The first year in the CHRO seat is not hard because the work's hard. It's hard because nobody tells you what the game actually is. So you spend months doing real work — really, really good work — and then wondering why none of it seems to land the way it should.
[INTRO]
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I want to talk about something that most people in this role don't say out loud. Being a first-time CHRO is genuinely hard in a way that has nothing to do with your ability.
Now, you've earned the seat, you know your craft, and then you sit down in the chair and you realize that everything that you were good at before — the functional expertise, the program delivery, the team management — like all of that was to get to the seat. But the actual job is something different. And your mandate's not written down. Your CEO is evaluating you in most cases on metrics that no one has ever shown you. Your peers are watching to see if you show up like an enterprise leader or a really, really impressive HR director. And the longer you take to figure out what the game actually is, the more runway you end up burning.
Now, I've spent time in that seat. And looking back, there were probably 10 things I wish I had known going in. I'm not talking about frameworks or practices — best practices, whatever that means. I mean 10 specific truths that would have changed how I operated from day one. That's what we're going to talk about today.
And before we get into it, a huge shout out this week to Mirari from Dallas. Thank you for being a part of the community. And thank you for everyone who's tuning in today, whether you're joining from Port Townsend in Washington — I love it there — or Sherman, Texas. I appreciate you being right here. All right, so let's dive into this.
[MANDATE AND CEO SCORECARD REALITY]
The 10 things I wish I had known. Number one: you don't have a mandate. You have assumptions. The CEO hired you with a version of what this job looks like. The board might have a different version. Your team has a third version. Your peers have a fourth version. And the job description that you interviewed against probably doesn't match any of them.
A mandate is a very specific, agreed-upon definition of what success looks like. What you own, what authority you have, what decision rights you own, and what you're going to be judged on 12 months from now. Now, my experience is that most CHROs never have that conversation in full. They fill in the gaps with assumptions. Their CEOs and boards also fill in the same gaps, but they do it with different assumptions. And everyone proceeds as if they're aligned — and that works until it doesn't, when something goes wrong.
Like, your mandate doesn't exist until you take the moment and you write it down, you share it with your CEO, you get it challenged, and then you agree. Your authority, your credibility, your decision rights, your ability to influence decisions — I think all of it runs through that document.
Now, here's truth number two I wish I had known. Your CEO is probably evaluating you on things you've never been shown. CEOs never really explicitly tell you what they need from the CHRO seat. They will talk in vague generalities: "Get the trains running on time. Be my strategic partner. Be a thought partner." Like, those don't actually tell you what the job is.
You do have the ability to figure out what the CEO wants, because they express it in questions, and in what they push back on, and in who gets airtime at the leadership team and who doesn't. Now, I thought I was being measured on things like engagement scores and program quality and retention numbers, because those are the things I was told. And those things did matter. But what my CEO actually cared about was whether I could tell her in plain English what talent was doing to the business — and to have that conversation in revenue, margin, speed, and risk. Not in HR language — business language.
Now, I think your CEO probably has a mental scorecard. Your job is to figure out what's on it and then build a version of it yourself. And then put that in front of him or her on a regular cadence. I think it's three to five metrics — the ones that connect your function to the outcomes that they're actually being measured on. Now, once that page exists, the relationship, in my view, changes. Now, here's truth number three.
[FIND THE CONSTRAINT, NOT MORE PROGRAMS]
You are not there to run programs. You are there to name the constraint. Now, this one, I will admit, took me longer to internalize than I'd like to admit. I came in with a long list of initiatives. I knew what good looked like. I was going to rebuild [it all — transcription unclear]. And I built most of them, to be honest. But what I didn't do was start with the business.
Your CEO has a strategy, and somewhere in that strategy, something is blocking execution. It might be the wrong people in pivotal roles. It might be a leadership team that can't make decisions fast enough. It might be a capability gap that no one's named yet. Whatever it is, it really does cost real money. And you are the person best positioned to identify it, quantify it, and make the case to fix it.
The shift is from "here's what HR is going to do this year" to "here's the specific constraint on your top priority, and here's what it costs, and here's how we're going to remove it." Like, that argument is very difficult to ignore. The program pitch is easy to defer.
