How to Align Your Talent's Skills for Organisational Success

No organisation can function successfully without talented and skilled individuals making up the workforce. The success of a business is intrinsically linked with your ability to attract and retain the best people for each role.

To ensure your organisation is set up for success, you must have the right mix of skills and experience, and ensure your employees' skills are aligned with your business goals and strategies for growth.

Aligning your talent to your business

Aligning your talent to your business refers to your organisation's ability to attract, train, and retain employees aligned with the company's strategy and culture. Your employees should share common goals and values so they can successfully work together to achieve those goals.

Hiring great talent sounds good on paper, but ensuring the talent is aligned with your organisational goals and pathway to success is just as important.

Why should you look to align your talent's skills with wider organisational goals?

Aligning your talent's skills with company goals will help your organisation achieve its objectives more effectively. You're essentially working to create a culture where employees feel valued, engaged and involved. It’ll also help them further understand their place within the organisation and their vital role in contributing to its success.

Aligning your employee's skills and talents also allows you to improve your understanding of working relationships within your organisation, making it easier to forecast growth and anticipate future problems or issues. A strategic alignment in hiring new talent for your organisation also simplifies the hiring process and allows you to find the right people for any vacancies. Hiring managers have a clear picture of the skills gaps that need filling and the skills expected of any candidate.

Your people drive organisational success, so hiring top talent is only one stage of the process - the talent you select has to be ready and willing to be immersed in your company culture and become an integral part of its growth.

How to align goals across your organisation

Aligning goals across your organisation is dependent on many factors. It relies upon strong communication, buy-ins at every level and great leadership. Let's look more closely at practical steps for aligning your organisation's goals:

1. Make sure you set clear goals

Goals alignment begins with your overarching organisational roadmap to success. Your leadership team should work together and craft your company's vision and strategy. They should identify specific goals you want to achieve as an organisation and need to reach to succeed. Once you have goals set in stone, you can drill down into the objectives and consider the skillsets required to succeed and achieve each individual objective. Clear objectives are vital so all your people, including candidates applying for future roles, can visualise and understand the shared purposes of your organisation.

2. Ensure leadership buy-in

Senior management has to be on board with your alignment activities. Therefore, it’s vital to communicate your vision, goals and benchmarks for progress and success with the senior management team. Incorporate and learn from any feedback to be sure their input is recognised within the strategy. You need senior management to buy into your goals and strategy to ensure effective communication company-wide and drive alignment through the organisation.

3. Communicate

Goals and accountability are only clear and understood if they’re well communicated. Employees are 2.8 times more likely to be highly engaged in workplaces with strong communication of organisational goals. Research by Harvard Business Review suggests only 40% of employees know what their company's goals are. If you want to lead your organisation to success, your goals must be widely known and understood amongst your employees. How can you align your employee's skills if they don’t clearly understand what they're working towards?

Clear, strategic, and consistent communication is the answer. You should drive goals in all meetings, one-on-one meetings, and performance reviews. You should gear training opportunities towards the skills needed to achieve company goals.

4. Understand what talent you need

To align your talent's skills with your organisation, you need to have a firm understanding of the skills your employees need. Talent management is about more than simply seeing the right qualification on paper - it has behavioural and values-based elements, ensuring any potential employee has the right experience, skills, and behavioural traits to fit well within your company's culture. A full understanding of your expectations of future talent is vital. Some characteristics can’t be taught, while other skills and experiences can be developed and trained on the job.

5. Support employee growth

Just as your people can’t reach your company's goals if they don’t understand them, they can’t succeed without the tools and support necessary. Team and organisation support ensures that even the most talented employees can grow and achieve their potential. At every stage, from onboarding to providing the right tools and resources to complete their role successfully, you must give your people the toolkit for success before expecting it from them.

Another core element of supporting your people’s growth is providing them with the learning and development opportunities necessary to succeed. An agile personal development programme allows your employees to develop the relevant skillsets for their role and position themselves for career growth and promotion when the time is right.

Aligning talent and strategy is key to your business success

Attracting top talent to your organisation should always be celebrated, but ensuring you make the most of this talent is also important. If your organisation wants to be primed for success, then the talent you bring in must be aligned with your company's goals in a strategic and meaningful way.

Taking the time to identify the right skillsets for every role and how they feedback into your overall organisational success is vital for ensuring the right people are brought into your organisation. Aligning your talent's skills and organisational growth is a time-consuming planning exercise. Still, it’s more than worth it when you benefit from the significant rewards, improved productivity, efficiency, and happy, engaged employees who feel like they belong.