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This is the author's own short version. The full article adds where the HR stereotype came from, why the CHRO stands outside the succession ladder, and a gender gap hiding in plain sight.
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Kyun · your host
Today's question: why does the chair that shapes leaders so rarely lead? Over to the author.
Fig. 1 · The advisor's desk
Every CEO says people are the greatest asset. Every board believes it. And yet the function built to own that asset almost never produces the person who runs the company. Fortune 500 firms see roughly 1 CEO in 70 emerge from the CHRO's chair. In India, that number collapses to 1 in a 1000. The rhetoric says people matter most. The org chart says otherwise. Something isn't adding up and it's time to ask HR itself the questions it usually reserves for everyone else.
Kyun
Three possible answers. Which one do you suspect? Tap it, and I'll ask you again at the end.
The author has sat in these rooms. Here is what the author has seen.
I have seen HR leaders who have been one of the best in running P&L, in EY - People Advisory Services, where running business was core for Service Line leaders, most of them from HR background or in Darwinbox, a HR technology firm. So it may not be a competency problem as much. But simultaneously, I have also seen the perception play out in Board rooms and key leadership discussions. HR leaders fail to impress with business insights, they are always found lacking when numbers are talked about and many a CEO, in 1-1 discussion with me have talked about how they wanted their HR teams to be more business centric.
Kyun
Some HR leaders did reach the top. What did they pick up on the way?
We have seen exceptions in the recent times, be it, Mary Barra, who held HR and manufacturing/engineering roles before running GM; Leena Nair, whose global CHRO tenure at Unilever preceded her move to Chanel; Tanuj Kapilashrami, who became the COO in Standard Chartered from a CHRO role. They all share one thing, none of them stayed in a pure-HR lane. Each picked up P&L exposure, an operating assignment, or board reps that manufactured the credibility.
The question it leaves
So to all my fellow HR professionals, the larger question is, becoming a Competency problem ?
“How do we solve the Perception problem about HR, and is it, slowly, but steadily The Kingmaker's Curse
Every CEO says people are the greatest asset. Every board believes it. And yet the function built to own that asset almost never produces the person who runs the company. Fortune 500 firms see roughly 1 CEO in 70 emerge from the CHRO's chair. In India, that number collapses to 1 in a 1000, a gap of nearly 10 times between the most HR-friendly large market in the world and one of its largest emerging ones. The rhetoric says people matter most. The org chart says otherwise. Something isn't adding up, and it's time to ask HR itself the questions it usually reserves for everyone else.
What is worth noting is, no institution, in India or globally, considers CHRO a category worth tracking as a CEO feeder pathway the way they track CFO, COO, or Divisional president. It tells one which pathways the market considers structurally significant, and which one it has quietly decided isn't.
So what are we really solving for?
Something isn't adding up and it's time to ask HR itself the questions it usually reserves for everyone else.
Kyun
Three possible answers. Which one do you suspect? Tap it, and I'll ask you again at the end.
I have seen HR leaders who have been one of the best in running P&L, in EY - PAS, where running business was core for Service Line leaders, most of them from HR background or in Darwinbox, a HR technology firm. So its definitely not a competency problem with the fraternity. But simultaneously, I have also seen the perception play out in Board rooms and key leadership discussions. HR leaders fail to impress with business insights, they are always found lacking when numbers are talked about and many a CEO, in 1-1 discussion with me have talked about how they wanted their HR teams to be more business centric.
Kyun
Now the author goes back 2,000 years, to a man who made a king.
चाणक्यThe parallel · Chanakya and Chandragupta
Indian history already asked the ‘irony in the profession’ question, 2000 years before Ulrich did. Chanakya saw further into human nature, ambition, and loyalty than any king he served. He identified Chandragupta, shaped him, trained him, placed the crown on his head and then stepped back into the shadows of the court, forever the advisor, never the throne. History remembers him as the sharpest strategist of his age. It does not remember him as an emperor. Was that his choice? Or was it simply never his to take?
2000 years later, the CHRO stands in the same place Chanakya was indispensable, unmistakably brilliant at reading power, and somehow still not holding it.
Where the perception came from ?
