Why replacing your Chief Human Resources Officer with your COO is a risk your organization cannot afford and what midsize and smaller companies can do instead.

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HUMAN RESOURCES STRATEGY · CHRO · 2026

The COO and CHRO serve complementary but non-interchangeable roles. One optimizes how work gets done; the other protects the organization and develops the people doing the work. Eliminating the CHRO doesn’t streamline leadership. It creates a vacuum filled by reactive, legally risky, and culturally damaging people management.

A growing number of organizations are consolidating their C-suites by folding HR responsibilities into the COO’s responsibilities. The logic is seductive: the COO already drives cross-functional execution, so why not people? Because people are not a process and the gap between those two things is exactly where organizations get hurt.