Leading With Heart: Why Change Needs a Chief Heart Officer

Traditional change management is broken. Sharon Parmar, the UK’s first Chief Heart Officer, believes the goal isn’t to “respond to change” but to make people change-ready, so they can thrive in a world that won’t stop shifting:

In today’s business landscape, the leaders who succeed will be those who can deliver high performance through heart-led leadership. Cultures built on trust and belonging keep teams performing even when the path forward is uncertain.

Some of the most senior leaders in Silicon Valley have my number on speed dial. Why? Because they know that courage and connection build team resilience in times of change, not spreadsheets or slide decks explaining the process of change. Leading with heart is no longer soft power - it’s strategic power.

The question is this: how change-ready are your teams? And are your leaders equipped to lead transformation with heart?

The ROI of Leading With Heart

A Chief Heart Officer isn’t a “nice to have.” They are as commercially decisive as the CFO, because culture determines whether people stay, perform, or walk.

Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia in the US, proved this when her work helped deliver retention rates of up to 72% in an industry where churn is the norm. That’s ROI, not rhetoric.

Trust Is the Speed Limit of Transformation

A team can only move as fast as the levels of trust allow. The Chief Heart Officer sets that speed limit, spotting the hidden rockstars who fuel performance, calling out toxic performers who corrode it, and creating a culture of belonging that makes people want to stay.

Belonging isn’t soft. It’s a growth strategy. Trust isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of resilience, performance, and adaptability.

At Humanity Works Consultancy, we’ve seen this first-hand. Our coaching and culture transformation programmes with global corporations have resulted in clients experiencing reduced staff turnover, higher resilience scores, and stronger team engagement. Leaders trust us because we don’t just design change frameworks, we nurture the conditions for sustainable growth.

From HR to the C-Suite: Culture as a Strategic Growth Driver

A Chief Heart Officer is not an HR replacement. They blend high heart with commercial fluency: deep insight into people, the courage to have the hard conversations, and the authority to make decisions that accelerate performance.

They are not a support role; they are a strategic counterpart to the CFO and CEO, because the balance sheet depends on trust, resilience, and retention just as much as on revenue.

Turning Heart into Hard Outcomes

You don’t need the title to be a Chief Heart Officer. But you do need an approach that blends humanity with performance.

I use tools and strategies from a mindset, skillset, and toolset framework to deliver sustainable growth in times of transformation. Here are three heart-led strategies you can use right now:

1. Mindset: Embrace the Suck. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. Leaders who sugarcoat it lose credibility. Naming the discomfort normalises it, freeing teams to focus on progress, not resistance. Ask your teams to name what they find hard and ask them what they are learning from the challenge. This enables people to build emotional agility and drive performance even in challenging times.    
2. Skillset: Healthy Conflict. High-performing teams don’t avoid conflict; they harness it. Surfacing tensions early and debating ideas constructively turns friction into innovation. Use Edward de Bono's red hat and blue hat exercise where one team is the challenger and the other team is pro-change. Then end the discussion with alignment on the next steps.
3. Toolset: Assume Positive Intent (API Rule). Start every interaction with the assumption that colleagues act in good faith. This simple tool builds psychological safety, accelerates trust, and keeps teams moving under pressure. When the CEO announces a shift in strategy, instead of thinking, “they just don’t get my work, this will hurt my numbers”. Think: “They want us to win differently; I need to better understand how to do that.”
   

The Future Doesn’t Belong to Managing Change

As the Greek poet Archilochus wrote: “In times of pressure, we don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.”

The same is true of organisations. In disruption, teams don’t rise to lofty strategies; they default to the culture that surrounds them. That’s why the future doesn’t belong to traditional change management. It belongs to the Chief Heart Officers of this world - leaders who can build trust, connection, and resilience at scale.

💡 Would you like to explore changing hearts and minds with Sharon Parmar? Email PepTalk at hello@getapeptalk.com or send us a message via the chat. You can also call us on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US). Remember, it’s always a good time to get a PepTalk!

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