Lisa Sterling

Lisa Sterling said “absolutely not” when she was first asked to take a Chief People Officer role. Not because she didn’t care about people, but because everything she believed about organizational performance was at odds with what HR was supposed to be. She took the job anyway, with one instruction: get rid of all of it and build what you actually believe in.

She’s now CPO at Perceptyx, an AI-powered employee experience platform, and that operating philosophy hasn’t changed. Lisa came to HR after years on the vendor side, which means she watched the function from the outside long enough to know exactly what was broken before she was ever responsible for fixing it. The engagement score obsession, the job architectures, the performance conversations that produce ratings instead of growth. She sees all of it for what it actually is, and she’s building something to replace it.

What she’s after is a talent infrastructure that treats people as capable of more than their job descriptions suggest, measured by what they actually contribute rather than how they score on an annual survey. She tells her own team that if they ever want her job, they should leave HR first. Go build experience somewhere else in the business. The people leaders who are actually moving things forward are the ones who stopped thinking of themselves as HR people. Her job, as she defines it, is not human resources. It’s organizational growth and value creation.

Sure, the title on Lisa’s business card says Chief People Officer. But this conversation is really about what happens when someone with that title decides the job description doesn’t apply to them anymore — and builds something better anyway.

In this episode, you will hear:

  • Lisa’s argument that HR doesn’t actually control engagement, and why the score is the wrong KPI
  • The difference between a CHRO and a CPO, and why she doesn’t call herself the former
  • How she ended up running global customer success on top of the people function
  • Why she tells her own team to leave HR if they want to grow
  • How Perceptyx is moving from data collection to actual behavior change
  • The capability operating system she’s building to replace job descriptions and performance ratings
  • Her imposter syndrome moment (and epiphany) at the New York Stock Exchange

Resources from this episode

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Category: Podcast