Radical Innovators #2 leading with innovation: the future of CHRO leadership with Prudential’s Lucien Alziari

Welcome to the Radical Innovator series powered by Ronstad. In each episode we will bring to you bold and insightful conversations with top HR leaders for major global organizations to inspire the town leaders of tomorrow. Join our journey as we explore how these trailblazers are shaping the future of work, driving innovation, improving the lives of their people and creating radical shifts in HR and talent strategy. I'm Frank Conjou, EVP of Human Capital Strategy and Executive Partnerships at Ronstad Enterprise. In each episode I sit down with industry leaders who are redefining the world of talent and business. Today I'm joined by Lucian Alciari, Chief Human Resources Officer at Prudential. With extensive experience leading global HR functions, Lucian has played a critical role in shaping workforce strategies that drive business success. Throughout his career he has been at the forefront of transforming HR from a support function into a strategic powerhouse. In this conversation we'll discuss Lucian's journey as a leader, his approach to workforce design and how HR can align more closely with business goals. We'll also explore what it takes to develop the next generation of HR leaders and the evolving role of talent in an ever-changing business landscape. Let's dive in. Alright, well thank you for joining us here today on the podcast. Today I'm excited to have Lucian with us. Lucian and I had a chance to meet each other several years ago at a CHRO dinner and more recently, and I didn't share this with you, but on a call Friday I was talking with someone who's renowned as a top global CHRO and they made the comment of saying, Lucian, Donna Morris, Peter Fasolo, Kevin Cox, and I said, "Well, where are you going with this?" These are the greatest CHROs that actually know how to run a business as a BSCHRO and run a business not just tied to the HR space. So your name has come up in some great lists in addition to being recognized earlier this year as one of the top CHROs. So thank you for spending some time with me this afternoon. Lovely to be with you. Thank you for those kind of lists. I'll put them in my defense file. Be sure to do that. So one of the things that we really like to do on the podcast here is give people an opportunity to know who you are as a person outside of your corporate role. And everybody knows you're the CHRO credential and have had some other big CHRO jobs along the way. So through the lens of just a quick check in and we can try one, we'll use Energy Check. So 0 to 5, where's your energy today and what's your rating? I'm at about 4.9 today. I'm high energy because I'm coming off a big kind of professional milestone having announced the CEO succession at Prudential, which has been the last 18 months of my life and I'm very, very happy with how it's going. Nice, congrats. So as someone who's had three big jobs and three big CHRO jobs and certainly others along the way, I think oftentimes people see you where you are today and don't really have a good sense for what it took to get there. So sometimes we can only connect the dots even personally as we look backwards. Sure. Sure. If there's a pivotal moment that you share either maybe one or two in your career, your life, that's all be the catalyst for your growth and got you to where you are today. Yeah, I think you're right, Frank. You don't know the pivotal at that moment. Kind of history is written after the fact and there have been several, but a couple very early on. I was recruited to Mars and then from Master PepsiCo and I was just lucky that I joined companies and there were relatively few at that point that really understood what HR could be all about. So I managed to grow up in great schools and then I was asked to come to the States and you know I'm English, I grew up outside the States and so there is that moment where you're saying to yourself, if you want to be a HR of a company, you've got to go where the company is and that was sort of surrounded by a number of international experiences that I never thought I would have ever, ever. And so I've ended up living in five different countries and visiting sort of 85, 90 and it's been like one of the joys of my life. And if you have said to the Lucie and of the sort of early 20s that that would be my career journey, I just would not have believed the word of it. And then you know I've had my share of successes and a couple of bumps along the way I was lucky that my biggest bumps were very early in my life in my career and I managed to learn from those and it's kind of better to get those out of the way quickly. Are any of those bumps ones you want to take out of the file and share are those bumps that we wanted to keep in their file? Yeah, so in my very first job, I was an operations manager and it was quite a technical component to the role. There was a piece of the way of doing business that I knew I didn't understand and I was hoping I could win it or it would never come my way but life always finds you on these things. I got put in a situation where I really needed to know what I was doing didn't and ended up getting formally disciplined by my company. I remember I'm sort of back in the moment now it was it was that kind of meaningful. I thought at the age of 21 my career was over literally and they were very good about it. They said, okay, we'll withdraw the discipline but like don't ever do this again and so I learned a lot from that one was I had never win anything. It's okay to say I don't understand but I never make it up on the spot and that's how I am but it's really played into how I lead other people. It's really okay for somebody to say I've really tried to understand this, developers as much as solution as I can but I need some help. I'm all ears I'm there for people that need that. If they just come to me and say I don't understand it you