The CHRO Playbook: Getting Off to a Strong Start in the Age of AI

Since we first published The CHRO Playbook in 2021, change has continued, but the context has evolved profoundly. AI is reshaping how work gets done, how organizations are designed and what the workforce of the future looks like. While still the steward of talent, the CHRO is now expected to be a co-architect of enterprise transformation. This refreshed edition incorporates what we have learned advising HR leaders through this shift, while preserving the timeless onboarding disciplines that still set great transitions apart.

Each of the nine points in the playbook now closes with a practical sidebar — “Putting AI to work” — showing how you can use AI to execute that point. A note on those tools: The vendor landscape is evolving at remarkable speed. Evaluate any tool against your organization’s security, privacy and procurement standards along with anything touching employee data. Insist on enterprise-grade deployments, never consumer accounts.

The challenge

Talent remains at the top of the CEO’s agenda — but the nature of the assignment has changed. CEOs and boards are asking their CHROs to answer questions that didn’t exist when most of today’s HR leaders built their careers: How will AI change the shape of our workforce over the next three years? Which roles will be redesigned, augmented or automated — and how do we reskill at the necessary pace? How do we capture productivity gains without breaking trust? And how do we keep culture, engagement and leadership pipelines strong while all of this is in motion?

At the same time, the perennial work of the CHRO has not gone away: attracting and retaining strong talent, developing leaders, sustaining a healthy culture, and creating a thoughtful succession planning process. It has never been more critical to build momentum early and create a foundation for your (and your team’s) longer-term success.

The solution

Your first 100 days in a new position is a unique window of opportunity before you become fully entrenched in the demands of the role. Getting off to a fast start (and preparing before Day 1) can earn the confidence of your CEO, the C-suite more broadly and the entire organization, and give you the momentum to achieve great long-term performance.

We have seen many successful HR leaders follow this proven plan:

1. Prepare yourself during the countdown
2. Align expectations
3. Shape your human resources team
4. Craft your strategic agenda
5. Lead the AI and workforce transformation agenda (new)
6. Start transforming culture
7. Manage your boss
8. Communicate
9. Avoid common pitfalls

Most steps take place concurrently and continue into the next 100 days and beyond.

PLANNING FOR GREAT PERFORMANCE IN YOUR FIRST 100 DAYS

1. Prepare yourself during the countdown

• Prepare yourself physically and mentally, as your stamina will be tested. A rested mind and body will allow you to rise above the hectic pace that comes with starting any new job and will help you maintain the perspective and mental space to ascertain what is most impactful versus seemingly urgent.
• Do your homework. What are the most important questions you will need to ask your key constituents? What public commitments has it made about its workforce, its culture and its values? What is the company’s posture on AI — ambitious, cautious or undefined?
• Begin your “listening tour” prior to your official first day by speaking with other members of the C-suite, your boss, other current/former employees, trusted confidantes and other critical stakeholders.
• Build your own AI fluency. Adopt the tools your workforce is using. A CHRO who has hands-on experience with AI will ask sharper questions, be able to distinguish between hype and substance, and earn instant credibility across the organization.
• Recognize what skills of yours need to be refined and consider outside sources for any specialized training that may help close these gaps. There is a reason the world’s best athletes leverage personal coaches; you too could benefit from one.
• Draft your 100-day plan with specific tasks and timing so you have a foundation from which to iterate when you start. Maintain a journal, noting everything you learn.
• Cultivate relationships with your peers in the C-suite. Understand which functions are critical to the AI and workforce agenda. Ask questions, be vulnerable and ask for their advice.
• Share your early hypotheses regarding the organization with a trusted ally, recognizing the perspective that “fresh eyes” offer during your early days.
• Review any recent communication or internal documents that provide a look at the company’s strategic vision, history, culture, employee engagement, workforce plans (including AI) or technology road maps that will shape your mandate.

