Talent experts warn that the absence of the ‘people factor’ in companies’ strategies affects their EBITDA, market positioning and value proposition.
- As an alternative, they propose business models that are more realistic and closer to the situation of their teams.
- Companies invest in product design, processes and technology to offer differential value, but the lack of suitable professionals in their workforce prevents them from obtaining the expected return.
- Getting the people factor right in the strategy allows CEOs to hire the right team and deliver the promised value to customers.
Madrid, 30 April 2025. A company’s strategy can look perfect without being perfect. Despite efforts to understand what makes their model attractive, to know what each type of customer values, and to be able to create it, companies generally leave the people factor out of the strategy. In other words, they forget to review all the aspects that lead to not having the right team.
Without the right team, execution fails
This is one of the revelations that Alfonso Roig presented at Strategy Reinvented, the international meeting organised in April by Strategy.inc, which brought together 47 strategists from 15 countries in Amsterdam to rethink the strategies of organisations in today’s market.
The contribution of Roig, Business Director of Grupo Binternational, challenged participants to incorporate the people factor into business models to act on all aspects that contribute to not having the right equipment. He likened the consequences of not having the right team to those of a power outage: loss of turnover, loss of profits and the delivery of less real value than what we want to offer.
When there is a gap between what we promise customers and what they receive
‘In our experience, we have observed a general lack in companies. Imagine you are playing chess, would you avoid moving some pieces or passing somewhere on the board? No, because you would be missing opportunities to win the game. When we analyse our company’s business model, we assume that we will have the right team and we wrongly establish their real capacity,’ Alfonso points out.
In the strategy-structure-people triangle, this trainer of managers and CEOs advises playing the full court, without limiting yourself, to prevent your competition from taking advantage of it. ‘There is a huge difference between the team you need and the real team you have: if you have the people you can afford but not the people you need, there is a gap that affects their motivation, their understanding of what they have to contribute, and their ability to meet deadlines. And this affects on-time delivery and the expected quality,’ said Alfonso Roig.
Strategies that are in tune with your employees’ reality
Beyond traditional headcount projections, one of the most serious mistakes in the design of strategies consists of leaving aside the reality that our employees live: how we react in times of uncertainty, what we believe in as a company, the clarity with which we convey to our teams what we expect of them or the culture that aligns us to be the organisation we want.
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report shows that 57% of European workers think 2025 is a good time to look for a new job, and 30% are already looking for a new job. As leaders, we must ask ourselves: with high turnover rates, do we have the capacity to deliver the scenario our strategy outlines?
The absence of the right team makes us unstable suppliers, a fact that is increasingly analysed by clients and public administrations in approval processes and that undermines the customer experience, the company’s reputation and its positioning in the market.
As part of the Grupo Binternational’s 2025 leadership outreach plan, its talent specialists invite strategists, executives and managers to focus on having the right people who, beyond executing tasks, break the mould and provide innovative ideas and solutions to problems.
