Talent Partner

University of California, San Francisco•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

The Talent Partner is a senior individual contributor within Organizational Effectiveness, reporting to the Director, Organization Design & Effectiveness. Each role aligns with two to three UCSF operating units and serves as the primary Talent & Organizational Effectiveness relationship and engagement lead for those areas. The role develops a strong understanding of business priorities, operating realities, organizational challenges, and ongoing Organizational Effectiveness (OE) work. It combines broad OE consulting capability with strong project and program management, helping leaders frame organizational needs, distinguish symptoms from underlying issues, coordinate appropriate expertise, and manage complex engagements from intake through implementation and review. The Talent Partner is the main point of contact for assigned business units and their HR Business Partners, and the lead integrator for OE support. The role maintains an integrated view of OE demand and work, identifies patterns and emerging needs, and helps the Director deploy OE capacity against high-value priorities. It is aligned to the business but deployed by OE; it is not dedicated embedded capacity and does not replace HR Business Partners. The Talent Partner owns continuity and integration of engagements, while specialist consultants remain accountable for technical depth in their disciplines. The role works across UCSF Health and Campus, including clinical, operational, research, education, and administrative environments. It must be credible with leaders working in complex, frontline-intensive, and highly regulated systems. The Organizational Effectiveness function develops leaders, strengthens organizations, optimizes talent systems, and advances innovative approaches that enable UCSF's people and mission to thrive. The Organization Design & Effectiveness pillar serves UCSF Health and Campus as an enterprise consulting and transformation capability, helping units improve performance by leveraging Talent solutions, offers, products, tools, and experiences. Work also encompasses organization design, transformation, culture, team effectiveness, and disciplined execution.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in organizational development, business, human resources, project/program management, healthcare administration, or a related field, and/or equivalent experience.
Four years of progressive experience in organizational effectiveness, internal consulting, program/project management, transformation, or related work in complex organizations.
Broad organizational effectiveness knowledge and judgment to frame complex organizational needs and identify when specialist expertise is required.
Strong project and program management capability across complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives.
Demonstrated consulting and relationship-management skills with senior leaders and HR partners.
Strong systems thinking, organizational diagnosis, problem framing, and analytical capability.
Ability to integrate multiple disciplines and recommendations into a coherent business solution.
Exceptional organization, follow-through, communication, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills.
Experience working in frontline-intensive, operational, clinical, academic, research, or other complex work environments.
Demonstrated experience managing complex cross-functional engagements from problem framing through implementation and review.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree or higher in a related field.
MP, Prosci, Agile, organization design, facilitation, or related certifications.
Experience in healthcare, academic medicine, higher education, or another highly regulated 24/7 operating environment.
Working knowledge of organization design, change, culture, talent, learning, and/or workforce effectiveness practices.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary OE relationship and engagement lead for assigned business units and their HR Business Partners, learning their strategies, operating environments, leadership priorities, and organizational challenges.
Bring the Talent Offer to operating units and manage their engagement in Talent and Leadership Initiatives.
Maintain an integrated view of OE demand, active engagements, emerging needs, and dependencies across assigned business units.
Conduct initial discovery and problem framing, using broad OE knowledge and systems thinking to clarify needs and determine appropriate interventions or specialist support.
Identify recurring themes and enterprise-level opportunities and raise them to the Director for prioritization and capacity decisions.
Partner closely with HR Business Partners while maintaining a clear distinction between HRBP accountability and OE specialist support.
Coordinate Talent offers, processes, and tools end to end with Talent subject-matter experts, including scope, outcomes, workplans, milestones, stakeholders, risks, dependencies, decisions, and follow-through.
Assemble and coordinate cross-pillar OE expertise for engagements requiring organization design, transformation, culture, talent, learning, leadership, or future-of-work capabilities.
Keep customer engagements coherent when multiple specialists contribute by ensuring clear roles, handoffs, communication, and accountability.
Anticipate barriers, escalate material risks and trade-offs, and maintain momentum across complex, matrixed initiatives.
Apply disciplined project and program management practices alongside sound organizational diagnosis and judgment.
Use interviews, stakeholder input, workforce and operational data, observation, and systems thinking to distinguish presenting requests from underlying organizational issues.
Frame problems in terms of structure, leadership, work, teams, culture, talent, operating model, or other organizational factors, and engage appropriate subject-matter expertise.
Integrate recommendations across OE disciplines into practical solutions suited to the business context and operational performance needs.
Translate recommendations with leaders and specialists into clear implementation actions, ownership, and sequencing.
Support implementation by coordinating stakeholders, communications, decisions, adoption activities, and dependencies.
Maintain relationships with business leaders, HR partners, and OE specialists throughout engagements.
Ensure leaders understand what is changing, what is required of them, and where decisions or sponsorship are needed.
Help transition completed work into sustainable business ownership rather than ongoing dependence on OE.
Partner with the OE Strategic Operations & Impact team and Talent SMEs to establish intended outcomes and practical success measures for priority work.
Monitor engagement progress and outcomes, surface evidence of what is or is not working, and support post-implementation review.
Capture lessons, patterns, and reusable practices from operating-unit work and feed them back into the OE practice.
Use portfolio evidence to recommend where work should continue, adapt, scale, or conclude.