2. Align expectations

• Clarify with your boss what they expect you to get done and how success will be measured so that you can effectively share these expectations with your team.
• Push for an explicit conversation with the CEO about how the context and priorities for the organization are changing. Where is the business under pressure? Is the organization in growth, efficiency or transformation mode? What productivity expectations — including AI — have the CEO set with the board? Is the workforce energized, stretched or fatigued by these changes?
• Understand where AI fits into your mandate. Are you expected to lead workforce transformation, co-lead it with the CTO or serve in a supporting role? Ambiguity is one of the most common sources of frustration for new CHROs.
• Prepare for how you plan to introduce yourself to your team. Be candid about who you are, what motivates you and excites you about this opportunity, what they can expect from you, and what you hope the team can accomplish together.
• Continue to share your leadership philosophy to set the tone for your change agenda and align with your team on important norms and behaviors.
• Host one-on-one meetings with critical stakeholders and pose key questions to ensure your strategic agenda reflects the institutional knowledge, insights and perspectives of your team

Potential questions include:

1. What are the five most important things to preserve about the company, and why?
2. What are the three most important things we need to change within our function and across the organization?
3. Where is AI already having an impact within the team and organization?
4. What advice do you have for me?
5. How can I help you be more successful?

3. Shape your HR team

• Assess the team against what’s required in the future. The modern HR team needs talent analytics depth, AI and digital fluency, organization design capability, and change leadership alongside the timeless strengths of judgment, empathy and business acumen. Honestly assess which capabilities you must build, buy or borrow.
• Strive for a diverse team that matches the company’s challenges and reflects the workforce and customers you serve. Teams with genuinely different perspectives and experiences consistently make better decisions.
• Determine what motivates the individuals on your team and uncover whether they are spending their time in ways that make best use of their abilities. Align on clear expectations and document these discussions.
• Rethink your HR operating model. AI is automating significant portions of transactional HR work, creating a genuine opportunity to redirect your function’s capacity toward higher-value advisory and strategic work. Make the HR function the proof point for thoughtful, human-centered AI adoption within your organization.
• Think about how to communicate with your team. What is the right cadence of meetings? Are there sub-team meetings you should join? How often should you have one-on-ones and what are the objective of these conversations.
• Be aware of how you show up across platforms. Make sure your messaging and behavior align regardless if yoi are communicating in-person, virtual or in writing.

4. Craft your strategic agenda

• Build your strategic plan as a team. Find the right balance between a compelling picture of where you want to lead the group and the flexibility to adapt as you go.
• Diagnose the HR team’s opportunities by listening to constituents. Use this diagnosis to build your manageable, short-term strategic agenda, making sure to under-promise and over-deliver.
• Adopt a “now-next” structure. Define how you will get the most from your function over the next 12 months, alongside the deliberate moves in skills, organization design and technology that will inflect outcomes over the next one to three years. Pace matters: skill sets are changing faster than ever before.
• Use your strategic agenda to help you and the HR organization make decisions, see what’s working and what’s not, and adjust as needed. Expect some level of pushback on your agenda but, rather than resist, coalesce that input in a positive way to maximize buy-in.
• Secure some early wins. Look for flaws in the organization and fix them quickly to establish your credibility as a leader and change agent.
• Connect with the rest of the C-suite. Along with the CEO, you will need the support of the entire C-suite to be successful.

Questions that may prove useful with this important group include:

1. How can HR help the company be more successful and thrive?
2. How can HR help specific functions be more successful and thrive?
3. What are the most important areas where we can collaborate?
4. How is AI changing the work and the talent and development needs in your function — and how can we get ahead of it together?
5. How do you think my experiences or perspective could be most useful to our management team?

