Can Your Workforce Deliver Your Strategic Plan?

Your goals are only as achievable as the workforce you build to deliver them.

A guest post by Danielle Pickens, CEO, US Human Capital Academy

Every organization I work with can describe its programs in detail. Far fewer can describe, with the same confidence, whether the people who have to deliver those programs are equipped to do it well.

In education, we have known for decades that the single most important in-school factor in whether a student learns is the teacher standing in front of them. But strong teachers do not just magically appear. We must invest the time and energy to find, grow, and keep them to support student learning.

Your organization is no different.

Whatever your organization does, a person does it. Your services are delivered by people. Your outcomes are produced by people. Your ambitious goals are met by great people, or they are not met.

So if you want a high-performing organization that meets its goals, you must design and implement an intentional talent strategy.

Workforce Whack-a-Mole and a better approach for your goals

Here is the trap I often see: most organizations are doing something to find and keep effective people on their teams. They just tend to address one piece of it at a time.

You have an open vacancy, so you post a job. You are struggling to find candidates, so you launch a recruitment campaign or attend a job fair. Too many new employees are leaving, so you create a mentoring program. People say they are burned out, so you add Wellness Wednesday. Your budget gets tighter, so you freeze positions or cut vacancies.

You’re playing Workforce Whack-a-mole. A problem pops up, we respond, and then another one appears somewhere else. The individual solutions seem perfectly reasonable. The problem is that they are often disconnected from one another.

A better approach is to manage the workforce as a system across five interconnected dimensions: recruit, develop, deploy, retain, and sustain. Who you recruit affects who you need to develop. How you develop people affects where and how you can deploy them. How people are deployed shapes whether they stay. And whether the work itself is sustainable affects all of it.

That changes the questions we ask. Instead of simply asking, How do we fill this vacancy? we can ask: Do we need the same role? Could the work be organized differently? Do we have someone we could develop into it? Are our strongest people deployed where they can have the greatest impact? What would make this a role someone wants to take and can actually sustain?

The goal is not to build five separate strategies, but to make decisions about how you recruit, develop, deploy, retain, and sustain as one workforce system.

As you read the five areas below, rate your organization red, yellow, or green on each one.

Red: We mostly react when there is a problem.

Yellow: We do some of this, but it depends on the person, team, or moment.

Green: We do this intentionally and consistently.

Do not worry about getting five greens. In fact, if your leadership team rates everything green, I would probably ask you to look again. The point is to identify where your workforce strategy is strong, where it is fragile, and where the way you manage talent is getting in the way of the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

1. Recruit for where you are going, not just what is open

Most recruiting starts too late. Someone resigns, a vacancy opens, and the organization immediately tries to replace the person who left.

But the first question should not be, How quickly can we fill this job? It should be, What people and capabilities will we need to deliver where we are going?

Sometimes the answer is another person in essentially the same role. Sometimes it is not. The work may have changed. Technology may be able to take on part of it. Another person on the team may be ready to grow into it. Two roles might need to become three very different ones. Or the organization may need a capability it did not need three years ago.

Recruiting should connect your strategy to the workforce you will need to execute it. That means anticipating where you are likely to have gaps, understanding the capabilities you need to build, and creating relationships with potential talent before you desperately need them.

Rate yourself: Are you anticipating the talent and capabilities you will need, or mostly recruiting once a seat is already empty? Red / Yellow / Green

Ask your leadership team: Which roles are most likely to open in the next 12 months, what capabilities will they require, and what have we already done to make sure we are not starting from zero?

2. Develop people for the work you actually need them to do

We often think of development as training: a workshop, a conference, a coaching program, a leadership retreat.

But development should start with the work.

What does someone need to be able to do exceptionally well in this organization? Where are people struggling? What capabilities will we need two years from now that we do not have enough of today? And who already on our team could grow into something bigger if we invested in them?

This becomes particularly important when someone moves into management. We routinely promote people because they were excellent at their previous job and then assume they will know how to do an entirely different one. A great program leader becomes a manager. A great fundraiser becomes a chief. Suddenly success depends less on their own individual performance and more on their ability to set priorities, give feedback, make decisions, and get results through other people.

Development is how you close the gap between the talent you have and the talent your strategy requires. It should happen because you know what people need to get better at, not because the training calendar says it is time for a workshop.

Rate yourself: Are you intentionally building the capabilities your people and organization need next, or offering development when an opportunity happens to come along? Red / Yellow / Green

Ask your leadership team: Who has taken on a bigger or different role in the last two years, what skills did that job actually require, and what did we give them beyond a title?

3. Deploy your talent where it matters most

This may be the most overlooked part of talent strategy.

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time asking whether they have enough people.

They spend far less time asking whether they are making the best use of the people they already have.

Who is doing what? Where are your strongest people spending their time? Who has expertise that is being underused? Which highly skilled people are spending hours on work that could be done differently, automated, or stopped altogether? Where does your organization most need exceptional talent, and is that actually where you have put it?

