As we consider a range of potentially significant changes facing today’s organizations and how those impact the role, operating models, and priorities of their HR teams, the most interesting involve the focus and make-up of their leaders. While the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) title and role have existed for years, the “Chief People Officer” (CPO) title has emerged more recently and has gained in popularity. Despite the perception among many that the two titles are interchangeable, there are significant differences when exploring the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles, including how they view their mandates, focus their efforts, and define excellence in HR. 

The Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles are a critical element of the conversation about the necessary evolution in HR due to significant shifts in: 

1. How an HR organization’s work is performed (in the context of AI and advanced technology adoptions) 
2. How operations are staffed (in the context of changing skill requirements and labor shortages) 
3. How organizations respond to increased volatilities (in the context of financial market, competitive landscape, and government policy and regulatory shifts)
4. How HR delivers services and increases business impact (in the context of staff reductions, C-suite changes)

Those trends are creating pressure for HR leaders to reconsider their function’s value proposition, what they prioritize, and how best to align the workforce and its collective capabilities to drive greater impact in achieving the organization’s objectives. Comparing and contrasting the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles is a powerful analysis for HR leaders as they consider how to enhance their teams’ business contributions.

The origins and emergence of the Chief People Officer Role

When comparing and contrasting the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles, it is helpful to understand the origins of the CPO title. The title was originally coined in the early 2000s, when Google renamed its HR function to “People Operations”. It was meant to signal a significant shift from a primarily administrative, process-oriented approach to one focused on building and enhancing the employee experience, development opportunities, and well-being. The critical shift was reframing employees as “assets” instead of “resources.”

Google’s PeopleOps core philosophy offers some early insights into how the focus and worldview of a CPO might differ from that of a traditional CHRO:

• Empowerment and autonomy: Considering and treating employees as individuals to be empowered, rather than a supply of “resources" to be used to achieve a specified business benefit.
• Data-based decision-making: Using data and evidence-based analyses to objectively assess and drive improvements to the employee experience, engagement, productivity, and retention.
• Strategic impact of talent: Hiring, managing, developing, and retaining curious, creative, and adaptive employees in ways that align their efforts and make them primary drivers of the achievement of organizational objectives.

As a result, the role of the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO represented a shift of HR from a manager of inert resources to be deployed impersonally to an architect of the workplace, work life, and work environment that maximized the value of the human assets that created and delivered its products and services. It essentially reintroduced a more humanistic, employee-centered approach to the attraction, development, deployment, and guidance of careers, more directly focused on and motivated by the company's mission, strategies, and objectives. 

The prevalence of the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO titles indicates the continuing popularity of the CPO focus and title. While the CHRO title remains the most prominent, representing 43% of top HR leaders, the CPO title follows at 25% of surveyed jobs, and more typical titles such as VP, SVP, or EVP of Human Resources continue to be used at 25%.

Comparing and contrasting the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles

While distinctions exist, both roles are typically C-suite jobs, with responsibilities that include HR strategy, aligning processes and initiatives with business objectives, integrating HR functions and team efforts to manage and resolve talent issues, overseeing operational and compliance requirements, and serving as a strategic advisor to the organization’s leadership. They are both engaged as experts on human behavior and capabilities to provide guidance to line management on how best to leverage, engage, motivate, and guide employee performance in the service of organizational goals.

The primary differences between the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles appear in their priorities and focus. Where the traditional CHRO targets HR and management process excellence and policy adherence, operational stability, and risk management, the CPO focuses more on culture, engagement, employee experience, and well-being. The Chief People Officer is viewed as acting on a more employee-centered, progressive platform, whereas the CHRO is perceived as focusing on a business-like infrastructure that provides stability for managers and leaders.

In general, the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO comparison can be viewed through the lens of the HR mission and its achievement. The CPO can be seen building their agenda on the outcomes of HR efforts (engagement, productivity, culture), while the CHRO targets excellence and impact through processes (recruiting, learning and development, job architecture). The CPO points to the integration of HR functions and resources focused on outcome-based HR planning, goal-setting, staff deployment, and impact reporting. The CHRO, on the other hand, traditionally targets excellence in HR functional efforts (performance evaluation and merit pay cycles, annual benefits reenrollment) and coordination between HRBPs, COE’s and Shared Services teams.

A real difference or a way to communicate a more modern approach?

Many draw distinct lines in the sand, with CHROs painted as primarily administrative, compliance, and process-oriented, and the CPO as culture, experience, and top-performer retention-focused. However, as will become evident, the differences are much less obvious and can be nonexistent for CHROs committed to leading practices and continuous evolution. That said, while both roles focus on business alignment, CPOs are generally more attentive to it, with a concentration on talent outcomes that are more closely tied to achieving business objectives. 

At the same time, some suggest that the difference lies in the CPO’s focus on a narrower set of priorities, centered on talent attraction, retention, and culture. That overly-limited view ignores the essential role that all HR teams play in legal and regulatory compliance, supporting employee and union relations activities, and overseeing essential administrative functions related to payroll, benefits, and employee data management. However, the CPO role emerged in response to the need to be more responsive to challenges faced by technology companies, which rely heavily on and are continuously engaged in heated competition to attract and retain top talent. 

