Perspectives 1

CHROs to the

Perspectives

The pandemic and the purpose movement

triggered urgency among CEOs to get

the right CHRO in place—even if it means

going outside their industry. Our panel

discussion with some of the very top

CHROs in the fi eld.

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Certainly, the CHRO role has evolved greatly

as organizations push for more digital

transformations, cultural makeovers, and other

business shifts. COVID-19, of course, has only

increased that pressure. “CEOs need that

combination of prior experience and a fresh set

of eyes in their CHRO to help them anticipate,

adapt, and adopt talent strategies to changes in

their industry,” says Torrey Foster, vice chairman

and managing partner of Korn Ferry’s Consumer

Markets practice in North America. Even more

prized, he says, is a track record of using data and

analytics to train, deploy, and build a pipeline of

leadership talent from the inside.

But what do the actual CHROs who have just

joined top fi rms have to say about all that’s

happening? To get some answers, we spoke

with the CHROs of four of the biggest names—

McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, and Walmart.

They all were appointed between 2018 and 2020

and came to their new industries with limited prior

experience or following a prolonged absence. The

following are excerpts from our conversations.

Over the last year, several of the biggest and

most recognizable companies in the world

have appointed new CHROs who have limited

experience in their new industries. While it’s

tempting to dismiss the pattern as no big deal—

to a degree, HR skills are industry agnostic,

right?—the reality is that it is a very big deal.

It isn’t common, after all, to see a CHRO move

from aerospace and defense to restaurants or

from a software company to a retailer. Against

the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the

purpose movement, the surprising new model not

only reinforces the elevated importance of the

CHRO function in the minds of CEOs and boards.

It also opens up previously blocked pathways for

C-suite talent to move into the CHRO position

and from it to other operational roles, including,

perhaps, CEO.

In his view, Doug Charles, president of Korn

Ferry’s Americas region and global consumer

operations, says the pandemic pushed and

stretched the demands on CHROs in a way never

before seen. “With so much on the line, CHROs

showed their strategic and tactical agility,” says

Charles. “Organizations that didn’t have the right

executive in the role were exposed.”

Once is an anomaly. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a trend.A half dozen times or more, however, is the making of a paradigm shift—and that’s what the recruitment of chief human resources o� cers is currently undergoing.

What’s behind the trend of organizations recruiting outside CHROs with limited experience in their industry?

Heidi Capozzi Executive Vice President and

Global Chief People O� cer

at McDonald’s

I think there are a couple of dynamics at

play. One is that current sitting CHROs

demographically tend to skew older, so

there are more retirement-eligible folks

that could be impacting demand versus

supply. Another is CEO turnover: as new

CEOs seek to build their own people

and culture agenda, there’s a personal

element to whom they pick as CHRO.

Certainly, it’s someone who shares their

values and brings expertise in the areas

that support their future vision.

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Ronald SchellekensExecutive Vice President and

Chief Human Resources O� cer

at PepsiCo

The CEO-CHRO relationship has defi nitely

been elevated, particularly in light of the

pandemic. There’s a new and greater

recognition among CEOs, executive

committees, and boards of the complexity

and impact of the CHRO role. We are

an integral part of the business and are

expected to have an opinion and provide

guidance on every part of it.

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Donna MorrisExecutive Vice President

and Chief People O� cer

at Walmart

I’m thrilled this trend is happening. It’s

great to see so many talented CHROs

transitioning into new roles and sharing

their wealth of experience across

industries. This allows for a fresh set of

eyes and a di� erent fi lter to question

processes and systems. For Walmart,

for instance, my two decades of

experience in technology allows me

to look at issues through a new lens.

Johanna SöderströmExecutive Vice President and

Chief Human Resources O� cer

at Tyson Foods

Talent is increasingly being recognized

as driving the transformation agenda.

As a result, the CHRO role is now viewed

as a transformation and growth role,

and strategically minded CHROs who

have built people agendas to help solve

business issues and provided a competitive

advantage are in demand.

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Why did you decide toswitch industries?

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Morris: Walmart is an amazing company,

and I knew it would o� er the opportunity

to make an incredible impact, which was so

important for me. And that has absolutely

been the case over this past year. The role

Walmart has played to make an impact on

its associates, customers, and communities

around the world is second to none. While

I’m proud of my 18 years at Adobe, growing

the company from 3,200 employees to

25,000, and actively recruiting many

senior leaders, I am excited to have this

opportunity to learn about a new industry

and make positive contributions to a strong

company. Walmart is also a company in an

industry I resonate with, bringing together

my passions for both people and digital.

