Have you ever thought of an employee as a raw material to making your business successful? If employees are one of the key ingredients to success, then having the highest quality of employee at all levels is critical to your business's success. This makes sense, right? So what do you do if your company requires many skilled laborers, but the community where you operate doesn't have enough qualified candidates? For companies in Southwest Alabama, you get involved in workforce development, and that is where SAWDC fits in.

SAWDC is the Southwest Alabama Workforce Development Council. It is a business association that helps to ensure there is a qualified candidate pool for the growing businesses in the area. Businesses can be clustered around maritime, healthcare, and manufacturing (steel, chemicals, and pulp and paper) among other areas. Laura Davis Chandler is the Executive Director of SAWDC and upon her arrival, she found that all of the board members (representing various businesses) were very committed to the idea, but had differing priorities and different language for talking about the same issues.

Laura, with her board's engagement, created a Balanced Scorecard to help focus the organization. There are three themes in the scorecard: inspire the supply of workers, influence the suppliers of workers (like community colleges), and forecast the demand from industry. With this focused strategy map, she was able to direct conversations and decisions, which allow her to leverage the capabilities of the board and partners of SAWDC.

You can learn more about her efforts in this podcast.

I encourage you to come to our conference in March and hear the whole story live. We have commitments from many great speakers, and we look forward to seeing you in Washington in March at our Mission-Driven Management Summit 2012.