Walk into a board meeting at a major bank. Listen to how capital is allocated. The Chief Information Officer presents a technology roadmap and gets a serious conversation about return on investment. The Chief Commercial Officer discusses customer acquisition and margin expansion. The Chief Risk Officer talks about regulatory capital and risk-weighted assets. Then the Chief People Officer speaks, and something subtle shifts. The conversation becomes softer. More sympathetic. People are described as an asset, sometimes even as “our most important asset” — a phrase that has never, in the history of business, preceded a serious budget allocation.
This isn’t a failing — it’s a gap that the people function has not yet closed. People investment has historically been harder to quantify than technology or commercial strategy. Boards understand technology investment because it has a cost and, theoretically, a return. They understand commercial strategy because revenue speaks for itself. People decisions are different — they live in a different accounting world, showing up as a line item rather than as a driver of revenue, margin, or shareholder value. The Chief People Officer who can bridge that gap changes how the board sees the entire function.
That’s the disconnect. And it’s the Chief People Officer’s job to close it.
The evidence is overwhelming
Let’s start with the data, because boards understand data. Companies with top-quartile people practices grow revenue 1.5 times faster than their bottom-quartile peers. This isn’t marginal improvement. This is the difference between a company that compounds growth and one that stagnates. Organisations with engagement in the top quartile show 23% higher profitability. Talent stability translates directly to customer retention, product quality, and the compounding effect of institutional knowledge.
In financial services, the stakes are even sharper. The cost of replacing a senior role averages 50% of annual salary — and that’s the hard cost. The soft cost, measured in lost relationships, knowledge gaps, and client continuity, is harder to quantify and harder to recover. When a relationship manager leaves, they often take clients with them. When a technology leader departs, project velocity stalls. When a risk expert exits, you don’t just lose a person; you lose the pattern recognition that took years to build.
1 in 3 Senior financial services leaders cite talent availability and retention as the single biggest constraint on their ability to execute strategy. It ranks ahead of regulatory change, technology investment, and capital availability as a limiting factor on growth. McKinsey, 2025
Yet boards typically think about people strategy in isolation from commercial strategy. The talent plan is a separate document. The organisational design is a separate conversation. The compensation philosophy is a separate negotiation. What they should be doing is tracing the line from workforce composition to revenue per employee, from retention rates to customer lifetime value, from time-to-productivity to market share gains.
What commercial people strategy actually looks like
A Chief People Officer who speaks the language of the board starts by translating people metrics into business metrics. This is not complicated, but it requires discipline and data infrastructure that many people functions lack.
Revenue per employee is a place to start. If your revenue per head is flat while your competitors’ is rising, you have a productivity problem, a pricing problem, or a composition problem. The people function needs to be able to diagnose which. Are you carrying too much junior talent? Is there a skills gap preventing senior people from reaching full productivity? Is your compensation strategy attracting the right people to the right roles? These are strategic questions with commercial implications.
Cost of turnover is another. The Finance Director can calculate the cost of a bad loan. The Chief People Officer needs to calculate the cost of a bad departure. If you lose 20% of your relationship managers annually, and each departure costs you 50% of salary in replacement and ramp time, your voluntary turnover is costing you millions in margin. That’s a board-level problem, not an HR problem. And it demands board-level investment in retention.
Time to productivity is the third. How long does it take a new hire to reach full contribution? In some roles, it’s six months. In others, it’s three years. If you’re losing people in year two because they haven’t yet developed the expertise to work autonomously, you’re investing heavily in training that walks out the door. If you’re losing them in year three because they can finally command a premium elsewhere, you’ve solved the wrong problem. Both are people strategy failures that show up as commercial failures.
The board doesn’t need to know your engagement score. The board needs to know whether your workforce is a competitive advantage or a competitive liability.
Skills-to-revenue mapping is perhaps the most sophisticated piece. Which capabilities generate the highest revenue per person? In a wealth management business, is it the investment expertise, or the client relationship skill? In a digital bank, is it the technology talent, or the product sensibility? Once you know, you can ask the next question: where are these skills in short supply, what’s your plan to build them, and what does the market pay for them? This is where people strategy becomes strategy.
Making it visible to the board
None of this happens by accident. It requires a Chief People Officer who has built the data infrastructure to see the business through a people lens, and who has the credibility to speak about it in the boardroom.
The language matters. Stop talking about improving the employee experience and start talking about reducing the cost of talent acquisition. Stop discussing retention and start discussing the premium your competitors would pay to poach your people — and why they’re not willing to pay it. Stop presenting a diversity roadmap and start presenting the revenue upside of diverse leadership teams, because the research shows it’s real. Translate every people investment into a business outcome. If you can’t, it probably shouldn’t be happening.
The second piece is asking questions differently. A board shouldn’t ask a Chief People Officer, “How are we doing on retention?” They should ask, “What’s the total cost to the business of our voluntary turnover, and how does it compare to our peers?” They shouldn’t ask, “Are our people engaged?” They should ask, “Are we attracting and developing the specific skills that drive revenue in our most profitable business lines?” They shouldn’t ask, “Is our culture strong?” They should ask, “Is our culture a competitive advantage or a risk?”
67% of boards rate their organisational health as good or excellent. Yet 40% of those same companies report significant people-related risks to their strategy execution. The gap is a perception problem, not a reality problem. Conference Board, 2024
This is where the Chief People Officer earns credibility. If a board asks about a people metric and the answer comes back as a narrative and some survey data, that CPO has lost the conversation. If the answer comes back as a financial impact with a benchmark comparison and a three-year trajectory, that person has the board’s attention. That’s the difference between being included in the conversation and shaping it.
The questions that matter
Here’s what every board should be asking its Chief People Officer, and what the answers should reveal:
What’s the true cost of our people strategy, end to end? Not just compensation and benefits. Include recruitment, onboarding, training, systems, turnover, and lost productivity from vacant roles. Add it up. The number is often larger than expected.
Which roles drive disproportionate commercial value, and are we staffed to compete for that talent? This reveals whether your compensation philosophy is aligned with your revenue drivers. Many organisations underpay the roles that matter most.
What does it cost us to hire and retain someone in our top 25%, and how much does that person contribute? If your top quartile is disproportionately valuable, you need an unequal investment strategy. Many organisations still think all jobs are created equal.
What’s our turnover actually costing us, segment by segment? Losing a junior analyst is one problem. Losing a client-facing director in year three is another. You can’t optimise what you don’t measure.
What’s our people-related constraint on strategy execution, and what would it take to remove it? Is it skills? Capacity? Speed of change? Cost? Once you name it, you can invest in solving it.
The boards that will outperform in the next three to five years are the ones that learn to see people decisions as strategy decisions, not compliance decisions. They’re the ones who ask their Chief People Officers to connect dots that have traditionally been drawn separately. And they’re the ones whose Chief People Officers can do that translation — who speak P&L, not process, and who understand that your most sustainable competitive advantage isn’t written down anywhere. It walks in the door at nine in the morning and walks out at five, and whether it does so for forty years or four months is the most important variable on your balance sheet.
Domi Alzapiedi is a Chief People Officer in banking, focused on the intersection of people strategy, organisational design, and commercial performance. She writes about the questions that keep leadership teams honest.