As partner and global co-head of the HR officers practice at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, Jennifer Wilson spends her career thinking about what makes a good HR leader.
“The bar for CHROs in 2026,” she says, “is what we’re calling an ‘enterprise CHRO.'” This is the leader who not only handle HR responsibilities, but are also a critical collaborator in the business at large—and are able to translate the impact that their work has on the entire enterprise.
In an interview with StrategicCHRO360, Wilson shares the skills CHROs should be investing in now, the path to becoming CEO-ready and how to balance both the short- and long-term responsibilities of leadership.
As CHROs begin 2026, which leadership capabilities are becoming truly mission-critical? What skills do you think CHROs are underestimating right now?
The bar for CHROs in 2026 is what we’re calling an “enterprise CHRO”: a leader who can deliver the HR fundamentals while also shaping business outcomes. In our recent survey of about 600 global C-Suite leaders, only about 22 percent of CEOs and board members said their CHRO is already operating at that enterprise level, so there’s a clear gap between expectations and current reality.
The mission-critical capabilities follow from that shift. First is business and financial acumen paired with principles-first thinking: being able to connect talent decisions to revenue, margin, innovation velocity and enterprise risk. Second is AI and technology fluency. CHROs don’t need to be engineers, but they do need to partner tightly with the CFO and with chief AI/data leaders to redesign work, govern new “human + AI agent” workforce models and scale adoption. Third is courage and cross-enterprise collaboration: stepping beyond the HR lane to align senior teams, fix broken operating‑model dynamics and lead visibly in moments of crisis.
What many CHROs still underestimate is the “translation” work, that is resetting the scorecard and dialogue from HR activity metrics to enterprise value metrics (for example, leadership bench strength, leadership risk, talent density and time‑to‑capability) and accelerating the organization’s ability to absorb and scale change at the speed AI demands.
With CEO turnover accelerating, how should CHROs rethink their role in succession planning across the enterprise leadership bench? How can they best support succession planning efforts?
Rising rates of CEO exits can create significant financial and reputational risk, making effective succession planning more critical than ever. Heidrick research shows CEOs and board members who are confident in their succession practices are 50 percent more likely to report stronger financial performance, and 61 percent expect succession planning to have an even greater effect on valuation over the next five years. With nearly two‑thirds of CEOs still promoted internally, building a ready leadership bench is one of the highest-ROI investments a CHRO can lead.
CHROs play a central role in elevating succession from an episodic exercise to a continuous, forward-looking discipline tied directly to organizational strategy. That means clearly defining what “ready now” and “ready later” actually mean in terms of gaps to be closed for the leaders in the plan vs. what might be available in the external market. This process helps expose vulnerabilities in succession plans, and sometimes leads to the realization that some leaders are not aligned with the company’s future direction, regardless of what development experiences the company might be able to provide.
CHROs have an opportunity to bring structure and rigor to the process from the very start of a CEO’s tenure, often earlier than anyone wants to do it. Done well, this connects succession planning to leadership development and ensures a strong, sustainable pipeline for the future.
We don’t often see CHROs ascend to the CEO position. What do CHROs need to do to set themselves up to be leaders that are ready to take on the top job?
It’s still uncommon. Heidrick data shows that only 16 CEOs at America’s 1,000 largest companies come from an HR background. Yet many of the capabilities CEOs increasingly prioritize today—culture, leadership and change management—are areas where CHROs bring deep expertise, particularly as AI transforms the workplace.
To be seen as CEO-ready, CHROs have to be experienced as enterprise operators and strategists, not “functional leaders who advise.” The fastest way to build that credibility is to own enterprise-level outcomes: leading or co-leading cross-functional work that the board and CEO care about, like AI-enabled operating model redesign, workforce restructuring or M&A integration, and be accountable for the results in business terms.
They also need visible business and financial acumen: understanding how the company makes money, and how talent decisions move revenue, EBITDA and risk. Finally, they must build board and stakeholder confidence over time—demonstrating judgment, courage and composure in volatile moments. When boards already experience the CHRO as the executive who stabilizes crises, aligns leaders and unblocks execution, the leap to CEO becomes more plausible.
What does an effective partnership between the CHRO, the CEO, and board actually look like today?
At its best, the CHRO–CEO–board partnership resembles a leadership “operating system,” not a set of occasional meetings. It starts with trust, but it’s sustained by clear cadence, role clarity, and a shared view that talent and workforce strategy are core to value creation.
In practice, three things stand out. First, direct access and no surprises: the CHRO has regular one‑on‑ones with the CEO, routine touchpoints with key committee chairs and the license to surface emerging risks early, things like succession vulnerabilities, skills decay, cultural fractures, burnout hotspots or AI-adoption friction.
Second, a common scorecard: The board dialogue is anchored in metrics that connect talent and leadership to enterprise outcomes (as mentioned above, bench strength and leadership risk, time‑to‑capability, talent density and the cost of people-related failures). That scorecard creates a neutral fact base for decision-making and helps the CHRO speak the board’s language.
Third, the CHRO acts as connective tissue across the C‑Suite, especially between the CEO, CFO and chief AI/data leaders, so that strategy, operating model and workforce plans move together. When that alignment is in place, the CHRO is empowered to step beyond traditional HR topics and co-lead enterprise transformation.
How are leading CHROs balancing modern workforce pressures like skills gaps, burnout and AI adoption while still building long-term capabilities for their organizations?
Leading CHROs are treating skills gaps, burnout and AI adoption as one integrated system: the design of work. AI can’t be a standalone “tech rollout,” and well-being can’t be something where we just treat the symptoms. They are both consequences of how work is structured, how roles evolve and how leaders manage change.
The best CHROs start by identifying where AI can remove low‑value work, augment decision-making and speed execution, then pair that with reskilling that reduces “time‑to‑capability” for the roles that matter most.
They also address the psychological weight of AI-driven uncertainty with transparency: being explicit about where AI will be used and why, and partnering with the CFO to think through how productivity gains will be shared, perhaps through career pathways, upskilling investment and compensation mechanisms. That clarity builds trust and accelerates adoption.
On burnout, EAP programs, mental health days and resilience training can help at the individual level but don’t address root causes. The real issues are systemic, and CHROs have direct influence over them: workforce planning (are roles carrying too much because we’re under-resourced?), organizational design (where are the accountability gaps and overlaps?), performance frameworks (are we inadvertently rewarding unsustainable behavior?), and succession planning (are we burning out high potentials by over-assigning them?).
Burnout is also often the first signal that an AI transformation is being managed as a technology initiative rather than a work design initiative. CHROs who can read that signal early and bring it to the CEO and ELT as a design problem and not an individual wellness problem are making the human cost of change visible before it leads to failure.
