We HR leaders have an uncanny ability to “complexify” human capital strategy in the name of being more strategic. Sometimes, we love to out-strategize the strategists by making our approach to people strategy even more complicated, lengthy, and difficult to understand than our organization’s business strategy.

In the spirit of simplification, let’s look at a handful of the critical things we need to know about putting together a good human capital strategy:

1. The strategy is about helping the business win.
2. Human capital priorities should be derived directly from business priorities.
3. Your human capital strategy should not take more than a few pages to explain and should be able to be summarized on one page.
4. Since strategy involves knowing what you are going to do and not do, you need to start by asking good questions before you can determine the right answers.
5. If you have more than three to five strategic human capital priorities by the time you are finished, you are probably not being very strategic.

I have seen and worked with many approaches to human capital strategy over the years. None is perfect, and all have their advantages and disadvantages.

Mostly, the secret to creating an effective people strategy is that it’s practical and simple enough for HR and non-HR people to relate to and embrace. Therefore, the process for creating the human capital strategy is as important as, if not more important than, the framework you use to articulate it. So use something you can relate to, and involve others in its creation.

The five human capital strategy dimensions I like to use are:

• Manage Talent. Do we have the right talent? Can we acquire and retain them? Are they engaged?
• Develop Leaders. Do we know who our key leaders are? Do they know what we expect of them? Are we assessing and developing them to meet these expectations?
• Drive Performance. Do we know what drives performance in this business? Do we measure and reward the key performance accountabilities?
• Build HR Excellence. Do we have an HR function that is capable of delivering on the human capital strategy?
• Harmonize Systems and Processes. Do we have the culture, organization design, systems, processes, and policies that reinforce our business objectives?

You might be wondering, “Why these five dimensions?”

I find they are comprehensive enough to accommodate a wide variety of specific priorities based on the needs of the business, yet they are focused enough to direct attention and resources to a handful of things that matter. They provide flexibility within a framework. But if they don’t work for your business, come up with your own set of dimensions, as long as they are sufficiently limited in number to help you prioritize and flexible enough to accommodate your key strategic people-related actions.

Ian Ziskin

President of EXec EXcel Group LLC