HR Leaders Will Need to Consider CEO’s Focus on Growth

The Gartner survey of 1,403 HR leaders in July 2024 found the top five organizational priorities for HR leaders next year range from leader and manager development to HR technology (see Figure 1)

“HR leaders are defining their priorities in the context of three factors that CEOs are focused on and are impacting the world of work: growth, the power of AI and labor market shifts that are putting pressure on talent strategies,” said Mark Whittle, Vice President of Advisory in the Gartner HR practice. 

“For organizations to deliver on their goals, managers must be prepared to successfully lead both today and tomorrow,” said Whittle. “Though 75% of organizations have made significant updates to their leadership development programs, and more than half are increasing spending on leader development, they are not seeing results.”

Recent Gartner research revealed that traditional leadership development such as seminars and lectures have a negative effect on development. HR leaders must shift to place more emphasis on intentionally and strategically enabling repeated peer connections for leadership development via networking and team building.

Organizations are struggling to embed culture in day-to-day work and foster connection, a key component to making culture stick. HR leaders can facilitate this by equipping teams to translate culture values into their unique context, and by providing actionable, scenario-based guidance, so managers understand what behaviors they should be demonstrating to live the culture they want.

Rather than approach strategic workforce planning as an organization-wide initiative, HR leaders should break it down into achievable phases, specifically by starting with small pilots, prioritizing projects by evaluating their relevance and HR’s capability to execute on them, and by establishing share ownership.

HR leaders can improve change effectiveness and reduce change by focusing on three things:

1. Determining where transformative change is taking place in the organization
2. Collaborating with business leaders and change sponsors to evaluate change impact, readiness and value at the onset of planning to ensure early buy-in (and determine when to say no)
3. Identifying and amplifying designated change influencers who are embedded in the process to boost change adoption

To show business value via HR technology, HR leaders should define the outcomes they are seeking first – both business and talent. HR leaders should go beyond using technology for automation and efficiencies, and seek technologies that enable HR’s strategic business value, including identifying the potential value from GenAI as its capabilities evolve.