5. Lead the AI and workforce transformation agenda

• Establish where the enterprise actually stands. Develop a clear-eyed view of AI adoption across the company: where is it happening “top down” and where it is happening independently; where it is creating value and where it is creating risk. Resist the bias to over- or underestimate adoption within your organization.
• Anchor AI work in real business problems, not abstract pilots. The organizations moving the fastest and most efficiently start with specific, valuable use cases and study how all functions are applying AI in practical ways, reducing risk while accelerating impact.
• Co-own the operating model with your technology partner. Decide together with the CIO/CTO who owns tool selection, workforce impact assessment, reskilling and the employee experience of AI. Ultimately, the CHRO’s distinctive contribution is at the functional level and enterprise level.
• Build a skills-based view of the workforce. You cannot redesign work around AI if you only understand your organization through job titles and headcount. Invest early in workforce intelligence: what skills you have, what skills the strategy requires, and where AI will substitute, augment or create demand.
• Make reskilling a system, not an event. One-off training programs will not keep pace. Build durable mechanisms in the flow of work, internal talent marketplaces and redeployment pathways so the organization can continuously absorb new capabilities.
• Put governance and ethics on the agenda early. Partner with legal, risk and technology leaders on responsible-use principles: transparency with employees about how AI is used in decisions that affect them (especially hiring, performance and pay), human oversight of consequential decisions, and compliance with the fast-evolving regulatory landscape across your jurisdictions.
• Be honest about workforce impact. The CHROs who maintain trust are those who tell the truth early, invest visibly in transition support and redeployment, and treat affected people with dignity. Your handling of this will define you and your company culture for years.
• Keep people at the center. The goal is not adoption for its own sake. Measure human outcomes — engagement, capability growth, internal mobility and trust — with the same rigor as productivity outcomes.

6. Start transforming culture

• Work to understand the culture of the company and the HR organization, identifying how “things work around here.” Diagnose if any type of significant change is required. Look across other functional areas to see where your HR team will need to lead and where it should follow others that are working well.
• Search for the key influencers, decision-making protocols, and the unwritten and unspoken conventions that influence the organization’s culture. Look for clues about how things get done, while listening and learning.
• Watch for culture atrophy. In today’s hybrid, technology driven workplaces, culture no longer transmits itself through osmosis. The organizations that sustain strong cultures are those that deliberately embed desired norms into daily work from how meetings run and how decisions get made to how feedback flows rather than relying on offices, events or slogans.
• Make your first moves count. People are most receptive to change early in your tenure. Whether you are making structural changes or people moves, secure the buy-in of the key power center (along with your CEO).
• Help the organization make change routine. Change is no longer an event with a beginning and an end; it is the operating condition. Equip leaders and managers to make steady progress visible, to reset expectations honestly and to protect their teams from change whiplash rather than relying on one more burst of inspiration.
• Address the organization’s cultural legacies. Pace yourself, continually assess the tolerance of the organization, get feedback and adapt along the way.

7. Managing your boss and board

• Share your onboarding plan with your boss to ensure alignment with your mutual goals. Given their broad mandate, be succinct in how your plan reinforces your boss’s strategic priorities and how it will drive profitable growth across the enterprise, understanding the stated and unstated motivations.
• Keep your boss aware of each phase of your initial plan. Many skilled CHROs have faltered by not keeping their boss engaged during each phase.
• Establish your credibility by having a sound strategic agenda. Be proactive, focused on top of the details of the business and implementing an effective communications protocol.
• Prepare for key conversations with the board and CEO. Boards and CEOs now routinely ask CHROs about workforce readiness, AI-driven productivity and the talent implications of technology strategy. Be ready to answer these questions with a point of view, grounded in data and a candid about the risks and rewards.
• Connect with the board as early as possible in your tenure particularly around C-suite succession, executive compensation and sharing what is really going on within the organization.
• Establish a discipline of collecting regular feedback from your boss. When it comes to the board, encourage “executive sessions” where the board discusses your performance in your absence.

