What It Takes to Be a Strategic CHRO in Today’s Business Environment | Gartner

As Chief HR Officers (CHROs) support their organizations in achieving critical business objectives and navigating an unpredictable business landscape, this article offers three suggestions for enhancing CHROs’ capabilities as strategic business leaders. 1) Develop a comprehensive business understanding, 2) Align HR strategy with the organization’s business priorities, and 3) Evaluate the flexibility and effectiveness of HR’s strategy. Regarding flexible HR strategies (# 3), this point emphasizes the need for CHROs and their HR teams to have HR strategies that can swiftly adapt to changes and disruptions in the business environment. To assess the flexibility and effectiveness of HR’s strategy, CHROs can regularly pressure-test talent strategies against various risk scenarios to gauge the organization’s preparedness to pivot quickly when necessary. Figure 5 illustrates how Nestlé employs a trigger-based strategic planning process, which helps identify various internal and external triggers that prompt a strategic review. As HR leaders and their teams test their HR strategies against different scenarios, I am resharing this 17-page paper by Deloitte, which has a framework (page 5) consisting of four scenarios within the context of inflation. While the paper focuses on inflation-driven scenarios, the framework can be used to construct various business scenarios (e.g., a 15% reduction of sales in the EMEA region, a new competitor entering the market, etc.) that serve as the basis for scenario-based talent and workforce planning.