Fine-Tuning Your Organization for High Performance

Fine-Tuning Your Organization for High Performance

Harvard Business Review Articles on Burning HR Issues

Issue 5: Labor and Efficiency

1. Developing an effective workforce system is a crucial factor for success

Many companies have devoted a lot of energy to identify, develop, and retain high-performance employees, so-called A-players. There is nothing entirely wrong with this approach, be-cause having the best people in your organization surely could establish an important competitive ad-vantage. But – and this is the striking point – it only could. It would be a mistake to think that just having the best people within your organization is enough to establish sustainable success. This judg-ment is exploited and put forward in two great Harvard Business Review articles, which discuss close-ly related issues of design criteria for effective workforce systems, namely “A players or A posi-tions?” (Huselid et al. 2005) and “Designing High-Performance Jobs” (Simons 2005).

There are not only a few companies failing in execution, besides having great strategies and great people on board. And there are several reasons for such failures. One is obvious: If high-performing people are not in the right positions, they cannot and will not be effective for the compa-ny, because they are engaged in work that´s not essential to company strategy. This is why you not only have to have high-performance employees, but you must have them in the strategically important positions. But what exactly are “strategically positions” (or A-positions)? And how can you manage these positions, after you know what they are? These questions are discussed in Huselid et al. (2005). The second reason for failing in execution in spite of having and retaining A-players in the company is that you will face all too often coordination problems, fragmented decision making or too less con-

trol for executing and managing your value adding activities. These problems are often a...