I spent my first five years as CHRO at a major research university thinking the job was about HR. It took me the remaining three years to understand it was about culture. That's the shift I want to talk about, because everything else in this work flows from that realization.

When you arrive as a new CHRO, especially at a large, complex institution, there's a gravitational pull toward operational excellence. You inherit systems, processes, compliance requirements, vendor relationships, and staffing challenges. You can spend every day fixing those things. Improving benefits administration. Reducing time-to-hire. Managing risk. Creating policy. All of it necessary. None of it strategic. I see new CHROs get trapped there because they mistake activity for leadership.

The real work — the work that actually changes what an organization can do — is shaping how people think about each other and their collective work. That's culture. And culture doesn't live in HR policy. It lives in how a provost responds when a junior faculty member challenges a decision. It lives in whether a department head advocates for someone or lets them slip away. It lives in the stories people tell about what this institution values. The CHRO's job is to be relentlessly focused on creating conditions where the right culture can actually take root and survive.

The Difference Between Managing HR and Shaping Culture

Let me be specific. Early in my tenure, we had a significant morale problem in one of our colleges. Faculty were disengaged, there was tension between faculty and administration, and people were leaving. My HR instinct was to diagnose it through an engagement survey, then launch an initiative to fix engagement. HR solution to an HR problem. But when I actually sat down with people in that college, I heard the real issue: they didn't trust their dean. He made decisions without consultation, he didn't advocate for their needs to the provost, and he was dismissive of their concerns.

The engagement survey wouldn't have fixed that. A retention bonus wouldn't have fixed that. What needed to happen was a difficult conversation with the dean about his leadership approach and what his behavior was actually costing the institution. That's not HR work. That's not even management work in the traditional sense. It's coaching. It's accountability. It's helping a leader see what they're creating, whether they intended to or not.

I had to ask myself some hard questions at that moment. Was I willing to have that conversation? Was I willing to potentially lose a dean if he wouldn't change? Was the provost willing to back me on it, or would they protect the dean and undermine my credibility? The answers shaped everything that came after. Because the moment the faculty in that college saw someone actually hold their leader accountable, the culture began to shift. Not immediately, not without setbacks. But the message was clear: we mean what we say about how we treat each other here.

That's the difference between managing HR and shaping culture. One is about programs and systems. The other is about creating conditions where integrity has to be real, not performative. It's uncomfortable work. It's also the only work that matters.

Shared Governance and the Politics Nobody Mentions

If you've never worked in higher education governance, here's what's different: you can't simply direct change the way you can in a corporate setting. Faculty have contractual governance rights. Shared governance isn't just policy — it's a constitutional feature of how the institution operates. Which sounds good in theory. In practice, it means you can't move anything without building consensus among people who have fundamentally different incentives and priorities.

On paper, that's supposed to make decisions better and slower. In reality, it often makes decisions slower and more political. I learned very quickly that the formal governance structure was maybe forty percent of how decisions actually got made. The other sixty percent was informal influence, relationship capital, and coalition-building among people who trusted each other.

I spent a lot of time early on thinking about this as a problem to be solved through better process. Clearer policies. More transparent decision-making. Better documentation. And some of that helped. But what actually moved things was understanding the political economy of the institution — who actually had influence, whose buy-in actually mattered, where the real barriers to change lived. That's not something you learn in an MBA program. It's something you learn by paying attention, having a lot of coffee meetings, and being genuinely curious about how people actually think about their work.

One of my most important mentors at the university was an associate provost who'd been there for twenty years. She taught me that the system wasn't broken — it was just working exactly as designed for a community of scholars who wanted to maintain their autonomy and influence. Once I stopped resisting that and started working within it, I became vastly more effective. I could get things done because I understood what was actually being negotiated, not just what the org chart said.

Faculty-Administration Tension and the Trust Problem

There's a fundamental structural tension in higher education between faculty and administration. Faculty see themselves as the institution — the scholarly mission. Administration sees itself as the steward of the institution — its sustainability, its growth, its future. These are not the same thing, and they often conflict. How you manage that tension determines whether the institution moves forward or fossilizes.

I made an early decision to be radically transparent about what administration was thinking, what we were dealing with, and what constraints we were operating under. I would go to faculty governance meetings and lay out realities about budget, about enrollment trends, about competitive pressures. Not to convince them to support my agenda, but so they could see the actual landscape we were inhabiting.

Some of that transparency made people uncomfortable. Faculty who'd never thought about institutional finances suddenly had to think about them. Tenured faculty who'd assumed they were economically protected had to acknowledge uncertainty. But something else happened too: trust started building. They realized I wasn't hiding anything, wasn't being dismissive of their concerns, and was genuinely trying to find paths forward that honored both the scholarly mission and institutional sustainability. I didn't always succeed. But they knew I was trying.

That became the foundation for hard conversations about what the university could actually afford to do, what priorities we had to make, and where faculty participation in governance had to be genuine rather than performative. I never would have gotten there through HR programs or policy initiatives. I got there by acknowledging the real tension, not trying to manage it away, and building trust through sustained engagement and honesty.

How Politics Actually Shapes Strategy Execution

Here's something nobody tells you in leadership development programs: strategy execution is political. Not corrupt, not illegitimate — political. Meaning that how things actually get done depends on influence, relationships, alignment of incentives, and who's willing to spend their credibility on something.

I learned this painfully. We had a good strategic plan. Clear priorities. Good analysis. And almost nothing happened the first eighteen months because the people we needed to execute it were either skeptical, under-resourced, or focused on other things. The problem wasn't the plan. The problem was that nobody had built the political coalition to actually make it happen.

So we stopped pretending that strategy was purely rational. We asked harder questions. What does the provost actually care about? What does the board want to see? What keeps the faculty governance committee up at night? Where can we find alignment? How do we resource people who are already overcommitted? We started treating strategy execution as political work — which meant relationship work, communication work, and trust-building work.

That's not cynicism. It's realism. In any complex organization with distributed authority, the gap between strategy and execution is filled with politics. The question isn't whether that's true. It's whether you're going to acknowledge it and work skillfully within it, or pretend it doesn't exist and then get frustrated when your strategy sits on a shelf.

What This Shaped About How I Work Now

Those eight years as CHRO didn't just teach me operational HR leadership. They shaped how I think about organizational change entirely. I learned that the technical problem — whether it's a workforce strategy, a technology implementation, or a process improvement — is rarely the actual problem. The actual problem is usually cultural and political. People don't know whether to trust the direction. Key leaders aren't aligned. There's fear about what change means for individual positions or status.

So now, when I work with organizations, I start by understanding the culture and the political economy, not the org chart. I spend time with people at different levels asking what they think, what they're worried about, where they see opportunity. I'm looking for the real barriers to change, not just the obvious ones. And I'm trying to figure out how to build a coalition of people who genuinely believe in the direction, not just compliance with it.

This is what shaped the Future-Ready Workforce Framework. It's not just a five-pillar model. It's a way of thinking about organizational change that acknowledges that workforce strategy can't be separated from culture, from governance, from how people actually relate to each other. You have to address all of it together, or nothing sticks.