do it that doesn't go very well and if they win it I'm not very nice. It really taught me the value of sort of being honest with yourself being professional and having the expectation of others that's kind of what makes the world go the world go around in good businesses. You talked about it through that story and thanks for sharing that a bit about development and making sure that others don't show up that way. To use a sports analogy you often think about coaches and sort of their coaching tree and the leaders they produce in the organization I think that's something you certainly have a reputation for whether it's from Pepsi or in current organization. Are there any people that you and many of these I think we know because they they tend the same dinners but are any of these people that you look at now and you can sort of say like there's this is the person that you helped create and here's how is there like a story in terms of. What people can pick up from the way that either someone absorbed and was made sure to leverage you as a mentor or conversely a way that you leaned into a person that you saw the potential and you want to make sure that they had the ability to realize it yeah there are about 20 big company C.H. R. O's that I've worked with and I'm not going to layman because they may deny that I had anything to do with it but I'm very clear that they got the jobs that they're in because of who they are I've got no kind of miss apprehension about that but we stay in touch and it's nice that we stay in touch. What I try and do is a lot of people took bets on me and put me in jobs that I wasn't ready for right and so there was some themes that sort of happened to me that I've just tried to sort of I mean it worked in my case and so I've just tried to sort of pay it forward and so this this combination of of belief in people spot things in them that they may not even know about themselves. You have to be 100% ready for a role to take on a role how quickly do you learn how well can you learn from other people how much basic curiosity have you got those are the kinds of things that I really look for in people very often that the bets that seem like they're really big bets they're not we know a lot about our people if we really have got to know them which is one of our biggest jobs as leaders and so. I just make sure that people get experiences that they haven't done before one of the things I would say to anybody on this call is don't end up with a career where you're doing the same job in disguise alright and it's quite good persuading you to do that it's not good for you it's actually not good for your business because nobody's learning anything so always trying be in a situation where. You know you can work out the percentages for yourself but some of the job you feel like you know what you're doing and then part of the job you're doing something for the first time. You might fail you don't know what the right answer is and anytime you spot that set of conditions you know you're in exactly the right place development because you're on the verge of another big sort of breakthrough in your learning and you're and you're widening your set of comfort zones that you carry with you. Yeah, I love that. So going back to that. piece around that the people on it, you've talked a lot about workforce design and simplification. I think it was at the TED conference where you sit up and there's a bunch of people who are talking about skills and all the different ways to go about things and just said, it's really, it's about the work. Is there, or should I say, how do you see that shaping the future of organizations? As I think CHROs need to get more closely aligned to thinking about what are the work that needs to be done? Because you hear all these organizations talking about this approach to going to skills-based time, organizations, and within that, it feels like over-indexing to keep abilities and skills that we need to have versus what is the actual work that needs to be done? I try and get to what's the real underlying cause of the driver of what we're talking about. So I grew up as a talent person and the fundamental question in talent sort of talent for what? What does your business need to be really, really good at in order to win? So I'd always start any conversation like this, Frank, with business leaders, we happen to have HR functional responsibilities, but I hope we wake up every day, passionate about what's going to make our business win. Who do we compete against? How good are we versus our peers and competitors? What do we need to be greater in order for us to achieve our growth aspirations? And so I always start there. If I think about our life in HR, the function has grown tremendously over the years. And so there's lots of different capabilities that it's added over time. And I've been lucky because I'm a talent guy and it's been in an era where talent has been like the number one requirement for Chief HR offices. I think the next big capability for HR is a fundamental understanding of the work of the organization. Because when you think about talent, talent to do what? Well, what companies do is they have strategies, they bring resources, they do work, and they meet the needs of customers. And so having that sort of basic through line in your thinking and my job as Chief HR officer is basically talent and capabilities to win. That's what I'm accountable for. And so the capabilities depend upon the strategy. And once you figure out the capabilities that helps you define what's the work that we need to do and how well do we need to do it? We don't need to be great at everything. There are some things where we just need to be as good as everybody else. If we're bad at it, it makes us lose. But if we're better at other people, it doesn't make us when payroll is good example. If you screw up payroll, you're done. But we don't need to be the best payroll company in the world. We just