A target operating model is only as strong as the people and behaviors that run it. You can design elegant value streams, crisp org charts, and modern platforms—but if the right capabilities are missing, or the culture fights the new ways of working, the operating model will quietly revert to the old one.
This chapter focuses on the human side of the TOM:
- Identifying the critical roles and capabilities for the target state
- Translating that into workforce plans (numbers, locations, sourcing)
- Defining the culture shifts and behaviors the new TOM requires
- Building a capability roadmap that is practical, prioritized, and measurable
7.1 Identifying Critical Roles and Capabilities for the Target State
Start with a simple premise: structure and process are meaningless if you don’t know who needs to be great at what.
You already have:
- Target value streams and end-to-end blueprints (Chapter 5)
- A macro-structure and governance model (Chapter 6)
- Design principles and customer promises (Chapter 3)
Now ask: Which roles and skills are truly critical to making this work?
A practical sequence:
- Anchor in value streams and governance
For each priority value stream and key governance forum, identify the handful of roles that make the biggest difference to outcomes. Typically these include:- Journey / value stream owners
- Product or portfolio owners
- Front-line team leads in pivotal processes (e.g., onboarding, fulfillment, support)
- Platform, data, and architecture owners
- Risk, compliance, and control owners in high-risk areas
- You are not listing every role in the company—just the small set of “keystone” roles whose performance has outsized impact.
- Define what “good” looks like for each critical role
For each role, describe capabilities in concrete, observable terms, for example:- Technical / domain knowledge (e.g., credit risk, supply chain, pricing, regulatory knowledge)
- Operating skills (e.g., lean problem solving, process design, agile ways of working, stakeholder management)
- Leadership and behavioral traits (e.g., data-driven decision making, cross-functional collaboration, coaching mindset)
- Aim for a short capability profile per role, not a 15-page competency dictionary.
- Cluster capabilities into capability “families”
When you look across all critical roles, you will see recurring patterns—these become your capability families. Typical examples:- Journey and product leadership (end-to-end ownership, customer-centric design)
- Data and analytics (data engineering, analytics translators, data scientists)
- Digital and automation (workflow designers, RPA/automation developers, platform engineers)
- Risk and control (risk modeling, compliance interpretation, control design, audit readiness)
- Operational excellence (lean, continuous improvement, root-cause problem solving)
- Change and transformation (change leads, scrum masters, transformation managers)
- These families are easier to plan and develop than thousands of individual skills.
- Assess current strength vs. future need
For each capability family, perform a pragmatic assessment:- Do we have enough people with this capability?
- Are they in the right places (functions, geographies, levels)?
- Are they operating with the right mandate (do they have influence, or are they buried)?
- Use a simple rating (e.g., “strong,” “patchy,” “weak”) rather than overly precise scores. What you need is a sense of where the biggest gaps are.
- Prioritize where excellence really matters
You cannot make everyone great at everything. Decide intentionally:- Where we need world-class capability because it is strategic.
- Where we need good enough, possibly supported by strong tooling.
- Where we can outsource or partner rather than build deep in-house expertise.
The output of this section should be:
- A critical roles map
- A small set of capability families with target strength levels
- A high-level view of where you are strong and where you are exposed
This will feed both workforce planning and your capability-building roadmap.
7.2 Workforce Planning for the Target Operating Model
Once you know which roles and capabilities matter, you can address the question every executive cares about: How many people do we need, where, and in what mix?
Workforce planning for a TOM is not a bottom-up headcount exercise. It is about aligning the workforce shape with the target operating model.
A simple but effective approach:
1.Define the target workforce “shape” by area
For each major area (e.g., front-line operations, shared services, technology, analytics, risk, and key business units), specify:
- Approximate headcount ranges in the target state (not down to single FTEs)
- Role mix (e.g., % leaders, % specialists, % generalists)
- Location mix (onshore / nearshore / offshore; hub vs. local)
- Sourcing mix (permanent employees vs. contractors vs. managed services)
2. You are designing a workforce architecture, not a staff list.
3. Compare current vs. target at a macro level
For each area, look at:
- Overstaffed vs. understaffed functions
- Roles that will shrink (e.g., manual processing) vs. roles that will grow (e.g., automation, data, journey owners)
- Geographies that are likely to consolidate vs. those that may expand
4. Turn this into a heat map of surplus vs. deficit, highlighting:
- Where redeployment and reskilling are realistic.
