Ask The Analyst: What do HR leaders who successfully reinvent the function tend to have in common, or what did they have to let go of?

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence email for senior business decision-makers, we ask our community of analysts – the true HR experts – to the biggest challenges facing HR.

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This week’s question: What do HR leaders who successfully reinvent the function tend to have in common, or what did they have to let go of?

Here are their views.

David Green, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Insight222:

The HR leaders who successfully reinvent the function tend to share one characteristic: they are willing to reinvent HR before asking the rest of the organization to change.

They start with the business problem, not the HR process or technology, and are prepared to challenge structures, systems and practices that no longer create value.

Three recent conversations I’ve had on the Digital HR Leaders podcast support this. Sharon Doherty at Lloyds Banking Group describes the modern people leader as a storyteller, tough lover and disruptor, combining respect for what came before with the courage to make difficult choices. At Eli Lilly, Eric Dozier brings a commercial operator’s perspective to HR transformation, while at GSK, Zaka Farhat’s team began its skills transformation with a commercial question and retired more than 20 legacy systems along the way.

The lesson is that reinvention is as much about subtraction as addition. Successful HR leaders let go of functional silos, legacy orthodoxy and activity as a proxy for impact, and organize instead around business outcomes, work and the decisions that matter.

Cheney Hamilton, Research Director, Bloor Research:

What they have in common is that they took back the disciplines HR gave away. Somewhere along the line, workforce planning went to Finance, organization design went to consultants, and work itself went to whoever wrote the job description last. HR kept the policies and the processes, and slowly became custodian of an operating model that no longer described reality.

Our research consistently finds that the vast majority of job descriptions bear little relation to what people actually do. You cannot reinvent a function that has outsourced its understanding of work.

So, the leaders who succeed reclaim work design as HR's core discipline. They map what people actually do before making any decision about technology, structure or headcount.

And that tells you what they let go of: the job description as the unit of truth, the annual planning cycle as the rhythm of change, and the idea that HR's job is to administer the organization rather than architect it.

They also let go of being the department that says no to AI, and became the function that decides where it belongs. That's the reinvention. Not doing HR faster with new tools, but deciding what work should be.

Jess Von Bank, Co-Founder, Now to Next:

It starts with the story HR leaders tell themselves about who they are. The ones who successfully reinvent the function see themselves as architects of work, not service providers to it. That shift in identity changes everything.

HR’s job is no longer simply to support the work happening around it, but to design work so humans and technology function as one integrated system from the start.

That requires running two tracks in parallel. One is disciplined muscle-building: trustworthy data, consistent and well-documented processes, and a reliable digital core. The other is envelope-pushing ambition: redesigning roles, workflows, skills, and operating models for an AI-first environment. The leaders who struggle tend to leap straight to the exciting part while the plumbing is still broken. You cannot build an AI-first operating model on a foundation nobody trusts.

It also changes the relationship with IT. IT must be in lockstep with HR, not treated as a downstream implementation partner—but neither function can own this transformation alone. Technology enables the change. HR understands the conditions of work, how people create value, and what must be redesigned. If AI is going to be embedded in the work from the beginning rather than bolted onto broken processes afterward, that partnership has to exist from the beginning, too.

Tami Nutt, Systems, People & Workforce Strategist:

HR leaders who reinvent the function for the future let go of “this is how we do it” and lean into the question of “why?” Why do we have this process? Why does it have seven steps? Why does HR own it? Why do we measure it this way? Why does an employee have to go to three different places to get an answer? Why are we still doing something that was designed around a system we implemented ten years ago?

There are usually legitimate answers to those questions. Processes are built around compliance requirements, technology, organizational structures, budgets, and business needs. Over time, though, those decisions become “the way we do it,” and we stop questioning whether they still make sense. That’s where HR leaders have to be willing to challenge their own assumptions.

The leaders who do this well stay curious about their own function. They don’t assume that because a process works, it works well. They keep asking why it exists, who it serves, and whether it still makes sense for the workforce and business they have today. Because if we were building HR today, we probably wouldn’t build all of it the way we have it now.

David Forry, SVP, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group:

The HR leaders who successfully reinvent the function tend to share one trait: they are willing to redesign the system, not simply add new technology to it.

Our research shows that high-performing organizations did not start with AI deployment; they started by rethinking how work is owned, governed and measured.

What they had to let go of was equally important: the belief that HR transformation is another program with a launch date, a project team and an endpoint. Leading organizations move toward clear product ownership, continuous improvement, measurable outcomes and accountability. They also let go of unnecessary local variation, siloed functional ownership and the expectation that a standalone HRBP can somehow integrate an increasingly complex system.

Instead, they standardize core workflows, embed governance into the work itself and organize around cross-functional teams with clearer accountability.

The common denominator is a shift in mindset: from launching HR initiatives to building an HR operating system that continuously learns, adapts and delivers measurable business value.