What does a chief human resources officer actually do? Talent, culture and the board

What a chief human resources officer is#

A chief human resources officer is the executive who answers for the people on which the institution’s strategy depends: who they are, what they cost, how they behave, and who will hold the top seats next. The title varies — chief people officer, group head of human capital — but the seat does not. It is the one place in the executive committee where the human side of every plan is owned by someone who can be asked to defend it.

That last clause separates the seat from the function beneath it. The function recruits, pays, trains and administers; it is necessary and it is not the job. The job is to price the bet the institution is making on its people, and to say so in the room where the bet is placed.

What the seat is for#

Every strategy is a people bet placed at the top of the house. A growth plan assumes the institution can hire, keep and lead the people it needs; a cost plan assumes it can lose people without losing the capability they carry; a merger assumes two cultures can be made one before the customers notice. None of those assumptions appears on the slide. The CHRO is the officer who prices it — who makes the assumption explicit, costs it honestly, and tells the executive committee what the plan is really asking of the workforce.

A seat that only administers the function has not priced anything. It has delivered the hiring plan the strategy asked for, at the pace it asked for, and left the question of whether the strategy could be staffed at all to be discovered later, by the people who then wonder why the plan is late.

The anatomy of the seat#

The seat has three movements, and a CHRO who is strong in one and absent from another is holding part of a seat.

• Talent as capital: workforce strategy tied to enterprise strategy, so that the bet is made explicit; the executive talent market — buy, build or keep — with what each truly costs; and pay that survives both the remuneration committee and the newspaper.
• Culture and conduct: culture measured honestly and reported to the board; speak-up, investigations and the case that involves a top performer; and the defining moments — restructurings, mergers, the bad week — where culture is made or unmade in public.
• The board’s people work: chief executive and executive succession as pipelines the board can defend; the CHRO before the remuneration committee as adviser, officer and witness at once; and the HR function itself — data, technology and the service model that earns the seat.

The third movement is the one most often missing. Talent and culture are recognisably the CHRO’s territory; the board’s people work is often treated as the chair’s, the nomination committee’s or the remuneration committee’s. It is theirs to decide. It is the CHRO’s to prepare, evidence and, when the moment comes, to witness.

Where the seat goes wrong#

The seat is won or lost on one question: does the people agenda arrive at the executive committee as strategy, or as administration? Most failures of the seat are answers of the second kind. The workforce plan is presented after the strategy has been agreed, as the means of delivering it, rather than before, as a test of whether it can be delivered. Culture is reported as a survey score rather than as evidence about behaviour. Succession is a list of names that the board has never had to defend. Pay decisions are explained to the remuneration committee in the language of benchmarks rather than in the language of what the institution is buying.

The seat is won or lost on one question: does the people agenda arrive at the executive committee as strategy, or as administration?

A second failure is quieter. The CHRO argues the people agenda in the function’s own vocabulary — engagement, capability, employer brand — and the executive committee, which runs on capital, revenue and risk, nods and moves on. The argument was not wrong. It was not made in commercial terms, and so it was not made at all.

What good looks like#

A well-held seat makes the people bet visible before it is placed. The CHRO can say what a strategy assumes about hiring, retention and leadership, what each assumption costs, and which of them the institution has failed to meet before. Culture is measured in ways the board can interrogate and reported with the bad news included. Executive succession is a standing discipline with evidence behind every name, so that the board can defend its choice on the day it has to make one. The CHRO stands before the remuneration committee able to advise on the decision, to own the process that produced it, and to bear witness to how it was reached.

And the function itself earns the seat. Its data can be trusted, its use of technology is judged by what it changed rather than by what was bought, and its service model is one the executive committee would recognise as run by an executive rather than administered by a department.

What to do next#

Take the current strategy and write, on one page, the people bet it contains: the hires it assumes, the departures it can and cannot absorb, the leaders it needs in seats they do not yet hold, and the culture it presumes. Cost each line. Then ask whether that page has ever been in front of the executive committee. If it has not, the seat has been administered, however well, and the work of holding it starts there. The CHRO Agenda in The Helm is built for exactly that work, with chief people officers who carry an enterprise mandate.