Workforce Planning -- The Most Important Job
But sometimes it's not clear where to start -- until you understand the business and its challenges. How do you do that? Ask a lot of questions of the organization's leaders, and a selection of the rank and file, and ferret out themes that indicate opportunities to make an impact. Ideas for talent planning will then begin to surface, and you are on your way to defining and implementing a talent plan.
There are a lot of ways to do this, and many questions you can ask, but here is a useful list that applies in almost any situation.
• What is your mission, vision and objective for your business? This can be for the until itself, the company overall, and even if there isn't a mission or vision statement, there must be an objective or set of goals. If there isn't, then this is a great place to dive deep, and put in place a process to get to one. Everything else follows from this point.
• What external factors affect your business or org now – and in the future? Context is everything. And knowing where we want to be, and get to, is critical. What does success look like? Make sure it's not just an inward looking discussion -- which is why the question has the explicit "external" element.
• What are the internal strengths & weakness (aka "opportunities") of your org or business? No, you won't hear everything from the business leaders. Even the best leaders have blind spots. And even by talking with everyone at the leadership level, you won't collect all the data you need. But it's a good place to start -- and how this question is answered, and the blind spots you learn about as you move forward, will be critical to how you construct your talent plan.
• What internal factors are preventing your business from achieving its objectives? This may have been answered in the second question, but often isn't -- or is colored by the discussion of strengths and weaknesses, I mean, "opportunities".
• What are the top two or three things that need to change to make your organization more successful – how would you change them? You may get some interesting business-focused responses to this question. Or you may get a leader who is thoughtful about people planning, and they may already have ideas about how to structure and develop their team to achieve their org's or business objectives. If the latter, that's great. This will almost never be a fully baked, complete recipe. But there may be useful nuggets. More important, it means this leader values talent planning as part of their overall business execution plan. That's great, because you now know this is a fertile ground for your work.
As I alluded to, these are not the only questions you can ask. Your conversations should produce topic areas to explore that can't be predicted -- and you should follow up on those. And of course there will be other data elements to bake into your talent plan, everything from objective data like information about turnover, compensation versus the marketplace, information you can glean from your predecessors, etc. But eventually you will be able to bake all this in to a proposal about what kind of workforce planning actions can help ensure that the business has a workforce that will meet its current and future needs.