need to do it as well as everybody else. There are many places in our business where good is good enough. I really learned this in John Budrow in my first CHO role. Companies have this tendency to want to be greater everything. You can't be. You have to be choiceful. So what are the elements of the business where good is good enough? And then in any business, I think there are two or three areas where you've just got to be better than everybody else. Because that's your source of competitive advantage. And so once you figure that out, you can then say, "Well, okay, what's the work that drives our ability to differentiate?" And at that, we need to be world class. In order to do world class work, you're probably going to have to have world class talent. And when you look at how the company is investing, it's various resources across the mix. The capital, the operating expenses, the talent investments, the technology investments, they should all be pointing towards the most important areas of competitive and less fuel business. So I think you can sort of work this both ways. You can go strategy to capabilities to talent and critical roles. But actually, you can go from critical roles to your definition of talent. You should be able to guess what the strategy is based upon your talent choices. So this is an alignment exercise that takes high-faluting strategy right down to here's how we're going to execute this to win in a very consistent kind of programmatic way. So in that sense, what advice would you give to HR leaders to make sure their initiatives are more closely aligned to the business strategies? Because I think to your point, one would be more simply they need to have a narrow focus and two, except that good in many areas are our key. Those are probably two of the things. Anything else you'd add to that? Yeah, I'd start off with it. It sounds like a bit of an existential question, but it's like, who are you? When I ask you that question, are you saying to yourself, well, I'm an HR person that I love doing HR work and I work for such and such company? What do you say to yourself, I'm a business leader. I have to have HR functional accountabilities, but my role is to help my company win. How can you help your company win unless you have a very clear understanding of what makes your company win? You can have a view of yourself, but if I asked your CEO or if I asked your peers around the C-suite, would they be describing you as a business leader? Or would they say, yeah, pretty good function executive, but pretty quiet when it gets to issues in the business are not much to say when it gets to strategy discussions. One of my favorite tests that I sort of grew up with and it was given to me by a mentor was if somebody landed from another planet and walked into a room where it was the CEO, the CFO and the CHRO, if they couldn't tell which one was which, you're probably in a really good company. And so this business curiosity, the passion around what makes business win, if you've got that, everything else flows from that without that, you're kind of without a compass. How do you get to that though in terms of retaining or drawing in the top talent because I think without naming who it was, a friend of ours, as a CEO of a large organization said, as he steps down and thinking about the next age of his career, it's about continuing to elevate the profession. And create it so that people go to business school wanting to be in an HR role. But if you look at the backgrounds and bios of so many CHRs, they didn't start there and oftentimes they say I had no idea I'd ever be here. How do you get it so that people have that long term or is there any sort of influence to have that long term view on HR and being aligned at the business? Because right now it feels like the most successful CHRs who have that affinity and alignment to the business didn't start at HR. It's changed over time. There used to be Academy companies. I grew up at PepsiCo, that was a place where people would go to get HR talent. It was true of GE at a point in time. There are fewer, I don't know that there are many sort of Academy companies. I think there are now Academy CHRs like who works for Kevin Cox. I mean, it's those kinds of conversations because then you know that you grew up under good leaders who in my view kind of have the right mindset around what HR is really about. I think then some of us have got to have a mission in life about spreading the good news. HR is much more impactful now at the heart of companies than it was when I was starting. Being able to go to business schools and saying if you want to make a real difference to your company and you want to make a real positive difference to a large number of people's lives, here's a place to think about. There are lots of others but there are only a couple of roles in a company that see across the company. There are only these probably one or two roles where you can say I have a direct impact on the livelihood of thousands of colleagues on the communities in which we live, the kind of societies that we're going because of the cultures that we're building. I would never have guessed that when I was young but I've got as it probably comes across quite a lot of conviction around that now. Well, thank you for that. So maybe shifting gears and sort of putting on the ability to look into the future for a minute. What do you see as some of the biggest challenges or opportunities that will face as people leaders and then how are you looking to address those within your own organization? Yeah, as I said, I'd like to have a through line in terms of what's my role. So I don't think my role, the role of the chief HR officer fundamentally is going to change that much. We're still going to be accountable for talent and capabilities to win. The context within which we do that is going to be quite different as we go forward. So we're living in a world now where technology can enable