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- Talent Edge Weekly - Issue 354 - Best of June 2026
Talent Edge Weekly - Issue 354 - Best of June 2026
The top 20 articles and resources—plus bonus resources—from the June 2026 issues of Talent Edge Weekly.
Brian Heger
June 30, 2026
SPONSORED BY
Welcome to this special Best of June issue of Talent Edge Weekly!
First, a shout-out to Bridget Penney, Chief People Officer at Applied Systems, for referring new subscribers to Talent Edge Weekly. Thank you, Bridget, for your support of this newsletter!
PRESENTED BY Draup
Boards are no longer impressed by AI initiatives or pilot counts. They want to know whether management can turn AI into real enterprise value.
Draup's latest boardroom briefing shows CEOs, CHROs, and executive teams what directors actually want to see.
The questions directors now lead with, answered with evidence
Why workforce readiness, not technology, is the real constraint
What AI buys at constant headcount
How to benchmark against peers on talent
The scorecard that ties AI spend to enterprise value
Grounded in real enterprise examples, this paper helps executive teams turn AI activity into evidence of real business value.
THIS MONTH’S CONTENT
This Best of June issue includes the 20 most popular resources from the June issues of Talent Edge Weekly. They span three sections:
AI & The Future of Work. Explores AI and the future of work, including AI-human collaboration, AI adoption strategy, the impact of AI on early-career pathways, AI's erosion of critical human skills, AI's burden on middle managers, and the impact of AI on the future of coaching.
HR Impact and HR Function. Covers HR impact and function, including communicating the human capital narrative to stakeholders, HR's overall perception and sentiments of the HR function, and leading employees through organizational change.
Talent Practices. Addresses talent practices, including critical role identification, critical role talent placement assessment, performance goal recalibration, workforce and scenario planning, succession planning, leadership transitions from manager to leader, internal mobility, mid-career talent mobility, develop-in-place tactics, and employee reskilling.
There are bonus resources, such as information about company layoffs and movement in and out of the Chief HR Officer role.
My Private Community for Internal HR
As we enter July, the first half of 2026 is behind us. For many HR practitioners, the window to make meaningful progress on this year's most critical priorities is getting shorter, not longer.
And as someone who has spent most of his career as an internal HR practitioner with organizations such as AT&T, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bristol Myers Squibb, I know firsthand how valuable it is to have a trusted, curated group of other internal HR practitioners who are in similar roles, navigating similar priorities, and working through similar talent challenges in other organizations.
If you want to go deeper with me and other internal HR practitioners on talent topics tied to your most critical priorities, I invite you to learn more about my private community, Talent Edge Circle.
The goal is simple: to help you cut through the noise and complexity so you can accelerate the execution of your critical talent priorities.
Don't let the rest of the year pass by without the right support and community around you. Apply today.
Let’s dive in.
THIS MONTH’S EDGE
I. AI & THE FUTURE OF WORK
Explores AI and the future of work, including AI-human collaboration, AI adoption strategy, the impact of AI on early-career pathways, AI's erosion of critical human skills, AI's burden on middle managers, and the impact of AI on the future of coaching.
AI & HUMAN COLLABORATION
A 44-page report identifies five priority changes that leaders will need to embrace in the age of human–AI collaboration. I expand on building proactive external talent pipelines.
McKinsey released its HR Monitor, an annual benchmark survey on the biggest global workforce and HR trends. This year, the report focuses on five priority changes that leaders will need to embrace in the age of human–AI collaboration. The 44-page report covers topics such as workforce planning, talent acquisition, employee development, and employee experience. One section I want to zoom in on is the talent acquisition chapter, which emphasizes building proactive pipelines through active relationship management with passive candidates, strong referral programs, and reengaging prior "runner-up" candidates. An often-overlooked pipeline source I would add is former employees. Although not every former employee makes sense to re-recruit, some high performers who voluntarily left may want to return after realizing their new role and/or culture was not the right fit. And research supports the case for rehiring. A study in the Academy of Management Journal found former employees often outperform new hires in roles requiring relational skills and coordination, while research in Organization Science shows returning employees tend to help colleagues more than external hires. Is rehiring part of your talent strategy? As you think through your strategy, consider a Visier analysis that found the average time away before returning is 13 months (up to 36), but likelihood drops sharply after 16, making 13 to 16 months the critical window. Don't let that window close. These are the types of strategic discussions we have in my private community, Talent Edge Circle.
