Top 5 priorities for HR leaders in 2025

This list of HR’s priorities helps me to explain how we work with clients. Most of the items on Gartner’s list are what we could call Step Two. So what’s Step One?

Step One is the strategic alignment and relationship-building that must be done before Step Two can actually be turned into reality and deliver ROI (e.g. designing and implementing programs).

Our focus at Enable-HR is Step One – helping HR to build its relationship with the business – building alignment, credibility, influence – and therefore impact at every level.

That’s what our original research showed – that what businesses want from HR is to build much more business-led approaches. That’s what we mean by Step One. Let me explain.

Step One is understanding what HR needs to deliver. You can only work that out by building and leveraging the relationship between HR and the business. Step One starts with understanding the business, and this is best done by learning via trusting relationships with the leaders and managers who have to deliver business results. HR has to learn from them what is really required. The CPO has to see HR’s priorities through a business lens. This can involve mastering the dynamics of your leadership team, in order to position yourself as a strategic partner rather than as a service provider. It certainly involves making sure that your voice is heard and valued by the CEO, CFO and other influential colleagues.

Working out the CPO’s mandate takes work, especially in the ever-increasing scope of the CPO role. It demands prioritising effectively, and leveraging resources. That often involves winning a budget, e.g. for improved HR tech or leadership development, and business leaders have to sign up to that. So there’s a lot of strategic influencing to do, not least getting senior leaders to take on board their own accountability for leading performance. Our focus, therefore, is on the interaction between HR and the business – from the top down.

Building productive relationships at every level means that the HR function can build alignment and unity, and present themselves to all stakeholders in the organisation as One HR Team. That’s when you can move successfully to Step Two – identifying the right priorities and executing them in ways that are practical and relevant for the business. And – because HR has credibility from the relationships that they have built – HR’s work is embraced and embedded.

We’ve developed a range of unique tools and concepts to help in this, including our strategic survey and a platform to bring your people analytics together into a hyper-flexible dashboard. Our clients appreciate that we’ve been there.

Our international team of consultants includes people like 4xCHRO Asad Husain and former CPO Rupert Brown, and we three will be running a season of high-level webinars in the coming months.

Message me for a conversation and/or to make sure you’re on our invitation list for events for strategic HR leaders.