Twelve employee practices anchored by your strategic style to maximize your profits by optimizing your workforce strategy

Highly profitable businesses have great teams who enjoy the people they work with, trust the people they work for, and believe in the product they are selling.

In The Talent Solution, Edward L. Gubman provides some excellent thinking on aligning strategy and people to achieve extraordinary results.  Gubman illustrates the process by which businesses with strong cultures choose people who are the right “fit.”

When you select employees who “fit” with your values, you’ll go a long way to ensuring value alignment and influential company culture.  New employees will be brought into your organization predisposed to hear what you have to say and prepared to buy into what you are trying to accomplish.

Suspicion and cynicism will be reduced because you will be hiring someone closer to the business culture, your leadership style shaped.  Below is a side-by-side comparison for identifying the best strategic style for your business adapted from The Talent Solution.

Strategic Style
	Operations Operational Excellence	Products Product Leadership	Customers Customer Intimacy
Founding Concept	To deliver low-cost, reliable, and easy-to-use products and services	To deliver leading-edge products and services	To provide highly-customized solutions and services
Examples	Cargill, Southwest Airlines, Whirlpool Lincoln Electric, Target Stores	W.L. Gore, Nike, 3M, Motorola, Bloomingdales	IBM, Nordstrom, Johnson Controls, USAA
Most Critical Business Need	To standardize operations as the key to efficiency	To support and fully engage in the creative process	To create customized solutions that produce distinctive results for customers
Source of Alignment	Goals and results	Technical activities and resources	Values
Core Capability	Consistent application	Continuous innovation	Committed relationship building
Management Style	Manage top-down	Manage inside-out	Manage outside-in or bottom-up
Leadership Type	Very charismatic; prefer to be the person who makes things happen	Quiet thinker; takes time to pursue the big picture and encourages others to do so	Acts on strong internal values; concerned with wellbeing/success of employees; wants them to enjoy their jobs, careers, and personal lives
Natural Inclinations/ Interests of Employees	Focus on making things happen	Focus on ideas and innovation	Focus on people and relationships
Lead Talent Management Practice	Performance-based compensation	Fluid and dynamic organization	Selection for best fit
Employee	Process control	Life-long learning	Relationship building
Competencies	Continuous improvement, teamwork, strong financial/operational understanding, attention to detail, driven to achieve results	Information-sharing, group problem-solving, breakthrough thinking, curiosity, artistic, creative and visionary	Active listening, rapid problem-solving, collaboration, independent initiative, quality-focused, understands internal motivations
Expectations of Employees	Employees deliver standardized products and services with great cost/value relationships for customers	Employees are enabled to create unique, leading-edge products	Employees provide customized solutions to meet unique customer needs or expert service, well beyond competitors’ offerings
Work Environment	Stable, predictable, measurable, hierarchical, cost-conscious, team-based, formal, compliant, “If it ain’t broke… break it bit-by-bit”	Exciting, experimental, learning-focused, technical, informal, fast-paced, resource-rich, comfortable, constantly changing, speed-to-market, “If we build it, they will come” vision	Values-driven, dynamic, informal, comfortable with change, collegial, conversational, minimal policies, service-oriented, bottoms-up, qualitative, employee as customer, “Whatever it takes” philosophy
Workforce Strategy	To utilize efficiency, order, and process as the foundations for building teams that deliver high-value, low-cost products, while playing by the rules	To provide a resource-rich and comfortable environment that allows its employees to be creative and visionary	Reliance on a core foundation of responsiveness, selection, socialization, and autonomy to enable front-line employees to serve customers with individualized expertise

You maximize your profits when you hire people who tightly fit your strategic style and teach them to perform their duties competently.  It’s unrealistic to expect flawless execution from your employees, particularly if they cannot see the “value creation” in what they do.

The mark of a great business owner is not constant, flawless execution; it’s how well you, and those who work for you, respond to the problems that arise.  An employee’s ability to respond to customer issues is proportionate to how well they understand your unique value proposition and their role in the process.

The highest praise you can give an employee is to call them a “problem solver.”  You position your employees as the type of problem solvers your customers need by hiring to fit your strategic style.  The better you empower those who work for you to solve problems without you, the fewer problems you will have to deal with on your plate.

What do your results say about your strategic style?

If you aren’t making the money you should, click here to see what your financial results tell about your strategic style.