AI IMPACT
A new 29-page report with findings from BCG’s fourth annual AI at Work survey, including how AI use and time savings are rising, but translating it into value remains a struggle.
BCG released the findings from its fourth annual AI at Work report, based on responses from 11,749 workers across 14 markets. One headline: 74% of frontline white-collar workers now regularly use AI, up 23 percentage points in one year, with 42% reporting a full workday or more saved per week. Time savings are even higher in functions such as marketing (60%), IT (53%), and human resources (50%). Yet, most organizations have not yet learned to convert that time into value. In fact, 66% of frontline employees who reported time savings say they receive limited or no guidance on what to do with it, and more than half are not reinvesting it into more strategic work. A few other stats I pulled from the report that might help to explain what is blocking that conversion: nearly half are spending more time directing AI than doing the work itself, with 72% saying AI has changed the skills expected of them. And 60% say the bar for what counts as good enough is rising. Add to this what BCG calls the joy paradox, where regular AI users report higher job satisfaction and greater cognitive load simultaneously, and these factors compound making it harder to translate “time savings” into true value. A good starting point for HR leaders: where is the greatest AI-driven time savings taking place in your organization, what is preventing it from being converted into value, and what is the plan for closing that gap?
IMPACT OF AI ON ENTRY-LEVEL ROLES
A new 42-page report shares a four-component framework for reinventing early-career pathways in an AI era.
Entry-level roles have long served as a foundation for building the institutional knowledge, judgment, and tacit skills that underpin long-term organizational capability. But as AI reshapes how work is performed, early-career workers are feeling the effects directly. This new report indicates that 37% of young workers globally are employed in occupations with medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change. The report offers a four-component framework for identifying where risk is emerging and what deliberate action is needed: job access (how organizations hire and onboard early-career talent as AI shifts role requirements); job design (how roles are restructured to develop capability rather than just execute tasks); talent pipelines (how organizations continue building future managers, specialists, and leaders); and education system alignment (how learning systems keep pace with rapidly changing workforce needs). Regarding job redesign, rather than simply automating entry-level tasks, some organizations are redesigning early-career roles so they continue building capability, judgment, and future leadership pipelines. In April, I made this post on how IBM is tripling its U.S. entry-level hiring in 2026 while redesigning junior roles around judgment, oversight, and customer engagement. Last month, I shared this post on how one banking organization is redesigning entry-level roles so junior analysts challenge AI outputs for incorrect assumptions, missing data, and logical flaws. How is AI changing early-career roles in your organization? Do you have a strategy for redefining them before the gap shows up in your leadership bench?
AI AND SKILLS
A new BCG article argues that over-reliance on AI erodes critical human skills such as judgment and creative thinking, and offers six strategies to address it
Layoffs and job cuts have dominated much of the recent headlines about AI and its impact. The Challenger Job Cuts Report, a monthly tracker of U.S.-based corporate layoff announcements, reported that AI led cited reasons for job cuts for the third month in a row. Separate from the job cuts narrative, a less visible risk is quietly compounding: organizations leaning too heavily on AI may be weakening the human capabilities they need most. A new BCG article argues that without deliberate design, widespread AI adoption leads to distributed de-skilling: the collective erosion of critical thinking, judgment, and problem framing across an organization. Half of the leaders surveyed say they are already seeing this, and more than 60% expect it to become a real threat within three to five years. The skills most at risk, such as judgment, problem framing, and creative thinking, are the same ones considered most essential to long-term performance. The article offers six strategies. Two stood out: redesigning work so humans retain ownership of judgment (Shell requires early-career employees to frame problems and build a baseline before using AI); and making human skill development visible in performance management (at CNIL, managers assess employees on their ability to challenge AI outputs, not just use them). As organizations identify the human skills most essential to their strategy, I am resharing a 39-page World Economic Forum report, New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage.
IMPACT OF AI ON MIDDLE MANAGERS
A new article examines how AI adoption could be creating an uneven distribution of burden across organizational levels, with middle managers absorbing most of it.
