Written by Kirsten McKenzie, Head of HR at Hunter Adams. This article is up to date as of September 2026.
September has always had something of a fresh-start feeling about it.
Perhaps it is years of conditioning from new school terms, new notebooks and, if you were lucky, a brand-new pencil case. But even in the workplace, September often feels like a natural point to reset.
Summer holidays come to an end. Leadership teams are back around the same table. Q4 is in our sights. And conversations are beginning about budgets, priorities and plans for 2027.
For leadership teams, it is a useful moment to ask a bigger question:
Are our people, managers and organisation actually ready for what comes next?
Because the leadership priorities shaping 2026 are not simply about setting a strategy and expecting people to follow it.
Organisations are navigating economic uncertainty, changing workforce expectations, AI adoption, employment law reform and ongoing pressure to improve productivity. At the same time, employees are looking for clarity, trust and strong leadership closer to home.
The leadership challenge is increasingly about connecting the two.
Here are five people priorities we think every leadership team should review this autumn.
1. Check your leadership team is genuinely aligned
Most leadership teams will have a business plan.
Fewer will be fully aligned on what delivering that plan means for their people.
That distinction matters.
Growth plans might require new capability. Cost pressures might require structural changes. AI investment might change roles or processes. An acquisition could require teams to integrate. A new strategy might require managers and employees to work very differently.
Leadership alignment therefore needs to go beyond agreeing on the numbers.
Ask whether everyone around the leadership table has the same answer to questions such as:
- What are the most important business priorities between now the start of next year?
- What will need to change for us to achieve them?
- What capabilities will we need more of, and less of?
- What decisions are likely to affect employees?
- What do managers need to communicate?
- What are we asking people to stop, start or do differently?
This becomes especially important during organisational change.
Research from McKinsey has found that C-suite engagement alone is not enough to make transformation successful. When transformations failed to engage line managers and frontline employees, only 3% of respondents described them as successful. When frontline employees had a genuine sense of ownership, reported transformation success reached 70%.
In other words, agreeing the strategy at board level is only the beginning.
Leaders then have to translate that strategy into something people throughout the organisation understand, believe and know how to act on.
That requires clarity and consistency, but increasingly it also requires emotional intelligence. Leaders need to understand how decisions are landing, recognise uncertainty and respond to challenge without becoming defensive.
Trust is built as much through how leaders behave during difficult periods as through what they say when things are going well.
Autumn leadership check: Ask each member of your leadership team to explain your three biggest organisational priorities and what they mean for employees. If the answers vary significantly, there is work to do before those messages travel any further.
If your organisation is already restructuring, redesigning teams, integrating businesses or preparing for a wider transformation, our Business Change Support Hub brings together practical guidance and support for managing the people side of change.
2. Turn your business plan into a workforce plan
Once the direction is clear, the next question is whether you have the workforce to deliver it.
Workforce planning can easily become an annual headcount exercise, but it should be much more useful than that.
Good workforce planning connects commercial plans with the people, skills, structures and capacity required to make them happen.
For example:
Are you growing? You may need to think about recruitment capacity, onboarding, management capability and whether your existing people processes will work at twice the size.
Are you reducing costs? You may need organisation design, skills analysis, redeployment planning or restructuring support.
Are you adopting AI? The question is not simply which tasks can be automated. It is what work will look like afterwards, which skills become more valuable and where people need development.
Are you entering a new market? You may need different leadership capability, specialist skills or changes to your operating model. You may also be considering a physical presence in a new geographic location.
The 2025 World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs research found that upskilling employees to work more effectively alongside AI is the most commonly anticipated workforce response to AI disruption, with 77% of surveyed employers planning to pursue it by 2030. Almost half also expect to redeploy people from AI-disrupted roles into other parts of their organisations.
That makes learning and development a workforce planning issue, not simply an HR programme.
It also makes succession planning increasingly important.
