The skill that moved me from CHRO to COO wasn't people strategy. It wasn't my stakeholder management, my engagement scores, or my ability to run a very good offsite. And I want to share more of that kind of content here...
It was commercial fluency. Specifically: learning to unify HR and Finance data in a way that let me speak the language of revenue impact instead of "culture" and "best practice."
The thing I kept coming back to when I was feeling myself wanting to grow as a CPO was the gap between a great People leader and a great Operator isn't empathy, it isn't even strategy... it's whether you can walk into a board meeting and talk about trade-offs in terms your board really, truly cares about.
New HiBob data makes for uncomfortable reading. Only 2% of organisations have unified visibility across people and finance data. Which probably explains why 68% say lack of timely data contributes to bad outcomes at least half the time, 65% can't ensure fair pay decisions without a combined view of people and budget, and 63% are working from inconsistent metrics across teams.
That's not a tools problem. That's a positioning problem. If your People team can't connect its work to commercial outcomes, it will always be defending HR best practice instead of proposing commercial solutions that happen to involve people.
The COO path from People Ops is genuinely viable... more so now than five years ago. But the entry ticket isn't an MBA. It's being able to show the board that headcount is 60% of spend, that your team manages the company's largest investment, and that you have the data to prove it's working (or flag clearly when it isn't).
I'd love to hear from the community about how I can share more about these skills so that we can all benefit, whether we want to move to a C-suite role, or just contribute further than our current remit...