Unlocking HR's Strategic Potential: Lessons from a CHRO's Journey to Elevate the Function. Kristen Bruner, the Global CHRO of Huron

CHROPartners

Unlocking HR's Strategic Potential: Lessons from a CHRO's Journey to Elevate the Function. Kristen Bruner, the Global CHRO of Huron

29:09

 

Cindy Lu from CHRO Mastermind Groups sits down with Kristen Bruner, Global CHRO at Huron, to dive deep into the world of HR transformation. Kristen shares her personal journey in leading a global HR function, highlighting key strategies around building a high-performing HR team, solving business constraints, and aligning HR initiatives with the overall business strategy. Key topics include fostering strategic consultation within the HR team, creating extraordinary HR solutions, and utilizing data to drive decision-making.

Whether you’re a seasoned HR leader or new to the profession, this discussion offers practical insights on how to elevate HR’s role as a strategic partner and consultant within the business.

Key Takeaways:

1. Strategic Consultation: Learn how to develop HR teams to be strategic consultants in the business, driving transformation beyond traditional HR roles.
2. Business Alignment: Build HR strategies that are aligned with business growth areas, margins, and talent challenges by collecting business insights and data.
3. Data-Driven HR: The importance of fostering a data-oriented mindset in HR to make informed decisions and measure success.
4. Creating Extraordinary HR: Deliver HR solutions that are so impactful that client-facing teams would want to sell them to clients.
5. Team Building & Listening: The significance of listening to your team, building an HR culture of trust, collaboration, and positive engagement.
6. Maturity Assessments: How maturity assessments and data help prioritize HR processes and resources effectively.
7. Workflow Improvements: Automate non-value-added tasks to focus more on strategic, impactful work.
8. Stakeholder Engagement: Keep stakeholders, from boards to business leaders, informed and engaged throughout HR initiatives.
9. Take Risks & Do the Hard Things: Advice for HR leaders to embrace difficult roles and stretch assignments that enhance agility and broaden their business acumen.
10. Hiring the Right HR Partner: CEOs should seek HR partners who can grasp the broad business landscape and contribute to overall organizational success.

HR transformation, strategic HR, HR consulting, business alignment, data-driven HR, HR strategy, leadership development, workflow improvement, talent acquisition, HR metrics

Transcript is generated with the help of AI.

**Speakers: Cindy Lu and Kristen Bruner**

**Cindy Lu:**
Hey everyone. It's Cindy Lu here with CHRO Mastermind Groups. And I'm joined today with Kristen Bruner. She's the global CHRO for Huron. And I'm going to have Kristen tell you a little bit more about her background, but Kristen and I met, oh gosh many years ago, a while ago in the DFW area.

And I just have been following her career and all the amazing things that she's doing in HR transformation. And so we caught up a little while ago and I'm like, you know what, we've got to get you on so you can tell us more about this. I think that the topics we're going to try to cover in the next 20 to 30 minutes is like about the HR transformation stories.

Just the emphasis on your team, right? The HR team solving business constraints, rebranding or branding the HR function and setting that vision with your leaders. If you've joined us this morning, feel free to drop a hello in the chat. And if you're excited, put an exclamation point behind that.

We'd love to hear from you. So we actually don't know if anybody's on unless you say hello, so feel free to say hello as we're chatting. All right. So Kristen, tell us a little bit about your background, a little bit about Huron to give us a little context.

**Kristen Bruner:**
I will do that. And first, let me start with a thank you. It was so great to catch up and it's so much fun to take the opportunity to do this as well. So Cindy, thank you. And thank you to everyone that's joining us and perhaps even rewatching this video. Let me start off with a little bit about Huron. And I'll say this is my first time ever working in professional services and I so value our commitment to its people and the focus we have on purpose-driven work, which obviously, you know, spending many years inside of manufacturing and engineering firm.

It's no surprise that's a marked difference. Not that of course, manufacturing doesn't do that, but we have a perspective that every night our most important assets walk out the door, and that puts a very fine point on employee experience. And what I appreciate about working at Huron is we live that, we talk about that, we think about that, and it shows up in all the ways that we work through how work gets done and how leaders lead.

And I think Huron is really, I would say, a midsize getting to a larger size, but we've got some major competitors. I don't know that we'll ever be the size of some of those, but we are a global professional services firm that collaborates broadly with clients in a number of key industries. But we do work from strategy development to distressed business advisory, optimizing operations, people transformation, people coaching, digital transformation.

