If every company on earth says “our people are our greatest asset,” why is the person who understands people best almost never handed the baton?

The corporate world treats people leadership like the orchestra pit instead of the conductor’s podium.

We say the words with such confidence. We carve them into mission statements. We repeat them at conferences and retreats and end-of-year speeches.

People first. People matter most. Talent is our competitive advantage.

And then the CEO retires.

And the room suddenly forgets everything it just claimed to believe.

The search begins… and almost by instinct the gaze moves toward finance, operations, sales… anywhere but human resources.

It is such a strange disconnect.

Like praising the orchestra all night and then refusing to acknowledge the conductor exists.

Part of it is history, of course…

The CEO role was designed in an era when companies were machines more than ecosystems. When leadership meant controlling factories, supply chains, balance sheets. When success was defined in steel and inventory and quarterly earnings.

So the corporate imagination learned to equate leadership with revenue. With hard numbers. With people who could speak fluently in profit and loss and investor language.

That story hardened into tradition. And traditions are stubborn creatures.

Even now, when the real differentiator between companies is not equipment or capital but human capability, we still reach for the same old archetype of leader.

The one who looks like a spreadsheet come to life.

There is also that lingering, almost unconscious bias about HR itself…

For decades it has been positioned as the department that keeps the trains running on time. Payroll, policies, compliance, benefits, forms, handbooks and performance reviews.

Necessary work. Important work. But rarely celebrated as strategic work.

So HR became labeled as a cost center rather than a creator of value. The place you go to fix problems instead of the place you go to imagine the future.

And labels have long memories. Once a function is mentally filed under “support,” it is very hard for it to be suddenly reclassified as “chief architect.”

I think about how boards see experience…

They want leaders who have fought visible wars. Who have stared down competitors, negotiated acquisitions, soothed investors, navigated crises in public. Those are loud arenas.

HR leaders tend to fight quieter battles. Culture battles, trust battles, alignment battles, battles over structure and behavior and the invisible currents that make organizations either thrive or slowly suffocate.

But quiet does not mean small.

Still… in rooms where bravado often masquerades as competence, quiet can look suspiciously like weakness. So the CHRO résumé gets read as “internal focus” while the COO résumé gets read as “real business.”

Even when the internal focus is the very thing holding the entire business together.

Then there is the tyranny of metrics…

CEOs are judged by crisp, merciless numbers. Revenue, margins and share prices.

HR leaders are judged by things that refuse to sit neatly in a cell on a spreadsheet. Engagement, trust, belonging, leadership depth and cultural health.

Anyone who has actually led people knows those are not soft variables at all. They are the engines of everything that later shows up in the financials.

But because they don’t ring a bell on the stock exchange, they get treated like background music.

So when succession committees ask, “Who has delivered measurable results?” the answer is often filtered through a very narrow lens.

A lens that struggles to see human impact as business impact.

And yet there is another layer we don’t talk about enough…

Many brilliant HR leaders simply don’t want the CEO seat.

They care about shaping environments, not standing in front of cameras. They are drawn to the craft of developing people, not to the theatre of quarterly calls and shareholder pressure.

The CEO job is a particular kind of marathon… political, relentless, public.

For some CHROs it would feel less like a promotion and more like leaving the very work that gives them meaning.

So part of the small percentage is not just exclusion. It is choice.

But the ground beneath all of this is slowly,
quietly shifting.

Organizations today are less like machines and more like living systems. Knowledge moves faster than processes. Culture eats strategy on a daily diet. Talent walks out the door if it feels unseen.

The greatest risks companies face now are not mechanical failures. They are human failures.

Burnout, disengagement, mistrust, brittle leadership. misaligned structures, skills that age faster than job titles.

Suddenly the people function doesn’t look administrative anymore. It looks existential.

And in that new landscape, the person who understands how to align human systems with business systems starts to look less like the orchestra pit and more like the only logical conductor in the room.

I imagine a future board meeting where the question is framed differently…

Not, “Who can manage the numbers best?” but, “Who understands how this company actually breathes?”

Who knows how decisions really get made here… how trust gets built… how teams come alive… how strategy turns into behavior instead of PowerPoint?

Those are CHRO questions. One day they will be treated as CEO questions.

Until then, we will keep living inside this odd contradiction…proclaiming loudly that people are our greatest asset…while quietly designing organizations as if systems and spreadsheets matter more than human leadership…and then refusing to put the people architect in charge of the whole design.

Strategic Reflection Prompt:

In your organization, who truly holds the baton? And if the person who understands your human system best were invited to conduct, what kind of performance might finally become possible?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, MCODE® Legacy Coach, writer and musician. I help leaders and independent professionals close the gap between strategy and execution by making invisible friction visible, so direction can finally translate into results.

If execution isn’t matching intent and you can’t quite see why, message me on WhatsApp. We’ll start with a brief Clarity Conversation to understand what you’re facing and decide together whether a focused Sensemaking Session is the right next step.