Where are your critical roles? Who could step into them? What knowledge sits with one individual? Which managers or specialists will you need 12 or 24 months from now?
Those questions are particularly important for businesses scaling quickly.
Processes that worked with 20 employees often begin to creak at 50. A leadership structure that worked at 50 may no longer work at 150. Informal communication gets harder. Founders and CEOs can become bottlenecks. New managers appear before there has been time to properly prepare them.
Our own work with growing organisations consistently reflects this progression: as a business scales, leadership capability, workforce planning, organisation design, HR infrastructure and culture require more deliberate attention.
If that sounds familiar, our HR Support for Scale-ups Hub explores the people foundations businesses need at different stages of growth.
3. Invest in the people in the middle
One of the clearest leadership trends of 2026 is the increasing importance of managers, and they are under pressure.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global manager engagement fell to just 22% in 2025, down nine percentage points since 2022. Individual contributor engagement stood at 19%.
The UK picture gives another clue.
The CIPD’s Good Work Index found that just 60% of managers say they have the training and information they need to manage people well, while only 59% say they have enough time to do it.
That should concern leadership teams.
Managers sit between business strategy and employee experience. They are expected to communicate change, manage performance, develop people, resolve conflict, support wellbeing and increasingly help employees adapt to new technology.
Yet many became managers because they were excellent engineers, accountants, project managers, salespeople or technical specialists.
People management is a different skill.
And the Employment Rights Act makes that capability even more important.
Our Accountable Manager whitepaper describes this as an accountability gap: managers are expected to take responsibility for increasingly complex people decisions without always receiving the training, confidence or practical support required to make those decisions well.
The answer is not another generic management course.
Development needs to focus on the moments managers encounter in real life:
- Having difficult conversations.
- Managing performance early rather than avoiding it.
- Giving useful feedback.
- Handling absence consistently and sensitively.
- Making fair decisions.
- Managing conflict.
- Leading teams through uncertainty.
- Knowing when to involve HR.
And increasingly, creating the conditions in which employees feel safe to challenge, experiment and speak up.
Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as creating an environment where nobody feels uncomfortable. It is really about whether people feel able to speak candidly, ask questions and raise concerns.
That matters even more as organisations experiment with AI and new ways of working. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index research found that where managers created psychological safety around AI experimentation, employees reported up to 20 percentage points higher AI readiness and value.
Strong managers create clarity and accountability while still making it safe for people to say, “I’m not sure”, “I disagree”, or “there might be a better way”.
That balance will become an increasingly valuable leadership skill.
Practical, scenario-based development, coaching, manager forums and useful conversation tools can all help. Our Accountable Manager white paper also recommends reinforcing development over time rather than treating management training as a one-off event.
Autumn leadership check: Look beyond your training calendar. Which people situations are managers currently avoiding, escalating or handling inconsistently? That is where your real capability gaps probably sit.
4. Make Employment Rights Act readiness a leadership issue
The Employment Rights Act 2025 should not sit solely on HR’s to-do list, and some changes are already in force.
Since 6 April 2026, Statutory Sick Pay has been payable from the first full day of sickness absence, the lower earnings threshold has been removed, and paternity leave and unpaid parental leave have become day-one rights.
More changes are approaching.
From 1 October 2026, the general time limit for bringing Employment Tribunal claims increases from three months to six months, with the equivalent contractual claim change in Scotland taking effect on 9 November. Further trade union measures follow on 30 October 2026.
Then, from 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal will fall from two years to six months, and the existing cap on compensatory awards for unfair dismissal will be removed.
For employers, the question this autumn should therefore be wider than:
Have we updated our policies?
It should also be:
Could our managers apply those policies fairly and confidently tomorrow morning?
Because policies do not manage absence.
They do not give performance feedback.
They do not respond when someone raises a sensitive concern.
They do not document why a decision was made.
Managers do.