We run the gamut. And what I love is we often call ourselves a startup at scale, which I think really captures our ethos. And from a diversity perspective, we really believe that innovation comes from embracing different perspectives, encouraging new ideas around the world. We've got a global workforce and challenging the status quo, that sort of underdog a little bit coming in often against some of the bigger competitors that we have. Our client-facing team members work in a number of really incredibly important industries.

So I think health care, education and research, financial services, among others, and they bring the best of Huron into the client organizations. And I'm super proud of what they've done in the two years worth of growth that we've been able to drive. For me personally, gosh, I would just say, how do you summarize a career? I have had such an amazing opportunity and such a wonderful series of roles and jobs and stretch goals and stretch opportunities. And I've seen things and been able to do things that honestly I never expected to see.

I spent nearly 20 years with the Boeing company and I'm deeply appreciative of all that I got to do, learn, experience. I think having the opportunity to work in so many different roles in so many different businesses certainly left an indelible impression on me, but it also underscored the need to keep an open mind, have strong learning agility, all of those things. And 20 years in one place also, you continue to learn.

So coming into Huron, I really had to learn to see, listen, observe, watch all things that make Huron special, bringing the best of what I knew, but also, making sure I didn't have the hubris to think that I knew everything. So coming into this role, it was a lot about relationship building, keeping an open mind, bringing a fresh perspective, and all of those things.

I think for me learning that there isn't any right way to do things, there's just the best way for your organization, has been invaluable as I transitioned into this great role. The fun fact I would maybe say is in this world of Hollywood squares and our online culture, I'm incredibly tall. Most people don't know that. And it can be a little, jarring when they first meet me, I'm six foot three. And so I think in real life, that can be one of those things that is Whoa, I had no idea about you. So I thought that I'd walk that in given that we're virtual today.

**Cindy Lu:**
Right. Yeah. Especially in the zoom world. That's fun. First of all, thanks so much for joining and sharing your feedback. I wanted to say hello to a couple of folks, some folks here, Barbara. Thanks for joining Eric, Maggie, Elizabeth, Carlos. Becky, Terry. Hey, I appreciate you guys joining. Makes us feel good that somebody is on the other end.

It's really, I'm used to doing zoom meetings where you can see everybody's faces. The thing about working at a professional services firm, you're right. Like I grew up in professional services, so it is all about the people, right? There's no IP, there's no assets, physical assets. It's just about the people. And I think that when you, it's like, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. If you can make it in this is in HR, you can make it anywhere. And it sounds like you have a really fortunate situation where your management team, your board, everybody really gets that whole people agenda, right? And it really is about the people. So we can dive into that a little bit more as we go through today's discussion.

I guess one of the things after running mastermind groups now for nine years, I've observed some common things that we hear from CHROs that are not just successful, but happily successful. You know what I mean? Like you can go through the job, or you can be happy. And I could just tell when we caught up how excited you are in your role. But one of the things is putting a great team together, right? Developing that team, nurturing that team. Tell me a little bit about your journey through transformation as it relates to your team.

**Kristen Bruner:**
Yeah. Look, it's all about the team. And if you don't get that right and you don't really plug in and understand what makes them tick and how to make them feel engaged and how to understand what's getting in their way, what's an accelerator? I think you're going to miss it.

And I think it's such a nuanced question because for me, when you're onboarding, it's a different kind of engagement. It's really all about how do you listen? How do you observe? How do you learn? And then take action. You can't come in hot as you're onboarding into a new company or even into a new role in the same company. You really have to be respectful and create a space of dignity and seek to understand. Before you just immediately start taking action because if you do that, then you're not building the team, right? You're putting your own perspective out before everyone else's.

I'm super lucky I think in this team at Huron that they were game. They were ready. They wanted to drive the transformation as much as, I think the business decided we needed it as well. For me, I think it's the first thing when you're onboarding is, be positive, respect, honor, listen, have a perspective that everybody on the team was working hard.

And doing what they thought was right and best. If you don't like something, maybe it's because you just don't understand it. And I think it's about starting there. I spent probably the first six months talking to anyone who would speak to me. And certainly even in my own team, I met with everyone.

I created opportunities to have, either one-on-one coffee chats or roundtables, just focus groups, what's working, explain to me our engagement results and just being consistent in that message, and certainly a lot of one-on-ones with the HR team and the HR leaders and the key partners.

You can't forget the people that work with you every single day, whether it's IT or legal or communications. You've got a lot of great partners that contribute to the success of the overall organization that manifest the HR remit, and you've got to treat them. They're part of the team as well.