Here's truth number four: your senior team does not agree on how to manage talent, even if they think they do. And I've learned this firsthand. You can too. Ask your CEO, your CFO, and your head of operations separately whether to promote from within or hire externally when a senior role opens up. And you are probably going to get three different answers and a bunch of caveats. What look like shared values is usually shared language — same words, different definitions. And the first time a major talent decision is made — whether it's a promotion or a termination — like, those differences surface fast. And they're usually in a room where everyone is looking at you to provide clarity and tell them what the rules are.
So I think the CHRO's job early is to get those assumptions documented — not to resolve every debate, but to surface them, to name them, and get explicit commitments on the dimensions that drive actual decisions. And I think that document is one of the most valuable things that you can produce in your first six months.
Now, here's truth number five. Your function is organized around activity, and the business sees it as a cost. Now, most HR functions are structured around processes, not outcomes — the recruiting team, L&D team, HR Ops, HRBP team. And to be fair, that structure made sense when it was built. But—
[PIVOTAL ROLES AND TRUE A PLAYERS]
—the question is whether it still makes sense today, and whether anyone in the business can look at your org chart and see where value gets created. When I was in the seat, I asked myself a simple question: what does my function actually produce? The honest answer was that most of what we tracked was activity. The business cares about outputs. What roles in my function are directly linked with the business outcome the CEO cares about? One of those categories should grow. The other probably shouldn't.
Okay, so here's truth number six. 5% of your roles drive a disproportionate share of outcomes. And most CHROs — and everyone else in the C-suite — can't name them. I believe that in any organization, there are a small set of roles where variance in performance creates a massive variance in business outcomes. An A player in that seat accelerates execution. The wrong player creates drag that quietly compounds over time. And sometimes that drag's not caused by a bad employee — just an average one where you needed a superstar.
And most talent decisions don't account for this. We distribute resources evenly, we apply hiring standards consistently, and all that's good, right? But if you identify the pivotal roles first, you can do something different — you can concentrate your attention there. And once you've identified them and defined what success looks like in each one with precision — not a job description, an outcome-anchored definition of what winning looks like. Like, what does this role need to produce in the next 12 months? When that definition exists, you stop making decisions by feel.
And here's truth number seven: an A player is a market-relative, outcome-anchored assessment. Most talent conversations inside organizations treat A players as a compliment — someone who works hard, brings energy, shows up early, performs well on their reviews. But that's not what it really should mean. An A player isn't just tied to the individual; it's applied to the role and the individual. An A player is someone in the top quartile of available talent for that role at the compensation you're willing to pay, producing at the level that role requires.
Now, that definition changes what you're actually doing when you make talent decisions. You're evaluating fit between the person, the market, and the role requirements. And that, in my view, is a completely different question than general capability or personality. And when you start thinking about your portfolio that way — what percentage of pivotal roles have A players in them right now? — the number is usually uncomfortable. And the goal is to move that percentage toward 70% or better in the roles that actually matter. That is talent portfolio management. In my view, at the CHRO level, that's what the job is.
Now, here is truth number eight. The org chart that you inherited is a hypothesis. And no one has probably ever revisited it. Now, when you inherit a structure, you inherit the decisions made at a specific moment, for a specific strategy, by people operating under specific constraints. Some of those decisions are probably still right, and a lot of them aren't. And that's because nobody ever went back to ask the question: are you using a structure built for the company you used to run, not the company that you want to become?
Does that make sense? Structure is not neutral. It determines where decisions get made, how fast information moves, and which outcomes have clear owners versus which ones fall between the gaps between functions. If you treat structure as a diagnostic question, you can win. Start with the strategic priorities. Map the decisions each one will require. Ask who owns those decisions today and whether that's the right answer. And then draw the structure that supports those answers.
[ORG DESIGN AND PREDICTIVE LISTENING]
Truth number nine is your annual engagement survey is an autopsy. Build something that helps you predict. Now, engagement surveys are not useless. The problem, however, is how most organizations use them. An enterprise-level score produced annually is too aggregated to act on. You find out you're at 68% engaged and you spend three months building a response to the enterprise average. The actual problem is five specific managers quietly breaking their teams. And you won't find that in the enterprise score.
