How well do your People priorities actually power your business goals for H2 - and beyond?

After a full-on H1, 2025 isn’t easing up. The pressure to deliver meaningful progress before year-end is on.

Growth through transformation is still the priority for CEOs:
🔸 62% have made it their #1 focus
🔸 79% have reshaped their business strategies for the post-crisis era (Gartner)

And yet… only 28% of People team leaders say their plans are fully integrated with business strategy (Gartner). That’s a big disconnect — and a missed opportunity.
Too often, we nurture well-meaning People initiatives that aren’t fully anchored in what the business needs right now. Meanwhile, execs may not always see how the People function can unlock value beyond operations. That’s on us — to show up as commercial enablers.

As you recalibrate your People priorities for H2 (and start shaping 2026), here are five thought-starters to reflect on:
🔹 Culture: your accelerator or your anchor
Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Hofstede described it as “the collective programming of the mind”.
Culture is what your strategy walks on. If it’s shaky, progress wobbles. If it’s aligned, strategy flies.
Step back & assess if your culture accelerates or hinders your strategic ambitions. People experts can help decode this for you.
🔹 It’s not just what you launch — it’s what sticks
Launching new people initiatives is exciting- but real value comes from embedding them. Now’s a good time to take a clear-eyed look: What has or hasn’t worked and why, what needs to be bravely killed off. Use learning loops to preserve what works, pivot what doesn’t, and stay agile.
🔹 Change capacity has a ceiling
Change fatigue is real — 73% of People leaders are seeing it (Gartner).
It’s not just the big transformations, but the micro-changes that stack up.
Trust and team cohesion boost your organisation’s capacity for change significantly — by 2.6x and 1.8x respectively.
Check the pulse on leadership energy, confidence, and collaboration. Are you ready to land more (people) change — or is it time to rebalance?
🔹 Outcome>Output
We People folk love to deliver. But solving the right people problems is what really unlocks value.
Now’s the time to slow down to speed up:
→ Diagnose root causes with tangible data
→ Align on business-critical problems
→ Define the people outcomes that unlock results
Less activity, more intention.
🔹 Zoom out
It’s easy to stay stuck in the internal people swirl. There’s a wealth of people insight out there to help you pressure-test priorities, spot blind spots, and decide what to be best, better, or simply good enough at.
Step out of the internal people bubble to stay sharp and deliberate.

Curious whether your People priorities are really fuelling your business ambitions?Let’s grab a virtual coffee. No pressure — just an honest, energising chat. Drop me a note.