They may be in a different function, but they're part of the team as well. You got to be transparent. You got to share what you're doing. You got to tell people why you're doing it. And you got to come back to them when you say you're going to. So you got to do what you say, and you got to, and you got to mean what you say.

And for me, I felt like the team really needed the opportunity to co-create our future. So it wasn't just anything I architected. In fact, we, for our operating model change, which coincided with a business operating model change, I actually stood up a tiger team and said, here's a ton

of information.

Here's all the different HR operating models. You guys come back with a recommendation on how you think we ought to do this. And what I appreciated about their work, first of all, they took it incredibly seriously. They listened, not just to the business leaders in terms of what do they need and what does the business need more of and less of, but obviously then spent a lot of time talking about the team and where we're at now.

We focus a lot on, we have HR development days. We continue to drive engagement actions. So for me, it's all about, how do we continue to make everyone feel like they get to come into work and it's a great day at work? Not every day is a great day, but on the whole, if you're putting more great days together rather than less, and how do we create the space for workflow improvement?

So the work you don't like to do, or that's non-value added, or can be automated, how do we automate that and drive those kinds of changes? So that you feel like you're learning and engaging at every level, at every part of the team.

**Cindy Lu:**
I love the coming in and listening and really taking sort of a positive perspective on what might be happening as you onboard and then I also love your comment around workflow improvements, right?

There's so many HR professionals who are stuck in tactics and it's, it can be really challenging to put that strategic hat on when you're like mired down into details. I know that I chunk out my days, right? Like I'm like, and I get to control that, right? Like in the mornings I do my deep thinking work and the afternoons I'll get on zoom.

But sometimes you don't have that choice when you're in HR where there's a fire drill. I love that. But also you mentioned something earlier about some development that you're bringing in. And I thought it was really interesting that you called it strategic consultation. Yeah. And so think about it.

You work at an 8,000 person consulting firm. If your team doesn't show up as consultants, if your team doesn't show up as consultative, that just can't work. So I don't know if you I'd love to hear your thought behind that rare that I hear that training, it's Oh, we need more on the technical HR stuff, or we need things on soft skills, but tell me about that strategic consultation piece.

**Kristen Bruner:**
We certainly do those as well, right? I think it's always important that people feel like they also get to master their own development. So nothing gets pushed. Nothing is told per se. We do. This is all about opportunity. But what's great about the strategic consultation, and we're also focusing on business acumen, is it aligns directly to the maturity assessment we've done to be the foundation for our strategic plan and our priorities for 2027.

And the team highlighted, my leaders highlighted, this is where we think we need to get better as a business, as a function, in order to enable the end user because you're absolutely right. Every single one of the people that we work with every single day is consulting to somebody else to help make their business better. That's the nature of the work that we do.

And so for us, we call that fostering extraordinary HR, and we have a very high pillar for ourselves. In fact, it came from one of my first discussions with our board members. They said to me, I'd really like HR to deliver more WOW. That was the feedback they gave me. And, I can't unhear that. I couldn't, and it's always been on my mind and the team really rallied around, I'll see you and we'll raise you with extraordinary HR.

And part of that is, how do we listen, how do we solve strategic problems? How do we engage directly with the business and address not just what's presenting, what is the symptom, but really get at what's happening underneath from an organizational dynamics, maybe a disconnect or a misalignment in certain processes that we have that are creating friction for an employee or between teams.

And, we're in a matrix organization now, so that shows up quite a bit. And so being good at understanding, diffusing, but being able to address the business root cause, not just the behavioral root causes.

**Cindy Lu:**
Yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to flow right in and dig in a little bit more into these business constraints because I think that is so critical.

I want to say hello to a couple more folks here. So thanks, Todd, for joining Jonathan, Peyton, Trish. It looks like Jonathan might have some questions. We'll address those a little bit later. Quick For the audience, if you believe that the most fun part of your job is getting to work on the strategic work, put the word strategy, right?

Just type in strategy in the comments. And let's dive into that. The business constraints, right? That it's so easy to jump into solutioning. So I loved what you said about listening, but tell me how you guys align your strategic HR or HR initiatives with the business.

**Kristen Bruner:**
And again, full credit to my team for being willing to be different in this space. So if I were to give a pithy answer, I would say I don't think you align the functional priorities. I think you build them from the business into the function. And so that's been one of the first changes I think that we made. How do we get data? How do we make sure that we really collectively understand where the business is headed?

So where are the strategic growth areas? Where are we challenged by margin? What can we do about it? Where do we have talent challenges? Or are we moving into a new region and we need some global expansion and a different approach to global expansion? So for us, that was all about taking, the smart, strong, amazing professionals I had, really deploying more of them out into the business and getting that voice.

