312: Blowing Up the HR Playbook with Lisa Sterling

Lisa Sterling said "absolutely not" when she was first asked to take a Chief People Officer role. Not because she didn't care about people, but because everything she believed about organizational performance was at odds with what HR was supposed to be. She took the job anyway, with one instruction: get rid of all of it and build what you actually believe in. She's now CPO at Perceptyx, and that's still her operating mode. The engagement score obsession, the job architectures, the performance reviews that produce ratings instead of growth. She's not interested in any of it, and she's building something to replace all of it. If you work in HR and you've ever felt like the function is measuring the wrong things and asking you to own outcomes you don't actually control, this conversation is for you. In this episode, you'll hear: Lisa’s argument that HR doesn't actually control engagement, and why the score is the wrong KPI The capability operating system she's building to replace job descriptions and performance ratings How Perceptyx is moving from data collection to actual behavior change Why she tells her own team to leave HR if they want to grow How she ended up running global customer success on top of the people function The difference between a CHRO and a CPO, and why she doesn't call herself the former Her imposter syndrome moment (and epiphany) at the New York Stock Exchange