"We're building a high-performance culture" is not a people strategy.

"We're building a high-performance culture" is not a people strategy.

It's an aspiration. And there's a real difference.
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The gap tends to show up when you ask HR leaders to describe their actual strategy... what they genuinely believe about how people should experience work at their specific organisation.
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Not the processes they run, not the system they use or the people-initiatives in play. But the underlying mechanism.
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Most find it harder to answer than they expect.
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That's not a criticism. It's a symptom of how HR has been sold to for the last two decades. Generic performance cycles, boiler plate 1:1 templates, annual engagement surveys that look identical across industries. It's why performance management is so often referred to as a tick-the-box exercise.
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A real people strategy has a defensible mechanism underneath it... eg:
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"We believe the manager-employee conversation is where performance actually happens. So instead of tracking whether managers completed their reviews, we measure whether employees found the conversations useful."

or

"We believe growth happens through experience, not coursework. So our development plans are built around exposure to new work, not training catalogues."

You can explain not just what you're doing, but why your specific version of it works, and why doing it differently would produce a worse result.
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Most HR leaders know this. The problem is the question they reach for next:
'What system should we implement?' rather than
'What do we actually believe about how people should experience work here?'
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The system is downstream of the strategy. Always.
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A simple diagnostic:

Can you tell the story of your people strategy in a way that makes someone say 'Yes! That sounds exactly right'?Not 'That sounds reasonable' or 'It's good enough for now'.

If you can't get there yet, it's worth treating that as the real problem to solve before you buy, build, or launch anything.

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