Labcorp’s Anita Graham on strategic time management

As strategy, execution, and transformation compete for attention, what does effective CHRO leadership look like? Labcorp’s CHRO, Anita Graham, offers a clear framework: design your calendar around priorities, empower a top team, and protect time to shape the future. She outlines where AI will likely deliver early impact in HR, starting with personalized employee support and talent acquisition, and how visible early wins build adoption and trust. Her counsel to new CHROs is direct: choose your time on purpose and stay in tight alignment with the CEO and board to keep decisions fast, avoid whipsawing, and focus on what the business needs most.

Anita Graham is EVP, Chief Human Resources Officer for Labcorp. She has led human resources through major business transformation in previous roles and currently holds board-level roles in several professional organizations including the CHRO Association (formerly HRPA), the Center on Executive Compensation and the Center on Executive Succession. She also serves on the National Board of Trust for Public Lands.

As the strategic importance of HR grows, many CHROs find their time stretched thin. How do you allocate your time across leading HR, advising the CEO and board, and planning for the future, while avoiding constant firefighting?

I combine a few approaches that work together. First, build a star team that effectively leads the HR function with you. You need to be the function leader for your team, but you are also the HR leader for the whole company and its people, and a partner and advisor to the C-suite, the CEO, and the board. You may also have commitments to external organizations where you represent your company. You can only do this effectively and sustainably when you have a great team.

Second, be clear on priorities and deliberately allocate time to them. Increasingly, I’m spending time architecting the future while balancing execution today with transformation for tomorrow. To do this, I prioritize time with peers, the CEO, the board, my direct team, and other key talent across the enterprise. I plan that time so it does not get swallowed by the fires that arise every day.

Third, do the things only you can do, and empower the team within the vision and strategy you set. Do not lose sight of your own function. Invest in developing talent within HR and enable them to lead change. That is the force multiplier that allows you to spend more time on the direction of the business.

If you had 10 additional hours in your workweek, how would you invest them, and what impact would you expect?

I would invest the hours equally in two areas: first, thinking about the future of the business and transformation, and, second, how the HR function must transform to lead into that future. One of the opportunities in front of CHROs now is to be greater, more impactful architects of a future that is coming faster than past cycles, with technology transformation and the expectations of advanced technologies like AI.

We should be on the leading edge inside our organizations. Pull technology partners with us into the same space and think through the implications together. Build the tools the organization needs to adapt with speed. We do not need to do it alone, and we should not. But we may need to be the conveners and the ones who push the agenda.

What percentage of your time is currently dedicated to understanding, experimenting with, and implementing AI? What areas are you most focused on, and why? Do you have any use cases you can share?

Sometimes it feels like 150 percent, and sometimes it sits to the side. It is pervasive. We are all being challenged with how AI will transform the business, how we will drive adoption, and how to make people feel comfortable enough to trust and engage with tools when they may be worried about their jobs or how their jobs will change. I am also thinking about career paths in a world where some front-end roles that build expertise may look very different.

I think about AI across the business and across the HR function. One way to drive agility and adoption is for HR to start using it and be role models. AI enables mass customization at scale. An agent can know you: how long you have been here, which benefits you are enrolled in, the jobs you have held, your career interests, and then serve you in a personalized way we have not been able to do at scale in the past.

We are leaning in hard on the employee–HR interface. We are standing up an agent we named DiNA (capital D, little i, capital N, capital A, for DNA, since we’re a science company). DiNA is individualized as an avatar. She shows up in a lab coat or scrubs depending on the scenario. She might be sitting on a beach if you ask about time off, or in the lab if you ask about something workplace specific. We have introduced her as the interface for what we call HR Central, and she will become the agent you interact with to do almost anything. In the future, you will not need to go into Workday to request time off. You will say, “Hey, DiNA, I would like to take off the first week in September. Can you send a note to my manager to approve it, and let me know when it is approved?” It will be natural language interaction, and DiNA will execute the steps through the system. That is the start, because ease of use matters for employees.

The second focus is talent acquisition. It is one of the spaces most disrupted by this technology. There are many solutions, and we hire 20,000 people a year. We need to connect with everyone who is interested, ensure they have a good experience, create a great experience for candidates we invite in, automate where we can, and improve flow and communication.

We already see demand signals from the business. For example, our EHS leader asked whether he could leverage DiNA for case reporting. Other parts of the organization are coming to HR to ask about DiNA, which is fantastic. Our people have not seen a ton of it yet. They will start to see it through HR in a friendly, helpful way so they experience these tools as amplifying their experience, not taking things away.

For new or aspiring CHROs, what pitfalls would you warn them about in allocating their time? Where are CHROs tempted or forced to spend too much time,
what gets missed when they do, and where would you advise they focus instead? Any “do this, not that” advice or early signals to watch?

The biggest pitfall is not being intentional. Sit down and think about where the business is in its strategy, needs, and challenges, and therefore where you should lean in most heavily. Consider where your function is in terms of maturity and needs, and the strength of your team. Be deliberate and thoughtful so you understand context: where the organization is, where the business is, where your function is, and where your CEO and peer set are. Actively engage and set expectations so you are not whipsawed into different things or working on items the business does not value. You may need to take the business through that journey, but know space and time so you can impact the right things and then set deliberate time toward them.

Where CHROs get pulled off course: a breakdown inside HR. You start getting questions from peers or the CEO, and if you do not have a strong team or you do not trust what is happening, you feel the need to go deep. Sometimes you must go deep, but strong prep work and planning reduce the frequency and impact. Mistakes will happen. Be planful, empower your teams to fix issues, and get to the root cause of what happened.

Another trap is too much navel-gazing when transforming your function, at the expense of supporting business transformation. Constantly check yourself. Ask how you pull out before inertia takes you too far. When there is a major crisis, mobilize the right resources and teams, whether the crisis is within HR or in the business. Do not go on autopilot. Keep asking: What should I be doing? What should my team be doing? What should someone else be doing? Is this the best use of my time?

Use the business as your gauge. Ask: What does the business need right now to make it through what it is facing? Align with your CEO on where you are spending time. I consistently ask, “This is what I am doing and where I am focused. Are you aligned with that?” Alignment matters.

“Do this, not that” in essential form: build networks with peers; invest time in relationships; build trust across the board; spend time with your CEO and your board; be a trusted advisor. That only comes from knowing your business, having the relationships, keeping an ear to the ground, and being able to execute. Do not stop thinking. If you believe in something and meet resistance, do not back off. Continue to push in the right ways. If pushing this way does not work, travel another way. Continue to challenge the organization from your experience, what you see, and what you sense. Figure out how to drive change in a way that fits your culture.