Perhaps not promises written explicitly to employees, but promises nonetheless.
A promise to members that their experience will improve. A promise to the Board that income will diversify. A promise that the organisation will become more influential, more relevant, more efficient or more responsive. Perhaps a promise that new audiences will be reached, new partnerships built or entirely new services created.
Then the strategy is approved, circulated and turned into objectives.
But there is one question that deserves far more attention.
Who have we just assumed will make all of this happen? Because tucked away inside almost every strategic commitment is an assumption about people.
And sometimes it is a very big one.
Imagine a membership organisation decides it wants to develop three new commercial partnerships over the next two years.
On paper, that's a commercial objective.
In practice, somebody has to identify those partners, build the relationships, understand what both sides want, negotiate the proposition, bring internal stakeholders with them and turn the idea into something members will actually value.
Has that work been added to someone's existing role?
Does that person have the experience to do it?
Do they have the time?
Or has the strategy effectively created a new job without anybody noticing?
The same thing happens when organisations decide they want to improve member retention, become more influential, create a stronger community or launch new services.
Strategies create work. Yet the people implications of that work aren't always considered at the same time as the financial or operational ones.
When organisations talk about workforce planning, the conversation can quickly become one of numbers.
Do we need another person?
Can we afford another salary?
Could the existing team absorb it?
But headcount doesn't tell you whether an organisation has the capacity to deliver its strategy.
You can have the correct number of people and still have the wrong combination of experience, responsibilities or available time.
Equally, an organisation may not need another permanent employee at all. It might need somebody for six months, expertise for two days a week, a project specialist or simply a different distribution of responsibilities across the existing team.
So perhaps the more useful question isn't “Do we have enough people?”It is:“Do we have the right capacity in the right places for what we've said we're going to do?”
That's a very different conversation!
This is where things become interesting. Take the strategic plan and ignore the organisational chart for a moment.
Look at every major commitment and ask who will actually deliver it.
Not which department, but which person?
If the answer repeatedly comes back to the same two or three names, you've learned something important.
If the answer is “the membership team” but nobody can identify who within that team has responsibility or capacity, you've learned something else.
And if the answer is “we'll work that out later”, the organisation may already have uncovered a delivery risk before the strategy has even begun.
This isn't about creating a new job for every strategic objective. Quite the opposite.
It's about making the invisible workload visible.
Organisational charts are strangely powerful things. Once boxes and reporting lines exist, we tend to organise work around them.
But what if we reversed that? Instead of asking how the new strategy fits into the existing structure, ask:
If we were designing this organisation today specifically to deliver this strategy, would we structure it in exactly the same way?
Would the same responsibilities sit together?
Would every existing role still exist in its current form?
Would there be a role that doesn't exist today?
Would you still need five full-time positions, or might you need three permanent people alongside specialist interim or project support?
There doesn't need to be a dramatic restructure at the end of that exercise. The value is in asking the question.
Because organisations evolve incrementally, and structures can easily become a record of how work used to be done, rather than a deliberate design for what needs to happen next.
This is often the moment when the hidden people strategy finally reveals itself. A resignation lands and the immediate response is understandable: We need to replace them.
The old job description is opened, a few lines are updated and recruitment begins.
But that vacancy might actually be one of the best strategic opportunities the organisation gets.
Before replacing the person, go back to the strategy.
What does the organisation now need from that position?
Does it still need the same role?
Could the budget be used differently?
Could responsibilities move?
Has a priority emerged since the person was originally appointed?
Would somebody with a different background bring something the organisation is currently missing?
A resignation creates disruption, but it also creates permission to re-design!
Replacing a person and replacing a role are not necessarily the same thing.
Boards rightly interrogate strategy.
Is it affordable? Is it achievable? What are the risks? How will success be measured?
There is another question worth adding:
Do we genuinely have the people and capacity to deliver this?
Not as an HR appendix after the strategy has been agreed, but as part of testing whether the strategy itself is realistic.
Because a strategy can be financially sound, commercially sensible and enthusiastically supported by members, yet still struggle if delivering it depends on people having time, expertise or capabilities they simply don't have.
That isn't a people problem. It's a strategy problem.
There is a very simple exercise membership organisations could try.
Put your strategic priorities on one side of the table and your current organisational chart on the other.
Then connect them.
Who delivers what?
Where does responsibility overlap?
Where are you heavily dependent on one individual?
Where is there no obvious owner?
Where are people being asked to deliver something materially different from the job they were originally employed to do?
And where might the next vacancy give you an opportunity to build capability rather than simply replace headcount?
You may discover that your people strategy has been sitting in front of you all along.
Because the moment an organisation decides where it wants to go, it has also started making decisions about who it needs to get there.
Whether it realises it or not.
Your membership strategy already has a people strategy hidden inside it. Perhaps it's time to pull it out and take a proper look.