many things that before we're just kind of, you know, gleams in the eye of the few of us. But now we have the technology capabilities to do it. We're living in a different kind of context in terms of the role of companies within society. The voice of companies that employees want us to be a voice on some issues. And in some cases, that's the right thing for us in other things. It's not something that we should be doing. And I think it's sort of a little bit over done the rate of changes faster than it's been, but it's pretty fast right now. Right. And so if you go back to your question, Frank, are there particular domain skills that we need to have sure there are, but the half life of those is going to be about three years because of the rate of change. And so if you come back to all then, what's really going to make you successful in a sustainable way? It's going to be this combination of stayed very close to what's the future of your business because that's always your reference point. And then it's going to be around your fundamental curiosity, your ability to see things emerging so that you can shape them and be ready for them as they sort of come your way. And then just the ability to be adaptable and agile on all that good stuff. And that's why I'm not worried about what AI is going to do to our world. It's going to help us not hurt us, but it's another resource to us in solving the problems that are going to help our companies win. And if you keep that as your focus, you're probably not going to straight you far. Yeah, that's great. Last question, or maybe second level, see, if you had magic wand and there was one thing you could go ahead and fix within our, this doesn't have to be specifically within your organization, but something that companies could leverage or implement to improve the lives of employees. What would that be? I think we live in pretty charged times in terms of the society, the politics, whatever. So I have a view that companies can either be the amplifier of all the noise that's happening in the world at large or we can be an island of calm for employees. And so this is very much an aspiration. I hope my company, I know my company, we're trying to be that. We can always be better at it. But by island of calm, I mean, it's a place where you can come to do your work and you know you're going to be fundamentally respected. You're going to be invested in. If you contribute, you're going to be rewarded appropriately, you're going to grow, you're going to be able to raise the kind of family that you want to have contribute to society. So institutions are losing credibility right now. People are placing a lot of emphasis on business as an institution. And I think good businesses are, they've always been a force for good, but they're so important in the world that we live in. And I think, you know, business can be a real kind of force multiplier for the things that actually we all value as human beings. So are there any specific things that Prudential is doing that you want to share with that specifically impacting the life of your employees? Maybe you talked about this idea of being a place where people will come and they can be confident that they'll be treated with respect. This idea that they'll be invested in is there one thing you'd say, this is something we're really proud of, we're investing in employees and they're telling us this is something that's meaningful to them, whether personally or professionally. Yeah, I don't think we're unique in this. I don't know many others that you'll talk to. I guess there's a similar kind of narrative, but we're all hopefully, and at Prudential, we are trying to combine what is going to make us the best company for customers to do business for you. Always many to remember there are customers out there. Right. And that's why we come to work is to meet their needs. But in the meeting of customers needs, the best way to do that is to treat people really well and this is an important man to expect the best of them. So I feel like we've kind of reoriented the deal at Prudential that Prudential has always been a great company to work for. Right. Ours is a company of high hopes and high expectations. We make no apologies for that. The better that we get at that, the more that we can invest in people and the bigger the difference they can make and that kind of virtuous cycle really kicks in. And that's what I think separates great companies from everybody else. Yeah. phenomenal. Well, hey, thank you for this has been a great conversation. Really appreciate. Not only you spend this time with me here, but the fact that I think we've had maybe three, four or five dinners together this year. I certainly hope to do that again next year. Now, always good to spend time with you. I appreciate the invitation. Thank you. Thanks, I said. What a fantastic conversation with Lucy in today. I truly enjoyed diving into his insights on transforming HR into a strategic function, the importance of aligning workforce strategy with business objectives, and how leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of work. Lucy's perspective on developing the next generation of HR leaders is something every executive should take note of. The key takeaway from our discussion is the critical role of HR in driving business success. As Lucy and highlighted, HR is no longer just about policies and processes. It's about influencing strategy, fostering innovation, and creating a workplace where people and businesses thrive. I hope you found today's conversations as insightful as I did, and be sure to join us on our next episode where I'll be speaking with Michael for Carro, Chief Human Resources Officer at MasterCard. We'll be discussing how HR can drive culture, innovation, and business transformation on a global scale. You won't want to miss it. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to having you with us again soon on the Radical Innovator Series.