As a business leader, you know that your employees are a significant expense, but are you truly recognizing the full return on your investment in these individuals? I believe people want to contribute to something greater than themselves and will give more to their job roles if they trust that their senior leaders are investing in and partnering with them. Most people in today’s workforce have developed mistrust in a previous company. So, just like any human does when mistrust sets in, people pull back a little, become somewhat wary of motives, and guard their vulnerable selves (which is often where their greatest strengths and potential reside).

Thus, most employees, even those who work extremely hard, are spending a lot of their energy keeping up their guard and holding back their greatest contribution to your strategic goals – their vulnerable ideas, talents, potential solutions.

Thus, we must prioritize the people strategy as high as our business strategy. The people strategy can be the yin to the business strategy yang, as long as you know what to look for.

How to assess your current people strategy to optimize its impact:

1. Look at the business strategy and then compare the people strategy. Are they simply aligned or does the people strategy actually support and drive all or most of your business strategies? If you look at a particular business strategy and ask yourself “what could my employees do to really accelerate this goal? Do our employees have the right skills and support to excel at this?” If you realize that the answers to these questions are not critical components of the people strategy, you have misalignment.

2. Consider your business’s vision. Do you articulate what your employees will feel, see, or experience in your vision statement? If your vision is targeted to your customers or business growth, do you have any supporting statements to describe your employees’ impact or the impact on them when this vision is realized? If no, you and the executive team have an opportunity to create a deeper connection to these strategies. Your people strategy will become more robust and will accelerate your business strategy when you see them and treat them as inextricably linked.

3. Does your people strategy have more than 3-5 macro goals? If so, your people strategy is trying to do too much in the next year and your business will not experience the acceleration desired. If you’ve done the work to align the business and people strategies, your next step is prioritization – most likely for both. Most macro people strategies will take time to implement (build future-ready teams, create robust pipelines for critical roles, build a competitive total rewards package, increase retention), so prioritizing the focus on 3-5 key strategies that will provide the most acceleration to your business is paramount to you excelling at this year’s goals.

While there are many more steps in a full assessment of a people strategy, these are three of the most critical questions for you to consider to determine if you need to spend more time aligning your strategies. And, as we all know, strategies are only as good as our actual focus and implementation of them, so also consider how proud you are of the momentum you are seeing on operationalizing the plan, not just the plan itself.