HR needs saving.
The CHRO is struggling today the same way the CIO once did. For years, CIOs were seen as back-office support, focused on systems and infrastructure, quietly reporting to the CFO. They were necessary but not strategic. Then Y2K happened, and everything changed. The threat of a global technology failure suddenly made the CIO indispensable. Technology wasn’t a cost center anymore—it became the engine of innovation. The CIO evolved from the person who kept the lights on to the person who helped shape the future. That same opportunity now sits squarely in front of HR.
Many of the CEOs I speak to admit behind closed doors that they don’t see HR as a value-add. Other organizations don’t have a formal HR department at all, including The Container Store. Of course there are some strategic HR leaders that are driving their organization’s success by focusing on business results but they are the exception not the rule. CEOs see HR as a compliance function. Payroll, performance reviews, engagement surveys. When they talk about culture, it’s often in the context of “employee satisfaction” rather than organizational performance. HR has become the department that enforces rules instead of enabling results. And that’s a problem—not just for HR, but for the business. Because the organizations that fail to connect culture to built results are leaving measurable value on the table.
The credibility gap exists because HR has too often spoken a different language than the rest of the executive team. When the CFO talks about success, they use metrics like EBITDA, cash flow, and return on invested capital. When HR talks about success, they talk about engagement, turnover, and morale. Those metrics matter, but they’re not what CEOs and investors respond to. They don’t tell a financial story. They don’t connect to shareholder value explicitly. If HR wants to reclaim its seat at the table, it has to start thinking—and communicating—in financial terms. It has to translate culture into impact, not initiatives.
John Frehse makes this point brilliantly in his article The Psychology Behind Retention and How to Fix It. He and his colleagues at Ankura outline how the partnership between the CFO and the CHRO can define employee impact in measurable, quantifiable ways. Their research shows that when employees feel relevant, they are 48 percent more productive and 20 percent more likely to become top performers. That’s not an HR metric—it’s a business one. Relevance, as John defines it, is about capability, trust, access to information, and decision rights. When people feel trusted and equipped to make decisions, they see themselves as part of something bigger. That sense of relevance is what drives both retention and performance.
And here’s the critical insight: relevance is culture. It’s the lived experience of trust, empowerment, and alignment. HR has the power to shape that—but not through policy manuals or engagement programs. Through systems. Through clarity. Through accountability. Culture is not HR’s “soft stuff.” It’s the operating system of the organization. When it’s healthy, it produces results. When it’s ignored, it quietly erodes them.
To make HR great again, CHROs must start owning the systems that drive results. That means taking on the disciplines that once felt “outside” HR’s domain. Take marketing, for instance. The best HR leaders are storytellers. They shape how the organization communicates purpose internally and externally. They understand that culture is a brand promise that has to be lived every day. HR should also be fluent in technology. The CIO transformed their reputation by embracing digital transformation—not by protecting the old way of doing things. HR can do the same by leveraging AI, analytics, and predictive modeling to forecast turnover, identify leadership gaps, and measure the ROI of culture. And finally, HR must understand finance. If you can’t explain how your initiatives impact the P&L, you’re not driving strategy—you’re funding programs.
When HR starts thinking like a CFO, storytelling like a CMO, and innovating like a CIO, it becomes indispensable. It stops reacting to business challenges and starts anticipating them. It can finally demonstrate, in numbers, how culture produces profit. The CIO earned their credibility by showing how technology investment created business value. The CHRO must now prove how cultural investment does the same.
The future of HR isn’t administrative—it’s analytical. It’s strategic. It’s about using culture as a lever for growth, accountability as a system for performance, and alignment as a measure of leadership effectiveness. High-performing employees deserve high-performing leaders. The CHRO’s job is to build that system and quantify its impact.
We don’t need to reinvent HR. We need to reposition it. It’s time for HR to evolve from a department that supports the business to one that drives it. The CIO did it. The CMO did it. Now it’s HR’s turn.
Elsewhere In Culture
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/10/the-cdcs-weekend-of-whiplash/684549
“You’re fired. Just kidding.” That phrase alone should make any leader cringe. For hundreds of CDC employees, it was not a joke but their weekend reality. After mass layoff emails went out Friday night, many spent hours wondering if their careers were over, only to get a second message reversing the decision with no explanation. It is easy to blame a coding error, but let’s be honest, this was not a technical glitch. It was a cultural one. When leadership fails to communicate with clarity and empathy, chaos fills the void. And once trust is broken, it does not matter how strong your mission is. People stop believing in the people leading it.
Moments like this remind us that culture is not defined by what is written in the handbook, it is revealed in how leaders handle the hardest moments. The CDC’s confusion did not just hurt morale, it sent a message that people are expendable. In reality, culture is what holds any organization together when everything else feels unstable. If you want results, real and sustainable results, you start by creating a culture where people feel seen, supported, and informed. Because the moment they do not, you have already lost more than a few hundred employees. You have lost belief.
https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/why-major-workplace-disruptions-arent-always-a-bad-thing/91245958
Disruption does not have to mean distrust. The new research from SparkEffect confirms what I have seen again and again in organizations. The moments leaders dread most are often the ones that define their credibility. When the road gets rough, whether it is an AI rollout, a major restructuring, or a sudden leadership change, employees are watching not just what decisions are made but how they are made. SparkEffect’s data shows that companies that navigate disruption with clarity, fairness, and empathy can actually boost trust by 12 percent, while those that fumble the response lose as much as 28 percent. That gap is the difference between an engaged, resilient workforce and one that quietly starts updating their resumes.
The takeaway for leaders is simple but rarely practiced. You cannot control disruption, but you can control how you show up in it. The most trusted leaders are not the ones who protect people from change, they are the ones who manage change transparently and humanely. That begins with middle managers, who hold the most fragile but most powerful source of trust in any company. Equip them to communicate clearly, invite questions, and show empathy, especially during high stress transitions like AI adoption or layoffs. When handled well, disruption becomes more than a test of resilience. It becomes a moment when love, care, and trust can rise to the surface and when your culture has the chance to grow stronger than before.
Surrender to Lead is the book Joe Terry and I wrote to redefine what leadership really looks like. We have both seen how often leaders think strength means control, but it doesn’t. Real leadership starts when you let go. When you surrender your ego, your need to have all the answers, and your attachment to certainty, you create space for trust, accountability, and real results.
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