The real signal, in my experience, lives at the manager level. Score engagement by manager. And the patterns are going to tell you whether to intervene and where to invest. Now, if you build a listening architecture — one that catches the signal early, scores it by the right level, and then tells you where to look before the problem is visible anywhere else — you are going to be golden.
[PEER ALIGNMENT ARCHITECTURE THAT WORKS]
And truth number 10: peer alignment is a system. Like all systems, it has to be designed. It is not a series of relationships that just naturally occur — especially at the CHRO level, where we have trained people to work around us for most of our careers.
Now, this is one of the most consistent failure modes that I've seen in the CHRO role. It's the leader who does excellent diagnostic work, builds a rock solid game plan, and then can't get the organization to act on it. The investment doesn't get approved. The performance conversation keeps getting deferred. I think we've all lived through that at some point. None of that's exactly a CHRO problem — but it is a peer alignment problem.
Your CFO can't see what you see. Your COO pushes on outputs because no one's really translated the systems underneath those outputs into language they can act on. Your head of marketing has been burned by HR initiatives that generated activity without changing results, so they're going to quietly pocket the ROI. Your job is to build the peer alignment architecture before you need it. Not in the middle of implementation — before.
Understand what each peer is actually accountable for. Find where talent is the active constraint on their priority. Build shared accountability around that intersection. Then show up in their world before you ask them to show up in yours. Now, the CHRO who's done all that work doesn't need to be more persuasive. They just need peers who can see what they see.
So that's 10 things. And here's what I want to tell you now. Everything I just walked you through — the mandate, the CEO scorecard, the strategy-talent constraint, the talent philosophy, the operating model, the pivotal roles, the talent density work, the org design, the listening architecture, and the peer alignment — those are not just a list of observations I assembled for the episode here. That is the curriculum for the CHRO Ascent Academy.
[ACADEMY, RESOURCES, AND CLOSING]
Now, we do that in 12 sessions. We'll have up to 10 sitting CHROs — but I think this summer I'm going to try to keep it a little tighter than that. And then we're going to be practitioner-led — that's me — with tools that you can apply to your very specific company starting in week one. Cohort 2 is going to start this coming Friday — that's, what, four days from now? Seats are still available. And the application is a brief 30-minute conversation with me to make sure it's the right fit for you and also for the cohort, to be fair. The link is in the show notes, and you can go to mytalentsherpa.com and book the appointment.
Now, I realize I just handed you 10 things to fix in four days to sign up for a program. You're welcome. And if you take one thing away from today, let it be this: the operating system that you needed on day one already exists. Most first-time CHROs figure it out by surviving and saying, "What am I going to do in my next job?" But you don't have to do it that way.
By the way — if you're in your first year, or if you're in the first year of a brand new CEO, these things matter just as much in those environments. So you don't have to do it before you start — sometime in your first 18 months, or with a brand new CEO, those are the right times to do it.
I want to say thank you for spending some time with me today. I really do appreciate you being a part of this community of senior leaders who want to rethink how human capital really works. If you're thinking about how to apply any of this, let me point you to a couple of resources. Propulsion AI is workforce intelligence for private equity. Their AI teammates are surfacing work risk before the close and helping leadership teams drive execution after. We talked a little bit about making sure that we have good, outcome-based role descriptions. That's one of the things that Scott's company can do. I've brought them into a couple of different clients of mine — really, really good stuff. It's all done through artificial intelligence. You can learn more at, again, the very cleverly named getpropulsion.ai.
And again, if you're heading into the CHRO seat for the first time, or you're close to it — you're who I built this for. You can find me at mytalentsherpa.com. Everything's there. And you can sign up for this. I have a brand new mandate protocol for $297 there. You can find everything at mytalentsherpa.com.
Now, that's it for today. I appreciate you. Until next time: keep raising the bar. Keep learning what the role actually requires. And keep on climbing.
