Name: Think Like an Investor, Lead Like a CEO: How CHROs Can Reshape Their Roles to Enhance Impact
Uploaded: 2025-05-19
Duration: 9 min 14 s

As talent volatility and accelerated transformation upend the workplace, the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) is emerging as one of the most strategically vital roles in the C-suite. What lessons can today’s leaders take from the world of private equity—known for precision, performance, and value creation—about how the CHRO role should evolve? Learn groundbreaking insights from a foremost leadership effectiveness expert on how HR leaders in any industry can shift from being reactive problem-solvers to strategic drivers of long-term business success. 

Think Like an Investor, Lead Like a CEO: How CHROs Can Reshape Their Roles to Enhance Impact

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In fact, I know a lot of you already know this. Chief human resources officers are now recognized as the cool kids of the C-suite. It's a role that's critical to a company's growth, innovation, and success. In a time of talent volatility and rapid transformation, no position may be more pivotal. And who better to dive into this than Rosanna Tresatti. She's the chief executive officer of Oliva Executive Leadership Advisory. She's a performance psychologist, an expert in executive effectiveness, and she's here to share a fresh perspective on how HR can shift from reacting to leading and to drive transformation that lasts. Please welcome Rosanna to the stage. Would it surprise you to know that the single biggest indicator of a CHRO being replaced has nothing to do with the CHRO? Alongside a very talented team, I spearheaded a longitudinal study over the course of nearly a decade where we looked at what differentiated the CHROs that were rated as the highest performers. Now we did this work largely in investor backed businesses, but as you'll see, the insights that I'm going to share apply equally to businesses of all ownership structures. And our findings are pretty interesting because they clustered into essentially two different groups. We found a number of variables that were very effective at predicting which CHROs would be rated the highest performers, and we quite cleverly called those success factors. We also found a completely different group of variables that were extremely effective at predicting the CHROs that were most likely to be rated as low performers, and we called those failure modes. And for the CHROs in our study, we found that there were two really clear and compelling failure modes. First, the quality of the relationship with the CEO was the single biggest predictor of a CH of how a CHRO's performance would be viewed. So much so in fact, get up, check this out. So much so in fact, that a change in the CEOC led to nearly 7 out of every 10 CHROs being being replaced eventually. Now you may say, well, it's not that unusual a CEO comes in and likes to tweak their leadership team, but we found that no other C-suite leader's perceived performance had anywhere near that level of dependency on the CEO. The second failure mode emerged when we saw CHROs who were running HR functions that had administrative noise or inefficiency. Those CHROs were significantly more likely to be rated as low performers and or exited. So the failure modes are really helpful. I like to talk about these as the hygiene factors or the absolutely necessary, though utterly insufficient conditions for success. The success factors, on the other hand, are interesting because they give us the real insights around what the CHROs who are really leading the way of the future, what they're doing that's different. But before I go there, I'm getting, as I tend to do, a tiny bit ahead of myself. First, I want to share with you a perhaps pretty obvious, though often um unnamed contextual reality. Consider that at the end of 2023, 11.8% of all C-suite rolls in the S&P 100 were held by women, only 11.8%. But that picture is actually even more lopsided when we double click into the data, because 72% of all CHRO role holders are women. So now go back and think about the failure modes that I just shared with you, where the quality of the relationship with her CEO and her ability to keep her house in order become the non-negotiable prices of admission for her role. Now, in case you were curious, we've done the same research with CEOs, CFOs, CEOs and CTOs, and the CHRO failure modes were the most distinct among that group. So these roles, largely held by women seem to come with the implicit expectation that she will be managing her household. This is essentially the corporate equivalent of making sure Sally has what she needs for soccer practice and Jimmy's done his math homework and everyone goes to bed with enough food in their bellies. This becomes the necessary threshold to be seen as adequate at your job. OK, but in the interest of time, let's focus on what are the skills and mindsets that actually help CHROs. Uh, irrespective of gender, re-script and move beyond this notion of the very important, the limiting expectation of being a business administrator to being a business accelerator, and we found four really clear clear success factors the CHROs who were doing this, what they did. First, think like an investor. So this leans really heavily on disciplined financial fluency. Be very clear on what investor investors call the value creation plan, which is essentially the strategic roadmap for how your company will drive its financial aspirations. If you know the strategic the value that your strategy is meant to drive and for which stakeholders, you can speak with greater specificity, relevance, and impact. 2, lead like a CEO. And this means doubling down on commercial acumen. It's business-wide over functional thinking. It requires strategic and systems view of the interconnected way in which your business operates to achieve its goals. 3, measure what matters. This is my favorite. If you think about how to build um dynamic data-driven insights that are not just descriptive but also predictive, that is a real driver of differentiation. So to bring this to life, employee engagement is a great measure, but it's descriptive. If you can tie employee engagement scores to what it's what outcomes it's actually driving, it's much more powerful. So one company I worked with, for example, was able to tie its employee engagement scores to key areas of the business to sales acceleration. That may sound something like, um, for every 4% points of increase in employee engagement in our sales function, we saw a 9% increase in sales in the subsequent quarter. Powerful. Number 4, and lastly, Lead from the front. Our data, which by the way, is not unique from any other meta-analysis on CHRO impact that you'll see in this particular regard, showed that the CHROs that were rated at the very highest of the performance group were seen as change leaders. So this is about, um, systems thinking. Um, and driving, excuse me, systems thinking and really becoming a, um, a mobilizing and focusing force for organizations around driving cultural and business change. This current CHRO of Apollo, Matt Brightfelser, who's both a real vocal advocate for high impact CHROs, as well as a role model for what that looks like, aptly points out that people are almost always the single biggest line item on a company's P&L, and furthermore, almost always the single biggest lever to driving and accelerating value for the company. Through that lens, it seems really obvious that these roles hold real commercial heft. So when you're visiting a foreign country, the more you speak the native language, the richer the set of experiences are that you have access to, the more doors open to you. And what these four success factors clearly show is that CHROs who learn the native languages of business are much better able to pick up the pen and re-script and broaden the understanding of their roles. To access that pen and shift the paradigms as well as shape your businesses. Think like an investor, lead like a CEO, measure what matters, and lead from the front. Thank you.