Deepy Turner-Kang

The Pull Toward Public Good

The private sector taught her plenty, but it never fit. "There's a lot of sales, a lot of trying to bring in things," she says of that period, and the constant push to win work sat awkwardly against what actually held her attention. Her NHS clients did. So did the delivery side of the work: the substantial, unglamorous business of doing something real for the people an organisation exists to serve.

It took her a while to name it. She had arrived out of university convinced she wanted finance, and it was only through the accumulated evidence of who she liked working with that she understood her values had been pointing somewhere else the whole time. Public good, and healthcare in particular. Once she saw it, the move across to the NHS was less a leap than a correction.

Wisdom From the Boardroom and the Front Line

Ask Turner-Kang who has shaped her and she splits the answer cleanly in two. The first group is the chairs and chief executives she has spent her career alongside, both as a headhunter and now as the person developing them. Years of proximity to that level of leadership have left her with a collection of small, durable pieces of wisdom, and one in particular she still carries.

It came from a leader who had been an executive, then a chief executive, and is now a chair. Turner-Kang is, by her own account, not someone who naturally pushes herself forward or self-promotes. His reframe was simple and it stuck: if not you, then who? Putting yourself forward for the next step is not sales and it is not self-promotion, he told her. It is a duty, because the system needs people with the right values in those jobs, and staying quiet is a decision with consequences.

The second group is the one she says she learns the most from: the junior members of her own team. They are the people in the thick of it, keeping the operation running day to day, and she is consistently struck by the ideas they generate, the challenge they bring back and the judgment they show. Her conviction is that senior leaders stay honest by staying connected to that layer, whether through reverse mentoring, deliberate connection points or walking the floors, even in the virtual world. "If you can keep in touch with them, that's been really powerful for me," she says.

Pushing AI to Its Limits, Carefully

"You are talking to someone that loves AI," Turner-Kang says, and she means it as a working practice rather than a slogan. She experiments with it personally and at work, deliberately pushing to find where the limits sit rather than assuming she already knows. Members of her team now return from annual leave and hand their inbox to AI to sort, prioritise and work out which message is which. She finds that genuinely mind-blowing.

Her ambition for it in healthcare goes well past automating junior functions. Consider a cancer diagnosis, she says: one consultant might test their thinking against three or four colleagues. Now imagine a system that can draw on every diagnosis ever recorded and bring that to bear on the case in front of you. She believes AI will change how the health service diagnoses, not just how it administrates.

The caution she attaches is precise. Never outsource the thinking. Never outsource the judgment. She has watched how easily, when her team is playing with these tools, the instruction becomes "do this" with no test of the reasoning behind it. She also expects the composition of teams themselves to shift: a team of 50 where 10 of the members are AI is not a scenario she finds far-fetched. That makes learning to lead for innovation, and knowing exactly what cannot be handed over, a live leadership skill rather than a future one. As she puts it, the question with any technology is the same one it has always been: do you use it for good, or do you not?

Advice for Talent Leaders

Heading into 2027, Turner-Kang returns to the point everything else hangs on. There is AI, there is the technical work, there is organisational development, and underneath all of it there are still people. Whatever the tooling, leadership never stops being about them.

"Be brave, be courageous, but remain compassionate," she says. People will not be eliminated by any of this. They will be amplified, supported, complemented. In healthcare above all, the work will remain a people industry, and the leaders who thrive will be the ones who kept their people skills sharp while everyone else was upgrading their tools.