Canadian HR Reporter

www.hrreporter.com 11 " T h e p e r s o n t h a t 's i n O D [organizational development] doing people in culture is really not interested in bargaining or collective agreement or compensation as an example," says Mitton. "You have to have people who are curious and are interested in the business, not just the business of HR." CEO and CHRO closely aligned The survey also highlights the effect CEO churn can have on CHROs: 19 per cent of CHROs left their jobs in 2019, representing 16 per cent more than in 2018. And of the 35 new CEOs ensconced in 2019, 40 per cent replaced the CHRO, says Upchurch. An internal CEO successor was two- and-a-half times more likely to replace the sitting CHRO in 2019 than an external CEO successor, finds the Talent Strategy Group. When hiring a new CHRO, an internal CEO successor was more likely to look internally than an external CEO successor. An internal CEO replaced the sitting CHRO with an internal CHRO successor 64 per cent of the time, while an external CEO replaced the sitting CHRO with an internal CHRO successor only 33 per cent of the time. "One of my emerging hypotheses is that a new CEO coming into the organization chomping at the bit to take this position over,' [but] there's a lot of companies that probably want somebody from the outside that brings in two or three experiences or qualities that they haven't had before," he says. "For example, when we get asked to do senior-level HR searches, most of them now want somebody that generally has luxury-brand experience versus automotive experience." Another possible reason is embedded within the general culture of HR, according to Mitton. "People tend to go into silos in HR: There's people who go into recruitment, there's people who go into labour relations, there's people who go into pension and benefits and into people and culture work. What I've seen is people go into those roles because they love that work, but they don't necessarily want to bridge across other disciplines within HR." To be a fully rounded and successful CHRO means familiarizing yourself with all aspects of the core business, not just narrowly inside human resources. It ranges anywhere from bargaining a collective agreement to overseeing a pension plan, which are large, substantive parts, she says. provides an opportunity to essentially reset executive teams. It's probably not unique to the chief human resources officer role; it's a natural changing of the guard that comes into play," says Upchurch. But it's the "unique relationship" between CEO and CHRO that may also be a major reason for some of this turnover. "The trust and the personal relationship is different than it is with some of the other functions like finance or marketing or IT, some of the other disciplines that are in the C-suite, and because of that, there's a trust level," says Jon Hamovitch, senior vice president HR at UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. "There is a unique relationship, typically, between this HR role and the CEO role, which is different from many other people on the executive team [in terms of ] the nature of the discussions that you have, because you're often talking about your peer group; you're the one person that gets to [provide] input on your colleagues." C-suite executives moving out during a change cuts both ways, according to a former CHRO. "We've experienced it with our peer group from a different perspective, which is actually it's HR professionals who have chosen to leave when they have a new CEO in place," says Suanne Nielsen, president of the Strategic Capability Network (SCN) in Toronto. "It's not like the CEO came in and gave them the boot because he wanted his own person or he wanted something different in the role. Our experience has been where there's been a change of CEO and the HR professional is taking the initiative that 'I'm not sure this is something I want to do. This isn't someone I really want to work for.'" CHRR "The trust and personal relationship is different than with some of the other functions like finance, marketing or IT." Jon Hamovitch, UJA Federation

• Cover