Essential Components
With these pitfalls in mind, there are four components of talent and capabilities management that can provide helpful guides as you examine your current practices. Each of these components is essential to enabling your business to respond to the rapidly changing market dynamics and growth requirements.

1. Strategic Organization Review – Taking a broad strategic view to gain cross-organization leadership alignment
   
   
2. Capability Requirements Segmentation – Segmenting across dimensions of time and strategic criticality
   
   
3. Talent Risk Assessment – Understanding who is at greatest risk to leave, how important they are to long-term business performance and what retention strategies should be developed
   
   
4. Capability Development – Identifying the crucial capability needs and most viable development options to deploy

Strategic Organization Review
The purpose of conducting a strategic organization review with the executive leadership team is to create understanding of and leadership alignment around the evolving (and sometimes dramatically changing) business model.  This is followed by the defining of short and long-term talent and capability requirements needed to drive higher levels of business performance.  The operating model or go-to-market strategy will likely have shifted given the recent economic environment.  An open dialogue around the key organizational issues, opportunities and marketplace trends expected to impact current and future business performance will be critical to gaining alignment.

Typically, such a strategic review includes exploration of several key focus areas across line and support functions: 

• External marketplace trends
  
  
• Evolving business requirements
  
  
• Potential organization changes required
  in process, structure, roles, culture/behavior
  
  
• Talent landscape and identified gaps
  (at a high level)
  
  
• Capability requirements and intervention alternatives (at a high level)

A thoughtful analysis, integrating thinking about external trends with talent and capability requirements, encourages an “outside-in” point of view rather than a more insular “inside-out” point of view.  For example, trends such as customization and segmentation on the commercial side of the business or increasing compliance demands on the administrative services side of the business clearly impact required talent and capability.

The process for conducting the review is straightforward.  This is not to say that it will be easy: it can be quite challenging, but it can also be energizing as the new direction becomes clearer.  A common starting point is conducting individual interviews with the GM or CEO and the top leader of each function.  This results in the identification of key themes in each review area.  This then concludes with a facilitated dialogue with the top leadership teams: outlining the results; gaining consensus on the business model and the capabilities required to achieve higher performance; getting agreement on high level next steps to address perceived capability shortfalls in critical areas.  To deliver high business performance, the top two to three levels of the organization need to be strategically aligned regarding changes in the marketplace, the evolving business model and their impact on the business which ultimately drives talent and capability requirements.

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