From Pain Points to Predictive Pipelines

It’s a common refrain I hear from my friends and colleagues in the healthcare sector: “We need more skilled workers for every job.”

The need is real and only getting more dire by the day — not only for patients and workers but for the future of the industry itself. In PwC’s annual survey of CEOs in 2023, 67% of healthcare CEOs said that labor and skills shortages would have a big impact on profitability over the next 10 years — higher than the overall global average of 52%. 

The problem is, the crisis is much more complex, nuanced, and protracted than any of the labor shortages we’ve seen before. The pandemic didn’t just strain resources; it exposed the fragile foundations of an industry already stretched to the brink. And it revealed the urgent need for more innovative approaches to training, technology adoption, and workforce planning. 

As Laura Dannels, Chief Talent Officer for Wellstar Health System, put it to me during Guild’s 2024 Opportunity Summit in Nashville earlier this month: Unlike in other industries, creating learning opportunities in healthcare isn’t about just closing a skills gap or providing a nice employee perk; it’s about mission-critical workforce planning and transformation. 

“We need the data and insights to say we’re going to have X patient-care techs on this date to support business growth and Y phlebotomists on this date as our care model evolves,” Dannels said. “This is about creating a predictive pipeline of talent for critical roles. And for us, it’s an absolute imperative to run the business with our executive team.”

In my conversation with Dannels and Kathy Driscoll, senior vice president and chief nursing officer for Humana, at Opportunity Summit this month, one theme kept coming to the fore: be bolder. And that leaders can’t just talk about being bold. They need to paint a more vivid picture of how talent, technology, and organizational priorities will evolve – then craft and deploy clear and courageous plans to guide key decisions around them. Without this, healthcare organizations will find themselves perpetually reacting to crises rather than preparing for and succeeding through them.

But how should healthcare talent leaders be bolder with their long-term strategic planning while the current job-market, economic, and societal conditions exert so much pressure to do the opposite? Here are a few thoughts, not just for healthcare CHROs, but for all talent leaders facing a sustained talent crisis. 

1. Make sure your talent initiatives have a direct line of sight to your strategic vision. 

Ensure that every talent investment — whether that’s in time, effort, or capital — brings you closer to your strategic vision. Doing this will force you to continually revisit and reprioritize your portfolio of talent projects, weeding out those that probably won’t push you in the right direction.

“It’s not just about solving today’s pain points It’s about anticipating the challenges we’ll face in five to ten years.”

_{- Laura Dannels, chief talent officer for Wellstar Health System}

As Dannels explained, Wellstar approaches the talent crisis with both short- and long-term solutions simultaneously. For immediate needs, they are creating “float pools,” teams of on-demand nurses and clinicians who can step in during high-demand periods. At the same time, they’re also preparing for a future shaped by AI, which will redefine healthcare delivery and open new career pathways. “It’s not just about solving today’s pain points,” Dannels said. “It’s about anticipating the challenges we’ll face in five to ten years.”

Dannels and Driscoll both agreed that one guiding principle to ensure that talent initiatives connect to an overarching strategic vision is to focus on employee incentives. Actively think about what makes employees happy, satisfied, and engaged in both the short- and long-term. “If you just focus on the month-to-month, you’re never going to get the investments right,” said Driscoll. 

2. Don’t be loyal to the status quo. 

The biggest obstacle to progress is often an unwillingness to abandon the old. Historically, Wellstar relied solely on partnerships with local schools for workforce development. But with labor challenges multiplying, the organization needed a lot more speed to market – specifically, a partner that could create a program to enable 15 to 30 career pathways within six months.

“Too many [clinicians] are leaving the profession and leaving organizations because they’ve been put in roles they are not prepared for – and without proper support.”

_{- Kathy Driscoll, senior vice president and chief nursing officer for Humana}

“We don’t have two years to partner with these academic institutions anymore. We needed a way to quickly scale workforce development efforts to meet our most pressing business needs. Guild has provided us the ability to scale and remain agile at the same time,” shared Dannels.

Humana faced a similar challenge with their clinician leadership pipeline. Their clinicians, while excellent, often need additional developmental support to position them to also excel in senior roles. So, the organization began offering stretch assignments, experiential learning, executive coaching, and soft-skills training. “Too many [clinicians] are leaving the profession and leaving organizations because they’ve been put in roles they are not prepared for – and without proper support,” Driscoll said.

3. Be prepared to handle criticism and resistance. 

Change is rarely linear. There will be resistance — sometimes from frontline managers, sometimes from senior leadership. Metrics may not always reflect immediate success, but long-term success requires persistence. Dannels shared how the idea to guarantee internal candidates’ placement in new roles faced pushback from hiring managers. “If our hiring managers are our greatest resistors, can we change?” she said. “Can we get out of our own way?”

One solution is to create incentives for managers to develop their teams, using preceptor models where leaders become mentors, coaches, and advocates. “It doesn’t have to be on them alone to solve,” Dannels emphasized. 

Amid such severe talent shortages, healthcare organizations also must get comfortable with hiring candidates knowing full well they’ll need to be trained – and HR leaders must be the ones to drive this change. “If you have 75% or 80% of the skills we need, we can supplement the rest,” said Driscoll. “There are certain nursing skills that you need as a nurse, but we can teach you skills like OASIS documentation.”

4. Listen to your people – all your people. 

Amid all the strategic planning, the most vital element of navigating this crisis is deceptively simple: listening. Kathi Enderes, senior vice president of research and a global industry analyst at The Josh Bersin Company, emphasized that healthcare leaders need to go directly to their workforce — both frontline and executive. Earlier in the day at Opportunity Summit she shared a story of a healthcare organization that conducted focus groups with its nurses to ask what would make their work easier. The feedback the organization received led to a simple but impactful change: moving cabinets in hospital rooms to make daily tasks more efficient. 

“Healthcare is something, without that, of course, our society can't run,” Enderes said. “So it’s pretty important what we are doing here in HR.”

The future of healthcare isn’t just about solving today’s problems. It’s about preparing for tomorrow’s inevitable challenges. And to do that, leaders must be bold, adaptive, and — above all — willing to listen.

About Hanna Patterson

Hanna Patterson is Senior Vice President, Healthcare and Applied Learning for Guild.