The New HR Mandate: Driving Market Success with Go-to-Market Strategy

The human resources department is a black box for most team members. It’s the place that brings you into the organization, manages your “employee file,” and facilitates employee communication. Beyond that, most people just don’t know what goes into operating an effective talent organization.

The role of human resources evolved to respond to evolving labor and consumption realities. After all, the developed world transitioned from agrarian to manufacturing to information and service in less than a century.

In the past five years, tight labor markets, social unrest, remote work, freelancing, and artificial intelligence trends multiplied the pressure to respond and adapt by many orders of magnitude.

Great enterprises respond by giving talent leaders a well-earned seat at the strategy table.

That seat comes with great power and responsibility. A firm understanding of commercial excellence in delivering the company’s product or service is critical. However, understanding how to bring those same disciplines into the talent organization may be even more crucial.

The Expanding Role of the Talent Organization in Strategy

An effective talent organization has responsibility for delivering four key areas:

1. Talent Acquisition
2. Talent Development
3. Compliance
4. Compensation & Benefits

While it seems logical and easy to assume that each of these divisions has the same stakeholder persona, they couldn’t be more different.

Let’s consider some examples.

Division	Persona	Needs/Desires
Talent Acquisition	Hiring Managers	High-quality qualification Quick response Insights from the field
	Advanced Candidates	Clarity on the process Information about the company Offer progress
	New Candidates	Clarity on the process Information about the opportunity Quick decision – yes or no
Talent Development	Existing Leaders	New or enhanced skills – hard and soft Status – peer recognition Job security
	Emerging Leaders	New or enhanced skills – hard and soft Status – moving up the ladder Expanded opportunity set
	Line-level Employees	Basics on how to do the job Best practices Wage growth Job security
Compliance	Legal & Internal Audit	Data security DEI & ESG compliance Risk mitigation Stay out of the news
	Employees	Easy to access paperwork Engaging compliance training
	Regulators	Meet or exceed fair labor standards Negotiate in good faith
Compensation & Benefits	New Recruits	Comparison to the next best alternative Lifestyle benefits Easy onboarding
	At-risk Employees	Maintain competitive wages & benefits Other opportunities within the company
	Line-level Employees	Compensation consistent with feedback Incentive compensation opportunities Unexpected rewards

This may be an oversimplification. Still, the framework lends itself well to considering each stakeholder’s perspective, similar to how a strategic marketing team approaches customers.

Strategic Alignment with Market Goals

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room” – Jeff Bezos

An employer brand is much more than ratings and reviews on Glassdoor. It represents the tangible and intangible aspects of your company culture.

It’s no secret that our customers want to buy from companies that share their values. They want to see themselves in the team members who serve them. This makes your employer brand just as, if not more, important than a marketing brand.

While marketing may be involved in your employer branding strategy from an execution point of view, the talent organization holds all the cards for building and maintaining the brand. Each touchpoint with future, current, and past employees offers an opportunity to communicate or enhance your brand. However, these touchpoints can diminish your employer and marketing brand if not properly managed.

Human resources is as much part of the delivery engine as the frontline departments.

Service- and information-focused businesses are more tuned into this reality than those that rely heavily on unskilled labor. Each team member has a unique essence that can make or break your brand. The talent organization is best positioned to understand and adjust as needed.

Every division in the talent organization can positively influence overall business strategy.

Facilitate Cross-Functional Collaboration

Product, sales, and marketing teams often develop the go-to-market strategy with minimal input from others in the organization. The strategy is then handed down from on-high after being blessed by the relevant C-suite and board approvers.

Building a strategy this way is inherently flawed.

As mentioned above, everyone who touches the company has different needs and desires that may influence product delivery. Therefore, a comprehensive strategy that considers inputs from HR, IT, Legal, Finance, and others will produce better outcomes.

More importantly, a strategy that considers input from the frontline is more likely to be adopted than one forced upon the frontline.

The talent organization with a seat at the strategy table is uniquely positioned to influence how the company can deliver for its customers and employees. Perspectives from each division reduce the need for politicized resource allocation during budget time and set a clear, simple direction aligned with frontline needs and desires.