- Where attrition or voluntary programs might be needed.
- Where you must hire or partner.
5. Define workforce transitions, not just end-state numbers
A TOM rarely appears in one big bang. Think in waves over 2–3 years:
- Wave 1: Quick shifts (e.g., eliminating clear duplications, creating a few key new roles, starting pilot teams).
- Wave 2: Larger shifts (e.g., moving significant volume to shared services, scaling up automation, standing up new hubs).
- Wave 3: Fine-tuning (e.g., optimizing spans and layers, rationalizing small residual teams).
6. For each wave, clarify:
- Which roles will be added, moved, reskilled, or reduced.
- The likely net impact by unit and location.
Plan sourcing: build, buy, borrow, or partner
1. For each critical capability family, decide:
- Build: Develop internally (e.g., upskill existing staff into new journey owner or analytics roles).
- Buy: Hire externally (for capabilities you lack completely, or need quickly at scale).
- Borrow: Use contractors, independent experts, or interim roles to bridge gaps.
- Partner: Use managed services or strategic vendor relationships for capabilities that are not differentiating but are complex to run.
2. This prevents a default pattern of “hire a bunch of people” every time you see a gap.
3. Integrate workforce planning with finance and HR
Workforce plans must:
- Tie into the financial plan (OPEX, restructuring costs, investment in training and hiring).
- Align with HR processes (recruitment capacity, internal mobility, performance management, labor relations).
- Respect legal and social constraints (e.g., collective agreements, redeployment obligations, timelines for notifications).
A short checklist for TOM-aligned workforce planning:
- Have we articulated the target workforce shape for each major area?
- Do we know, at a high level, where we will reduce, where we will grow, and where we will reskill?
- Do we have a clear view of timing and sequencing of workforce changes over the next 24–36 months?
- Are finance, HR, and business leaders aligned on the numbers and the story?
If not, the TOM will remain a PowerPoint exercise.
7.3 Culture Shifts Required by the New TOM
Every TOM design implicitly makes a bet about culture: “If people behave differently, this will work.” If you do not make those cultural bets explicit, the existing culture will quietly defend itself and win.
Culture, for TOM purposes, is best thought of as a small set of recurring behaviors that shape how work happens—what people do when no one is watching.
Start by asking: What must people do differently, consistently, for this operating model to succeed?
Typical shifts associated with TOM redesigns include:
- From silo-first to end-to-end accountability
- People stop optimizing only their function and start caring about entire journeys.
- From opinion-driven to data-informed
- Decisions rely more on facts and analytics than on hierarchy or anecdotes.
- From heroic problem-solving to standardization and continuous improvement
- Fewer one-off fixes; more root-cause elimination and reuse of solutions.
- From local autonomy by default to global standards with targeted flexibility
- Teams accept common ways of working where they create scale, quality, or control benefits.
To make culture actionable:
- Name 3–5 critical behavior shifts
Link them directly to specific TOM elements. For example:- “End-to-end owners will publicly review journey performance and fix cross-functional issues monthly.”
- “Leaders will challenge work done outside core systems and support migration to standard platforms.”
- Avoid vague values (“collaborative,” “innovative”) that no one can disagree with but no one can act on.
- Identify where current culture will resist
Use interviews, surveys, and your knowledge of the organization to answer:- Where is the current culture strongly attached to local autonomy or legacy ways of working?
- Where are there entrenched power centers that may feel threatened by new accountability or transparency?
- Where is fear of failure or blame likely to block experimentation and change?
- This gives you a map of cultural risk for the TOM.
- Hard-wire new behaviors into mechanisms
Culture follows systems and symbols, not posters. Embed desired behaviors in:- Governance: who sits in which forums, how decisions are taken, how often performance is reviewed.
- Metrics and incentives: including end-to-end KPIs, cross-functional targets, and team-based rewards.
- Processes: standard ways of working that require collaboration (e.g., joint business–tech prioritization, risk sign-off embedded in workflows).
