What People Analytics Leaders Can Learn from Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has outmaneuvered record labels, redefined genre boundaries, and engineered one of the highest-grossing tours in history. She holds the record for the most tickets sold on any tour by a solo artist.

Her business savvy is the subject of Harvard Business Review Journal senior editor Kevin Evers’ recent book, There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, which showcases the pop icon as a study in leadership.

And arguably, the leaders who could learn the most from Swift’s strategies are not the ones center stage in company town halls or dominating boardrooms, it’s those who lead people analytics.

Continuous creation and reinvention

Swift never stops producing. Over the past five years alone, she’s released eight new albums and re-recordings, each offering a reinvention of her sound, story, and connection with her audience. These shifts aren’t reactive—they’re proactive, rooted in her instinct to create consistently and evolve deliberately.

For people analytics (PA), this is a critical lesson. The function holds proprietary workforce data that no one else can access. That alone is a massive, often underleveraged asset. But the key is using that data creatively—finding new ways to synthesize, analyze, visualize, and connect it to real business problems.

Continuous creation isn’t about building new dashboards; it’s about iterating with purpose and bringing forward the next insight that helps leaders see around corners in real-time or when they need it most.

As AI reshapes what’s possible, the most valuable people analytics leaders won’t just use new tools—they’ll use them to reimagine what their function delivers. The PA field is digitally native. It’s increasingly AI-native. And that positions it as one of the most forward-looking parts of HR—if its leaders are willing to evolve.

Stakeholder centricity

One of Swift’s defining traits is her obsession with understanding her customers / audience and converting them into repeat customers ( i.e., fans), with arguably the highest customer lifetime value of any music artist of the past 50 years. She listens constantly—lurking on message boards, interpreting feedback, watching social media, according to Evers. Her choices, from set lists to album drops, are designed to meet (and exceed) fan expectations. In return, they’re fiercely loyal.

People analytics, which so often oversees employee listening strategies, has a similar opportunity—if it recognizes that the business is its primary customer. The goal isn’t just to produce technically accurate reports; it’s to solve problems that actually matter to leaders across the enterprise. That means aligning insights with strategic objectives, tying work to KPIs, and clearly demonstrating the ROI of action.

And, just like Swift’s fans defend her against critics and support her re-recordings, a business that feels supported and enabled by its analytics function will invest more deeply in it. Solving for stakeholder success builds trust and influence—currency every analytics leader needs more of.

Be an alpha type

Look closely at Swift’s Eras Tour—or her decision to give six-figure bonuses to the truck drivers who supported it—and you’ll see the signs of total strategic ownership. Every detail of the fan experience is considered. Every move supports a broader story of trust, value, and longevity.

This level of intentionality is critical for people analytics leaders, too. Much of what PA teams do is invisible—helping other functions achieve their goals, shaping decisions behind the scenes. But to elevate the function, leaders must become more than enablers. They must be curators of the experience that leaders have with data—translators, guides, and strategic partners.

And they need to lead the function like a business: thinking in terms of investment, impact, and revenue opportunity. The future of PA is not as a cost center—it’s as a revenue-generating function. That shift starts with a CEO mindset.

Create the market that doesn’t yet exist

At age 16, Swift wanted to release an album aimed at teenage girls—a market country music executives didn’t believe existed. She proved them wrong, opening a new fan base and reshaping the genre’s boundaries in the process.

The lesson for people analytics? Many organizations still don’t have a PA function—or they have a team of one. According to i4cp’s 2025 People Analytics Benchmarking Survey, 36% of organizations have either no PA function or just a single FTE​. That’s not because the value isn’t there—it’s because the vision hasn’t yet been realized.

It’s on people analytics leaders to show what’s possible: to make visible the value that can be unlocked when the right data reaches the right people at the right time. There’s a whole marketplace of untapped insight—about workforce risks, productivity levers, skills, and strategy alignment—that most organizations don’t even know they’re missing.

This will be a challenge for functional leaders who use the phrase “it depends” as a sentence. They must evolve to become succinct with their data points, confident in their meaning, and clearly articulate the best solutions to the challenges they illuminate.

People analytics is uniquely positioned to bring that future into view. But like Swift, its leaders must be persistent, persuasive, and unshakably clear on the value they bring.

The bottom line

Taylor Swift didn’t become a global phenomenon by waiting for someone else to shape her narrative. She learned the system, then changed it. She listened to her audience, then elevated their expectations. She created, iterated, and evolved—not because she had to, but because she knew relevance is earned, not assumed.

People analytics is at a similar inflection point. The function holds the data, the tools, and the potential to shape the future of work. But that potential must be activated—through creative reinvention, strategic ownership, and an unwavering focus on stakeholder value.