So we start with the voice of the business. We start with, what does it mean to the business? Where are they headed? What are they challenged by? Where do they see gaps again in the business plan? And our job then is to wrap our strategies to fill those gaps and work with others to do that. And one thing I would just say contextually is when I started and strategically, we knew this was on the roadmap.

Huron was a relatively siloed organization and our own structure reflected that. And so not only have we been transforming our own operating model, but we've worked hard to create what we call a team Huron ethos, which is a more heavily matrix structure. And we do a couple of things and I'm super proud of this.

So our strategy leaders, our business leaders, our HR business leaders bring in the business strategy and they highlight what's necessary. We spend a lot of time, and this can be messy, talking about what's a priority, what's needed, what's an accelerator, what's an enabler, what's a nice to have. You immediately move into collecting data, and I'm, data is my love language.

My team knows this. Chocolate is too, but we'll talk about data. What do we know? What's the baseline from last year? How do we know we've been successful, but you've got to really make sure that you're using data to get that insight, to create that foresight, and then define what action you're going to take.

The other thing I'll just walk in is a couple of thoughts around. We spend a lot of time also doing maturity assessments. So for each part of our function, I invite all of the HR leaders and a pretty large group of senior leaders to, in fact, rate the maturity of our processes. And with that rating is also what is the priority of that process?

So not only are we rolling around in the business, but we're also getting direct feedback from the business in terms of performance management. I saw that in the chat, talent acquisition, coaching development, all of the things, and we use that then to prioritize the work we do and how we invest and allocate resources.

The last thing I'll say is, I'm a big believer in project management, but also stakeholdering, keeping the board connected, keeping your leadership team connected, and making many course corrections along the way. But, I've been so proud of how the team is engaged directly in this, but starting with data, really driving those priorities.

And the third is making sure we understand what measures we're going to use at the same time so that we know when we've been successful and then stakeholder.

**Cindy Lu:**
Yeah, it sounds like a very similar process that most consulting firms would take. Imagine that. Yeah, but I was just like, Ooh, she said the magic word strategic consultation.

It looks like a lot of people here are excited about the work they do in strategy. Thanks for joining us. My only question on that the last few minutes is, is it dark chocolate or milk chocolate?

**Kristen Bruner:**
And with the exception of white, right? I'm not a white, and please don't @ me in the comments about not loving white chocolate, but my team. Absolutely. Every once in a while in my office in Chicago, little packages will show up and I'm eminently grateful for the kindness of the team and how to help me get through particularly tough days with a little bit of Hershey's or Reese's peanut butter cup.

And again, no advertisement for them. They're just great.

**Cindy Lu:**
I love it. Okay. We have a couple of questions that I think are relevant to this discussion right now and on data. And I'm a data guy. So Eric knows this data person too. How do you drive a data-oriented mindset with your HR team, especially in areas where those folks may not be living in much data?

**Kristen Bruner:**
Yeah. I think the first thing you have to do is you as a leader. You have

to make sure that as you're having discussions and people are bringing ideas and perspectives forward, you appreciate what they bring forward and you send them back to go get the data, right? You have to be consistent. Thank you, Kirk. I agree. White chocolate isn't chocolate, but back to data. I think you really have to be consistent about saying, I love this point of view and it's existing in the polarity and using that and what data did you look at to prove this hypothesis? Or as you're contemplating what problem we're trying to solve?

What are the KPIs they're using or what benchmarking have you done? And let me see those. What I have found with the team is they very quickly, and they're very quick to say, I need some help with this, which I'm fine with. I love asking for help because I'd rather we deploy people that really strongly understand data and really bring that level of capability up.

But for me, the team knows if we're talking about something or we're making a business case. And if you don't have it, that's okay. We can talk qualitatively, but we won't and can't approve anything until we understand the data and the quantitative nature of the elements behind it.

**Cindy Lu:**
It's so interesting. Even though I'm a data person, I just actually am working with a coach and I was like, Oh, this offering is not working. He's how many people have you actually talked to about it? And I'm like, he doesn't. He's that's just not enough data. So it's an emotional. And so being grounded in reality is something you're right, Eric, that a lot of HR professionals really need to focus in on.

So I love that. So Kristen, I think one of the things that you've mentioned to me is just how your organization, because it's all people, it's all about people. Your leadership team gets it. You get to sit in on all the board meetings all day, two days, whatever it is. You have that opportunity, but I'm curious, how did you establish the HR brand and vision early on?

