Explore the 6 Muscles of Strategic HR
1
THINK
Analyzing data, understanding systems, making predictions, diagnosis & insights
2
SENSE
Capturing signals that matter, inside and outside, feedback, indicators, trends,
3
CREATE
Co-creating solutions solving problems, creativity, design thinking, anticipating, decision making.
4
DELIVER
Execution, orchestration, resilient and agile, change management navigate resistance & barriers, sustainable results
5
FEEL
EQ – self-awareness, beliefs, and values, accountability, confidence, intuition & curiosity
6
ENGAGE
EQ – other awareness, relationships, showing up, communicating, influencing, challenge, navigating politics
THINK muscle
- Putting order to the inputs from your sensing
- Analyzing the root causes of a phenomenon
- Forming a diagnosis that leads to insights and the best possible remedies and solutions
- Stepping back to see the whole picture and how the dots are connecting
- Go beyond a siloed functional interpretation
- Anticipate cause and effects when you apply certain levers
- Converting data into a diagnosis and insight
- Ask the right questions to form the possible hypothesis
- Seek the right data inputs
- Call out misrepresentation and misinterpretation of data
- Spot the weaknesses in an argument
SENSE muscle
- Catching signals, seeing, smelling, listening
- Become intimate with the most important business problems and opportunities
- Focus your curiosity, seek data, asking questions, observing, digging in, benchmarking, understanding trends, reacting to threats, anticipate risks
- Sense the value of your people practices
- Expand your data sources beyond your function
- Seek exposure to the truth out-of-the-box sources of inspiration and learning
- New impulses for your challenges, to explore different perspectives and approaches
- Balance your radar between inside versus outside.
FEEL muscle
- Strong self-awareness and ability to regulate emotions
- Conscious about your values, style & role
- Owning up to the strategy and being accountable for success and failure
- Confidence comes with exposure – having the courage to show presence
- Intuition will take you the last mile to important decision making… But don’t let intuition replace the hard & necessary work of seeking insights
- Curiosity – being an active sensor and listener for inputs, inspirations, risks, trends…
ENGAGE muscle
- Empathy for the world around you
- Show up and claim your seat at the table of strategic discussions
- Build trust that you can contribute, add value with insights, have assets, be accountable, lead and be part of the solution
- Navigating the ecosystem of stakeholders and develop relationships
- Comfortable playing in a team of diverse contributors
- The ‘challenge moment’ is where the rubber hits the road, where your strategic thinking comes out in the open
- Your message is coming across, you are precise, concise and synthesize appropriately
- Coaching your team on their strategic capabilities
CREATE muscle
- Co-design forward-looking strategy and solutions aligned with your diagnosis & insights
- Business strategy and HR strategy become ONE
- Navigate the multiple factors have surfaced in your diagnosis: Competition, complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and constant change
- Meaningful and impactful strategy and solutions require creativity and out of box thinking
- Unexplored paths may have the potential to solve the most complex problems
- Quirkiness, diversity of thought, breaking with paradigms and inspiration from the most unlikely sources may open your horizon
- Anticipate, make assumptions and create scenarios
- Facilitate informed decision making and pro-active approach to managing risks
DELIVER muscle
- Confront a lack of decision making and seek constructive conflicts
- Develop high-quality action plans with effective follow-up mechanisms tying back to the analytics that facilitated the original decision making
- Inspire & energize all actors to buy into the direction of your strategy
- Mobilize and enable to ensure high-quality execution and sustainable change.
- Facilitate transparency, openness and feedback loops to continuously improve your plans
- Seek transparency and be proactive about risks
- Confront and evaluate the barriers and rebukes: New data point that has surfaced and you need to be agile and consider new directions. Or your approach needs strengthening in, for example, seeking buy-in, improving enablement
- Prompt, constructively aggressive and resourceful about managing problems