Your Organization Is Changing. Is Your Talent Team Ready?

We asked 103 talent leaders whether they are equipped for what’s coming. The answer should concern every CEO, board, and funder.

A guest post by Danielle Pickens, CEO, US Human Capital Academy.

A few days ago, I wrote an article on how talent strategy doesn’t happen on its own. You cannot set ambitious goals and assume the workforce you need to deliver them will simply appear.

But there is another part of this conversation we need to have: Who are we asking to lead that work? And are they actually equipped to do it?

Think about what your organization is navigating right now. Perhaps it’s funding that is less predictable than it was two years ago. Pressure to merge, consolidate, or partner your way to stability. AI arriving faster than your policies. Roles that have to be redesigned because the old version of the job is no longer attractive to a new generation of talent.

Every one of those challenges has a workforce implication. A merger becomes a staffing and organizational design challenge. A budget cut requires decisions about reductions, roles, and redeployment. AI changes which work people do and what capabilities they need. New expectations require new roles, skills, and ways of working.

And eventually, much of that work lands on your HR or Talent team.

So we wanted to know: Are the people responsible for the workforce actually equipped for what organizations increasingly need them to do?

At the US Human Capital Academy, we spent the last year asking. In winter 2026, we surveyed 103 K-12 HR and Talent leaders and ran focus groups with more than 60 others. We published the findings this month in Voices of HR 2026.

Our data comes from school systems, but the pattern does not. Every time I have shared these numbers with leaders outside education, the response is some version of: “That is us.”

Finding 1: The people responsible for strategy have almost no time for it

Eighty-two percent of Chief Talent Officers told us they are overwhelmed or stretched thin. Just 4 percent said they have meaningful capacity for strategic work. Among rural leaders, that number was zero.

They are not idle. When we asked where their time goes, the top three answers were day-to-day operations, people management, and crisis response. Strategic planning ranked fourth. Fifty-three percent said compliance demands had grown in just the past two years.

Think about what that means. The people being asked to anticipate workforce needs, redesign jobs, develop leaders, navigate AI, improve retention, and advise the CEO are spending most of their time keeping today's operation moving.

In your organization: Look at the people who own talent strategy. How much of their week is actually available to think ahead? If most of their time is spent clearing a queue, responding to crises, and meeting compliance requirements, how can they prepare your organization for what’s next?

Finding 2: Internal talent decisions become someone else's daily experience

This is the heart of the report for me. In schools, talent decisions are not abstract. A student experiences them as a prepared teacher who stays, a rotating cast of substitutes, or an empty desk at the front of the room.

The data bears it out. Leaders with adequately staffed talent teams were twice as likely to report retaining at least 80 percent of their new teachers. Systems that post positions early fill them in about 40 days. Those that post late take 77. Two in three leaders said vacancies land hardest in their highest-need schools, the schools least able to absorb the disruption.

The distance between an internal staffing decision and someone's experience of your organization is much shorter than most leadership teams assume. In a school, a delayed hire means a student gets another substitute. In another organization, it may mean someone waits longer for a service, a client gets a third case manager in one year, a program scales back, or a relationship never gets built.

In your organization: What does a vacancy, a bad hire, or persistent turnover look like from the perspective of the people you serve?

Finding 3: The people responsible for everyone else's pipeline have almost no pipeline of their own

Fifteen percent of school systems have a well-developed succession plan for their top talent role. Thirty-four percent of Chief Talent Officers have been in the job less than two years. When a strong leader leaves, the relationships, institutional knowledge, and strategy often leave with them.

Then there is the number I keep coming back to. We asked these leaders whether they would recommend this career to someone else. The Net Promoter Score was negative three. Among non-chiefs, the people most likely to step into the top job next, it was negative eight.

We are asking these leaders to build pipelines for everyone else while the pipeline behind them is disappearing.

The people are not the problem. The job is.

In your organization: Pick your three hardest leadership roles and ask the people holding them: Would you recommend this job to a talented friend? If the answer is no, pay attention. You can invest heavily in leadership development and still lose the people you develop if the jobs you are preparing them for are not jobs they actually want.

Finding 4: The people who will help determine how AI changes the workforce do not feel ready

Twenty-four percent of the talent leaders we surveyed said they are ready to guide system-wide AI decisions. Forty-four percent said they are not ready at all. And 68 percent named AI as their top request for professional development, making it the single most requested topic in the survey.

That matters because AI is too often treated primarily as a technology question. It is also a workforce question. Which work should still be done by people? Which tasks should be automated? Which roles will change? What new capabilities will people need? How should work be redistributed when technology takes on part of it? How do we make sure we are improving the employee or client experience rather than simply making an old process faster?

These decisions cannot belong only to the person in your organization who happens to be most curious about AI. The people responsible for the workforce need to help lead them. And right now, many of them are telling us they have not been prepared to do that.

In your organization: Who is making decisions about AI, and is your talent leader part of that conversation? More importantly, have you invested in building their capacity to help answer the workforce questions AI is already creating?

The change is coming either way

The consolidation, the funding pressure, the AI decisions, the leadership turnover. None of it is waiting for your organization to be ready. And nearly every one of those challenges will eventually become a people decision.

So the real question for CEOs, boards, and funders is: Have we equipped the people responsible for our workforce to help lead the organization through what comes next?

There is enormous leverage in the answer. Strengthen one talent team and you can change the experience of an entire workforce and, ultimately, the people that workforce exists to serve. Few investments reach so many people through so few.

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Danielle Pickens is CEO of the US Human Capital Academy, a national practitioner community working with school systems and state education agencies to equip HR and Talent leaders to recruit, develop, deploy, retain, and sustain the great educators our students need every day.

Voices of HR 2026: What Superintendents, Funders, and State Leaders Need to Know to Ensure Great Teaching for Every Student Daily is available here. 

A footnote on the Voices of HR title: A colleague at Volution Advisors suggested I retitle the paper to the Voices of Talent Leaders. “HR” signals compliance, paperwork, and the person who emails you about benefits enrollment, she told me. Nobody picks up a paper about HR. 

She is right about the perception, but I decided to keep the title anyway. Renaming a function does not redefine it, and the distance between what we assume HR is responsible for and what actually runs through that function is part of the point.