Similarly, others see the CHRO as a traditionalist, a guardian role (vs. a CPO as innovator and culture architect), but that is too binary and serves only a hype cycle or self-promoting ideals. As a result, the CPO focuses more heavily on employee-centric efforts, including a great employee experience, a robust employer brand, skill development, and career advancement practices and programming. It represents a return to HR as the employee champion and advocate movement of the 1980s.

Some key differences in the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO comparison

Where each type of HR leader focuses their efforts and time on planning, goal-setting, and staff deployment decisions, these vary depending on their perspective, organizational expectations, and role demands.

Emphasis

The CHRO focuses on executive coaching and consultation, operational stability, risk management, technology, operating model, service delivery, compliance, process, and trend reporting. In essence, the CHRO focuses on establishing and maintaining a stable infrastructure that provides a solid platform and support to primary organizational objectives. This is based on the belief that structured and reliable systems and processes will direct employees toward consistent performance and goal achievement. There is a drive to create reliable, consistent, and goal-aligned behaviors and actions by managers and employees in service of the organization’s mission, strategies, and goals. In response to external forces and trends, change is something to plan for, respond to, and manage. 

The CPO, in contrast, emphasizes the proactive management of organizational culture, employee experience and engagement, collaboration and relationships, well-being, employer brand, purpose-driven values, and talent capability and development. Their focus is on building and sustaining a dynamic work environment that engages employees to contribute, adapt, and thrive. This is based on an assumption that well-resourced, highly-skilled, consistently motivated, and continuously learning employees will collectively deliver business, financial, and operational results. The focus is on organizational agility, responsiveness to strategy and market shifts, and human readiness to adapt and meet emerging business directions. In response to external trends and success barriers, change is something to drive, adapt to, and live in.

Leadership approach

While the difference in how a Chief People Officer vs. a CHRO leads their teams reflects their personalities, competencies, and strengths, as well as their communication and delegation styles, their worldviews and role requirements can also shape their approaches to leading their organizations.

The Chief People Officer is most frequently defined as having more streamlined responsibilities, with a primary focus on culture, the attraction and retention of superior talent, and management of a culture that continuously and dynamically aligns with the organization’s mission, values, and strategic direction. They rely on their humanistic beliefs that people respond best to positive and respectful treatment, job autonomy, communicative and collaborative relationships, and transparent guidance and reporting from their leaders. The CPO takes on the primary challenge of proactively championing and fostering an agile, inspiring work environment that is responsive to change and continuously preparing its workforce for future operational advances and market shifts. 

A CPO leads by influencing culture, creating a sense of purpose and mission clarity and alignment, engaging workers by building relationships and opportunities for collaboration, and continuously developing the skills they need to meet their aspirations while achieving evolving corporate goals and objectives. The CPO leverages their knowledge and expertise in human needs and work behaviors to motivate and guide their performance, productivity, growth, behavior, and goal alignment. They rely on data and proven psychological concepts that have been shown to be positive drivers, including manager coaching, social support, professional and personal growth, and engagement in decisions that affect them. 

A CHRO has a broader remit, overseeing the entire HR function, from processes and policies to systems and culture, including recruitment, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance management, and technology. They lead by championing and guiding operational excellence, consistency, and equity. Similar to the CPO, the CHRO leverages expertise in human behavior to champion and refine processes, systems, practices, and approaches that deliver the reliability, continuity, and consistency humans crave in their environments. It uses communication strategies to engage workers in the mission and objectives, policies that guide managers in coaching and evaluating employees, and systems, programming, and support that direct employees to learning resources that help them grow and advance.

What Chief People Officers believe differentiates great HR

Drawing on foundational People Operations concepts, certain themes emerge and shape how CPOs focus HR strategies, capabilities, and operations. Remembering that the role was first created to meet the unique needs and circumstances within Silicon Valley companies, they emphasize business alignment by mirroring and adapting its operational success constructs, including responsiveness and nimbleness enabled by technology adoption, tailored solutions, and the integration of resources and efforts. Those themes include:

• Employee performance enablement. A continuous search for opportunities to optimize how workers navigate their work, support, and administrative tasks. This brings employee experience (EX), process improvement, employee engagement, and managerial effectiveness approaches to the forefront as drivers of business, financial, and operational success. 
• Data-driven insights and action. Reliance upon objective insights related to barriers to productivity, collaboration, skill-building, individual advancement, and organizational goals and objectives. CPOs need to drive major investments in analytic capabilities, HR data literacy, and employee listening to drive their team’s productivity in trend analysis, root cause identification, solution option comparisons, and outcome measurement. 
• Agility and flexibility. Establishing HR as champions of organizational dexterity and resourcefulness to enable individuals, teams, functions, and business units to respond and adapt to market shifts, competitive challenges, technology adoptions, as well as changes in corporate direction.
• Adaptive and tailored talent management. Enabling flexible programs, practices, and solutions that address the unique needs of critical employee segments. Creating integrated solutions that reinforce primary operational goals by motivating and creating accountability for action by aligning performance standards, evaluation criteria, and rewards and recognition with the achievement of business objectives 
• Relationship building. Promoting the value and benefits of collaborative behaviors that drive teamwork and work coordination, cross-functional alignment, more frequent and successful innovation, idea sharing, and establishing broader employee networks that drive individual satisfaction due to having more connections across the organization and stronger bonds with the culture.
  
