Voices in Leadership • 8 MIN READ
Five Lessons From My First Year as Chief People Officer
APR 1, 2026
The transition from HR Director to CPO is bigger than the title suggests. Here are the five hardest lessons one new CPO learned in her first twelve months.
Lesson 1: the credibility clock starts on day one
The first 90 days of a CPO role are a credibility audit. Every conversation you have, every commitment you make or fail to make, every decision you visibly take part in or avoid, is being assessed by the leadership team and the HR function. I underestimated how much senior leaders would test my judgement early, not through formal challenges but through the problems they brought me and watched how I handled them. The lesson: be visible, have a clear perspective, and follow through on everything you commit to in those first 90 days, even if it is uncomfortable.
Lessons 2 and 3: know the business and pick your battles
Lesson two: spend the first month understanding the business before proposing any HR changes. Talk to the CFO, the COO, the heads of the major business units. Understand what keeps them up at night. The most credible HR strategy is the one that speaks directly to those concerns. Lesson three: you cannot fight every battle in your first year without losing the war. Identify the two or three changes that will have the most visible impact and execute them excellently. A small number of well-delivered improvements builds more credibility than a large number of partially completed initiatives.
Lessons 4 and 5: build the HR team and accept ambiguity
Lesson four: the quality of your HR team determines the quality of your function. I spent too long trying to improve outcomes through process changes when the real constraint was capability in the team. Invest early in developing your best people and be willing to make difficult decisions about those who are not performing. Lesson five: the CPO role operates in permanent ambiguity. You will make decisions with incomplete data, in situations where there is no clearly right answer, and where the consequences will not be visible for months. Building comfort with that ambiguity, and the discipline to make a decision and own it rather than waiting for certainty, is the defining skill of the role.
