To begin, you’ve built and led workforce development at scale through transformation, across geographies, and with rare cross-functional scope across HR, IT, and shared services. Based on that remarkably wide ranging set of experiences, what do you see as two or three non-negotiables every CEO and CHRO must get right when it comes to workforce development?
First, bring the outside in. Do not lose perspective on what “great” looks like. It is very easy to fall in love with the initiatives you have implemented, especially if you have had historical success. But that’s when you get insulated in your own bubble. I always push leaders to stay in conversation with other organizations and other industries, so they can continually compare and refresh their practices and build for the future.
A big part of that is democratizing learning. Boot camps and highly tailored programs are useful, but on their own they do not fuel curiosity. When learning is available to all employees, regardless of time zone, function, or level, you create incentives for people to pull knowledge from different sources and rethink how they work day to day. That is also how you build business centricity across the enterprise, not just deeper expertise inside one function.
Second, anticipate the future and be bold about priorities. I challenge teams to pause and ask, “What will be needed next, and how do we build it now?” If you only build for the present, you will arrive in the future and realize the world changed again, and you are playing catch-up. And when you choose where to invest, do not dilute your resources across hundreds of “nice-to-haves.” Focus on the capabilities that are core to your strategy, then commit to them in a way that truly differentiates you.
Finally, treat transformation as an ongoing journey, not a project with an end date. Transformation does not happen overnight. It takes patience, persistence, and resilience. Many organizations create a transformation office for a short period, implement something, and declare victory. The reality is that it cannot be “over.” You transform something today, and tomorrow you transform something else. The capability you want to build is continuous renewal.
From a board or CEO perspective, “development” can feel intangible. How did you make your workforce transformation measurable and board-visible? What would you tell CHROs at the start of a development transformation about ways to translate the progress being made into metrics and proof points that boards and CEOs can consistently track? And what might be warning signs that an effort is becoming performative rather than embedded?
For me, it is simple. If the business is not delivering tangible results, or you are not seeing an inflection in the near future, your initiatives are not working. The ultimate goal is to deliver the strategy. If you are not doing that, then development has become activity instead of impact.
That is why I like listening mechanisms that tell you whether capability is showing up in the work. Engagement surveys are one example, and I would broaden that to feedback loops with internal and external stakeholders. If you invest in leadership development and employees still say they are not receiving proper feedback, or managers are not helping them bring the best version of themselves to work, then your program is not landing. If you are investing in a toolkit of skills and stakeholders are not seeing improvement, then it is not working.
Where leaders get into trouble is relying on traditional metrics that no longer mean what we think they mean. I have seen learning leaders bring “hours of training,” “budget per employee,” and benchmark comparisons. Those measures do not serve us well anymore. People learn in many ways, including reading and practicing in the flow of work. Instead, start by clarifying why you are doing a program. When you stress-test what you are trying to accomplish, it becomes easier to define what success looks like. Then you can choose one or two simple metrics that help you calibrate your work over time.
One more caution: spending more is not proof. In fact, if you can deliver development more effectively and spend less, that is a win. Metrics become performative when they reward inputs rather than outcomes. The warning sign is when the dashboard gets better, but business results and employee experience do not.
You began your career as a chemical engineer in manufacturing, a different starting point than many corporate leaders have. What did starting there teach you about what creates real growth at the beginning of a career, and how has it shaped the way you design or evaluate leadership development?
The reason I chose chemical engineering is the same reason I later chose HR: transformation. I have always been fascinated by the idea that something raw can become something different. When I was five, I built what I thought was a shampoo factory in my bathroom. My mom supported my experiments with one rule: I could not test the shampoo on my hair or the dog’s hair. That curiosity stayed with me. In HR, I love transforming people. The happiest moments for me are when someone tells me they earned a promotion, received meaningful feedback, or applied coaching in a way that helped them succeed.
Those early years in operations also taught me humility and shaped the way I lead today. As an intern, I worked closely with operators, including people with less formal education than I had. I learned so much because I never approached the work as the “owner of the truth.” I did not impose my approach. I took genuine interest in people beyond their job titles, and that created trust. They wanted me to succeed. That experience became a foundation for how I evaluate leadership now: character, respect, and the ability to learn with others, not just perform in front of others.
Operations also taught me “management by walking around.” Nothing happens at your desk. You can read an email and close a deal, but to make accurate decisions you need information from the source. As you grow in an organization, information becomes filtered. When you see with your own eyes, you can form your own conclusions. I traveled extensively and spent time with local teams to understand culture, needs, and barriers, because that is where opportunity is. That is also where early career growth becomes real.
Finally, I always tell interns and trainees that life is not linear. Be open to opportunities. I thought I had my entire career planned when I graduated. HR was not part of that plan. Someone saw a fit, invited me into an assignment, and I said yes. If I had not been open to the new, my trajectory would have been very different.
