Texas Insurance Marketplace

Texas Insurance Marketplace

Some HR divisions have inserted phrases such as strategic partner in their mission statements, hoping that the words alone would make it Texas Insurance Marketplace happen. Unfortunately, hopes without understanding create more cynicism than change. To become a strategic partner requires overcoming five challenges:

1. Avoid strategic plans on top shelf (spots).
2. Create a balance scorecard.
3. Align HR plans to business plans.
4. Watch out for quick fixes.
5. Create a capability focus within the firm.

Challenge 1: Avoid Strategic Plans on Top Shelf (SPOTS)

More Texas Insurance Marketplace strategies are written then acted upon. More visions are created than realized. More missions are espoused than executed. More goals are started than accomplished. Without creating a disciplined, rigorous, and thorough mechanism for translating aspirations into actions, strategies remain Strategic Plans on Top Shelf (spots). Bookshelf funerals for strategies occur too often: Ever so much thought goes into the written document, which then ends up in a binder on a shelf. Strategy fails to impact Texas Insurance Marketplace practices.

All too often, the strategic planning scenario unfolds like this. The top management team goes to a “strategic offsite” and spends a week working on strategy. Team member review customer expectations, business trends, technological innovations, and core competencies; they debate alternative investments of resources; they draft statements about aspirations, visions, and missions. During this week and the weeks following, executives work long hours and participate in intensive and thoughtful debates about how to compete for the Texas Insurance Marketplace future. At the end of these forums, provocative and often profound statements are made about the future. Unfortunately, these statements—variously called missions, visions, aspirations, goals, or objectives—fail to acknowledge and, therefore, to involve all the organizational processes required for their Texas Insurance Marketplace accomplishment.

Becoming a strategic partner means turning strategic arguments in to a set of organizational actions. Overcoming the challenge of spots requires that HR professionals force organizational issues into the strategic discussion before strategies are decided. At Engcon, the organizational diagnosis championed by the head of human resources helped the company turn its global strategy into effective HR practices.