Managing People for Competitive Advantage

What Does Managing People For A Competitive Advantage Mean?

Give serious thought to this question - What does it really mean - Managing People for a Competitive Advantage?   This sounds like a great concept - manage your people to give your company an advantage over your competition.   But look at this much deeper - If you were the CEO of a business What is it you could actually do - put in place in your business to in fact give your organization a competitive advantage over your competitors?

Explore this question in a deeper way than just a simple surface statement of a few things you might do - this question really must consider what is it you can do strategically and on a sustained basis to create a competitive advantage.  What is realistic - within the constraints of operating financially sound?  What approach will leadership and management buy into?  What approach will employees buy into?

As the CEO of a business what will you do to actively engage your senior leadership team to create an environment that does realize a competitive advantage for your business over time?

Sometimes, students view this assignment with a focus on product line, technology, marketing, sales, supply chain or the financial status and capability of a given business - yet where the real advantage is for most all businesses today is in how they develop, utilize their people assets, so as you prepare your response keep that in mind.

Provide rationale for why you believe your approach will create a competitive advantage - what is your basis for that rationale? How will you measure success?  How will you know that you have achieved a competitive advantage? Prepare your paper accordingly.

The application of how we can manage people for competitive advantage will be highly subjective. It will take form in different ways for different students. 

For me, the foundation is a combination of what we learned from the book The Advantage and the 2021 HR Competency Model. It begins with utilizing the Four Disciplines Model. You want to ensure that you have the right-sized leadership team (8 or fewer) with the right leaders who can share vulnerability-based trust. Once that is established, they must create the playbook for the organization, answering the six questions. Next, they must share the clarity they have found across the entire organization. This will begin from the top-down, move laterally, and then get reinforced through organizational rituals (recruiting, onboarding, recognition, compensation, etc.). Only after the organization has made it to the point where they have begun reinforcing clarity companywide must we take from the University of Michigan's 2021 HR Competency Model- specifically the core competency, simplifying complexity. 

All people leaders, after clarity is established, should work to ensure that they can enable their employees by removing those obstacles that get in the way of them performing their duties. The critical thing to note is that this described approach can be free for an organization. Of course, there could be some financial commitments if the leadership team fully commits to Lencioni's approach and participates in an offsite retreat and Myers Briggs testing. The organization should take these steps, and it can be inexpensive- hold the retreat at an executive's house and price shop the Myers Briggs testing. 

A good way to achieve buy-in is for leadership to walk the talk. This begins with executive leadership, CEO included, working towards the clarity outlined in the playbook and ensuring that their directors see them living the playbook. Executive leadership should lean into conflict with their directors if any exists. After all, "very few people in the world are incapable of supporting something because they initially had a different idea." (Lencioni) Once the Directors have bought into the organization's clarity, a similar approach should be taken with their employees so the entire organization has clarity. Reinforcement is essential not only to keep momentum but also to integrate new hires into the ecosystem. 

I believe this approach would be effective as it combines two comprehensive methods- the one used by Patrick Lencioni in his consulting business and the other that the University of Michigan has studied and developed over the last 36 years. Success is measured in the long-term, and we will understand that we achieved a competitive advantage once we see that the goals of the playbook are executed and if employee morale is high and turnover is low. After all, an organization is not tangible. An organization is the people who make it up.