The stereotype didn't appear from nowhere, and its origin matters, because a perception rooted in real structure is much harder to argue away than one rooted in pure prejudice. When I was about to pick up the Post Graduation course in HR (Personnel Management & Industrial Relations then), one of the Business heads from my erstwhile organisation (Tata Hitachi), advised me against it. The simple reason, “You will never become a CEO”. When I look at what contributed to this in my early years, I realised, HR's own history has conspired to it.
"Personnel departments" emerged to handle payroll, statutory compliance, and the paperwork of hiring and firing and administrative work. Dave Ulrich's 1990s reframing of HR into "business partner" and "change agent" was itself a response to a widely shared perception that HR, as practiced, was mostly filing forms and running the cafeteria of benefits (In the Indian context, Rangolis to be precise). The CHRO title is comparatively young; the wholesale rebranding of "personnel director" into "Chief Human Resources Officer" across companies is largely a 2000s-and-later phenomenon, decades behind the CFO title's arrival in the C-suite.
The metrics arrived late. Finance has a shared, audited, universally legible language: revenue, margin, ROI. Every CFO candidate for CEO can point to a P&L they owned and a number they moved. HR, for most of its history, had no equivalent. Engagement scores and attrition rates are real and useful, but neither carries the audited, board-legible weight of an income statement. A CHRO is hardly ever able to say "we reduced regretted attrition by four points, and it will show up in cost-of-hire savings next year.” Even that, is a translation of a people outcome into a financial one, for the room to understand it.
Kyun
The next part is about who reaches the top, and who does not. Read it slowly.
There's also a harder truth hiding inside what looks like progress: women reach the top of HR in India far more than they reach the top of anything else. An estimated one-third of large-company CHROs in India are women, against roughly 5% of NSE-listed companies with a woman CEO. On one reading, that's real progress. On the harder reading, it's occupational segregation feeding a glass ceiling — women welcomed into the leadership of the function everyone calls indispensable, while the launchpad functions remain far more male- and family-controlled. If the CHRO-to-CEO gap is a business-design problem, it's quietly one of India Inc.'s more significant gender-equity problems too, hiding in a function that looks, on the surface, like a success story.
Why the CHRO can't build their own ladder
If this were purely a competency gap, the fix would be simple; send CHROs to business school, wait a generation. It isn't purely that, and the reasons are structural.
The CHRO role rarely carries revenue or P&L ownership, by design, not by accident. The entire logic of a centralized HR function is to serve every other P&L, not to own one itself. That's a reasonable choice for running HR efficiently and a poor one for producing CEO-ready HR leaders, and very few companies try to solve for both. Board exposure is gated behind the CFO and the CEO, not the CHRO.
I have observed, many a times, that the CHRO typically enters the boardroom for a scheduled compensation-committee item or a succession update, while the CFO is present at every board meeting, every investor call and building the "managing the board" skill, Boards look for in a CEO candidate.
And the sharpest irony of all; the CHRO is very often the executive who designs and administers the company's overall leadership succession framework including, in many companies, the CEO succession plan itself. Yet that same framework, in the overwhelming majority of companies, does not name the CHRO as a plausible candidate. The person who builds the ladder is, structurally, standing outside it. The CHRO spends two decades immersed in what makes other executives "ready," while rarely being formally assessed against that same rubric themselves.
The person who builds the ladder is, structurally, standing outside it.
Fig. 2 · The ladder and the chair beside it
Kyun
A few did make the climb. What did they do differently?
What the exceptions have in common
The rare CHRO-to-CEO transitions that do exist — Mary Barra, who held HR and manufacturing/engineering roles before running GM; Leena Nair, whose unusually long, board-facing global CHRO tenure at Unilever preceded her move to Chanel, Tanuj Kapilashrami, who became the COO in Standard Chartered from a CHRO role — share one thing, none of them stayed in a pure-HR lane. Each picked up P&L exposure, an operating assignment, or board reps that manufactured the credibility. That is the clearest evidence available that the barrier is addressable, not an immovable truth about what HR people are capable of.
Kyun
Want the next people number you bring to the board to land in rupees? Start here.
