There are multiple components involved in getting and staying healthy, and they’re all intertwined. Howard Cleveland and Meg Crosby, Co-Founders of PeopleCap Advisors, have created a people-first business strategy that uses the same philosophy.
Howard and Meg share the six imperatives for creating a successful people strategy and dive deep on elevating talent. Check out some of their insights on developing a healthy organization by getting clear on your goals, not by biting off more than you can chew.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Sharpen Focus
A clear vision creates a common purpose. If an organization has a clear vision and is aligned around it, then that focus stays sharp.
2. Calibrate Culture
You can’t leave culture to chance. And as your strategy changes, your culture really has to change. There’s a great story about Edgar Shine, who’s sort of the father of organizational culture. And he was asked, ‘Do we have a good culture?’ And he said, ‘You’re asking the wrong question. The question should be, do we have an effective culture? Is the culture we have helpful in helping us achieve our strategy?’
3. Strengthen Leadership
The third imperative is to strengthen leadership and make sure that that foundation is strong enough to support growth because you can’t outscale the effectiveness of your leader.
4. Elevate Talent
Employees need to be trained by the folks who are doing the job, they are the best trainers. They know how to do the work and know how to do it in the culture that they’re operating in with the clients. And so it’s really important that those people can spend time developing these new employees, getting them up to speed, managing them. What we help them realize is this is not something that can be outsourced. The key leaders in the company need to find the capacity to do this. The message is you’ve gotta slow down to move faster. We’ve gotta slow down and build this capacity in the organization, bring these new people up to speed so that you have the capacity to do more. And then you can go fast because you’ll have those processes in place.
5. Align Your Structure
You have to align your structure, and as your strategy changes, the structure of the organization needs to change to support that.
6. Amplify Communication
As you move from one level to the next and grow, some of those hallway conversations get lost, but also one-way communication needs to give way to multidirectional communication—getting feedback from employees, having employees talk and divisions talk among each other so things don’t get siloed.
Book Recommendation:
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Listen to the full episode: Episode 174: Six Imperatives for a Successful People Strategy with Howard Cleveland and Meg Crosby
