Chief Human Resources Officer - How CHROs Describe Their Job

How CHROs Describe Their Job

Two recently published books about the CHRO profession, The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan; and The Chief Human Resource Officer, Defining the Role of Human Resource Leaders by Pat Wright, offer unique insights into the profession from its leading practitioners.

The perennial top priority for CHROs is talent management. In The Chief Human Resource Officer, Defining the Role of Human Resource Leaders, Eva Sage-Gavin, CHRO for the Gap emphasizes this point saying, "... at the end of the day, you and your team are the experts at talent management and must be able to understand and identify good versus great talent… Identifying critical positions, the great attributes needed to fill them, and prioritizing recruiting strategies accordingly was the key to success, whether I was working with engineers, apparel designers, or international operations management." Kevin Cox, CHRO for American Express, argues that "Great CHROs (and great CEOs) understand that talent needs to be developed in thoughtful, but not incremental, ways. Getting the balance right between ‘stretch’ and ‘in over her head’ isn’t easy, but it is vital to the success of a world-class talent strategy."

The CHRO helps the company build sustainable competitive advantage through the selection and development of top talent that possess capabilities that help differentiate the company from its competitors. Conaty and Charan emphasize this point in Talent Masters by noting that “Only one competency lasts. It is the ability to create a steady, self-renewing stream of leaders. Money is just a commodity. Talent supplies the edge. We can’t put it any better than Ron Nersesian, the head of Agilent Technologies’ Electronic Measurement Group: ‘Developing people’s talent is the whole of the company at the end of the day. Our products all are time- perishable. The only thing that stays is the institutional learning and the development of the skills and the capabilities that we have in our people.’”

Other leading CHROs emphasize additional aspects of HR leadership, such as delivering results with a global team – a major challenge identified by Hugh Mitchell, CHRO for Royal Dutch Shell – and developing and communicating an employee value proposition that will differentiate the company in its efforts to attract and retain the caliber of talent needed to achieve its business objectives, as emphasized by Michael Davis, CHRO for General Mills.