12 Talent Things to Focus on in 2025

It’s already time to look ahead into 2025. What are your priorities, and how are you going to set yourself up for success?

Here are 12 talent-related items to consider focusing on in the coming year. Bookmark this blog to reference it monthly, or take a few minutes right now to add these items to your calendar.

January—Growth Guides 

Your people are your organization's most important asset. It’s easy to get caught up in daily tasks and overlook the relationships you’re working to build. The Growth Guide is a tool designed to help leaders gain deeper insights into their team members' unique talents, interests, goals, motivations, and work styles.

Utilizing the Growth Guide can significantly enhance the relationship between managers and their employees. Not to mention the fact that the insight you can help increase their productivity. Relationships have a direct impact on your bottom line!

• Take Action: Kick off the new year by conducting a Growth Guide with each person you manage. Devote 60 minutes to each conversation and commit to having the conversation outside of your normal workplace. Make it special by taking your direct report out for coffee or for lunch.

February—Recruitment

Recruitment deserves more than just a one-month focus, but starting a small recruitment habit is a step in the right direction. Much like sports teams, you want a strong bench of people to pull from when an opening occurs on your team.

Building a weekly recruitment habit will ensure you aren’t scrambling to find “a person” instead of having the luxury of hiring “the right person.”

• Take Action: Create a 30-minute weekly recurring event on your calendar titled “recruitment.” During that 30-minute period each week, connect with people on LinkedIn, reach out to your current staff for referrals, and conduct quick 15-minute touch bases with any names that come through.

March—Onboarding

Did you know that 30% of employees leave their jobs within the first 90 days of employment and that it costs 1.5 times someone’s annual salary to replace them?

That doesn’t even take into consideration the opportunity cost of the time you have to spend finding, hiring, and training your new team member. It’s important to get the onboarding piece right—and you’ve only got one chance!

• Take Action: Create a Customized Onboarding Checklist to use with each of your new hires. Work with your team to ensure everything is included in your checklist to set your new hire up for success, even before day 1!

April—Top Talent Reports

Who doesn’t want to know about their unique talents and how to maximize their strengths?  Generated from talent assessment results, the Top Talent Report provides each individual with insight into their top five strengths and 15 actionable strategies they can use to grow their strengths.

• Take Action: Bring Top Talent Reports into a sales meeting. Have each attendee identify one talent they want to work to grow over the next 90 days and one strategy they will use to help grow that talent. You could also provide time for people to compare their Top Talents, discuss commonalities, and pinpoint talents that could add power to their teams.

May—Effective Feedback

Hearing, “Can I provide you with some feedback?” can be scary. Feedback is associated with “negatives.” Instead, the magic ratio for feedback is actually 5:1 – 5 pieces of positive feedback for every 1 piece of feedback that may be more difficult to hear.

This doesn’t mean you should provide 5 positives, followed by a piece of constructive criticism each time. It means you should consistently fill someone’s bucket with positive feedback. People need to hear what they’re doing well so they can repeat those behaviors again.

• Take Action: Put 5 pennies in your left pocket. Each time you provide someone with a positive piece of feedback, move a penny into your right pocket. Challenge yourself to do that as often as possible, until you no longer need the pennies to remind you.

June—Employee Engagement 

We define employee engagement as someone’s emotional commitment and willingness to give their best at work. Strong levels of engagement on your team lead to increased productivity and revenue, higher key account retention, and reduced regrettable turnover.

But, all too often engagement levels are overlooked. The best way to gauge your team’s engagement level is through a Culture and Engagement Survey.

• Take Action: Conduct a Culture and Engagement Survey to gain an understanding of the level of engagement on your team (or overall within your organization). At CSS and Up Your Culture, we partner with Energage. Contact us to learn more about our partnership benefits!

July—2025 Talent Magazine

Each year we release our Talent Magazine in July, highlighting everything you need to know about recruitment, selection, development, and engagement. Stay in-the-know and up-to-date on the latest information!

• Take Action: Sign up to be one of the first to receive our annual Talent Magazine as soon as it’s released to the public! BONUS: If you want to go above and beyond, set a goal to be one of the Talent Superheroes we feature in the magazine.

August—Teamwork and Collaboration

Departments and divisions can often be siloed. Many times, it’s “because that’s the way we’ve always done things, “ or it’s due to a loss of trust over time. Actively working to dissolve siloes and encourage increased communication and collaboration will positively affect overall morale.

• Take Action: Invest in enhancing team dynamics and improving overall organizational performance with our Team Builder Series. Over the course of 4 weeks, participants will build trust, improve collaboration, increase conflict resolution, and boost productivity.

September—Your Personal Growth and Development

As leaders, we talk a lot about the growth and development of our people, but it’s easy to overlook our own personal growth and development plan.

• Take Action: Sit down, reflect on the following questions, and create a plan:
  • What were my personal growth goals for 2025?
  • What steps have I taken so far to accomplish them?
  • What do I still need to accomplish?
  • What support do I need to accomplish it?

October—Recognition

Recognition goes a long way when building and enhancing the quality of your relationships. When you let someone know you’ve seen the hard work they’ve been putting in, you’ve noticed specific things they’re doing well, and you’re taking the time to let them know, it builds trust.

• Take Action: Reference each person’s Growth Guide to revisit how they prefer to be recognized and who they’d like to make sure hears about their success. Commit to recognizing each person in the way they prefer to be recognized before the end of the year.

November—Talent Feedback Calls

Talent feedback calls can happen at any stage in an employee’s lifecycle, whether it’s pre-hire, prior to onboarding, or post-hire for development. Our certified Talent Analysts are here to support you every step of the way.

• Take Action: Schedule a Feedback Call for someone on your team who you could use some additional insight on. Or, request a Team Composite Review to learn about the overall strengths of your team, how to get the most out of them, and potential talents to look for in those you continue to bring on board.

December—Priority Strategies

Before you know it, it will be time to prep for a new year with new goals! To help you effectively lead your people into the new year, focus on maximizing the strengths of each individual and working around any weaknesses that may hinder their performance. Priority strategies can help you narrow the focus to really move the needle.

• Take Action: Identify two to three Priority Strategies you can use with each person you manage. These strategies should take into consideration strengths, weaknesses, and unique workstyles. They should also closely align with what each person wants from you as their manager.