JLL’s Laura Adams is changing the CHRO mandate by being a business leader first

For decades, the CHRO role had a clear boundary: people.

People, places and technology were three separate conversations – all with different priorities and different owners.

“Today’s CHRO has to be a business leader first,” states Laura Adams, CHRO at JLL, a Fortune 500, $26 billion real estate and investment giant with 110,000 employees worldwide.

Being the People expert at the enterprise strategy table, in Adams’ view, is simply not enough anymore.

CHROs now need to think like business operators, partnering with every corporate line and function.

“It doesn’t matter what HR, IT or Finance owns on an org chart. Employees don’t experience an org chart; they experience the outcomes,” Adams says.

The goal is for the organization to be “actually building things together, at the same table, from the start, to deliver better outcomes for the company.”

Business proximity has ‘made me a better CHRO’

Adam’s business leader-first philosophy plays out most clearly in JLL’s structure.

At the real estate giant, every executive sponsors a function outside their remit and/or one of the company’s top 10 countries.

For Adams, that’s Corporate Real Estate and the China business. With the latter, the country CEO reports directly to her, and she’s accountable for making sure they’re defining and executing a local strategy that’s in step with the enterprise’s approach.

This model, she says, has “made me a better CHRO.”

Not only does it give her first-hand access to how the business operates, “it has also been interesting for me to see how our people strategy lands in a market with its own dynamics, not just through the global lens.”

“A CHRO’s credibility as a business leader comes from exactly this kind of proximity to the business.”“A CHRO’s credibility as a business leader comes from exactly this kind of proximity to the business.”

While it’s not possible for all CHROs to copy JLL’s model, Adams’ urges her peers to “lean in” wherever there are opportunities to get hands-on with business decisions. This positions HR to “develop better, more aligned solutions to the business problems we’re asked to solve.”

The tough HR judgement calls behind transformation

JLL’s HR business proximity is being tested by AI and its disruption of the workforce. The toughest part of Adams’ job is “how to balance the benefits of technology for our workforce without losing our focus on human care.”

“Anyone can put ‘people-first’ in a value statement; the real test is whether it shows up in the decisions you make when things get hard,” notes Adams.

This shows up concretely in how her team uses its workforce modeler tool, which predicts the impact of AI on roles by showing “what’s going to change and what’s going to go away” role by role.

The data may suggest, for example, that a function needs 90 people instead of 100 – Adams’ team doesn’t default to being “formulaic” and making a headcount cut. Instead, the focus is on “reshaping and reskilling our talent for the roles and skills of the future.”

Adams admits that “we won’t be able to redeploy everyone, but our position is that our employees are a huge asset and worth equipping with the skills they’ll need next.”

The same instinct is behind HireBuddy, an AI tool which has cut interview scheduling time from three days to 15 minutes – a meaningful shift when JLL hires 30,000 people each year. As Adams notes, every day that roles remain unfilled “impacts our financial performance.”

That time isn’t just saved – it’s redirected towards the skills required for the future of work: process engineering mindset, critical thinking, AI fluency and durable human skills like creativity and curiosity.

None of this AI transformation works without trust – and trust isn’t earned “by pretending that anxiety isn’t real.” It’s built “by being in the room with people while they’re feeling it.”

In JLL’s HR function, that takes the form of ‘Ask Us Anything’ sessions, where leaders answer questions live and unscripted – there’s “no filtering the hard questions out.”

“It’s brought a level of transparency to our transformation that I’m genuinely proud of. It means we’re having two-way conversations with team members who are actually living the change, not just broadcasting to them,” Adams says.

Offices are a growth-first, downstream decision

This judgement-over-formula thinking shapes how JLL approaches its office space.

18 months ago, Adams and her team – which includes Corporate Real Estate – shifted from reactive to strategic decisions. Business and Finance leaders are now more involved in the decision-making; “we start with their growth strategy, then ask ourselves to predict the people implication based on our workforce modeler.”

This shift broke an assumption about the role of offices at JLL: that the future of offices would mean more open, collaborative spaces, and fewer private offices and meeting rooms.

Instead, because AI is absorbing more process work, “people need more heads-down space to do the judgement-heavy, harder-to-automate parts of their jobs.”

This means space has become a “downstream decision – it follows how work is changing, not the other way around”, according to Adams.

The next four years at JLL, by design

For Adams, JLL’s real estate vision comes to life in how JLL has designed its new London office, which opened in July this year. The London property also exemplifies how the real estate giant’s Accelerate 2030 strategy shows “up physically, not just on paper.”

Published in March this year, the future-focused strategy aims to drive JLL’s competitive advantage in the long term. For Adams, the strategy will succeed “because of our culture, not in spite of it.”

Adams started this year by asking herself three questions about the Accelerate 2030 agenda: “How was I helping drive the AI agenda? Was I meaningfully contributing to the transformation required by the Accelerate strategy? And how was my team role modeling what needed to be done?”

She started with the third question; for Adams, HR shouldn’t just role model change, the function also needs to “free up its capacity to lead the enterprise through transformation.”

That includes launching tools like ‘Ask JLL’, a “single digital front door for HR, Finance, and Techology support across JLL.”

“The part I care about most is what happens when it can’t help – it connects you with the person best equipped to address your issue,” she shares.

“What matters most to me is how we support our people” through change. That’s easier said than done, but Adams is excited about the opportunity in front of her and her CHRO peers.

She concludes: “If this is truly a people transformation, then HR is at the center of it.” HR is perfectly placed to “shape how work evolves, what experience we give our employees and how all that translates to better outcomes for our clients and shareholders.”