HR professionals have long wrestled with how best to train employees for leadership positions. In 2015, 39% said “developing the next generation of organizational leaders” would be their biggest human capital challenge over the next decade, according to SHRM.

Texas Children’s Hospital, headquartered in Houston, has invested in leadership development for 20 years, but its employees’ needs shifted during the pandemic, according to EVP and CHRO Linda Aldred.

“Trying to develop leaders, it no longer feels like one size fits all, and we don’t think it should anymore,” Alrdred said. Her team, which oversees HR operations at the largest children’s hospital in the US, started exploring ways to make their leadership development offerings more scalable and flexible, in the interest of responding to individual employees’ needs.

The result is a partnership with BetterUp, a virtual platform offering coaching and mental health resources. Aldred spoke exclusively with HR Brew about the investment.

Keep reading here.—CV

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Change and disruption are constant, and the world looks pretty different than it did 5 years ago. But with all that change comes an opportunity to find new ways to work and thrive. Learn from the best in the biz about how to make that change work for you (and your big plans for the future).

Watch the keynote to learn how to:

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Day 1 starts today. Get the insights you need to move into the future with confidence. Catch the keynote on demand here.

Your managers aren’t really feeling it right now, and by “it,” we mean your company.

A recent Glassdoor report found that middle managers’ confidence in their employers’ six-month outlook dipped nearly 6% compared to last year, “as the economy slows and employees experienced a wave of layoffs at the start of 2023.” By contrast, entry-level employees’ confidence in their companies—which is historically lower than that of middle managers, according to Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor—fell just 0.1%.

“There’s been a more drastic decrease over the last year for middle managers…and I think really this comes down to the fact that middle managers have felt the squeeze of layoffs,” Zhao told HR Brew. “Middle managers are important bellwethers for how business is doing. They’re not so high up in the company that they lose their connection to frontline employees.”

HR pros can play a strategic role in combating middle managers’ depleted confidence in their employers.

Keep reading here.—MC

Most champions of AI predict the tech won’t replace jobs entirely, but instead take on the mundane and repetitive tasks most employees dread. But what about jobs organized around this kind of work?

Interns perform data entry; law clerks proofread opinions; medical residents are regularly assigned scut work. These tasks seem tailor-made for bots.

The availability of entry-level roles in professional firms in the legal, tax and accounting, global trade, and risk management fields is expected to decrease over the next 18 months to five years, according to a new report from Thomson Reuters.

Mary Alice Vuicic, CPO at Thomson Reuters, said professionals in fields that lean on green employees to tackle mundane work to both familiarize themselves with the organization and industry and grow their early careers will need to reimagine what those positions look like.

Keep reading here.—AD

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Some 80% of employers expect to give their employees more financial wellness benefits in 2024. (Plan Adviser)

Quote: “Is there truth to some of these claims about the dangers of AI? I believe, yes, those are true if the technologies are not used in an ethical and responsible way.”—Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday, on the impact of AI on HR (HR Executive)

Read: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation wants at least 30% of its workforce to be made up of women by 2030. (the Sacramento Bee)

Won’t you stay?: Find out how companies are partnering with CareerBuilder to retain top talent—and get a sneak peek into the current state of hiring. Download the report.*

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