, tailored to both corporate capability creation and the needs of individual leaders and leadership teams. It is well supported ongoing development activities that are a part of a corporate management model.
The ultimate target is to tie a new era of leadership development activities directly to corporate capability creation. To secure and increase speed to perform identified business development activities and tasks on different organisational levels in order to build chosen corporate capabilities. To create clarity and transparency are important as well. Ultimately, this approach addresses the “eternal problem” of improving the success rate in realising corporate vision and strategy—automating strategy realisation through a new era of capability creation and leadership.
