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HR's 2025 Priorities: The Dog that Didn't Bark

culture leadership: developing others/building teams

This Gartner Survey of the Top Priorities for HR in 2025 caught my eye.

Here they are with a short description:

1. Leader & Manager Development. Only 36% of HR leaders believe their current leadership development programs effectively prepare leaders for future challenges.

2. Organizational Culture. Organizations are struggling to activate culture successfully, with 97% of CHROs keen to change some aspect of their organization’s culture. 

3. Strategic Workforce Planning. HR organizations frequently adopt a narrow, tactical approach, concentrating mainly on headcount planning. This inconsistent & non-scalable process hampers HR's capacity to anticipate & adapt to changing circumstances 

4. Manage Change. The annual volume of enterprise-level changes has surged due to cultural shifts, remote and office work mandates, and new technologies. Traditional change management practices fail to address overlapping, incompatible changes, leaving employees without sufficient time to adapt to one change before another begins.

5. Get HR Technology Right.  However, current HR technology strategies have fallen short of their transformative promises.

What is becoming ever more important is the ability to organize, focus, and coordinate people to get results.  In fact the more central AI becomes, the more important the ability to build and lead teams and coordinate the use of that AI will likely become.

The Dog that Didn't Bark

What strikes me most about this list is what is not there. 

None of the five priorities mentions teams, teamwork, and improving team effectiveness organization-wide.

Now maybe it is hidden somewhere between the lines. The category descriptions were short on specifics.

Fixing leadership development is in there, but there are no specifics about what needs to change in our approach to developing leaders.  Could it be HR wants leaders who are better at leading teams?

Changing culture is in there, but what aspect of culture needs changing?  Were they thinking a stronger culture around team effectiveness?

It's not clear.  But to me, if HR Leaders responding to the survey were really focused on building the team leadership muscle in their organizations, they would have called it out specifically.

It's absence is surprising for two reasons.

Most of the outputs of organizations come from groups and teams working together. If groups and teams are producing the bulk of your results, why wouldn't you be hell-bent on improving team effectiveness in the short-term and ensuring your leaders knew how to build high-performing teams to sustain effective teamwork for the long term?

The second reason I am surprised it wasn't specifically mentioned is that with the rise of AI, knowledge work, especially at the entry level, is becoming less important.

What is becoming ever more important is the ability to organize, focus, and coordinate people to get results. In fact the more central AI becomes, the more important the ability to build and lead teams and coordinate the use of that AI will likely become.

I recently wrote an article about 20 different company-wide approaches that were tried to increase organization effectiveness and had ChatGPT stack rank them from largest impact to smallest.  Improving team effectiveness was in the Top 10 with a track record of success.

Gordy Curphy is a colleague of mine and one of the top consultants in the country working on team assessment and team improvement. He recently wrote an article about how a systemic approach to improving teams is a powerful lever for improving organization performance and also why trying to improve employee engagement is a fool's errand.  (This Public Service Announcement is brought to you by...)

An organization filled with high-performing teams, heck, even just a modest increase in across-the-board team effectiveness is such a huge opportunity walking past HR leaders' front doors, ya gotta wonder why their dog isn't barking about it.

In Part 3, I'll report on the results of letting AI design a cross-company improvement initiative.

 

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service that has helped hundreds of newly hired and promoted executives get great starts in challenging new jobs.