- Talent decisions: who gets promoted, who is put in critical roles, who gets public recognition.
- If you say “we want collaboration” but still reward only individual P&L wins, the culture will follow the money, not the posters.
- Modeling by the leadership team
Nothing undermines TOM culture faster than leaders who opt out of the new behaviors. The executive team must:- Use the new governance forums seriously (not decide everything offline).
- Accept and act on TOM metrics, even when uncomfortable.
- Be visibly willing to standardize “their” areas when principles demand it.
- Show openness to data that contradicts their intuition.
A practical exercise: write down five real decisions you expect to take in the next 6–12 months (e.g., major investment, product withdrawal, location consolidation). For each, define:
- How this decision would be taken in the old culture.
- How it should be taken in the new TOM-aligned culture.
Use that comparison in leadership discussions—it quickly reveals whether the culture shift is understood and credible.
7.4 Capability-Building Roadmap (Checklist and Examples)
With critical roles, capabilities, workforce shape, and culture shifts defined, you can now answer: How do we actually build this?
A capability-building roadmap is not a generic “learning & development” calendar. It is a targeted, time-bound sequence of capability moves that directly support TOM implementation.
A practical way to build it:
- Prioritize capability families by impact and urgency
Map each capability family against:- How critical it is for early TOM waves (e.g., journey owners and change leaders often matter early).
- How weak it is today.
- High-impact, low-strength capabilities go to the top of the roadmap.
- Define target audiences and learning objectives
For each priority capability family, specify:- Who needs this (by role, level, function, location).
- What they need to be able to do differently (not just “know more about X”).
- Example:
- Audience: front-line team leaders in operations centers.
- Objective: lead daily huddles using TOM KPIs, run basic root-cause analyses, coach teams to adopt new standard work.
- Choose delivery mechanisms that fit the work
Skip the assumption that everything must be a classroom course. Use a mix of:- On-the-job learning
- Stretch roles (e.g., assigning high-potential managers as journey owner deputies).
- Rotations into TOM design or transformation teams.
- Structured problem-solving projects (e.g., kaizen events, agile squads).
- Coaching and peer learning
- Internal coaches or buddies for new roles (e.g., pairing new product owners with experienced ones).
- Communities of practice for data, risk, operations leaders.
- Formal training
- Short, applied modules on methods (agile, lean, data literacy, risk frameworks).
- Certification where it is meaningful (e.g., certain technical or regulatory domains).
- On-the-job learning
- The mix should reflect your culture and constraints, but in TOM work, “learn by doing” usually beats “learn by classroom”.
- Sequence capability building with TOM waves
Capabilities must be in place before or alongside TOM changes, not 12 months later. Work backwards from your transformation roadmap:- If Wave 1 will launch a new shared service, when must service leaders and team leads be trained in standard work, performance huddles, and coaching?
- If Wave 2 will roll out new platforms, when must product owners and data stewards be in place and prepared?
- If Wave 3 will move more decisions to local markets within a global framework, when must local leaders be ready to manage that autonomy responsibly?
- Build a timeline of capability interventions tied to each TOM wave.
- Define ownership, budget, and success measures
Capability building needs clear owners. Typically:- Business leaders and value stream owners own what is needed and how it’s used.
- HR / L&D own how it is delivered, standardized, and scaled.
- For each major capability initiative, specify:
- Sponsor and accountable owner.
- Budget (training, coaching, time away from day jobs).
- Simple success measures, such as:
- Adoption of specific practices (e.g., % of teams running daily huddles).
- Improvements in TOM KPIs where capability was meant to help.
- Self-assessed or manager-assessed competence levels over time.
A concise capability-building checklist for your TOM:
- Have we mapped critical roles and capability families for the target TOM?
- Have we prioritized capabilities by impact and current strength?
- Do we know who needs which capabilities, and by when, aligned to TOM waves?
- Do we have a mix of on-the-job, coaching, and formal training, not just courses?
- Is there a single, visible roadmap that links capability initiatives to TOM milestones and business outcomes?
- Are ownership, funding, and success metrics for capability building clearly assigned?
If you can answer yes to these questions, you are treating people, skills, and culture as integral to the operating model, not as an afterthought.
