Succession pipelines are drying up, and senior leaders are becoming increasingly concerned about where the next generation of senior talent will come from in an AI-driven workplace. Moreover, many leadership teams have a fundamental misunderstanding of the core principles of workforce planning, what they truly entail, and how to ensure their talent is equipped for the future. One thing is clear: a new approach is needed, and fast.
Robert Half and Protiviti recently held a roundtable event with leaders from PE‑backed, tech, finance, and creative industries, hosted by Charlie Grubb (Senior Managing Director at Robert Half Executive Search) with a keynote speech by Scott Bolderson (Managing Director at Protiviti).
Over the course of the discussion, attendees shared insights, concerns, and advice on workforce planning and the evolving role of AI in business, covering talent development, the critical role of HR and people management, and how leaders can build and future-proof the talent their businesses depend on.
Shifting mindsets from headcount to capabilities
The conversation around succession planning has become about building the organisation of the future. Rather than recording what people do today, experts around the table agreed that true workforce planning should move beyond headcount and instead consider which capabilities the business requires to deliver on its strategy in the future.
“What we're trying to coach ourselves to do is ask the questions: can the workforce that we've got deliver against the strategy? Is it the right workforce? Have we got the right priorities? Have we got too many priorities? And then it's this argument about capacity versus capability. When we're looking now, we're trying not to just look at headcount, but capability within the teams,” said one attendee.
“Instead of looking at skills, we actually wanted to look at the tasks they're doing,” said another. “So, we're looking at what people actually do, versus the skills they came in with. Which, in a big organisation, you lose track of, because you recruit them, but you never really know what they're doing three years later — they’ve moved around. Their manager knows, but the organisation doesn't. So, I think a more task-based approach is what we're looking at.”
AI as a tool, not a replacement for expertise
Discussions at a board level have moved away from which AI tools to buy and towards interrogating how AI will impact the workforce and its operations. While AI has become an essential tool for acceleration and efficiency, it’s critical to invest in expert talent and junior talent development.
“No AI tool is going to choose a stock or a fund or a strategy for investing people's money based on anything other than the facts that it's got in front of it, whereas we believe in the people that run the companies that are delivering. It's not about the technology per se, it's about the individuals that are in that company,” said an attendee from the financial services sector.
“If you've got a business that is just purely tech, it's going to give you acceleration, but it's not going to give you permanence. And we're a great believer in the permanence of organisations, and permanence comes from the people and the knowledge within the organisation.”
“They're doing a lot more with sampling, with AI-like tools for audits, and I don't get where the audit partners of the future are going to come from,” said another attendee. “I was with a fund manager in the city the other day, and he said, ‘60% of our work could probably be done by AI. The judgment bit can't be but all the analysis.’ So, how do you create those junior fund managers of the future? If all that grimy stuff is given to an LLM or SLM, you're not gaining the skills.”
An organisation’s people are its primary value
Cheap debt and expansion are no longer enough - organic EBITDA growth relies on a curated leadership team with a succession pipeline of skilled leaders to guarantee fulfilment of the value-creation plan. Proper workforce planning, along with serious people leadership, and intentional talent development are non-negotiable if organisations want to scale, deliver returns, and sell a business that the buyer can trust will keep performing.
“To get a 2.5x return on money 10 years ago, you needed to get 5% EBITDA growth year on year. That's now up at 12. So, you need twice as hard a squeeze to get the same amount of juice. And one of the main operational value-creation levers you can pull in that business is people. Probably the main one. If you don't have the people executing that value creation, then it's not going to happen,” said Ben Hewitt, PE portfolio executive search expert at Robert Half.
“I think any PE-backed business currently going into a cycle or trying to go through a turnaround without a sincere people plan focused on talent due diligence, talent development, and talent succession planning, then it's going to be a real trouble, because no secondary sponsor is going to want to take on a business that's got a strong leadership team. They're all going to take their check and walk out the door. It's going to be important to make sure that's really prioritised over the next five to seven years.”
A PE chairman and CEO agreed, saying, “If you haven't got the people dimension sorted, you're not going to scale. You're just not going to deliver. All you'll do is lurch into two- to three-year cycles, when all you're doing is constantly replacing the leadership team and going again, and it just gets progressively harder for the people who come later in the game.”
HR/people leadership as a board-level function
To scale a business into a saleable asset, HR/People leadership must shift from an administrative to a strategic, board-level function. It is critical that they have a seat at the table and take an active role in shaping the hiring plan, capability building, culture, and succession plan.
“It's the middle managers that don't get HR apart from, ‘Can you fill in this form? Oh, I need this done.’ And so, when those people become board-level execs, they still don't get HR, and I think there probably aren't many true Chief People Officer types out there. But having an HR leader who is a true partner at all but board level is invaluable,” said a tech NED.
On the challenge of sourcing top HR talent, one attendee said, “I think you can be creative with how you do it. For example, I went off to work in America, came back, and they'd put the Chief Commercial Officer in to run HR. And he was basically bringing all his experience, wisdom, and leadership into that group. It elevated the department like you wouldn't believe, and their whole mindset changed. They became a lot more outward and were involved with the business a lot more, where previously, they were off to the side, filling in forms.”
Another agreed, offering, “It can be a sales leader that becomes Chief of Staff. We see it a lot in small defence businesses where you've got a Chief of Staff who's come up — especially when you've got a driven, entrepreneurial founder who's maybe less people focused and more mission focused, that Chief of Staff is the perfect one to keep the entire workforce completely engaged and completely aligned with the founder without the founder actually having to do it. So, thinking outside the box for HR leadership roles is interesting.”
