Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #360

Updated AI impact analysis, internal mobility, unlocking workforce capacity, change readiness, and new book on the changing leadership landscape.

Author

Brian Heger
August 16, 2026

PRESENTED BY

Welcome to the new issue of Talent Edge Weekly!

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If you’re part of my private community, Talent Edge Circle, this is a reminder that we have an upcoming discussion this week you won’t want to miss.

On Thursday, Aug 20, Patti Phillips, CEO of the ROI Institute, will join us for a 90-minute discussion on Demonstrating the ROI and Impact of Talent Initiatives.

And thanks again to Dave Ulrich, Co-Founder & Principal at The RBL Group, for recently joining us to discuss Creating Stakeholder Value Through Human Capability. Check out last week’s issue to learn about two learning opportunities from Dave and his colleagues at RBL: the HR Learning Partnership (HRLP) and the RBL Institute.

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THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Below are links and descriptions of the topics covered in this issue. If you're interested in my deep dive, you can read the full newsletter.

Also, check out my job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer move of the week, which is an excerpt from my CHROs on the Go platform.

Now let’s dive in.

Brian Heger
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THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

AI & EMPLOYMENT

Updated research shares six findings on employment shifts since ChatGPT’s release. I expand on one related to early-career workers and include a recent Stanford webinar that goes deeper into the research.

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab just released an updated 140-page research paper, Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts About the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence. Using ADP payroll data through mid-2026, the authors examine employment shifts since ChatGPT's release. One insight relates to a topic I’ve covered often in Talent Edge Weekly: AI's impact on entry-level and early-career roles. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations is now about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations, up from 15% a year ago. The decline appears driven primarily by reduced hiring rather than increased separations. The declines are concentrated among younger workers in roles relying more on “codified knowledge” AI can increasingly reproduce, while experienced workers in those same occupations show no comparable decline and rely more on tacit knowledge built through judgment and experience. These insights reinforce the need to answer this question: as AI takes on more entry-level tasks, what work should replace them so early-career employees can still build the judgment and experience needed for future roles and strengthen the talent pipeline? As a bonus, here is a one-hour Stanford webinar on the updated research and its Canaries Dashboard, which tracks AI's impact on hiring by occupation, age, and gender.

INTERNAL MOBILITY

A recent study of 200,000+ workers explores how manager behaviors that support internal talent mobility can lead to various positive outcomes, including an increased number of lateral moves.

I am looking forward to attending the 2026 HR Tech Conference in October, where I will get a firsthand look at where HR technology, including internal mobility (IM) platforms, is headed next. But as I have shared many times, while technology is a critical enabler of IM, many non-technological factors also determine its impact. One example is organizational practices and guidelines that can unintentionally get in the way of talent movement, which I cover in my one-page diagnostic. Another underleveraged factor is the manager. A recent Quarterly Journal of Economics study of 200,000+ white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 11 years reinforces this point. Seven years after gaining a high-flyer manager (defined as reaching the first management level by age 30), employees’ lateral moves were 40% higher, including moves into different types of work and functions. Pay was also 13% higher, with 64% of the higher salary explained by lateral job changes. The organizational benefit went beyond mobility: these managers also increased employee sales productivity. What is most interesting is what these managers actually did to support IM: they spent more time in one-on-ones, provided structured feedback, created opportunities aligned with employees’ skills and aspirations, and encouraged employees to explore new roles, teams, and projects. As your organization invests in IM technology, is it making the same investment in the manager behaviors that enable mobility to actually happen?

ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY

My one-pager shares 9 ways organizational ways of working can quietly diminish workforce capacity, with warning signs to watch for and one practical next step to address each one.

One objective of workforce planning is ensuring that an organization has the workforce capacity to execute its critical goals and priorities. While acquiring more people (e.g., employees, contractors, etc.) is one way to increase workforce capacity, another way is to unlock capacity of an organization's existing workforce through improved ways of working. Picture a team losing 30% of its time to low-value meetings, prolonged decision-making processes, and work duplicated because no one is clearly accountable for it. By streamlining meetings, speeding up decision-making, and assigning clear ownership for shared work, that same team can free up significant capacity. For example, Shopify reclaimed 76,500+ meeting hours by cutting recurring meetings and completed 25% more projects. AT&T saved 3.6 million hours and over $230 million in three years by eliminating outdated processes, tools, and policies hindering effective ways of working. Where is there trapped capacity on your team and organization? My one-pager covers 9 barriers that quietly limit workforce capacity, from priority misalignment to goal creep (where goals gradually expand without recalibrating priorities and resources) to meeting overload, with the warning signs to watch for and one practical next step for each. As a bonus, since goal creep is one of the barriers covered, I am resharing my other one-pager, to help teams recalibrate goals intentionally.

CHANGE READINESS & CAPACITY

A new article offers a framework for increasing organizational readiness before launching a new strategy, including three conditions leaders should assess and tactics for strengthening each one.

I recently shared a post on organizational capacity to absorb change, drawing on research showing employees can realistically take on only one or two major changes per year, even though leaders are planning three or four by 2027. That post focused on the volume of change across an organization. This HBR article picks up a different thread: even when the volume of change is reasonable, a single initiative can still fail if the right conditions were never built before launch. The author calls this the Readiness Triad: appetite (are people genuinely committed to the outcome and do they see it as theirs to shape), capacity (does the organization have the bandwidth, focus, and resilience to sustain the work), and skillset (the degree to which current capabilities match the actual demands of the work). McKinsey and BCG research cited in the article finds roughly 30% of large-scale change programs deliver expected value, with execution failures tracing to one of these gaps, not a flawed strategy. A few tactics proposed for each: for appetite, explicitly connect the work to something people value. For skillset, create low-stakes practice before the real stakes get high. For capacity, postpone one initiative so another can succeed, or shift resources to what matters most. On that last point, I am resharing my one-page template that helps leaders see all organizational changes in one view, so they can make strategic choices about resource allocation, timing, pacing, and other decisions that determine the success of change efforts.

LEADERSHIP

I highlight this new book, edited by Sheri Feinzig, Ph.D., and Mariangela Battista, Ph.D., which brings together nearly 50 contributors to examine how leadership is changing, along with strategies and tactics for leading effectively in this new era.

As someone who contributed a chapter, Enabling Strategic Workforce Planning Through Skills, Artificial Intelligence, and Internal Talent Marketplace, to Strategic Workforce Planning: Best Practices and Emerging Directions (SIOP Professional Practice Series, March 29, 2024), edited by Marc Sokol, Ph.D., and Beverly Tarulli, Ph.D., I am always excited when the SIOP series releases a new book on an important topic. I value how these robust resources bring together perspectives from corporate practice, academia, and consulting to help translate ideas into practices that create stakeholder value. That is why I had been eagerly awaiting the recent release of The Changing Leadership Landscape: New Challenges, New Expectations, New Actions, edited by Sheri Feinzig, Ph.D. and Mariangela Battista, Ph.D.. Spanning 500+ pages and 27 chapters, with nearly 50 contributing authors, the book examines how leadership is changing amid hybrid and remote work, AI, and continued disruption, while also offering strategies and tactics for leading effectively in this new era. I'm looking forward to exploring these themes further this fall when Sheri and Mariangela join my private community for internal HR practitioners, Talent Edge Circle, as guest speakers for a practical and strategic discussion on this very topic.

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TALENT REVIEWS

My cheat sheet on the three interrelated tactics that determine whether a talent review leads to action or just conversation.

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