the business strategyBusiness strategy is the plan an organization has in place to achieve its long-term objectives; it defines where and how an organization can best compete in the marketplace. P&G CEO A.G. Lafley suggests the two key business strategy questions are: “Where should we play? And how can we win?”
Business strategy is beyond the scope of this book, but whatever your organization’s strategy is, be very clear about the resources and capabilities the business requires to build and sustain competitive advantage. These resources and capabilities include the kind of talent profile(s) you focus on, the employment benefits you use to attract them, and what you expect from employees in return if they choose to join you.
Three goals of every employer branding initiative are to attract, engage, and retain the best talent. To accomplish these goals, you first need to figure out what “best talent” means in the context of your organization. The best talent for your organization isn’t necessarily the brightest, most creative, or most highly skilled candidate. More likely, your ideal candidates possesses a unique blend of knowledge, skills, confidence, drive, imagination, integrity, and a host of other qualities that make them perfectly suited for your organization, its mission, and the positions to be filled. Employees with “the right stuff” enhance your organization’s corporate culture and contribute to its diversity. They make your organization better in all the ways that make it distinctive, and they help to reinforce its competitive advantage.
Most organizations require a variety of different skills and competencies to meet their resourcing requirements. However, before you start segmenting your workforce into different target talent groups, identify the overall qualities you would like all your employees to share in terms of the desired culture and values. These qualities may already be clearly articulated in a statement of your company’s values. If they’re not, then consult with your leadership team to determine these baseline characteristics. Typically desired qualities fall into the following three categories:
❯❯ Collective purpose: The ability and commitment to work with others to achieve a common goal. This category includes customer focus, teamwork, respect, honesty, integrity, and communication skills.
❯❯ Mental agility: The ability to adjust one’s thinking to best meet the challenges of work. This category covers innovation, imagination, learning ability, resourcefulness, and problem solving.
❯❯ Drive: The dedication to completing a task or achieving a goal. This category includes personal initiative, passion, confidence, decisiveness, performance focus, and persistence.
Although all these qualities are certainly desirable, the important distinction between a generic target profile (good people) and the specific profile targeted by your employer brand (the right people) is differentiation. Among the generally positive qualities, which particular qualities do you emphasize? On which dimensions do you want people to overindex (outperform)? To answer this question effectively you must be clear about the culture your business most needs to achieve its strategic objectives and win in the marketplace. Here are several examples:
❯❯ Google looks for the following qualities in its ideal employee: A desire to use technology to make the world a better place, an entrepreneurial spirit for developing and selling new ideas, and “Googliness” (a mashup of passion and drive that Google describes as hard to define but easy to spot).
❯❯ In addition to the requisite professional and technical knowledge to join the world’s most prestigious consulting firm, McKinsey also looks for the following personal characteristics: an unusual blend of passion, dedication, and energy. It looks for people who are creative and insightful problem solvers, who enjoy working in teams, who have an entrepreneurial spirit, and who are interesting people outside the office.
❯❯ Helmut Schuster, the Executive Vice President of HR at BP, describes the combination of qualities BP looks for in prospective employees as
● Thinking ability, and the right level of experience in its field
● Social competence, emotional intelligence (EQ), and the ability to communicate with other people
● Drive, combined with commitment to the long-term interests of the company
❯❯ A.G. Lafley prioritized innovation as P&G’s primary competitive weapon and engine for growth. According to Lafley, “We had to redefine our social system to get everybody in the innovation game.” Although P&G continued to recruit for values, brains, accomplishment, and leadership, it shifted its determining factors for assessing cultural fit to curiosity and an entrepreneurial spirit.
CULTURE AT THE LEGO GROUP
Effective leaders typically have a good sense of the organization’s culture. Asking them to describe it in their own words can be a powerful way of clarifying to potential candidates what makes the organization tick. The following example is from the CEO at the LEGO Group:
What a strong culture is about is people know what to do without reading a little book. You have an intuitive sense of how to do things. But that doesn’t mean there is only one solution to the same problem. That would be so untrue of the basic idea of LEGO Organization where we recognize there are many solutions to the same problem and you have to put your imagination and creativity to work to make the best solution.
One day I went off to work and my oldest son said, “Who are you going to spend time with today?” and I said, “I’m going to spend time with Kjeld, who is the owner of the LEGO Group,” and my son’s immediate reaction was, “So what are you going to build?”
The company is still very much about playing and building. We’re constantly reminded of that wonderful quote: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”
As you work toward developing your EVP, keep track of the employee perspective on what the corporate culture really is. This perception can shed light on changes your organization needs to make to bring the culture more in line with what leadership decides is best for the organization.
Culture fit doesn’t imply uniformity. In addition to identifying the qualities you’d like all employees to share, also consider how you can ensure your employees represent a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. All other qualities being equal, research suggests that a diverse workforce is superior to one lacking in diversity for several reasons:
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