Much of the discussion around AI has focused on how efficiency gains will help employees create new forms of value. But does this hold true in all cases? A new HBR article explores who captures AI’s upside and who absorbs its costs. Based on 18 interviews across two major consulting firms, it finds AI is enabling role elevation at the junior and senior levels, but not in the middle. Junior consultants are moving into work they may not have done as early before, such as joining strategy conversations that were once more likely handled by senior staff. Senior leaders are also expanding the scope of work they can take on. But the middle manager layer is where the pressure seems to be building. Managers are now expected to validate AI outputs, catch what the authors call workslop (AI-generated content that looks professional but lacks substance), coach teams on AI use, and maintain quality standards, while still facing the same delivery pressure and limited formal support. This adds to an existing middle-manager burnout problem, already shaped by leaner structures, layoffs, and broader spans of control. It also raises a longer-term concern: if managers spend more time checking AI-generated work, they may have less capacity for the coaching and apprenticeship that help develop future leaders. While based on a small sample of consultants, the article usefully challenges the simplistic “AI frees everyone up for higher-value work” narrative. Question: When your organization measures AI adoption success, are you tracking what is happening to manager workload and capacity, and the unintended consequences on other important outcomes?
AI-ENABLED COACHING
The inaugural ICF report explores how coaching might evolve by 2036 across four scenarios, ranging from AI-dominant delivery to community-centered human connection.
Last month, I had the pleasure of having Dr. Anna Tavis — Clinical Professor and Chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU and author of The Digital Coaching Revolution (2024) — join my private community, Talent Edge Circle, as a guest for a discussion on how AI-enabled and digital coaching are reshaping how organizations develop employees at scale. We covered everything from the democratization of coaching and the emergence of fully AI-powered coaches to privacy and data ownership, to name a few. As this topic continues to generate strong interest among Talent Edge Weekly readers, I want to share this 76-page report by the International Coaching Federation. While published earlier this year, it remains highly relevant for HR, learning, and talent leaders thinking through how coaching strategy and tactics may need to evolve, including the role AI-enabled coaching might play. It provides a glimpse into five drivers of change shaping the future of coaching and four plausible scenarios for what coaching could look like by 2036, from a high-tech, high-collaboration future where AI expands access broadly, to scenarios marked by digital divides or a return to locally rooted, human-centered models. The report provides a useful starting point as you begin to think through how AI-enabled coaching might fit into your organization's overall coaching strategy. For those already in Talent Edge Circle, the replay and discussion notes from our conversation with Anna are also available in the community.
II. HR IMPACT & FUNCTION
Covers HR impact and function, including communicating the human capital narrative to stakeholders, HR's overall perception and sentiments of the HR function, and leading employees through organizational change.
HR CREATING STAKEHOLDER VALUE
A chapter from the recently released open-access eBook (Age of HR) examines how organizations can tailor their human capital narrative to different stakeholder groups, including the metrics that can support it.
A few weeks ago, I shared a new open-access eBook, The Age of HR, edited by Anthony Nyberg, Rebecca Kehoe, Dave Ulrich, and Patrick Wright. This excellent 332-page resource brings together 85 global thought leaders across 62 chapters organized around four human capability domains: talent, organization, leadership, and HR. Given the depth and breadth of topics covered, I will highlight one chapter each week over the next few issues. This week, I want to draw attention to Chapter 56, Telling the Human Capital Narrative, by Patti Phillips and Rebecca Ray, beginning on page 262. They share how different stakeholder groups, such as investors, current and prospective employees, customers, and strategic partners, are each likely to be most interested in different parts of an organization's human capital narrative. Their guidance covers how to start with the business-related challenge or opportunity that has the attention of key stakeholders, a topic on which I have shared many of my own resources, including Framing Talent Initiatives Within the Business Context, through to the metrics that can help support the narrative shared with each group. As CHROs and their teams work to tailor their human capital narrative to key audiences while drawing from a single source of truth, this chapter provides practical and actionable guidance. For those in my private community for internal HR practitioners, Talent Edge Circle, I look forward to Patti joining us in August for a discussion on demonstrating the ROI of HR, and to Dave Ulrich joining us next month for a discussion on how HR practitioners can deliver more stakeholder value through human capability (talent, organization, leadership and HR).
HR SENTIMENT
A new 38-page report examines the perceptions of HR professionals about various aspects of the HR function.
