178 | (Day 3) The Strategic HR Sprint – Finding Your Strategic Focus

Hello, and welcome to day three of the Five Day Strategic HR Sprint,

where you're building your confidence and your skills about being strategic in your

HR role in just 10 to 15 minutes each day.

Whether you're doing the sprint live as each episode is published, or you've

only just found out about it and you're joining partway through, welcome.

It's great to have you here, and I hope you're going to really enjoy it.

No matter when you find this video or this audio, you can still sign up for

free to access all the materials that go with each day's activities by going

to brightskyhr.co.uk/sprint, or by using the link that I'll put in the show notes

and the YouTube description for you.

And if we haven't met before, hello, I'm Fay Wallis, a career and executive

coach with a background in HR, and I specialize in creating resources and

services to help HR professionals have successful and fulfilling careers.

If we have met before, hello again.

It's wonderful to have you doing this sprint with me, and I really

hope you're finding it helpful.

On day one, we talked about what it really means to be strategic.

We explored the idea that strategy is about shaping the future.

Yesterday, for day two, we started looking at how to take an outside-in

approach to learn more about the sector and the trends impacting

the organization that you work for.

And today, we're going to go one step further.

One of my favorite books about strategy is Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference

and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt.

I like it for lots of reasons, but one of the biggest is that Richard Rumelt spent

many years helping organizations develop their strategies, and through his work

and his research and throughout the book, he shares the patterns that he's noticed,

the mistakes organizations often make, and what good strategy looks like in practice.

One extract from the book is something that I come back to again and again.

So in the book he says, "A good strategy honestly acknowledges the

challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And

the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates

efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect."

This was a real light bulb moment for me when I first read it.

The book helped me realize that good strategy doesn't start

with a long list of actions.

There are always 100 different things we could be working on, but being strategic

partly means deciding what not to focus on, so your time and energy are spent

tackling the challenge or the challenges that will make the biggest difference.

So for this day of the sprint, I'm going to encourage you to

identify one challenge in your organization that's worth focusing on.

Now, the challenge that you choose may well depend on the role that you're in.

If you're in a more senior level role, you might find that

it's easier for you to choose a challenge that's organization-wide.

If you're earlier in your HR career, it might be something much closer to your

own role that you have influence over.

Neither approach is better than the other.

This is all about being strategic.

It will be strategic no matter which one you do.

The important thing is choosing a challenge where you can

make a positive difference.

And to help you do that, I've put together a worksheet for today's activity.

You should have received it in your daily email in your inbox this morning.

If you don't have it, don't worry.

You can still sign up to receive the whole sprint for free at

brightskyhr.co.uk/sprint, and I'll send you all five days of the

sprint, including the worksheets.

If you've got the worksheet in front of you, you'll see that it gives you

a few different ways to identify a challenge that's worth focusing on.

If your organization has a clear strategy, that is a great place to start.

Have a read through it, look at the priorities it sets out, and

ask yourself, "Which challenge or challenges is this trying to solve?"

Maybe it's that the organization hasn't been generating enough profits, or

that it has a particular product that isn't doing as well as it used to.

Maybe an expansion into another country didn't go as well as hoped.

Maybe there's a fear that it doesn't have a broad enough range of services, so it

wants to acquire another business that already offers that services The challenge

or challenges can be almost unlimited.

But if it doesn't work for you to read through the strategy, don't worry.

It could be that your organisation doesn't have a strategy, or perhaps the one that

it does have isn't very clear, or it feels a bit out of date, or not very strong.

In that case, the worksheet gives you plenty of other ideas.

You could think back to what you learnt yesterday about the external

environment that's impacting the organisation you work for.

Maybe you felt excited about the idea of focusing on one of those things, so

you're going to pick one of those ones.

Or if you're still stuck for a challenge that you'd like to help

solve, you could look at data.

You can look at things like employee engagement data, staff turnover, absence

data, recruitment metrics, or, or it could even be that you just reflect

on the conversations you've been having with managers and employees.

Where do the same frustrations keep coming up?

What problems seem to be getting in the way of your organisation succeeding?

Where do you find yourself thinking, "There must be a

better way of doing this"?

Once you've got a few ideas, just choose one and ask yourself, "If I

could improve just one thing over the next six months, what would

have the biggest positive impact?"

That's the challenge that you'll find probably the most helpful one to

focus on for the rest of the sprint.

And don't worry about trying to solve it just yet.

Tomorrow, we'll start exploring what's really causing the challenge before we

think about the best way to tackle it.

Unlike the other days in this sprint, I haven't actually included an AI prompt

for today, and that is for a good reason.

The reason is that today's activity is about identifying a challenge within

your own organisation, and I didn't want anyone to accidentally share

confidential, commercially sensitive, or personal information with an AI tool.

I think there's way more risk of that happening with today's activity

than with any of the other ones.

So instead, I'm hoping that you're going to find the worksheet valuable enough

on its own and that you're not going to miss not having an AI prompt for today.

But before I go, I would love to hear how you're getting on with the sprint.

If you'd like to share your progress, or any insights, or anything that you're

enjoying about it, please do leave me a comment underneath this YouTube video.

It's so exciting when I get comments on there.

Or maybe post about the sprint on LinkedIn and tag me in so I can see it there.

Or, um, you can always email me, so you can reply to any of the daily

emails that you're getting from me.

It's amazing to hear from you, and I really appreciate any

feedback that you have for me.

So that's all from me for today.

Goodbye for now, and I'm looking forward to being back again tomorrow

with day four of the sprint for you