The CHRO’s New Mandate
June 15, 2026 – Across industries, the organizational design structure has shifted from a traditional pyramid to an hourglass model. This is not a recent development, explained Slayton Search Partners’ John Doyle in a recent report. “Organizational efficiencies, increased technology and the first wave of Baby Boomer retirements began this transition nearly two decades ago,” he said. “Experienced leaders have been retiring. Internal pipelines have been thinning. Roles have been evolving faster than people are developing. And the middle of the talent stack, the layer that once translated vision into execution, has been shrinking in ways that are permanent, not cyclical.”
Mr. Doyle noted that these mid-level roles are essential in giving high-performing employees relevant, on-the-job developmental opportunities. However, these jobs are not coming back. “New strategies require creative thinking to develop future leaders,” he said.
What remains is a widening chasm between the top of the house and entry-level talent, with fewer bridge builders in between, according to Mr. Doyle. He explained that in 2026, navigating that reality has become the defining challenge for every chief human resources officer serious about long-term organizational performance.
The Shrinking Middle
McKinsey has described middle management as being under a 25- to 30-year assault, with organizations running endless rounds of cost cutting under the belief that flatter structures meant faster decisions. “In many cases that was true,” Mr. Doyle said. “But as the research noted, after two decades of pressure, many organizations have reached the point where the connective tissue has begun to fray. What looks like efficiency on an org chart can often obscure serious gaps underneath it.”
A common misperception is that hiring failures begin with the candidate, the Slayton report explained. “The fit was not right,” it said. “The experience did not translate. Rarely does the conversation turn to the conditions that candidate stepped into. In organizations where the middle has eroded, new senior hires land in a vacuum, expected to perform without the infrastructure that makes success possible. This is not a talent problem. It is a structural one.”
“CHROs who want to address this should start with an honest audit of their leadership bench, not just headcount at each level but genuine readiness,” Mr. Doyle said. “Who in the organization is actively being developed for the next role, and how many roles internally is that same person being considered for? Without that clarity, organizations can unknowingly build succession plans that look robust on paper but rely too heavily on a single individual across multiple critical seats. Where are managers being promoted before they are prepared? What does the coaching and leadership development infrastructure look like for people sitting between the senior team and the front line? Does the organization have a formal process for identifying and tracking external talent pipelines, not just developing the people already in the building? The value of asking these questions is not just what you find. It is what the exercise itself reveals about where the organization has been making assumptions it cannot afford to keep.”
Reclaiming the CHRO Mandate
The HR function has not failed. “It has been distorted,” Mr. Doyle explained. “Years of cost pressure, unseen global events and misaligned incentives have nudged the CHRO back towards the administrative center of gravity, producing a function that often knows the most about organizational health but has less influence over the decisions that shape it.”
John Doyle has more than 20 years of executive search experience, specializing primarily in the human resources function. He has recruited chief human resources officers, as well as group level HR generalists and functional specialists across a wide variety of industries for companies of all sizes. As an HR professional, Mr. Doyle has directed the development of recruiting, training, and management assessment strategies for client companies coast to coast.
“There is a meaningful difference between an HR leader who attends business reviews and one who actively shapes them,” Mr. Doyle added. “The former brings workforce data to the table. The latter brings a point of view on what that data means for strategy, for risk and for the decisions the organization needs to make now to avoid a more expensive correction later.”
“Reclaiming that mandate means showing up to the business conversation with a clear perspective on leadership depth, pipeline health and succession risk before those topics become crises that land on the CEO’s desk,” Mr. Doyle continued. “It means building deep partnerships with finance and operations, not to gain access but to earn the influence required to act. And it means being willing to name what the data is saying, even when that conversation has been easier to defer than to have.”
The Baby Boomer Exit: A Knowledge Crisis in Slow Motion
Roughly 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement age every day, a pace that will continue through 2030 according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That figure has been cited so often it has lost some of its force. “What organizations are less willing to confront is not the headcount loss but what leaves with it,” Mr. Doyle said. “This cohort carries something that cannot be posted on a job board: institutional memory. Not just process knowledge or technical expertise, but the relational intelligence, cultural context and pattern recognition that comes only from years of operating through multiple cycles of challenge and change.”
Related: CEOs and CHROs: Strategic Alignment or Differing Priorities?
Recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) research makes the risk concrete. While 83 percent of HR professionals report that their organizations document company policies, only about one-third document cultural norms and fewer than half document client relationship knowledge, the very areas HR professionals say would be most difficult to rebuild if experienced leaders suddenly retired. The same research found that 93 percent of organizations have no formal recruitment programs targeting older workers, meaning organizations are not only losing this knowledge but building no strategy to retain or re-engage it.
The most strategically valuable thing an organization can do with a departing senior leader is not simply plan for their replacement, according to the Slayton report. “It is to architect their departure,” it explained. “This means treating the final 12 to 18 months of a senior leader’s tenure as an active investment in continuity rather than a countdown to vacancy. Structured mentorship pairs exiting leaders with high-potential successors in deliberate, time-bound relationships. Shadow leadership arrangements give emerging talent real exposure to decision-making before they are handed the keys. Phased retirement structures, consulting agreements and formal advisory roles can extend the knowledge transfer window beyond the exit date itself.”
“The organizations that get this right do so because someone decided to own it,” Mr. Doyle added. “For CHROs, that decision is the mandate. It is how the function earns something more valuable than compliance — it earns the organization’s trust that HR is where the hard problems get solved.”
Where to Start
Recruiters say that the hourglass organizational structure is not a future state. It is the current one. But diagnosis without direction serves no one. The CHROs best positioned to lead through this moment are the ones who move from recognizing the problem to owning the response.
“That means three things in practice,” Mr. Doyle said. “First, redesign your development model for the structure that exists, not the one that used to. Investing in management capability looks different when the proving ground of middle management is gone. Second, reclaim the strategic conversation by bringing a workforce risk perspective to business planning that goes beyond headcount and turnover rates. Third, architect the exit of your most experienced leaders with the same rigor you would apply to any critical business transition. The organizations that will outperform over the next decade are not necessarily the ones with the best current talent. They are the ones actively building it, with a CHRO who understands that is precisely what the role exists to do.”
Related: The CHRO’s Leadership Imperative in the AI Era
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