There is no shortage of survey reports on how HR is thinking about the priorities it will focus on for any given year. However, this recently published report by The Talent Strategy Group takes a different angle by gaining insights on the perceptions that HR professionals have about the function itself, from how engaged HR is to where the profession is stalling. While there are several insights across this 38-page report — based on a census of 500+ HR professionals across levels, functions, and geographies — one that stood out is the recommendation to make commercial fluency and interest a hiring and promotion criterion for HR roles. The report finds that HR professionals who are in the function primarily to help their organization succeed financially, and who genuinely believe in the mission of the companies they work for, are more likely to reach senior levels, and that this orientation appears to be a condition of advancement rather than something that develops once people arrive. The report draws a pointed distinction: business acumen is a skill, meaning the ability to present HR in business terms. Commercial orientation is something different: it is whether someone is fundamentally in HR because they want their company to win. One practical implication for Chief HR Officers is to audit HR hiring and promotion criteria and ask whether it screens for commercial orientation, not just business acumen. There are many other insights in the report, so you will want to be sure to dig through it. Thanks to Marc Effron and The Talent Strategy Group for bringing us these insights.
CHANGE ENABLEMENT
Outlines three suggestions for managing change more effectively. I build on the one related to sequencing change based on employees’ capacity.
As organizations implement new technologies, AI tools, team restructurings, and other organizational changes, change fatigue has become a growing concern for HR and business leaders. Change fatigue happens when the volume and pace of change outpaces what employees can realistically absorb. Prosci's 2023 Best Practices in Change Management Report found that the average organization is managing five major change initiatives at any given time. Many are juggling 10 or more once smaller projects and process changes are factored in. A new MIT Sloan Management Review article adds important context: research cited in the piece finds that employees can realistically absorb only one or two major changes per year, yet leaders are planning three or four by 2027. Most organizations don't fail at change because they are doing too much. They fail because they are not intentional about the cumulative changes occurring at the same time. The article outlines three suggestions for managing change more effectively, including sequencing change with people's capacity in mind. With this as the backdrop, I am resharing my one-page template that provides space to capture current and proposed changes, priority level, degree of impact, timing, risks, and recommended action. It gives leaders a practical starting point for aligning the pace of change with what employees can realistically handle.
III. TALENT PRACTICES
Addresses talent practices, including critical role identification, critical role talent placement assessment, performance goal recalibration, workforce and scenario planning, succession planning, leadership transitions from manager to leader, internal mobility, mid-career talent mobility, develop-in-place tactics, and employee reskilling.
CRITICAL ROLE RISK
My one-page cheat sheet to evaluate six risk factors in your critical roles and prioritize actions accordingly.
In every organization, a segment of roles (~20%) have a disproportionately large impact on strategy execution and business performance. These are often referred to as critical or pivotal roles. But simply knowing which roles are critical isn't enough. The real value comes from strategically and proactively managing talent investments in these roles. A good starting point is knowing where risks exist in critical roles and how to convert these risks into a talent advantage. My cheat sheet helps you evaluate your critical roles across six risk factors: Top Talent Risk (the best talent is not in the role), Incumbent Risk (high risk of the incumbent leaving the role in the near future), Internal Bench Risk (weak internal pipeline for backfilling this role), Development Risk (challenging to develop internal talent within a reasonable timeframe and cost), External Talent Risk (hiring externally would take considerable time and cost), and Role Change Sensitivity Risk (the requirements and skills for this role are highly susceptible to rapid shifts from AI, automation, or changing business conditions). Input your critical roles (assuming you have a process for role identification) and click a box to indicate which risks apply. Upon completion, the visual will highlight where the greatest risks exist, helping you prioritize actions. This exercise is not about filling out a template. It is about jumpstarting a thought process and discussions that lead to more informed talent decisions in the roles that have an outsized impact on business performance.
TALENT IN CRITICAL ROLES
My cheat sheet offers five factors for evaluating whether a critical role is staffed with the talent needed to deliver its full value.
In recently shared my cheat sheet for evaluating six factors that can signal risk in an organization’s critical roles. These roles, which may represent roughly 20% of total roles, have a disproportionate impact on business strategy execution. The intent is to jumpstart discussions that help organizations proactively identify risks and turn those insights into actions that protect performance and strengthen talent advantage. One factor I presented is top talent risk, where a critical role is not occupied by the best available talent. This risk can signal an opportunity to strengthen organizational performance by ensuring the role is staffed with the talent needed to deliver its full value. To help make this determination, I’m sharing another cheat sheet that considers five factors, including performance results, such as whether the person is delivering what the role requires, and internal benchmarking, such as whether someone internal could perform the role significantly better. The cheat sheet also includes why each factor matters, probing questions, and indicators. These are examples, and you can use your judgment to determine the criteria that best fit your organization. As a bonus, here is another one of my cheat sheets on talent reviews, of which critical roles are often a part.
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