From Cost Center to Catalyst: How CPOs Turn People Strategy Into Business Advantage, with L. David Kingsley

L. David Kingsley has been a Chief People Officer five times over, at MuleSoft, Vlocity, Alteryx, Intercom and now Illumio, where he leads global people strategy across talent acquisition, learning and development, total rewards, engagement and DEIB. He did not start in HR. He began as a systems integrator at Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture, implementing PeopleSoft systems for organizations in the middle of technology transformations. That route in is the reason his language sounds more like an operator's than a practitioner's.

The premise of this episode is one most people in HR spend their careers arguing against. David says HR is a cost center, not a profit center, and that people teams which keep fighting that description are spending energy in the wrong place. Accepting it, in his telling, is what makes the function useful.

Across the conversation with host Darcy Mehta, he lays out the three jobs of a people function in order, explains why most organizations are far closer to treating HR as a trusted advisor than HR realizes, and gives one question he would have every leader ask their team in the next 90 days.

The three jobs of HR, in order

David's framing is deliberately unglamorous. Job one is to keep the company out of jail. Job two is to keep it out of the headlines, at least for the wrong reasons. Job three through X is everything else that helps the company achieve its mission. The first two are table stakes, and his point is that people teams forget the order rather than the list.

What follows from accepting cost center status is a discipline about effort. Product, sales, marketing and customer success all have a legible line to a customer. The G and A functions, which he lists as finance, accounting, HR, IT, legal, real estate and workplace services, do not. So their question becomes how close they can get to delivering that same customer value with, in his words, the minimum amount of calories deployed.

The failure mode he names is doing HR for HR's sake. His phrase for it is doing what the dusty binder tab three says you are supposed to do. He includes himself and points out that customers never feel the benefit of work done that way.

Necessary evil, critical enabler, trusted advisor

David describes every people function as sitting somewhere on a three-point continuum. Necessary evil at one end. Critical enabler in the middle. Trusted advisor at the far end, which he defines not by title but by whether the room waits for you before it starts.

When he joins a company, he says the function is usually somewhere between the first two. The more interesting claim is what sits underneath that. Most of the time, he argues, the organization is already about 75 percent of the way to treating the people team as a trusted advisor. It simply has not issued the invitation, or the team has not yet shown up in a way that made the invitation obvious.

His example comes from Illumio, where the chief product officer told him that at a previous company he always felt he was having to chase HR, putting things on the table he wanted them to think about.

When the demand signal is already there, he says, the job is simply to show up and meet it. His practical advice for finding out where you stand is to ask directly. He mentions using a Gartner assessment of HR function maturity, and adds that you do not need an analyst firm to do it. Ask your internal clients how they perceive you, what they use you for and where you drive value, and most will tell you plainly.

Simplicity is expensive, which is why it wins

Asked why the best organizations simplify while most add process, David reaches for the line usually attributed to either Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal: I wrote you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one. With AI in the room, he notes, producing the long version costs almost nothing. Producing the short one still costs what it always did.

His argument is that a tight, distilled position earns airtime because of what it signals. It tells the stakeholder that you put in the time to make this simple so they would not have to. The alternative, in his description, is a complex word salad policy that feels impressively HR and wins internal praise while nobody reads it.

He makes the same point twice through design rather than policy. The first is a night in Tokyo, walking a mile to dinner with an empty water bottle he could not throw away because there was no bin anywhere in sight.

The second is getting up from a Southwest Airlines seat and finding himself folding the seatbelt across it the way the cabin crew do, because the culture had a way of doing things and he had absorbed it inside one flight. Both stories point the same direction: design that removes a problem beats process that manages one.

Why HR gets seated at the kids' table

This is the section most likely to sting, and David puts himself inside it. His observation is that an outside observer can usually pick out the HR person in a room, because HR people speak on HR topics and go quiet on everything else. Product development lifecycle, customer maturation, the marketing approach: no view offered.

His self-test is a score he runs on meetings. In any executive or board meeting, how often is he contributing on something that is not explicitly HR? He asks his colleagues to engage on culture, talent and retention, so the same expectation has to run in reverse.

In publicly traded and venture-backed companies he means that literally. If you cannot discern one financial acronym from another, cannot connect people work to net-new ARR, NACV or GRR, you will not be heard. He extends the point to how HR teams are developed: the first time someone encounters these business concepts should not be when they land their first CPO role, and too often it is. He sees teaching them earlier as the job of whoever currently holds the executive seat.

Mental wellbeing as capacity, not a benefit

David sits on the board of Nivati, a mental health platform, while running people strategy at a high-growth cybersecurity company, so he has had to make this case to business audiences rather than HR ones. He does it with an analogy rather than a statistic.

Tie your dominant hand behind your back for a day and type with the other one. You would get through the day. Your emails would go out slower, your responses would lag, you would accomplish less and finish with a cramp. That, he argues, is what turning up to work without mental wellbeing looks like: not absence, not underperformance you could name in a review, just working with one hand.

He backs it with something he heard from a neuroscientist. Under threat, with cortisol spiking, people drop into fight or flight and functional IQ falls. Someone who normally operates at 130 or 150 might be working at 105 or 110, unable to do their best work because they are not psychologically safe in that moment. If you want people at the height of their game, you have to set them up for it.

The 90-day non-negotiable

Asked for the single action every Chief People Officer should take in the next 90 days, David did not name a project. He named a question, and said it should be asked of every person in the organization.

His claim is that most organizations run at roughly 80 percent of the capacity they believe they have. Not because people are disengaged in a way an engagement report would flag, but because some are under-engaged, under-equipped, under-informed or under-empowered in ways that never surface unless somebody asks directly. Most people will say they are fine. A few will tell you they came to do one thing and have not been able to, and that is the answer worth having.

His name for the alternative is crockpot management.

Set it and forget it works on beef stew. It does not work on people, and the fix is a moment in your skip levels, your one-to-ones and your coffee chats rather than a new program. If you want the phrasing that gets useful answers, our guide to engagement survey questions covers how to ask without leading the witness.

What asking actually communicates

Asked how real-time listening platforms help build the business case for people strategy, David put the signal ahead of the data. When an organization stops and asks in a way the employee believes is sincere, the message received is simple.

That, he says, is the most important thing engagement efforts do. A very close second is the insight itself: the feedback that tells leadership the thing they believe is working is not working, or not in the way they think. Both require the asking to be genuine, which is the part that cannot be automated.

Participation before sentiment

The most practical idea in the episode is also the least intuitive. When David looks at manager effectiveness surveys, the first number he goes to is not the score. It is the participation rate.

He borrows the physics to explain it. Vector is direction, valence is energy. If there is no valence, you cannot re-vector things. So on a 360 survey, what he wants to know first is how many people gave feedback about their manager at all, good, bad or indifferent. People who tell you what would make them more effective are people who believe their voice is valued, and a group that has gone quiet is the harder problem, not the safer one.

That is where manager effectiveness surveys and continuous listening earn their place in his argument. If participation is the leading indicator he says it is, the number worth watching is whether people still think it is worth answering, and that moves long before anything shows up in your attrition data.

For a broader look at what this means for the people at the top of the organization, our piece on leadership engagement covers how senior teams stay connected to the work they are accountable for.