Strategic, Tactical and Operational Hires: making sense of it all

Strategic. Tactical. Operational.

In a workplace setting, these are considered as layers of how work gets done by level of work task maturity. By extension, these can also be considered as levels of personnel executing these tasks in an organization.

So how do you differentiate between a strategic, tactical or operational resource? Or how do you determine whether an employee’s role is largely strategic, or largely tactical?

In reality, the delineations are not clear-cut, and senior employees considered to be strategic take on a couple of operational tasks in their daily flow of work. But a helpful analogy of the differences between these is by thinking of a building, and room, and tasks done in a house.

Operational hires come into an already built house to execute an already defined set of responsibilities. These can look like daily fetching water from a tap and filling up a bucket. The features of operational tasks are that they are:

• consistent – done daily or weekly or a predefined frequency,

• use the same range and quantity of resources, and

• success has a defined criteria – like in the example above, a bucket filled with water.

Tactical hires also come into an already built house, but their tasks involve

• supervision – ensuring all the operators fill their buckets of water in time and to quality specifications,

• resource coordination – ensuring the tap is working well, the buckets are not leaking, the operators are all available to get all the buckets filled and any absences are promptly closed up.
• They also are responsible for providing reports on how work gets done.

You can think of tactical hires sometimes as room owners – each room in the house represents a business function. Tactical hires are middle-level managers and supervisors. 

Strategic hires are either brought in to build the house from scratch (create a blueprint, determine the resources required, staff and keep the house going). Or if a house exists, to set up a new room (function) for executing a newly defined set of capabilities an organization needs to attain a renewed strategic intent.