Söderström: While food is certainly

di� erent than chemicals, there are

similarities between Tyson and Dow that

made it easy to switch industries. Both are

manufacturing companies with massive

production facilities. Both have two distinct

employee cohorts—frontline workers

and o� ce employees—with di� erent HR

needs and experiences. Both are global

players. I felt Tyson was a great fi t for me

to use my skills and experience to help the

organization achieve what it has set out to

accomplish with its people agenda.

What advice do you have for CHROs who come into an industry that they have been out of for a while or are unfamiliar with?

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Capozzi: It’s one thing to bring great HR subject-matter

expertise to the table, but you have to understand the industry

and business to apply that expertise in the most relevant

and e� ective way. Anyone considering a move should have

a curiosity for the new and be very intentional about their

onboarding. One of the fi rst things I did when I got to

McDonald’s was don a uniform and get trained up to be a crew

member at one of our restaurants in Chicago. I spent over a

week there making Big Mac sandwiches, working the register

and the drive-thru line, cleaning up. I talked to restaurant crew

and got to see the day-to-day inner workings of the business.

Schellekens: You defi nitely need to get a sense of the

uniqueness and rhythm of the business. The worst thing you

can do is copy and paste a previous HR strategy and system

to a new organization. Even though this was my second stint

at PepsiCo, I had been out of the company for 16 years and

had never worked in the US, so I went in very consciously

saying this was like joining a new company and not the

same one I left. If I used old experiences and visions of

the past to interpret what PepsiCo is now, I’d set myself

up for failure. The same goes for anyone entering a new

industry. You need to be clear about your past experience

while appreciating the uniqueness, culture, and needs of

the new role and business. You may think you recognize

patterns based on previous experience and rush into

action faster than you should. My advice is that slightly

slower and right is better than quick and wrong.

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Morris: Sector matters less than cultural fi t. You

need to understand who you are going to work

for and with. How receptive the organization

and its leaders are to change directly relates to

how successful you will be able to integrate and

bring forward ideas. To be successful, CHROs

need to develop partnerships and interpersonal

connections; and if you don’t understand how you

will work together with other leaders in advance, it

could be a derailer.

Söderström: That’s part of the challenge: balancing

cultural fi t with your mandate. It takes a certain

amount of sensitivity and emotional intelligence

to understand what the culture is enabling and

hindering while also driving the changes the

company hired you to make. They did hire you for

your specifi c background and expertise. You need

to understand how to use the organization and its

leaders to enable change and bring people along.

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“It’s great to see so many talented CHROs transitioning into new roles and sharing their wealth of experience across industries.”—Donna Morris, Walmart

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The Road Less TraveledThe pandemic, remote work, and purpose elevated CHROs’ visibility and

importance to business success. As the resumes of the four CHROs highlighted

in this piece show, the progression also created a paradigm shift whereby

organizations are increasingly willing to go outside their industry to get the

right executive for the role.

Heidi Capozzi

Donna Morris

From: Senior Vice President

of Human Resources

at Boeing

From: Chief Human Resources

O� cer and Executive

Vice President,

Employee Experience

at Adobe

To:

Executive Vice President

and Global Chief People

O� cer at McDonald’s

To:

Executive Vice President

and Chief People O� cer

at Walmart

Senior Vice President

Chief Human Resources

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Ronald Schellekens

Johanna Söderström

From: Chief Human Resources

O� cer, Group HR

Director at Vodafone

From: Senior Vice President and

Chief Human Resources

O� cer, Human Resources

and Aviation at Dow

To:

Executive Vice President

and Chief Human Resources

O� cer at PepsiCo

To:

Executive Vice President

and Chief Human

Resources O� cer

at Tyson Foods

Chief Human Resources

Senior Vice President and

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This is a unique time period, of course—the pandemic, remote work, and diversity and inclusion issues. All of your new companies have essential and frontline workers. How did they help shape your approach to health, safety, and mental and emotional well-being last year?

Schellekens: PepsiCo is a company that is very

visible in our communities. More than 230,000 of

our 290,000 associates go out to our factories,

warehouses, and stores every day, and throughout

the pandemic, they have continued to serve our

consumers and communities when they needed

us most. Our frontline workers are our heroes,

and we realized very early on that we had to do

everything possible to keep them healthy and

safe. We also realized they have di� erent needs

than our o� ce workers due to the nature of their

jobs. So we focused on ensuring proper social

distancing in all of our facilities and the distribution

of PPE [personal protective equipment], including

donating PPE to fellow frontline workers around the

world. We also expanded benefi ts for associates

who were diagnosed with COVID-19 or had to care

for a sick family member. And because we know

our associates thrive when our communities thrive,

we also worked with The PepsiCo Foundation to

provide over 145 million meals to hungry families

impacted by COVID-19, with a special focus on

providing nutritious meals for students who usually

get meals through school.

