（兩會受權發布）最高人民法院工作報告

Is there a through line, a secret sauce if you will, to the companies whose HR teams are successfully grappling with the three T’s — talent, technology, and transformation — and reimagining the world of work?

We believe there is, and we’ve highlighted it in CHRO Case Studies: Leading from the Front.

The magic? Having an HR leader who’s willing to take risks — to step outside of convention, move quickly, lead from the front, and embrace the possibility of failure.

As one leading CHRO puts it: “The biggest risk is not taking risks.”

According to a global survey of CHROs done by LinkedIn and YouGov, 78% of HR leaders agree that building a culture of innovation where more risk-taking is encouraged is critical to their business’s growth over the next five years. 

Leading from the Front shares five case studies from companies — IBM, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Allianz, Wood, and LinkedIn — that have embraced innovative approaches or launched inspiring programs that address the current moment.

IBM reengineers performance management

Over the past few years, IBM realized that traditional performance reviews hadn’t kept pace with the disruptive change in its business. Leaders needed a better way to understand not only what employees had achieved but also how they were preparing for the future.

Under the leadership of senior vice president and chief human resources officer Nickle LaMoreaux, Big Blue moved away from the once-a-year review to a more dynamic, skills-based approach that emphasizes growth, adaptability, and real-time feedback. 

“Like most companies,” Nickle says, “we are grounded in performance — results matter, and they still matter.” But, significantly, IBM now also looks beyond results and accounts for how employees achieve their goals and continue to develop.

First, the company formally integrated skills development as the second pillar of its performance framework. Employees would be evaluated on how they were preparing for the future. This meant that someone could be the highest-performing salesperson in the company but they couldn’t earn the top rating or qualify for a bonus if they weren’t building future-facing skills. 

“We want employees to understand not just the skills that are needed today,” Nickle explains, “but the ones they’ll need next.” To earn executive buy-in, Nickle and her team shared a three-year lookback that showed that top performers who failed to build new skills frequently declined over time, becoming average or even below-average contributors.

Nickle and her team weren’t finished. Over the past year, they updated the performance framework to include behaviors. “The world is moving so quickly,” Nickle says, “and we began evaluating this idea of behaviors — entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity, being able to move with speed, being OK with failure as you try new skills.” Embracing the possibility of failure, it turns out, is critical for everyone, not just the leaders of HR.

Read the report — and reconsider where there may be promising opportunities

In addition to a detailed look at how IBM reshaped its performance management, Leading from the Front looks at how Boston Consulting Group has fully embraced AI; how leaders at Allianz are modeling the change they want to see; how Wood is addressing burnout and well-being; and how LinkedIn has rolled out Coaching for All.

Inevitably, with challenges — and HR leaders face a slew of them — come opportunities. And the CHROs who have the vision and courage to chart a new direction are the change agents reimagining the world of work.

“What I’m most excited about,” says Amber Grewal, the chief talent officer at BCG, “is that HR is no longer just about managing people and managing processes. HR is now about business transformation and creating business value through designing an archetype of what the future workforce is going to look like.”

We hope that the report will prompt HR leaders to reconsider what they do now and look at where there may be promising opportunities to do something quick, something new, something from which helpful lessons can be drawn.

The biggest risk for HR leaders? We like to think it would be not diving into Leading from the Front.