Fundamental alignment at the early stages of strategy execution enhances efficiency in delivering for the customer. The ability to ease collaboration between silos will also show up in better execution for the customer.

Build Agility and Change Management Capabilities

Change is a constant in today’s world. Resilience is an essential trait for any successful business.

Our world fundamentally changed when the COVID-19 pandemic changed how we work in Q2-2020. The public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 added more stress to an already challenging work-life adjustment.

Labor markets are fickle regardless of whether your team is primarily skilled or unskilled.

Talent leaders can rely on the following three tools for building agility within their organization:

Clear Vision

Great strategy is easily communicated in 30 seconds.

Your strategy should tell the story of who you’re serving, how what you do benefits them, and what success looks like for your team. Anything more than this is fluff.

As previously discussed, this information comes to the surface best with a collaborative approach that includes the people who know your stakeholders best. Such a process enhances the strategy’s value and the likelihood of user acceptance.

Simple Scorecards

Star players want to know how they are doing. More important, the scorecard needs to be simple and easy to access.

Think about a football game.

The coaches have headsets, playbooks, stat sheets, and a suite of other tools to make the best strategic decisions. Players on the field have good training, an assignment, and a scoreboard that tells them the score and progress toward the next milestone.

While a comprehensive dashboard may influence strategic adjustments, it will only add unnecessary complexity to those doing the work.

Tighter Feedback Loops

Once you have a clear picture of your destination, you need a mechanism to monitor and adjust as needed.

Agile project management organizes work in sprints. These sprints are bookended by planning and retrospective meetings, and a daily huddle keeps execution on track.

The genius of the agile methodology lies in the extremely tight feedback loops. Team members self-select the work best suited for them, and their team provides support for clearing obstacles daily.

While all parts of this framework may not fit your team well, the core principles can add resilience in a rapidly changing labor environment.

Leveraging Data for Market Success

Amazing marketing teams leverage data better than anyone in the organization. They understand the cost of customer acquisition, which strategies are winning and losing, the length of the sales cycle, and dozens of other factors related to their customer.

Data in the talent organization made a big splash when Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was released in 2011. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the movie follows the main characters as they break tradition by focusing on data over intuition in building a championship-quality baseball team with a group of misfits.

Opportunities for using data in the talent organization are abundant today.

While talent acquisition and development are the most accessible places to start, the other divisions can use data to reduce risk and enhance outcomes. Beware, using data effectively is not always easy.

Software designers do a good job of collecting and displaying information. It’s up to the leaders to sift through all that information to separate the signal from the noise.

Consider the intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital.

Intensive care is characterized by careful monitoring marked with periods of intense focus and execution. Nurses and doctors in this environment need the right information at the right time. Anything else is a potentially life-threatening distraction.

ICU practitioners rely on management by exception (MBE) to address situations that deviate from the expected or normal. This provides confidence that everything is on track until it’s not. It helps manage their energy level so that they can respond only when essential.

The talent organization is uniquely positioned to use a similar approach in data strategy development and execution. Their trusted connections to the overall team can amplify the most critical signals for delivering the strategy.

The Future of the Talent Organization in Strategic Business Leadership

Talent organizations will continue to evolve to meet the company’s varied demands. Many operational leaders will also continue to add pressure to reduce costs and enhance productivity within this department.

Great talent leaders respond to these demands with innovations that enhance service delivery for all stakeholders.

Strategy development is hard work. It requires a strong stomach to step away from the comfortable best practices and into the uncertain, hypothesis-driven innovation.

The strategy table is set for talent leaders in the most innovative companies. We can expect more widespread adoption as operational leaders and board members see the value of their input in core strategic decision-making.

LXK Group assists senior leaders with developing strategies from the ground up. We begin with a thorough assessment and then create a plan of action that involves all relevant leaders in the discussion. This involves helping senior leaders identify and engage catalysts outside the traditional hierarchy to bring in the most relevant perspectives.

Book a call today to start enhancing your strategic approach.