Whether a Better CHRO Would Fix It

The CEO asked it after his third senior resignation in six months. "Is the real problem here that I just don't have a strong enough CHRO? Should I be looking for someone better instead of buying more training?"

It is a legitimate question. A CEO watching senior departures pile up has every right to ask whether the function responsible for retention is simply understaffed with the wrong person.

Where the question comes from

The instinct to look at the HR seat first makes organizational sense. Retention is nominally that function's responsibility, and when the number is bad, the natural move is to ask whether the person in the seat is capable of fixing it.

In this specific case, the CHRO had flagged the exact pattern behind two of the three resignations, in writing, eight months and eleven months earlier respectively, in both cases naming the CEO's own habit of overriding decisions after asking for input as the likely driver. The CEO had read both notes and taken no action on either.

The question of whether the CHRO was strong enough was, in this case, actually a question about whether the CEO wanted to hear what a strong CHRO had already told him twice.

How much is one unresolved conflict really costing your company?

The honest answer

The honest answer is that a CHRO, however skilled, cannot fix a retention problem whose root cause is a specific behavior sitting one level above her in the org chart. A CHRO can diagnose the pattern, name it clearly, and recommend a fix. She cannot force the CEO to change his own reflex, and no amount of additional HR headcount or seniority changes that basic structural fact.

Replacing a CHRO who has correctly diagnosed the problem, in order to avoid acting on the diagnosis, does not solve anything. It only delays the moment the same diagnosis gets made again, likely by someone with less institutional patience than the person who made it the first time.

Doug Noll's new book Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results lays out why the seat that most needs to change is often the one asking whether someone else needs replacing. See it here.

What to say when someone still pushes back

If the CEO insists the problem is still the CHRO's execution rather than his own behavior, the direct question worth asking back is: "What specifically did she recommend, and what did you do about it?" In this case, the answer was nothing, twice, over almost a year.

That answer usually ends the conversation on its own. A CHRO cannot be faulted for a diagnosis that was correct and ignored. If a CEO genuinely believes the diagnosis itself was wrong, that is a different and legitimate conversation, but it has to be had honestly on its own terms, not disguised as a question about whether to replace the person who raised it.

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