When Joji Sekhon Gill joined semiconductor manufacturing company Applied Materials as corporate VP of HR in 2020, she knew exactly where she wanted the role to take her. And she wasn’t shy about voicing her aspirations to her boss, Susan Winchester.
“I was pretty clear that I [wanted] to be a CHRO, whether here or somewhere else,” Gill said.
Winchester, who was SVP and CHRO at the time, saw potential in Gill, and helped her put together a development plan to work toward this goal. After three and a half years of gaining exposure to Applied Materials’s leadership through environments like offsite events and compensation committee meetings, Gill was chosen to take over as CHRO for Winchester in January of 2024.
Gill said the transition was so successful that it now informs how she thinks about succession planning more broadly at Applied Materials.
Learning on the job. When considering how best to support Gill, Winchester was informed by her own mentorship experiences in HR. She spent over a decade in various HR roles with cereal company Kellogg, but “hadn’t been personally developed by anybody over a period of time” prior to taking on her first CHRO role with Rockwell Automation.
When Winchester joined Milwaukee-based Rockwell as SVP and CHRO in 2007, “it was a real eye-opener,” she recalls. “I will tell you that first year, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing?’” Many of the skills that she now considers essential to the job—like executive compensation, board management, and CEO-board dynamics—were new to her.
To get up-to-speed on these elements of the job, Winchester leaned on advice from mentors in her wider HR network. Mara Swan, who was EVP of global strategy and talent at ManpowerGroup, as well as Tracy Keogh, then CHRO at Hewitt & Associates, became regular points of contact on Winchester’s “dial CHRO helpline.” Through a former Kellogg boss, Winchester connected with Chuck Mazza, an independent compensation consultant, to tutor her on executive compensation.
“I had to really ramp because I had not had any of those experiences,” Winchester said. Years later, when Gill approached her about the CHRO role, she recalls saying, “I will try to think of every single experience I wish somebody had given me, before I became a CHRO at Rockwell. I will try to think of everything that I wish I’d had, and I will try to give all that to you.”
“Waiting in the wings.” Experience working with corporate boards is an increasingly valuable credential for potential CHRO candidates, HR Brew has previously reported.
To gain exposure to Applied Materials’s board, Gill started attending HR compensation committee meetings, where members would discuss issues like long-term executive succession and development.
In compensation committee meetings, Gill developed an understanding of issues that were important to Applied Materials’s board, and how they balanced those with the CEO’s priorities. At Applied Materials, the compensation committee is headed up by the board chairman, “so you get exposure to what the board members think, what’s valuable to them,” said Gill, who attended the meetings for nearly two years. The topics covered extended beyond compensation, and also included diversity, “the culture of the company, how we’re thinking about succession…how we are developing our people,” she said.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Gill also attended board meetings and joined offsite events to develop relationships with board members alongside Susan. She oversaw the results of a benchmarking process with The Hackett Group “to take a look at how we were performing against the benchmark relative to the effectiveness of our HR [organization]”—a job that Winchester would normally have taken on, but assigned to Gill instead. Last fall, employees in the talent and organizational effectiveness departments were moved to work under Gill, which gave her additional responsibilities.
“These were all intentional moves that were giving her opportunities to really take the reins and perform,” Winchester said.
The process was intense, Gill admits, particularly in the year leading up to Winchester stepping down. “I was literally doing two jobs. I was shadowing [Susan] in a way…and then I was doing my day job. But it was great learning for me.”
By the time Winchester announced she would step down as CHRO in January 2024, Gill had been preparing for more than three years, and the executive team knew who she was through her work and presence in succession reviews. The CEO, Gary Dickerson, made the decision to promote her to CHRO, and she took over before the end of that month. The succession process did move quickly, “but it’s because we had Joji waiting in the wings ready to go,” Winchester said.
Lessons learned. In promoting an internal candidate to CHRO, Applied Materials bucked a trend when it comes to executive HR appointments. Research has found companies are more likely to hire CHROs from outside their organization, with external appointments representing 60% of those hired to the role in 2023.
When her promotion was announced, Gill said she heard from employees who were happy to see someone internally get the job. And for both Applied Materials’s CEO and board chairman, the transition offered an example of what good succession planning can look like.
This is true for Gill, as well. “Succession is a big focus for me, and for the organization…I’m going to be using some of my own learnings and my own experiences for that,” she said.
Correction 11/26/24: This piece has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Susan Winchester’s name and employer of Tracy Keogh in 2007.