As we were doing all of this to protect our frontline

workers and communities from the pandemic,

we also faced a reckoning on racial inequality.

After some of the horrifi c incidents we witnessed

in 2020, we stepped up our dialogue with our

associates and our employee resource groups,

and we realized we needed to do a better job of

listening to them. There was real hurt, pain, and

anger, but also a lot of constructive dialogue.

Out of these conversations came our Racial

Equality Journey, a more than $500 million

commitment to our Black and Hispanic associates

and communities. This initiative has three pillars:

people, business, and communities. When it

comes to people, we are focusing on increasing

Black and Hispanic representation at PepsiCo

through recruitment, education, internships, and

apprenticeships. When it comes to business, we

are leveraging our scale and infl uence across

our suppliers and strategic partners to increase

Black and Hispanic representation and elevate

diverse voices. For communities, we’re working to

drive long-term change by addressing systemic

barriers to economic opportunity, with tools like

scholarships for community-college graduates to

help them earn four-year degrees. We still have a

lot of work to do, but this initiative is something I’m

very proud of.

Capozzi: At McDonald’s, there are over 2 million

individuals who work under the Arches, most

of them working in restaurants. Having the

opportunity to work in the restaurant during the

pandemic really allowed me to walk in their shoes.

It gives a di� erent lens to the work you are doing.

We also did a lot of listening. In appreciation of

our crew during the pandemic, many franchisees

o� ered enhanced compensation programs,

including bonuses. Last year, we provided

additional employee assistance and emotional

support counseling sessions for employees in

our corporate-owned restaurants in the US,

and later in the year, we piloted a program that

o� ered expanded access to backup eldercare

and childcare.

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We’ve also talked over the last year about

transparency and accountability around DEI

[diversity, equity, and inclusion]. We took

an important step forward this year as we

incorporated a human capital metric—inclusive

of driving our values, increasing representation of

women and underrepresented groups in leadership,

and strengthening our culture of inclusion—into the

incentive program for our senior executives.

Morris: What our 2.2 million frontline associates

did last year for the company, our customers, and

our communities was heroic and unprecedented.

I am absolutely blown away by the impactful

and meaningful work that happened across our

business. Our goal as a company is always to

support our greatest asset, which is our people.

We did that last year by launching a COVID-19

leave policy that the New York Times called “a

standard for the rest of the private sector.” We

paid out $2.8 billion in cash bonuses to frontline

workers as a form of gratitude. We pledged

$100 million over fi ve years to a new Center for

Racial Equality, and established four associate-led,

shared value networks focused on the US criminal

justice, education, fi nancial, and healthcare systems

to address racial equality. All of those things

happened because of what we saw and learned

from our frontline workers last year.

Söderström: The health and safety of our frontline

workers has been our top priority, and we’ve made

signifi cant progress. We’ve invested hundreds of

millions of dollars to transform our facilities with

protective measures. We hired our fi rst-ever chief

medical o� cer, who reports to me since health

and safety oversight has become part of my role.

We’ve also added 200 nurses and administrative

sta� , have been vaccinating thousands of team

members, and are piloting several free health

clinics this year for employees and their families.

In addition, we remain focused on creating career

development opportunities for our frontline

workers, launching an on-site program called

Upward Pathways that provides free training and

certifi cate courses. We also pledged $5 million

to fi ve di� erent organizations chosen by our

team members that are committed to advancing

diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Initiatives like these that resulted from the pandemic helped thrust CHROs into the public spotlight last year. Given that the issues of remote work, D&I, and employee well-being aren’t going away, how does being more visible create opportunities to elevate the role?

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“One of the fi rst things I did when I got to McDonald’s was don a uniform and get trained up to be a crew member at one of our restaurants in Chicago.” —Heidi Capozzi, McDonald’s

Söderström: Last year, our team gave more news

media interviews than any other function in the

company, as we shared the steps we’ve been taking

to protect our team members during the pandemic

and what we’re doing to promote a culture of

well-being and build a healthier workforce. People

and purpose are now on the table in a way they

never were before, and they elevate everything a

company takes on because of the impact they

have on communities.

Capozzi: The fact that our position is more public

is an opportunity. Now, everyone is listening. It’s

a chance for us all to step up and make more

progress and a greater di� erence. We need to

use this time to innovate around how to connect

people and ideas better, particularly inside our

own departments, because we can then fan that

out to the rest of the organization and the wider

CHRO community.

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It’s interesting that you mention the wider CHRO community. One of the things we’ve heard from other functional roles during the pandemic is how much even competitors relied on each other for support, to share best practices, and just connect with each other. Was that the case for CHROs as well?

