The CXO Trinity That Will Drive Business Success in 2017

2017 has seen the CHRO enter the CEO's mind as a strategic business partner, alongside the CFO, as organizations place emphasis on people management at par with financial management.

It’s a given that an organization is entirely dependent on its people to carry out business functions and make all the difference. CHROs lead the way, and if recent reports by some of the most prestigious industry watchers and consultants are to be believed, they are required to tackle what is considered by most CEOs to be the single biggest challenge in the corporate world – that of human resources excellence, and yet, as a function, this facet of organizational management ranks eighth or ninth in the CEO’s priority list. CHROs lead the way, and if recent reports by some of the most prestigious industry watchers and consultants are to be believed, they are required to tackle what is considered by most CEOs to be the single biggest challenge in the corporate world – that of human resources excellence, and yet, as a function, this facet of organizational management ranks eighth or ninth in the CEO’s priority list.

Which brings the onus of Leadership Development back to the CHRO. New research shows that realigned business leadership should ideally comprise the trinity of the CEO, CFO, and the CHRO. This places the CHRO on an equal footing with CFO, in the strategic deployment of resources to meet organizational goals.

In spite of this, even in today’s flat organizations, it remains the CEO’s prerogative to ensure the upliftment of the CHRO to the strategic level, clearing away any hurdles on the way, and making people leaders actual strategic partners of ownership. To what end? This class of high-proximity collaboration makes for an optimized utilization of an organization’s human resources along the same lines of an organization’s financial resources – and this is the essential component of success in a fast-growing digital world, where employee management mandates the CHRO to don multiple hats and the employer’s commitment is as crucial a factor for success as employee’s.

SEEING THE CHRO IN A NEW LIGHT AND UP CLOSE

Another shift in perspective that the new age CEO needs to imbibe is in the form of a closer and clearer view of the CHRO’s role, with a suggested “contract” of the contributions the CHRO is making, and how the requisite expectations in the short, middle and long-term from him or her can be elucidated in a clear and concise manner.

The CEO+CHRO alliance, in such scenarios, should ideally focus their efforts on a three-pronged path to organizational excellence and maximized productivity – namely, pre-emptive and remedial policy-making, diagnosis of threats and challenges to the productivity of the entire workforce and finally, accurately identifying the key people who will drive the growth and success of this new alliance, disseminating information and achieving the end objectives.

This approach should then be applied to enhance the performance of the entire spectrum of human resources functions, including employee satisfaction, employee engagement, benefits and compensation, workforce diversity and talent acquisition and mapping.

In conclusion, the collaboration in the partnership between the CEO, CFO and CHRO is an extremely potent alliance that can revolutionize the way stakeholders view the CHRO. This time, as a strategy provider over the erstwhile ‘strategic partner’. New cross-function metrics can be developed and implemented, and the perceived value addition that this will bring about in organizational excellence is far too great to be limited by just this article.