Because, you get this first 90 day discussion and I'm like, I feel like people make judgments much faster than that, right? About what kind of HR leader you are. And I just curious to your personal experience with setting that vision and brand for the HR function. And you talked about extraordinary HR, but what was that process like?

**Kristen Bruner:**
As I mentioned, when I was initially stakeholdering and joining the company, I was talking to anyone who would listen. I would talk to and I routinely heard, and again, strong foundation, great people on the team needed a consistent, cohesive, what are we delivering? And what is the North Star for the function? Where should they expect us to play?

And again, that discussion with one of my board members in terms of delivering more WOW really sat with me. And so our ethos, our aspiration is that we deliver solutions that are so good, our client-facing team members want to sell it. So that's the aspiration that we actually hold ourselves, which is great. I know, it's crazy, but we're doing it.

We are starting to spend some time in client-facing engagements, explaining how we're using certain products or we're engaging internally to continue to level ourselves up. And so I think really setting that North Star for yourself, that aspirational target, and then you've got to be it.

You've got to walk it every day. You've got to use the data. You've got to manifest and really represent in every single briefing, every single communication that goes out. It's got to be a message. It's got to speak to your EVP. It's got to be aligned to what we're doing and it's got to speak from the voice of the end user who is receiving the communications, right?

Who is receiving the information from us rather than what do we as a function want to say? And I think that's an important discernment because often we write communications functionally that explain a process, but don't articulate what we want and expect of leaders and employees in the process and what we want them to be able to achieve, which ultimately, for our leaders, is being the best version of themselves in performance, in comp, in talent, in all of these things.

So that's where we've been focusing our time. What are our artifacts? What are we communicating? How do we show up? And how do we make sure that what we're delivering looks as good or better to the extent we can get it as what we would deliver to a client?

And that's all from the team, right? That's the "we'll show you" spirit and ethos of my team, which I'm here for that. Like I'm incredibly competitive. So I love that.

**Cindy Lu:**
Okay. I'm so fired up about creating solutions that are so good that your client, that your consultants want to deliver it to their clients.

That's so good. That's a, I don't think that's that far of a reach for you guys. It's good. I have known about companies like we started a company in Milwaukee many decades ago, and this one organization was just known for great talent and something happened to the organization and I was able to hire a bunch of their people.

So they just had amazing talent. As it turns out, they also were a feeder system to the business. They had such amazing talent in HR, and sometimes I'm like, you know what? The CHRs need to think about that, right? Like, how could you be a potential feeder system to the organization too?

All right, I'm going to ask you for some, just any other advice you might give folks. I know we only have five minutes here, but if you guys have any other questions, put it in the chat for our members. I'll make sure that we get that into our community group as well. But what's the advice that you would want to give to other CHROs?

**Kristen Bruner:**
Yeah, I would. So I would say number one, do the hard things, right? As you're coming up in your career, take the hard jobs, push yourself into spaces that maybe aren't quite as comfortable. I think, as I reflect on my career and certainly, my time in previous organizations. As I mentioned when I started, I got to do things and work in spaces and on products and solving problems, M&As, that I never thought I would do.

And as I sit here and reflect now, it has served me so well in terms of, Oh, I've done that. Or I know someone who can help me with that, whether it's the network or your own body of experience. I would just say, sometimes take the hard path. Do the things that maybe scare you a little bit. Do the things that, to your point, maybe take a business rotation.

Maybe take a role or whatever coaching space, right? Do the thing that sort of scares you a little bit because it only helps you be stronger, better, more agile, more panoramic in your perspective.

And I would say, for CEOs, make sure that you're really hiring an HR partner who can do all of those things within for you, right? They should be able to understand the panorama of the business and not again, they're not going to be your bestseller, but they're the couch that you get to lay on. So you need to have someone beyond just your CFO who can also help you run the organization and understand its dynamics and what we're trying to achieve overall. So that's, that would be my learning from the years.

**Cindy Lu:**
Kristen, thank you so much for joining us today. And for those of you who love these kinds of conversations and would actually like to interact with our speakers live on zoom.

We have this thing called CHRO mastermind groups. So we'd love for you guys, if you're interested, ping me on LinkedIn. And let's have a conversation. Kristen, thank you so much. I love the aspirational side of being a service provider, potentially from an HR perspective. I love the strategic consultation side of things and just how much clarity you have around the impact that you want to make for your people.

So thank you.

**Kristen Bruner:**
And thanks for having me.

**Cindy Lu:**
All right. Thanks everybody for joining. Make sure you give Kristen a thumbs up and a thank you in the chat.