Our Accountable Manager white paper makes this distinction clear: the frontline of employment risk increasingly sits with the line manager, because their day-to-day judgement, behaviour and communication turn organisational policy into employee experience.
This is why ERA readiness should include reviewing manager capability alongside contracts, policies and processes.
There is also an opportunity here.
Better management standards can reduce risk, but they can also improve trust, engagement and consistency across the organisation. Strong compliance and strong culture do not need to pull in opposite directions.
Used well, the Employment Rights Act can prompt improvements in how people are managed, rather than becoming another compliance exercise.
Our Business Change Support Hub includes further guidance on Employment Rights Act readiness, organisational change and manager accountability.
5. Re-engage your people before the Q4 push
September often marks the beginning of another intense period.
Targets need to be delivered. Budgets need finalised. Projects need finished. Next year’s planning starts before this year’s work has ended.
It can be tempting to respond by pushing harder.
Before you do, find out how your people are actually doing.
Gallup’s latest global research found that just 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025. In Europe, the figure was only 12%.
The CIPD’s UK research offers another warning. Around a quarter of workers say their job negatively affects their mental or physical health, with excessive workloads, pressure, workplace relationships and the quality of line management among the strongest associated factors.
Engagement does not mean trying to manufacture enthusiasm for Q4.
It means understanding what might be getting in the way of people doing good work.
- Do people understand the priorities?
- Are workloads realistic?
- Do employees trust what leadership is telling them?
- Are good ideas being heard?
- Do managers have meaningful one-to-ones?
- Can people raise concerns without worrying about the consequences?
- Are employees getting opportunities to learn and develop?
- Do people understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture?
Our own employee engagement research highlights the role leaders play in building trust through listening, clear communication, recognition, development and involving people in decisions that affect them.
None of those things requires a flashy engagement initiative.
A good September reset might simply mean leadership getting closer to what employees are experiencing.
Run a pulse survey. Hold small listening groups. Review exit themes. Ask managers what they are hearing. Look at absence and turnover patterns. Have proper conversations.
Then act on what you learn.
Trust is not built by asking for feedback, but it is built when employees can see that somebody listened.
The leadership priority for the rest of 2026: build organisations that can adapt
There will always be another trend, another piece of technology, economic shift, piece of legislation, change programme.
Perhaps the most important leadership trend of 2026 is therefore not a particular leadership style at all.
It is adaptability.
The strongest leadership teams are learning to hold two things at once: performance today and readiness for tomorrow.
They are commercially focused, but human.
They provide clarity, but invite challenge.
They use technology, but protect trust.
They expect accountability, but give managers the capability to deliver it.
They make decisions at pace, but understand their impact on people.
And they recognise that culture, workforce capability and employee engagement are not separate from business strategy. They are what make the strategy possible.
September gives leadership teams a useful moment to take stock before the final quarter gathers pace.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether your organisation is ready for autumn.
It is whether your people foundations are strong enough for whatever comes after it.
Planning growth or change?
If you’re heading into autumn with growth, restructuring or wider organisational change on the agenda, start with a conversation with us.
We can help you take stock of where you are, work through the people implications and identify what needs attention now. Whether that means strengthening leadership capability, reshaping teams, preparing for employment law changes, improving engagement or bringing in additional HR expertise, we’ll help you find the right way forward for your organisation.
And if finding the right people is part of the challenge, we can support with HR recruitment and executive search too, helping you bring in the HR and leadership capability you need for what comes next.
If you’d like to explore further, our Business Change Support Hub brings together practical guidance and support for organisations navigating restructuring, transformation, M&A and employment law change.
For growing businesses, our HR Support for Scale-ups Hub covers the people foundations that help businesses scale with confidence, from leadership and workforce planning to culture, hiring and HR processes.
Whatever is ahead, you don’t need to have all the answers before you speak to us. Talk to the Hunter Adams team and let’s work out what your people priorities should be next.
One partner through growth, change and recruitment.
