Organization Strategy (Strategic Planning and Management)

 

Strategic Planning and Management

All successful organizations-public and private entities, for-profit and not-for-profit-generate value for their stakeholders. They are effective at understanding their stakeholders' needs, their environments, and their resources and how these elements may change over time. Their leaders use strategic planning and management to set long-range goals and align organizational resources and actions to achieve those goals.

Strategy

A strategy is essentially a plan of action for accomplishing an organization's long-range goals to create value. The strategy details separate activities (tactics or initiatives) that must be coordinated over time. The strategy must look both inward, toward the strengths and vulnerabilities of the organization, and outward, toward possible external influences, opportunities, and obstacles. Growth is not a strategy but the result of a successfully designed and implemented strategy.

Levels of Strategy

There are three levels of strategy:

• Organizational strategy focuses on the future of the organization as a single unit a general vision of the future it seeks and its long-term goals.
• Business unit strategies address questions of how and where the organization will focus to create value.
• Operational strategy reflects the way in which organizational and business unit strategies are translated into action at the functional level through functional strategies. Strategic planning and management processes are repeated at each level, and unit and functional leaders must assume the same strategic mindset that the organization's leaders have adopted.

These levels of strategy must be aligned. This means that the HR strategy will be interwoven throughout the organizational and functional strategies. It must be consistent with the organizational strategy and must support other functional strategies. All policies, programs, and processes are selected and evaluated for their strategic impact. HR resources must be spent on strategic activities that add value at all points in the employment management cycle: workforce planning, talent acquisition, engagement and retention, rewards, and development of necessary skills and future leaders. The function must organize itself and acquire necessary strategic competencies, such as the abilities to manage risk and change, to use data to make better decisions, to manage a global and diverse enterprise, and, most importantly, to lead the HR function as part of a larger organization.

Source: SHRM, Learning system

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