If AI, as many predict, shrinks the availability of entry level roles and organizations become less of a pyramid and more of a “tower,” what happens to leadership pipelines over the next five to ten years? As that entry point narrows, how can companies be proactive? Where and how do they need to rethink entry level hiring and selection? How does the required development investment per hire change, and in what way does the focus and nature of early career development evolve?
I think we have to look back and learn from history. This is not the first revolution that reshapes how work gets done. It felt similar when personal computers became widely available in organizations. The organizations that do best are the ones that become more intentional earlier, especially about succession and leadership development.
Most companies spend a lot of time thinking about succession at the top of the house. In a “tower” world, you need to plan earlier on. One practical implication is that entry level hiring becomes less about filling a job and more about selecting long term potential. I have seen companies do this well by hiring interns, trainees, and MBAs for leadership potential, not for a specific seat. They keep hiring with consistency across good years and bad years, because they are hiring now for what they will need five to ten years from now, and they are developing people across that full horizon.
A second implication is that traditional, time-based succession paths will not work as well. The idea that someone must spend X years in area A, then X years in area B, then X years in area C assumes you have the luxury of time. Many organizations will not. You will need faster experiences that build toolkits through real work. I like agile ways of working for this reason. People learn through projects where sometimes they lead and sometimes they follow. That forces situational leadership and builds humility. It also accelerates capability because people are practicing in varied contexts.
The biggest shift, though, is when leadership development starts. Traditionally, organizations wait until someone becomes a people manager to begin leadership development. I think that is too late. Theory matters, but you do not learn leadership from books alone. You learn it by going through difficult situations, experiencing conflict, and having hard conversations. If AI compresses the entry level, leadership development may be the area that suffers most, unless CEOs and CHROs protect it and start it earlier while employees are still individual contributors.
One statistic that stuck with me is a Gallup study that suggested only one in ten people are naturally wired to be a manager. That should keep leaders up at night. You will not find all the “ones.” You have to invest time and money to develop the “nines.” And if you start too late, people will not have had enough experiences to build the muscle for conflict management and difficult conversations, which are essential at senior levels. That is why selection matters earlier on, and so does development, long before the first management title.
Last, in an AI-shaped economy, what are the three moves you would recommend CEOs and boards make in the next 12 to 24 months to reduce talent and capability risk while strengthening the leadership pipeline? What risks do leaders most often underestimate, and what early warning signals would you monitor to catch problems before they show up in succession gaps or performance?
First, adopt a “talent to value” mindset. Finance allocates capital every day based on expected value. Leaders should treat talent placement the same way. There are roles that may be small today, but you expect the biggest growth from them over the next five years. Your best talent needs to be there. That can feel counterintuitive because compensation systems often reward size and scope, but strategy does not always follow org charts. You do not need to redesign everything. You need to get very intentional about the small set of roles that truly drive outcomes.
Second, identify the 30 to 50 roles that will deliver a disproportionate share of your strategy, then manage those roles with “surgical precision.” In my experience, this is often a small number of roles that can drive 70 to 75 percent of strategic value. For those roles, stop listing 30 skills or a hundred responsibilities. Be precise about the few “jobs to be done,” then define the two to three “superpowers” and experiences required. After that, map people against those requirements scientifically. Those roles are not a testing ground. You have many other roles where you can develop talent. For the roles that drive strategy, you need the right leader, the right team, and a successor plan you believe in.
Third, become explicit about the operating model for responsible generative AI, and make it a leadership capability, not a tech policy. The train has left the station. Everyone is using it. You can see it even in schools, where some teachers embrace it with rules of engagement and others try to forbid it. For me, “forbid it” is like saying you cannot use a calculator. The tool exists, so you must teach its responsible use. Boards and C-suites need this discussion in the room. Leaders have to be ambassadors for responsible implementation and keep humans at the center, because AI should enhance decision-making, not replace accountability. Someone still presses the start button.
The risk leaders underestimate most often is confusing potential with readiness, especially in the roles that drive strategy. Learning agility is powerful, but it is not always enough. Some experiences require tenure and real exposure to downturns, tough negotiations, and hard tradeoffs. If someone has never lived through those situations, placing them into a critical role is a risk, no matter how fast they learn.
The early warning signals are usually visible before performance collapses. Listen for a lack of business inflection tied to your development bets. Watch engagement and stakeholder feedback for persistent signals that managers are not giving real feedback, avoiding conflict, or failing to develop people. Monitor the strength of succession slates for the highest value roles, not just the top of the org chart. And finally, pay attention to whether the organization can accept “bespoke” decisions without breaking trust. When certain roles have different resources, decision rights, or compensation because strategy demands it, leaders need to explain the logic clearly. If they cannot, the organization will fight the model instead of executing it.
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