Job-switching rates reached new heights during the pandemic, and the desire among workers to hop from one job to another remains high, even in a tighter economy.
This trend holds true for HR professionals, though one veteran CHRO’s career path shows the value of staying in one place, provided your company offers the right mentorship and opportunities to develop your career.
Daniel Marsili spent three decades at the consumer products company Colgate-Palmolive, where he rose through the ranks to become CHRO. The technical experience he received, coupled with mentorship from higher-ups, shaped his approach to HR, Marsili told HR Brew. Ultimately, he paid it forward by mentoring Sally Massey, an employee who went on to become Colgate-Palmolive’s next and current CHRO.
On-the-ground experience. Psychology and HR are the most common fields of study for people pros who go on to become CHROs or CPOs, according to Live Data Technologies figures provided to HR Brew. Marsili, however, decided to earn a juris doctor degree from Loyola University New Orleans, fueled by his interest in labor law.
Though he didn’t realize it at the time, some of the less sexy jobs Marsili took on early in his career were preparing him for higher-level work. Early in his career with Hyatt Hotels, he covered a benefits role that was temporarily open. The work was largely administrative, but it required him to interact with a lot of hourly workers employed by the hotel.
“I had to develop the soft skills, because you’re basically dealing with a very high-stress issue,” he said. “The beauty of some of these great exposures when you’re young is, you don’t know it at the time, but you’re actually building skills that you’re going to use when you’re very senior, and they’re just coded into your natural abilities.”
After finishing law school, Marsili worked as an area employee relations manager at Pepsi Bottling Group (later acquired by PepsiCo), where he gained firsthand experience working with organized labor, as many workers were represented by the Teamsters. In 1991, he joined Colgate-Palmolive, where he continued to cut his teeth in roles focusing on labor relations, as well as total rewards.
Learning to loosen the reins. Colgate-Palmolive’s former SVP and head of global HR, Robert Joy, was intentional about giving Marsili and a few of his colleagues “a tremendous amount of exposure” to prepare them to potentially lead HR at the company. They regularly met with Colgate-Palmolive’s board of directors, whose members took the opportunity to pepper these younger HR leaders with questions on a range of topics. Marsili recalls being asked how he would approach executive compensation design and strategy, and how he would align HR strategy with Colgate-Palmolive’s business strategy, if given the top role. In the year leading up to his appointment, he also attended personnel and organization meetings, as well as governance committee meetings.
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Marsili got the CHRO job in 2005, and the experience informed his own approach to mentorship and succession planning.
“You have to give a collection of the right people the right opportunities, and then let them excel on their own,” he said. Ideally, a C-suite executive might start thinking about developing their potential successors three to five years before they leave the company, and make sure those people “have the best exposure to show people they can get there.”
As part of this process, executives have to be willing to “loosen [their] own reins” a bit, and let their mentees succeed or fail, he said. In working with Joy, Marsili saw that “he never let any ego stand in the way of allowing us to shine under him” in “very visible areas” of the business.
Letting others shine. When Marsili began to think about developing his own successor several years back, one candidate he identified was Massey, who had been with the company since 2000. Just as Joy had done, Marsili looked for opportunities to take a step back and allow her and other promising CHRO candidates to shine. In one case, he asked Massey to present on behalf of the HR department at one of Colgate-Palmolive’s global general management meetings, which convened 300 or so leaders from the company for a week-long session focused on development, strategy, and learning. Normally, Marsili would have presented HR’s vision for the next three years, but he assigned the task to his potential successor.
“It’s a great opportunity to give someone the opportunity to stand up on that stage and talk about the future,” Marsili said. “You have to give people in the organization the opportunity to envision that potential successor in the job.” Massey confirmed that she led the agenda at the meeting Marsili referenced, and said she plans to give the same opportunity to a potential successor in the future.
After a vetting process that lasted about six years, Massey was appointed as CHRO of Colgate-Palmolive in July 2020. Marsili, who currently serves as president of the National Academy of Human Resources, recognizes that many companies choose to bring in CHROs from the outside, but sees value in mentoring internal successors, too.
“Boards and companies are all managing, now, such constant change,” he said. “You get such enormous benefit from an executive who knows the organization,” including its people, as well as “unwritten rules…on how things really get done, and what buttons you have to push in order to accelerate things.”