ASRC Federal Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Gordon Foster recently served as keynote speaker to WashingtonExec’s Strategic Human Capital Council, highlighting how to build both functional and strategic leaders.
All businesses require tactical stakeholders to operate efficiently, including finance, accounting and human capital management. However, in periods of intense growth or contraction, business strategy and operational leaders oftentimes lack strong partnerships. To plan for future growth and stability, functional leaders must be given the opportunity to provide input to strategy.
For an organization to remain forward looking, it must encourage input and have constant communication with its functional leads, including human resources, project managers and financial stakeholders. Thus, both chief financal officers and HR leads must insert themselves within an organization’s strategic planning team. Doing so allows all leaders to plan for future growth and stability, while also providing better insights to employees and clients.
“In today’s competitive business environment, strategic leaders can no longer make decisions without the input of operational stakeholders,” Gordon said. “Functional leaders, including CFOs, VPs of HR and GMs, must purposely engage with the strategy of the overall success of the organization in order to not only add value to the organization, but also to better address the multilayered challenges presented in today’s federal contracting industry.”
WashingtonExec’s Strategic Human Capital Council is led by Steve Woolwine, SVP of HR at AECOM, and Jeff Brody, chief human resource officer of ManTech International. Each participating executive nominates one critical talent individual to the forum. This one-of-a-kind group allows HR leads to develop the next generation of HR professionals while building their respective professional networks.