8. Communicate

• Tailor your message to your audience. Stakeholders will want to hear your ideas and it is key you are consistent and continually reinforce your messages to get your plan embedded with these respective audiences.
• Be conscious of the signals you are sending in the first 100 days. Every move you make is being closely watched. Both explicit messages and implicit signals will have an impact.
• Play to your natural strengths when it comes to communication. Use modern approaches in your communication while remaining true to your authentic self.
• Don’t act like you have all the answers. In your communications, quote key leaders in the company or offer ideas captured from your customers or consumers. This will build credibility, trust and stakeholder engagement.
• Be direct and honest. Transparency is a must when it comes to AI. When employees ask "What does this mean for me?" they deserve a direct answer. Tell them what you know, what you don’t know and when you will know more.
• Get the information out as quickly as possible during crisis. Acknowledge the challenges of the situation to establish credibility. Act as a bridge between uncertainty and employees’ desire for stability.

9. Avoid common pitfalls

• Lacking a formal plan. The most successful CHRO transitions have a plan for the first 100 days and beyond.
• Making rash decisions. New CHROs have more capacity to respond to various issues. Don’t be afraid to pause and listen, develop a plan, and then test the approach before fully committing.
• Delegating AI to the technology function. If HR hands over the people agenda when it comes to AI decisions about work, skills and employees will be made without genuine people perspective. Ultimately the CHRO will inherit the consequences of AI-led decisions.
• Chasing tools instead of outcomes. AI strategy that begins with vendors rather focusing on the business objectives first is set up for failure. Technology choices should be based on strategy, not the other way around.
• Failing to connect with the board. Delaying interaction with your board early in your role, particularly around C-suite succession, will limit your role and influence in navigating talent efforts for the organization.
• Living in the past. Continually sharing what you did at your previous company will cause your current team and stakeholders to eventually stop listening.
• Becoming trapped in an ivory tower. CHROs who lack visibility are often perceived as being inaccessible and out of touch. Visibility must be engineered; you cannot simply assume it will happen organically.
• Stifling dissent. Being defensive or shutting down discord will cost you some of your most valuable team members. Skeptics of your transformation agenda are often your most valuable assets in preempting possible issues.
• Overplaying the CEO relationship. As CHRO, you serve multiple stakeholders. Attention needs to be appropriately balanced among these stakeholders.
• Misreading power sources. Gauging the true source of power in your organization is critical in the early days, but it’s also important to refresh your assessments as you move forward.
• Picking the wrong battles. Avoid focusing on issues that ultimately have little impact on the CHRO role, pulling your attention away from critical priorities.
• Not being transparent with your team. Articulate clear expectations with team members and the function more broadly. How your team executes your initiatives enables your impact and long-term success as CHRO.

• • •

Today’s CHRO jobs are more complex than ever, and it will be the same tomorrow and in the following days. The most successful CHROs are not those who arrive on day one believing they already have all the answers. True leaders bring disciplined curiosity, move with both urgency and humanity, and build organizations that keep adapting long after their first 100 days are over.

The best leaders and thinkers also understand their path is not a solo effort. They lean into a supportive peer group, seek out a coach when needed, and, most importantly, lean on the strength of their teams.

Continuing the journey: Spencer Stuart’s CHRO Xcelerator Fellowship

Much of what this playbook recommends — a confidential peer network, experienced coaching, world-class faculty and a disciplined rhythm of reflection that extends well past day 100 — is exactly what our CHRO Xcelerator Fellowship is designed to provide.

The CHRO Xcelerator Fellowship is an invitation-only development experience designed for first-time CHROs who aspire to lead boldly and effectively at the enterprise level from day one.

Fellows engage in a highly curated 12-month journey that combines multiple immersive, in-person convenings, personalized coaching and virtual master classes focused on the most critical issues facing today's HR leaders.

Fellows also gain exclusive access to the Wharton CHRO Leadership Forum, a premier annual gathering of Xcelerator Fellows and alumni, as well as ongoing counsel from Executive in Residence Lucien Alziari, former CHRO of Prudential Financial. Through a trusted peer cohort, world-class faculty and seasoned practitioner guidance, Fellows build the perspective, confidence and network needed to accelerate their impact as true enterprise leaders.

New cohorts launch every six to nine months. For more information, visit spencerstuart.com/chro-xcelerator.