Chapter 33Your People

Your people are the only ones who can deliver your strategy. Your people are the only ones who can bring about genuine, sustainable change.

Figure depicting the pieces of chess.

To deliver the change you require, your people need to be genuinely engaged and aligned to deliver. We have discussed ways and means of doing this throughout the book – clear two-way communications, genuine stakeholder engagement, strategy development, strategy execution …

In this chapter, I want to talk about your people; your talent. And I want to share two tools that I have found to be particularly useful. One is my take on an old HR staple for talent assessment and development, the ‘Nine-Box Grid’. The other is a deceptively invaluable little tool for managing people, invented by a very good friend of mine, John McKee, CEO of an outstanding Northern Ireland consultancy, Linkubator (www.linkubator.com). It is called ‘The Performance Choice Grid’ and it maps attitude vs knowledge/competence. I believe it is one of the best people management tools I have come across.

The Nine-Box Grid

The Nine-Box Grid is a common tool used by HR departments and executive teams worldwide as a guide for talent assessment, talent development and succession planning. When used correctly, it can be a very useful guide to prompt and assist leadership teams to conduct valuable discussions about their most valuable asset.

But it requires ...

Get The Change Catalyst now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.