A new report from a leading HR research firm warns of a growing structural risk within organizations: leadership capacity is failing to keep pace with the rapid rate of technological and workplace change. This widening gap is creating tension, fatigue, and missed opportunities for strategic innovation.
Quick Intel
McLean & Company's HR Trends Report 2026 identifies a growing gap between organizational change and leadership capacity.
The top three HR priorities for 2026 are developing leaders, enabling innovation, and retaining employees.
Only 35% of HR teams are highly effective at developing leaders, despite leaders being central to managing change and innovation.
Innovation has surged to become the #2 HR priority, rising from tenth place in 2025.
Change fatigue is rising as AI adoption outpaces human readiness and strategic direction.
The report positions HR as a strategic, stabilizing force essential for guiding organizations through uncertainty.
The 2026 HR Trends Report from McLean & Company, based on data from 1,626 organizations, paints a picture of a workplace under strain. While external pressures from AI, economic shifts, and new employee expectations accelerate transformation, the internal systems designed to support adaptation—leadership capability, cultural alignment, and change readiness—are lagging behind. This disconnect is no longer theoretical; it is visible in daily operations through rising employee change fatigue and leaders struggling to manage both technological and people-driven transformations simultaneously.
“Organizations are trying to move faster than ever, but their systems for leadership, culture, and change haven't fully caught up,” says Karen Mann, Senior Vice President of Research at McLean & Company. The firm advises that in this environment, HR must evolve from a reactive support function into the organization's de facto stabilizing force, increasingly relied upon to navigate complex challenges while maintaining cohesion.
The report’s list of top HR priorities for the coming year underscores a strategic pivot from cost containment to capability building. The ranking reveals a meaningful shift: while developing leaders remains the perennial top priority, enabling innovation has surged from tenth place in 2025 to second place in 2026. Concurrently, controlling labor costs has dropped in relative importance.
This reordering signals that organizations are recognizing that navigating ongoing disruption requires more than efficiency; it requires intentional investment in people to build long-term resilience and adaptability. The focus on leadership (#1), innovation (#2), and retention (#3) highlights a concerted effort to develop the workforce and enable new ways of working to secure a competitive advantage.
Leadership development retaining its position as the #1 HR priority reflects the acknowledged central role leaders play. However, the data reveals a persistent and problematic capability gap. McLean & Company finds that organizations with highly effective people leaders are 2.3 times more likely to be high performers in innovation and agility. Despite this clear correlation, only 35% of HR teams report being highly effective at developing their organization's leaders.
This indicates that traditional development programs may be falling short. The report emphasizes the need to move beyond periodic training and embed continuous, practical learning into leaders' daily routines. Strengthening foundational people-leadership capabilities and integrating expectations into talent processes like performance management are key to closing this gap.
Two additional areas require urgent HR attention: aligning culture with strategy and implementing structured foresight.
Culture as a Strategic Lever: As business strategies evolve, organizational culture must keep pace. The report finds that companies where culture, values, and strategy are aligned are twice as likely to excel at innovation and adaptability. A critical failing is that fewer than half of organizations hold leaders accountable for acting in alignment with stated values, which erodes trust and slows change. HR is advised to regularly revisit core values, integrate them into leadership expectations, and actively position culture as a tool for transformation.
The Power of Scenario Planning: In a climate where 70% of organizations report challenges with managing change, scenario planning emerges as a high-impact solution. However, it remains underutilized, with only 22% of organizations using a structured approach. Those that do are 2.1 times more likely to be high-performing in innovation and 1.8 times more likely to excel at executing strategic goals. The mandate for HR is to shift from ad-hoc responses to guiding leaders in structured foresight, helping them anticipate multiple futures and reduce the strain of uncoordinated change.
A key driver of the change-capacity gap is the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence. The report notes that AI integration is moving from pilot projects to being embedded in everyday operations. However, the people side of this transformation is lagging. Many HR teams are not highly effective at enabling technology adoption, and employees are reporting increased fatigue from constantly evolving tools and workflows.
McLean & Company stresses that sustainable AI transformation is not merely a technological upgrade but a profound leadership, culture, and change management challenge. It requires a close, strategic partnership between HR and IT to ensure implementation is both responsible and human-centric, focusing on readiness and adoption rather than just deployment.
The overarching conclusion of the HR Trends Report 2026 is that this is a pivotal moment for the HR function itself. The widening gap between the pace of change and leadership capacity presents a significant risk but also a clear mandate. HR is uniquely positioned to close this gap by building strong people leaders, ensuring cultural alignment, and introducing structured approaches to uncertainty. By doing so, HR can solidify its role as an indispensable strategic leader, guiding organizations to innovate effectively while building the resilience needed to thrive amid continuous disruption.
About McLean & Company
McLean & Company pairs evidence-based research and immediately applicable tools with deep HR expertise to position organizations to meet today's needs and prepare for the future. The global HR research and advisory firm's member organizations enjoy comprehensive resources, full-service diagnostics, workshops, action plans, and advisory services for all levels of HR professionals, from executive leadership and HR leaders to HR team members, that help shape workplaces where everyone thrives
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