Podcast

Bold Questions, Unfiltered Answers

1. • What does the dual mandate really mean in today’s CHRO role?
   • What specific skills or instincts should HR professionals borrow?
   • Where do you see CHROs struggling the most when trying to think like business owners?
   • What role does story-telling play in helping CHROs influence like founders and lead CXOs?
   • Is it possible for CHROs to groom future founders and CXOs and how do you do it?

Do you want to go deeper into the conversation?

Read our insightful blog, “Three Mindset Shifts You Need to Adopt If You Want a Seat in the Boardroom” And learn what it takes to be boardroom ready in 2025 and beyond.

Mic-drop Moment:

“To stay relevant in your field, you must be agile and upskill yourself.”

Shailaja points out that agility and upskilling are two majorly important skills to stay relevant in the industry and CHROs play an instrumental role in it. It’s crucial to keep relevancy on the pedestal because tech outdate and skills that don’t serve are no longer needed.

In these changing dynamics, CHROs emerge as strategic players to educate CXOs and strategize programs and campaigns to upskill them with industry trends, tech, and innovation. Shailaja believes a CHRO holds immense power to prepare the workforce ready for future and inevitable challenges that come with it.

No Prep. Just Perspectives:

• One trait HRs need more of to be boardroom ready?

Having a relevant POV and a voice.

• One CXO trait, founders often underestimate.

Followership.

• What’s harder, launching from zero or scaling with governance?

Scaling with governance.

• One book that shaped your HR leadership style.

Not a book, though but an article in HBR, “Pygmalion and management.”

• A CHRO who can’t _______, will struggle in the next 5 years.

Who can’t master the pace of pivot

• Build fast or build right, which wins in your world?

Build fast

• What would your founder’s manifesto for CHRO say in one line?

Carpe diem. (Seize the day)

Dual role of CHRO: Food for thought

1. What is the dual role for a CHRO today?

If you are a CHRO, then you are no longer a people enabler. And it’s time that you realize that this traditional role will not serve your growth. Rather, you should now think, plan, and act like a business growth partner to your CEO and CXOs. Why? Because you are the key stakeholder to bring risks, revenues, and long-term goals under the HR lens.

The dual role of CHRO pushes you to not be stuck at talent strategy, DEI, and culture building, leadership development, workforce planning, and employee retention but think ahead of it. For example, step into the shoes of other CXOs and take the steering wheel to build a future-ready team.

Now, you would ask, how? So, here is the strategy for you.

• For CFO : Focus on cost-per-hire, attrition costs, ROI on every event and campaign
• For CTO :Assess digital readiness and co-create upskilling campaigns
• For COO : Create agile resourcing models
• For CMO : Partner for internal programs and EVP
• For CEO : Align talent strategy with business goals

2. How can CHROs challenge and support the CEO?

As a CHRO, you can not only challenge the CEO’s visions that might seem impractical but also support them to achieve their business goals in a practical way. But while doing so, you must be strategic and rational.

Here are some of the weak directions you can call out.

• Challenge the disconnect between leadership and values.
• Assess whether current leaders can drive future growth.
• Underscore burnout, attrition, and morale issues.
• Highlight power struggles, communication gaps, and silos.

Question ethics and human cost of success and milestones.

Challenging is not enough. Ensure you don’t leave them with hanging doubts and unanswered callouts. Support them with solutions by:

• Helping them reinforce company’s value across teams
• Providing them with coaching on team alignment and presence
• Translating business goals into talent priorities.
• Ensuring leadership continuity with strong leadership pipeline
• Providing people insights to inform strategy.

3. What makes a CHRO truly boardroom-ready in today’s business world?

One chief trait of a boardroom-ready CHRO is business-first thinking. Unless HR doesn’t think, talk, and act like they are the backbone of the business, they will not understand how the boardroom thinks like and what exactly it needs to take it to the next level.

The second important thing is to talk in the language of data because the boardroom doesn’t believe in fluff. It needs quick insights, super speedy decision-making skills, proven facts, and emerging trends—all possible with the data.

Focusing on leadership succession is another crucial objective for a CHRO. Strong leaders make ideas weak, and weak leaders can doom a strong idea. That’s the power of being a clear-headed leader.

In short, you just have to be mindful to get the boardroom ready. It’s not a big deal—just critical:

• Org Design and Agility—If you think, one post hiring can bring order into chaos, propose the position.
• Tech & AI Fluency in HR—If you experience, your precious time is being utilized by manual tasks, ask for a HRMS.
• Global and Inclusive Mindset—Foreign companies are going above the board, copy them. Follow them on LinkedIn and learn from them.
• Leadership Succession—If you experience, the company needs more leaders, go for it.
• Risk & compliance Awareness—Highlight if your company is missing out on any compliance or regulations.

4. Why is boardroom participation important for CHROs?

For CHROs, boardroom participation is crucial because their role is pivoting. From people’s welfare to business strategy, they must ensure business criticalities like future-readiness, M&A, CEO succession, ESG, and DEI.

For example, how do hiring, leadership, culture and retention affect the business ROI in the long-term, and how working on people can impact the figures. Such puzzling situations need CHROs to put smart perspectives and future-proof decisions.

For strategic business moves like organizational restructuring or complete digitization, the boardroom needs data on how it would impact the talent and the future of the company.

The role of CHRO is changing. It might not seem like an urgent step but over a period, boardroom participation shapes your POV and voice, that’ll help you get a reputable seat over there.

If you want some tips to build a presence in the boardroom, you can do this by:

Raising red flags on leadership issues or ROI failures

Using data on engagement, attrition, competency gap, and ROI risks to influence boardroom decisions

Proposing strategies and roadmaps for resilient workforce, AI-implementation in the organization, and building influential and learned leaders.