Engagement Scores Soared. The CHRO Was Gone by Year’s End.

HR leadership metrics
Written By Jim Woods

It was the kind of number that gets HR leaders celebrated at board meetings:
Employee engagement up 12 points in 18 months.

By December, the CHRO who delivered it was cleaning out her office.

The Illusion of the Metric

For two decades, engagement scores have been HR’s equivalent of GDP — a single number paraded to prove the health of the workforce. Entire consulting contracts are built on improving it. Awards are given for moving it.

But engagement is perception, not performance. It measures how employees feel, not how the enterprise competes.

“A company can be the happiest place to work — and still lose the market.”

At one North American manufacturer, engagement hit a five-year high just weeks before a major revenue miss. The CEO didn’t survive the quarter. Neither did the CHRO.

The CHRO’s Fatal Blind Spot

Ask most CHROs what the CEO cares about, and you’ll hear: talent, culture, engagement. But in reality, those are inputs. CEOs keep executives for outputs — execution reliability, revenue growth, competitive positioning.

The problem? In the Ulrich advisory model, HR is designed to be a trusted advisor, not a system owner. That keeps CHROs focused on sentiment while their peers own the levers that actually decide enterprise survival.

When a downturn hits or a strategic pivot is needed, HR’s achievements in “people metrics” are reclassified as nice-to-haves.

“In the CEO’s calculus, happy doesn’t equal safe.”

How the System Sets HR Up

The average CHRO tenure is under three years — shorter than CFOs, COOs, and even CMOs. The reason is structural.

  • HR is measured on variables it doesn’t fully control.

  • Wins are soft, but failures are blamed on them.

  • Their authority exists at the pleasure of the CEO, not by design.

The Ulrich model reinforces this trap by keeping HR’s role peripheral — a business partner, not a business owner. In practice, it means HR can deliver every engagement target and still be replaced for “business alignment” reasons.

The Metric That Actually Matters

The CEOs who keep their CHROs through multiple cycles aren’t doing it for morale scores. They’re doing it because those CHROs own execution systems that protect performance through change.

That means controlling:

  • Standards — the non-negotiables that define acceptable performance

  • Structure — how authority, reporting lines, and accountability flow

  • Systems — the platforms and processes that enforce work, not just track it

  • Signals — the metrics and dashboards that drive executive focus

  • Sanctions — the invisible guardrails of consequence that prevent drift

  • Sustainment — the reviews and recalibrations that make execution irreversible

This is the architecture of the Woods HR Power Model™ — a direct replacement for the advisory trap of the Ulrich model.

“Engagement is the byproduct of a system that works. But the system comes first.”

The Takeaway for HR Leaders

If engagement is your scoreboard, you’re in the wrong game. Metrics matter only if they secure your position when the business is under pressure.

Relevance comes from system ownership, not survey results.
Survivability comes from making execution a condition of enterprise success.

By the time the next survey went out, no one was talking about engagement anymore. They were talking about how the business would win.

Fix the system. Don’t just measure it.
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Jim Woods
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