2. 5 steps to align your talent strategy to the organisational strategy
Follow these steps using the tools and templates provided to develop your talent strategy:
Gather information on the organisation context and strategy, and existing HR and talent strategy, including business strategy documents; Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STP); external factors impacting the organisation; existing HR processes and plans e.g. resourcing plans, succession plans, critical roles, organisational structure; talent data e.g. attrition rates, headcount, performance data etc.
Conduct interviews with internal stakeholders including the CEO, strategy lead, operations lead, finance lead, clinical leaders, medical leads, chief nurse, among other relevant individuals. Collect information on the priorities in their area of the organisation, the challenges, the opportunities they see in the future and the talent, skills and resources they think they need to achieve their objectives in the short, medium and long-term.
Use the Organisational Challenge Template (slides 3-4) to help you collate the information you have gathered on your organisation’s context and strategy during the first two steps.
Using the Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool (slides 5-7), identify the overarching talent principles that will guide the development of your talent strategy. The tool can be used in your stakeholder interviews or a facilitated group exercise with a team of stakeholders to give you a clear picture of where your organisation currently sits on the ten most common talent dilemmas and where your stakeholders believe the organisation should sit. The aspirational position guides the development of your talent principles. The gap between your current position and this aspiration will inform the actions in your talent strategy.
When you have completed the previous steps, you are ready to start the critical planning stage. Use the Talent Roadmap Planning Template (slides 8-9) to identify and record the priorities and key actions to take at each milestone on the journey to developing your talent strategy.  
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3. Organisational Challenge Template
The Organisational Challenge Template Tool enables you explore the context that your organisation is operating in and record the key challenges or opportunities facing the organisation, considering the implications for talent management and identifying the actions you need to take.
This could be used during stakeholder interviews or could be adapted to be a questionnaire. It allows you to capture data on the organisational context and the associated talent implications, which will provide direction for your talent strategy.
Identify the key challenges or opportunities facing your organisation
Explore the kinds of skills, capabilities and resources required to be successful in these scenarios or environments
Rate the current state in your organisation to identify priority areas
Identify the implications for talent management
Record the actions that need to be taken to address the implications
A couple of worked examples are below:
What are the critical challenges/opportunities facing the organisation?
What will the organisation need to excel at to meet these challenges?
To what extent do these capabilities exist?
What are the implications for talent management?
What actions need to be taken to address these?
The rise of digital
Digital technology
Red – high priority
Lack of digital skills in clinical teams
Targeted recruitment
New leadership
Effective leadership behaviours to manage change
Amber – medium priority
Lack of change management skills in existing leadership
Leadership development
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4. Organisational Challenge Template
What are the critical challenges/opportunities facing the organisation?
What will the organisation need to excel at to meet these challenges?
To what extent do these capabilities exist?
What are the implications for talent management?
What actions need to be taken to address these?
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5. Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool
The Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool presents the top ten dilemmas that organisations face. It enables you to identify and define the talent principles that will guide your talent strategy, ensuring your strategy is fit for purpose for your organisation. It is a useful tool to use in conversations with stakeholders to understand and identify the approach to talent management that your organisation should adopt and how far from that they are currently. It could be used in a meeting to get the views of a team of stakeholders or individual conversations. In addition to the ten dilemmas provided, you can also include any specific dilemmas that may be relevant for your organisation. Once you have your set of talent dilemmas, mark where your organisation is currently for each dilemma and in a different colour, mark where you or the stakeholder believes the organisation should be. The example below marks the current state in orange and the aspirational position in green for three of the dilemmas:
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6. Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool
The dilemmas give you an idea of the aspiration of your organisation and the gap between that and your current state, which shows you how far your need to go to reach that aspirational position. From these dilemmas you can develop talent principles that will form the basis of your talent management approach. Create clear and inspiring, practical and action-oriented talent principles that will ensure you obtain buy-in and shared commitment among stakeholders. Based on the worked examples of the three dilemmas, your talent principles might be: Please note that you do not necessarily need one principle per dilemma, as some dilemmas can be combined to create one principle. We would recommend that you develop a maximum of six simple and persuasive principles that you can communicate easily to stakeholders. 1 2 3
Mobility across geographies and functions will be supported to develop talent
We will be open with individuals about their performance and potential
Our talent processes will be well-defined to ensure a rigorous approach
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8. Talent Roadmap Planning Template
The Talent Roadmap Planning Template enables you to plan out the actions that will form the basis of your talent strategy. Using the output from the Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool as a basis, you can start to map out the journey to get you from your current state to the aspirational state as defined in your talent principles. The prioritisation of the actions to address the gaps in your talent principles will be dependent on your specific organisational objectives and how well developed your talent strategy currently is. Depending on the priority and impact of the action, determine the appropriate timescale for implementing each action and the associated activities. Below is a worked example, based on the second principle “We will be open with individuals about their performance and potential” from the example in the Talent Dilemmas Diagnostic Tool:
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR ONE
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR TWO
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR THREE
ACTION
Get the fundamentals of talent and performance management right
Build line manager skill and will to manage talent and performance
Embed talent management by sticking with the process
KEY ACTIVITIES
Review and align talent and performance management processes
Clarify talent definition
Test manager mindsets around transparency
Agree who will give the feedback and how
Review and streamline performance management process to ensure links to feedback process
Focus on an accurate and fair talent identification process
Test current levels of feedback skills
Develop and run programme of interventions to build individual skill
Ensure inputs to, and outputs from, current year performance management process are clearly linked to talent management
Run second-year data collection processes
Run first year of feedback
Run third year of data collection and second year of feedback
Enhance talent identification process with input from other sources
Build additional sources into feedback process and performance management process
Focus on action planning for development and deployment
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9. Talent Roadmap Planning Template
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR ONE
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR TWO
PLAN OF WORK: YEAR THREE
ACTION
KEY ACTIVITIES
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