In education, this question becomes especially visible. A school system can technically have enough teachers and still have its least experienced teachers concentrated with students who have the greatest needs. A nonprofit can have its full headcount and still have its strongest program staff buried in administrative work rather than serving clients.

Headcount tells you how many people you employ. Deployment tells you whether those people are positioned to deliver the outcomes you care about.

Rate yourself: Are your strongest people, their time, and their expertise intentionally deployed against your highest priorities? Red / Yellow / Green

Ask your leadership team: If we could redeploy three people, three hours of leadership time, or three responsibilities to improve outcomes where the stakes are highest, what would we change first, and what policy or habit is preventing it?

4. Retain the people you cannot afford to keep replacing

Retention is often treated as a morale problem. Someone leaves, leaders worry about culture, and the organization responds with a survey, a wellness benefit, or an effort to make people feel more appreciated.

Those things may matter. But before creating another retention initiative, I would ask a more basic question: Why would a great person stay here?

People experience an organization through their actual work. They experience whether expectations are clear, whether their manager is good at managing, whether they have the tools and authority to do their job, whether excellent performance is recognized, whether they can grow, and whether anyone notices that their workload has quietly become impossible.

And not every retention problem is the same. Losing a strong employee because they cannot see a future in your organization is different from parting ways with someone who is not performing. Losing five people who report to the same manager is different from losing people because compensation is substantially below market. The strategy starts with understanding what is actually driving the turnover you care about.

Retention is not about keeping everyone forever. It is about creating the conditions that make your strongest people want to keep doing their best work with you.

Rate yourself: Do you understand why your strongest people stay and leave, and are you deliberately acting on what you learn? Red / Yellow / Green

Ask your leadership team: What do month one, year one, year five, year ten, and beyond look like here, and who is accountable for ensuring that each stage makes staying more likely?

5. Sustain the people and the work

This is the piece I think most organizations miss.

You can recruit great people. You can develop them. You can put them in the right roles. You can even convince them to stay. But can they keep doing the job?

I’ve become increasingly interested in this question because I’ve watched organizations invest heavily in preparing talented people for leadership roles without asking whether those roles themselves are sustainable.

As an example, over more than a decade, the US Human Capital Academy trained upwards of 160 leaders to step into chief talent and HR roles in school systems. It was strong programming. People loved it. Yet more than three-quarters of those leaders are no longer in those roles today.

For a long time, I looked at that as a development challenge, but I no longer do.

Development without work redesign merely produces a better-prepared person who leaves.

Sustainability forces us to look at the job itself. Is the scope reasonable? Does the person have the authority to make the decisions they are accountable for? Do they have the staff, data, technology, and resources they need? What happens when they take a vacation? Is there someone who could eventually step into the role, or does the whole thing depend on one heroic person holding it together?

Sometimes the answer to a talent problem is not finding a more resilient person, but designing a more sustainable job.

Rate yourself: Have you designed your critical roles so talented people can succeed in them without relying on heroics? Red / Yellow / Green

Ask your leadership team: Which roles here would we hesitate to recommend to a talented friend, what makes them hard to sustain, and what are we willing to redesign rather than simply endure?

Now look at your colors

If you did this exercise with your leadership team, what would you see?

Maybe you are green on recruiting but red on retention. You have gotten very good at finding people, but you keep having to replace them. Maybe you are green on development but red on sustainability. You invest heavily in making people better at jobs that are fundamentally too big to do well.

That is why these cannot be five separate initiatives.

A red in one area eventually shows up somewhere else. Poor deployment becomes a retention problem. Weak development becomes a recruiting problem because you always have to look outside for talent. Unsustainable roles create vacancies that send you right back to recruiting.

And suddenly you are playing whack-a-mole again.

Talent strategy is organizational strategy

None of these five things belongs to HR alone.

HR cannot decide by itself what capabilities the organization will need three years from now. It cannot decide which work matters most, which roles should be redesigned, where the strongest people should be deployed, or which priorities should come off someone's plate.

Those are leadership decisions.

And that is why a talent strategy cannot be a separate document sitting next to your organizational strategy. If your strategic plan says you are going to grow, serve a new population, launch a new program, adopt new technology, improve outcomes, or fundamentally change the way you work, there is a workforce implication attached to every one of those decisions.

Who will do it?

What will they need to know how to do?

Where will you find them?

How will you use the talent you already have differently?

What will make your strongest people stay?

And have you designed jobs they can actually sustain?

Those questions belong in the same conversation as your goals, your budget, and your program strategy.

Because every ambitious goal depends on people having the skills, support, and conditions to do great work.

That does not happen on its own.

So as you look at your organization’s most ambitious goals for the next few years, ask yourself:

Are you as intentional about building the workforce that will make those goals possible as you are about setting the goals themselves?

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Danielle Pickens is CEO of the US Human Capital Academy, a national practitioner community working with school systems and state education agencies to equip HR and Talent leaders to recruit, develop, deploy, retain, and sustain the great educators our students need every day.