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“Last year, our team gave more news media interviews than any other function in the company.”—Johanna Söderström, Tyson Foods

Schellekens: Absolutely. Certainly for me and my

fellow CHROs at IBM and MasterCard. We are all

in the same vicinity, so it was like helping out your

neighbor. We all consulted with each other on

things like o� ce reopening playbooks. We wanted

to help each other out. Institutions like Gartner

and HR executive networks also quickly linked the

various CHROs together to share best practices.

Söderström: Same thing with Donna and me.

We both started our new jobs within months of

each other. So we both were newly relocated

to Arkansas, in new jobs in new industries, amid

the pandemic. It has been great to have a CHRO

network to bounce things o� and learn together.

Morris: Johanna and I had a prior connection

from sitting on the board of the Society of Human

Resource Management as well. It was fortunate to

be able to connect a few times to compare notes

on what we were going through, for sure. As a

member of the HR50, we’ve also had subgroups

sharing best practices. Accenture, under the

leadership of Ellyn Shook, has been so generous

with that, for instance. I think the pandemic has

absolutely strengthened the CHRO community—

we all had a common focus on the well-being

of our workforce.

Capozzi: In this job, you often face new challenges,

di� cult decisions, and issues that can’t be

discussed with just anyone. Having a network of

CHROs to call on for advice has been incredibly

helpful. This was true before the pandemic, and

it certainly was a source of support during the

pandemic. Even as it relates to switching industries,

I know I’ve turned to CHROs in the restaurant and

retail business who have been very open to sharing

best practices.

Getting back to the position being more visible, it’s no secret that CHROs have one of the shortest average C-suite tenures, down to a current average of 3.7 years from 5 years in 2016. CHROs also rank at the low end of C-suite positions in terms of succession planning. How much do those two data points play into the switching industries trend and organizations trying to upgrade or realign the position with business objectives?

Morris: On the tenure topic, I’m actually not sure

given the pace of change that it’s a good idea to

have a CHRO in the job for more than a decade.

I question how objective someone who has been

in the seat that long can be when they built

everything. If the role is a catalyst for change, that

becomes hard when you are in a fi xed position. I’m

not sure four years is right, but I’m not sure 10 or 18

years, like I put in at Adobe, is right anymore either.

Given the global demands of the role now, I’m not

surprised though that an average tour of duty is

three to fi ve years.

Capozzi: On the succession side of the equation,

we spend a lot of time helping other leaders plan

succession pipelines for their functional areas. In

reality, CHRO succession should be a model for

how it is done in other positions. We should be

using ourselves to experiment and pilot ideas to

improve succession management.

Schellekens: There’s no question that boards and

CEOs are turning to CHROs to help them drive

the business agenda. And if they don’t have the

right person in the role to do that, they are going

to go out and get the right person, which plays

into the tenure and succession issues. No matter

the industry, certain aspects of the role are always

transferable. What companies are looking for are

CHROs who can establish deliverables around an

organization and people agenda to meet their

business priorities.

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“The worst thing you can do is copy and paste an old HR strategy and system to a new organization.” —Ronald Schellekens, PepsiCo

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CHROs haven’t historically been considered potential CEO successor candidates, partly because of the lack of operational and P&L responsibility. But if the issues of the last year aren’t going away, and if CHROs are being held accountable for delivering on a business agenda, then does that mean there could be a path to the CEO position for CHROs?

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Söderström: I could see a path opening up

sometime in the future depending on your career

path and experience. We are at a point in time

where CHROs are expected to step up and lead in

a broader space than before. With purpose, culture,

strategy, and other people agenda topics becoming

part of everyday C-suite conversations, CHROs are

core business enablers and value creators.

Schellekens: Although HR is more integrated with

the business and plays a much larger role, I don’t

think we are quite at that point yet. I think there’s

a value to moving HR executives into operating

roles so that they can understand other elements of

the business and to be on the receiving end of HR

policies and practices and see what has an impact

and what doesn’t. But when it comes to most CEO

roles, it’s critical to have a deep understanding

of the consumer and how to run end-to-end

businesses at scale.

Morris: I’ll put it this way, the function has a lot

of runway to make a sustainable impact on an

organization, whether as CHROs or in another

leadership position.

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Perspectives

© 2021 Korn Ferry. All rights reserved.

For more information, contact:

Doug Charles at doug.charles@kornferry.com

Torrey Foster at torrey.foster@kornferry.com

Daniel Rubin at daniel.rubin@kornferry.com

Sheila O’Grady at sheila.ogrady@kornferry.com

Thomas Wrobleski at tom.wrobleski@kornferry.com

Christian Hasenoehrl at christian.hasenoehrl@kornferry.com

George Atkinsongeorge.atkinson@kornferry.com