The MBS Group’s new whitepaper, ‘Performance under pressure: the changing role of the Chief People Officer‘, explores how the Chief People Officer role has been reshaped by years of continuous volatility since Covid. It draws on original interviews with CPOs, HR Directors and senior leaders across retail, healthcare, hospitality, sport and leisure, conducted as part of our Boards of the Future programme.
The paper finds that the role has changed beyond recognition, and that people risk is now performance risk. When organisations struggle to execute under pressure, the cause is rarely strategy, capital or technology. It is increasingly a question of how decisions land with people, and who inside the organisation is holding the line between commercial reality and human consequence.
Four themes shape the paper:
- Volatility has made the CPO more enterprise-critical than ever.
- The role sits at the intersection of commercial pressure and human consequence.
- AI is a governance challenge, and it sits in part with the CPO.
- Breadth of experience now matters as much as depth.
Read the full report here.
