Talent Strategy is a Leadership Problem
I’ll be honest with you.
Talent Strategy was my job for years. VP of Talent in the FTSE100. I worked alongside experts from Harvard, McKinsey, KornFerry. I built frameworks, ran talent reviews, commissioned assessments. I genuinely believed I was solving the right problem.
It took stepping away from all of that – and starting to work alongside senior leaders from the outside – to realise something uncomfortable. I was the wrong person to be doing it. Not because I wasn’t capable. But because talent strategy isn’t an HR problem. It’s a leadership one.
If you’re a senior leader who’s been handed a talent strategy, asked to sign off on one, or quietly wondering whether yours is actually fit for purpose – this one’s for you.
The 9-Box Trap (and the Shiny Platform Problem)
When organisations decide they need to “do something” about talent, they typically head in one of two directions. Either they dust off the familiar 9-box grid – that time-worn model that plots performance against potential – or they go looking for the latest platform promising to transform how they identify and develop their people.
Both instincts are understandable. And both tend to lead organisations down the same path: a lot of activity, a lot of data, and a strategy that doesn’t quite deliver what the business actually needs.
What works for one organisation won’t automatically work for yours. There is no magic answer sitting in a research paper or a software licence. The best talent strategy is the one that’s simple, specific to your business, and relentlessly focused on what you need to succeed. Not what worked for someone else. Not what’s fashionable right now.
The question worth asking is a simpler one: what talent do we have today, what might we need tomorrow, and what’s the single most important thing to focus on right now?
Stop Looking at People. Start Looking at Capability.
The second pattern I see repeatedly is an obsession with assessing the people already in the organisation. Complex psychometric tools. Calibration sessions. Talent pool nominations. Hours of leadership time spent debating whether someone is “high potential” or not.
I’m not saying that understanding your people isn’t important. It is. But too many organisations start there – with what they’ve got – when they should be starting somewhere else entirely.
A talent strategy isn’t about people. It’s about capability. And the crucial question isn’t “who are our best people?” – it’s “what capabilities does this business need to win?”
Get specific about that – really specific about the roles, the skills, the behaviours your organisation is going to need to succeed over the next three to five years – and everything else flows back from there. The assessment, the development, the hiring, the succession planning. All of it becomes clearer when you start from the right place.
Why This Is Your Problem, Not HR’s
Here’s the part that tends to land with a bit of a thud when I say it to senior leaders: your HR team – however talented, however experienced – can only build a talent strategy based on what they’re given. And what they’re given is the vision, the strategy, and the future direction of the business.
If that’s unclear – or if it exists on a slide deck but hasn’t really been thought through at the level of “what does this actually mean for the people and capabilities we need” – then even the most sophisticated talent strategy will miss the mark. It’ll be well-designed. It’ll create a great experience. And it won’t deliver the future your business needs.
That’s not a reflection on your HR team. That’s on you. And I mean that genuinely, not as a criticism – because the moment senior leaders own this as their problem rather than delegating it as an HR process, the whole conversation shifts.
You need talent to win. Winning requires a clear vision of what you’re winning at. That clarity has to come from you.
Where to Start
If any of this is resonating, it’s probably because you’ve either lived it or you’re living it right now. You might have a talent strategy that feels disconnected from where the business is actually heading. Or you’re being asked to validate one without really knowing if the foundations are right.
The place to start isn’t with a new framework or a new platform. It’s with a clear-eyed look at where your business is going and what it’s genuinely going to take to get there. From that, a talent strategy that’s worth having starts to take shape.
If you want to work that through – to get underneath what your business actually needs and build something that’s genuinely fit for purpose – that feels like a conversation worth having.
A question to sit with: if someone asked you today to describe the three or four capabilities your business is going to need most in five years’ time, how confident would you feel in your answer?