  

The Chief People Officer vs. CHRO role requires a shift in perspectives

Deciding that a CPO role better meets an organization's strategic and operational needs (or one’s personal values) is a significant step. While some responsibilities will remain the same, and others will drop in priority, there are a number of changes in perspective that accompany the title. In addition to some current standards in high-performance HR (deep business acumen, continuous learning, data literacy, analytic prowess, curiosity, and a zeal for experimentation), a number of core values or beliefs drive CPOs. 

• People are assets that, when nurtured, increase in value and can be developed to create more organizational “wealth.”
• Talent outcomes that cut across HR processes and impact operational or business objectives are prioritized. 
• Organizational flexibility and agility are critical cultural elements that drive success
• Employment is about fulfilling careers vs. jobs to be filled and executed
• Focusing on individual growth, well-being, and belonging drives engagement and performance.
• Recruit and retain the highest performers, culture matches, most adaptable, and growth-focused. 
• Employee experience is critical for productivity, engagement, and retention.
• Culture management is a continuous strategic priority and differentiator.
• HR consulting must focus on relationships and collaboration at the peer, team, function, and business unit levels. 
• Reliance on analytic insights is essential to understanding trends, creating more accurate and effective solutions.
  
  

Chief People Officer priorities

Given the core beliefs that underpin the differences between the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO roles, and what a CPO considers differentiating, a number of priority strategies and actions emerge as considerations when building a PeopleOps-aligned vs. HR strategy. These can serve as examples of activities and changes to focus on, along with the operating models that accompany such a shift.

1. Focus on talent outcomes 

Create a shift from process toward outcomes-focused strategies, plans, goals, practices, and initiatives that are more directly aligned with quantitatively proven drivers of business outcomes. Tailor HR strategies to better drive improvements in employee experience, engagement, productivity, and retention in workforce segments.

2. Target culture as an organizational capability

Understand its elements, define the values and beliefs that support it, and articulate the primary behaviors that enable and sustain it. Measure and track how it is lived and experienced by employees across the organization, report on it, and hold leaders and employees accountable for adhering to its core elements. Recognize where cultural variations naturally occur based on roles, functions, national and regional (geo-social) and socio-political differences, and allow “freedom within a framework” to manage those differences. Use organization development (OD) methodologies to build more effective teams, inter-team, and cross-functional collaborations.

3. Develop organization design expertise

Review the organization's structures, roles, and responsibilities that impede workflow outputs, such as speed, production volume, and product or service quality. Analyze cross-departmental and functional interactions, hand-offs, review and approval cycles, and reconsider how to reorganize them to best leverage the relationships, governance, and collaborations needed to meet operational standards and the company's evolving direction or objectives.

4. Break down traditional HR silos

Reconfigure the HR (or PeopleOps) team to encourage integrated, cross-functional solutions based on the targeted talent, operational, and business outcomes. Encourage cross-training of generalists and specialists alike, short-term redeployments, and mixed-function HR SWAT or project teams focused on improving targeted people outcomes, such as employee engagement, retention, collaboration and innovation, or employee experience with process and technology redesigns. Consider wholesale reorganizations of traditional COEs into outcome-focused teams, such as:

• Employee Experience (EX): combining employee listening, Lean or process excellence, HRIS, human-centered design, HR analytics
• Talent Development: integrating L&D with career development, skills management, onboarding, and career mobility
• Leadership and Engagement: Leadership development, management development, succession management, employee listening, performance management, and employee engagement.
• Transformation Management: Change Management with organization development (OD), organization effectiveness (OE), and digital transformation.
  
  

5. Be proactive and quantitative

Create a reliance on metrics and analytics, employee experience capabilities, and related skills (employee listening, analytics, design thinking, Lean, HR consulting) to generate early warnings, assess trends, and make initial judgments about potential problem areas and improvement opportunities. Adopt leading methodologies (organization development, performance consulting, Lean, or Agile) to generate objective assessments of root causes more quickly and accurately, and to identify potential responses and solutions. Use these methods to assess challenges and solutions more methodically, efficiently, and objectively.

6. Build leadership and management capabilities 

Adopting a more humanistic approach to managing people is core to the differences between the Chief People Officer vs. CHRO. There is a need to define, respond to, and guide leaders and managers as they are called upon to oversee organizational shifts toward AI, digital transformation, and the increasing pressures of a multi-generational workforce. Focus on experiential development that fosters cross-functional and business-boundary mindsets and tests their ability to collaborate and coexist constructively and successfully. Consider dynamic development programming that combines education, experience, and exposure opportunities with rigorous, continuous assessment techniques that objectively evaluate how each leader is performing, adapting, and responding to challenges, growing and expanding their capabilities, and demonstrating the necessary leadership values and behaviors.

Relevant Practices & Tools

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