Can Today’s CHRO Become Tomorrow’s Strategic Business Leader? | Sonalee Ambardar | CHRO | Recyclekaro

I began in 2004 as a customer service associate. Twenty-odd years later, I sit in the CHRO chair.

In between, I worked across almost every facet of HR: training, employee management, industrial relations, employee relations, learning and organisation development. Some may call that a winding path. I call it my education.

Every time I took on a new role, I had to relearn the business. Sometimes it was a new industry; almost always, it was a new perspective.

I think of business understanding as dimensional.

The same company looks completely different from the service desk, the shop floor, the negotiating table with a union and the boardroom. Each vantage point teaches you something the others cannot. You do not truly understand a business until you have seen it from several of those angles.

Facts first, then the human layer

I am a storyteller, but my stories come with receipts.

They are built on facts, detail and what I have observed and listened to work in the businesses around me. I do not rely on “HR connections”, instinct or goodwill alone to make a point.

Here is the part some may find uncomfortable: people run a business, but it is essential to understand what they bring to the output without allowing emotion to cloud the assessment.

What skills do they bring? What output? Where is capability strong, and where is it thin?

Only once you have that clear-eyed view can you do the second half of the job well: build a proposition that is valuable for the people themselves by understanding who they are, what they need and what will help them grow. Rigour first, then humanity.

Reverse the order and you risk sentiment without strategy.

Listening at scale

You do not need to know the private thoughts of 5,000 employees. No one can.

What you do need is the ability to listen well.

I think listening at scale is, in many ways, a marketing skill. Marketers listen to the market. They watch patterns, signals, shifts in behavior and changes in demand.

Over time, an experienced HR leader learns to read a workforce in much the same way. You begin noticing where energy is changing, where trust is weakening, where capability is emerging and where frustration is building, often before a survey confirms it.

That does not replace data. It makes you better at interpreting it.

Learning the whole language of business

Growing into the CHRO role required me to learn far more than HR.

I had to understand how to remain relevant to internal and external audiences, how to contribute meaningfully to investor conversations and, most importantly, how to understand the numbers.

Once you understand the numbers, you begin to understand how a CEO sees people: as capability, cost, productivity, risk, leadership depth and growth potential, all at once.

That is when the conversation changes.

Attrition is no longer only an HR metric. It can be a productivity risk, a capability gap or a revenue problem. Succession is not simply a talent discussion; it can determine whether a business can scale, enter a new market or integrate an acquisition.

You stop explaining HR to the business and start contributing to the business itself.

The seat is only a placeholder

So, can today’s CHRO become tomorrow’s strategic business leader?

Yes. But I would challenge the framing.

For years, HR has talked about earning “a seat at the table”. The seat is only a placeholder. It is an invitation, nothing more.

The real question is: is sitting in it enough?

It is not.

An HR leader becomes a true business leader when they begin adding value to the seat they have been offered. Not when the title changes or the reporting line moves, but when the room begins turning to them for answers to business questions, not merely people questions.

When they can connect capability to growth, culture to execution, and talent risk to commercial risk.