If you work in human resources or talent acquisition, or are a consulting partner in that business space, it behooves you to keep track of trends and developments in all things staffing related. You don’t have to agree with every new management philosophy or bit of hiring advice that drifts along, but if you don’t even want to know about any of it, it might be time to try a different field. Leaders who aren’t interested in the people side of the business are overlooking the biggest reason a business is successful in the first place.

As someone who creates content for one of the aforementioned “consulting partners” to human resources and talent acquisition and needs to keep up on the latest industry chatter, I behoove my way around business and HR sites with some regularity. In the course of doing so, I recently dove into the deep end of a popular business-management website to see what they were saying about leadership, people engagement, and talent development.

I dug back through 40 or 50 articles and found lots of good advice on marketing, technology, customer satisfaction, branding, event planning, and pretty much any other non-academic or financial subject you can think of related to running a business. Except one: employee development.

There were exactly zero articles or blog posts about hiring the right people, building teams, motivating or engaging staff, developing future leaders, and succession planning. On a site devoted to leadership.

Anyway, I really wanted to call this piece, “It’s the employee, stupid,” though that probably wouldn’t suit Caliper’s editorial policy, and I’m not sure George HW Bush vs. Bill Clinton references are topical anymore. The fact remains, however, that people are the pillars that support organizational success, and that is always topical.

The best products and services in the world are still imagined, designed, developed, built, marketed, and sold by people. Shouldn’t those same people be part of the leadership conversation?