The crises keep coming. Good thing People and Culture got really good at leading through them.

By Garreth Ball, Partner, Clifton & King Executive Search

Back in 2020, I wrote a published article about how HR had been thrown into the spotlight by COVID. Entire workforces moved remote in a matter of weeks, legislation was being read at midnight and implemented at 6am, and HR was quietly holding it all together. I said at the time that HR's seat at the leadership table had never mattered more.

I'll be honest, part of me wasn't sure it would stick. Once things settled down, would HR drift back to being seen as a support function? Six years on, it hasn't. If anything, the opposite has happened.

Because here's the thing nobody told us in 2020: the crises didn't stop. They changed shape.

Since then we've had the post-COVID reset, geopolitical conflict, supply chain pressure, real economic uncertainty, and a workforce that is anxious about what the next twelve months look like. And now the big one everyone is talking about, AI, and the very real fear that it's coming for people's jobs. Each one lands differently. But they share a common thread. At their core, they're people problems.

That's why the conversation has shifted. People and Culture, as more of us are rightly calling it, isn't just managing the fallout of a crisis anymore. It's leading through it. Not in every organisation, and not without having to earn it. But in the best ones, absolutely.

Think about what actually gets tested when something goes wrong. It's not the balance sheet first. It's trust. It's communication. It's whether your people feel safe enough to stay focused, and whether your culture holds together or quietly starts to unravel under pressure. Those are the things that decide whether an organisation emerges stronger or limps on for months. And those are exactly the levers People and Culture has its hands on.

One Chief People Officer I spoke with recently put it well. She said her job used to be measured by how well she ran the engine room. Now it's measured by how steady the whole organisation stays when the ground moves. “Crisis leadership used to be something we supported. Now it's something we're expected to own.”

That's a big shift in a short time, and I see it confirmed regularly in the executive searches I run.

One of the clearest signals for me is the number of CPO searches where communications now sits within the remit. A few years ago that felt like an unusual add-on. In 10 of my recent CPO mandates, communications has been part of the brief. When I stop and think about it, it makes complete sense. A CPO is responsible for culture, trust, and how people feel about where they work. Communications is a natural extension of that. Getting the right message out, at the right time, in a way that lands with people, is a people leadership skill. The best CPOs I work with own the communications piece because they understand that how you communicate shapes how people feel, and how people feel shapes everything else.

Which brings me to AI, and something I find genuinely fascinating.

You'd expect AI to land as a technology problem: new tools, new systems, get the IT and data teams on it. That part matters. But watch where the hard questions about AI are landing inside organisations, and more often than not they're directed at People and Culture. Not technology.

Why? Because the hard part of AI was never the software. The hard part is the human part. How do you reskill a workforce so people have a future, not just a redundancy letter? How do you keep your best people engaged when many of them are quietly worried a model will make their role obsolete? How do you set boundaries around ethics, fairness and trust so AI is something your people work with, not something done to them?

Those aren't technology questions. They're people questions. And the function being asked to answer them is the one that has spent the last six years proving it understands people under pressure.

Many boards are still catching up to that. Technology can deliver the tool. Whether AI actually works in your organisation, whether it lifts your people or fractures them, depends on how it's introduced, communicated and led. That's a People and Culture mandate, not an IT rollout.

So where does that leave us?

I keep coming back to what I wrote in 2020 about HR's seat at the table. It was true then, but it undersells where we've landed. The best People and Culture leaders I work with aren't asking to be in the room. They're who the room turns to when things get hard.

The pandemic gave HR its moment in the spotlight. The years since have shown it can carry the weight.

As we head into whatever comes next, more geopolitical noise, more economic uncertainty, an AI transformation we're all still working out, I'd back the organisations that treat their People and Culture function as core crisis leadership. Not a support act.

Crises aren't going anywhere. And the function that understands people best is the one most likely to get you through them.

A useful test for any board: ask your CPO what the organisation would say to its people in the first 24 hours of the next crisis. If the answer takes more than a moment, that's your gap.

Garreth Ball is a Partner at Clifton & King Executive Search, identifying and appointing the leaders who shape Australia's asset-intensive sectors.

The views expressed in this article are my own, drawn from my experience in executive search and conversations with clients and candidates.