What is HR’s most pressing issue right now? I don’t know the answer. I’d like to think it’s something along the lines of attracting new talent into the field, or learning to think of things from a business perspective, or figuring out ways to remove the silos and other barriers throughout organizations that prevent good work from getting done, or using emerging technology to our advantage, or radically improving the employee experience, or getting better at shaping culture by synchronizing our efforts with the company’s strategic direction, or creating employment brands and match and mesh with the business brand, or better developing and supporting better leaders in making better decisions (that’s a lot of “better”, I know), or making diversity a competitive advantage instead of a box to check, or helping the company create better results through rehumanizing – or just plain humanizing – work, or taking a hard look at the seismic shift business is currently undergoing and redefining what HR is and means in the age of social business.

Those seem to be just a sampling of the pressing issues our field is facing right now. None of those are easy to do and there are precious few right answers, yet they are all areas where HR could radically increase its value to the organization.

Although there are plenty of sharp HR folks thinking about those things, I’m not convinced any of those areas is where we have focus as a field. But I suppose infighting and credentialing power plays are important to focus on, too.