In this episode of the Proteus Leader Show, host Erika Andersen interviews Stacy Green, EVP and Chief People Officer at Sony Pictures Entertainment, about how the human resources (HR) function has transformed over the past decade. Green describes a "cultural revolution" driven by millennial and Gen Z workforce expectations for purpose, alignment, and personal development, which has pushed HR from a narrow, administrative specialty to a broad, strategic, and visionary business partner. She explains that modern HR professionals must act as generalists—combining legal, marketing, psychological, and business acumen—to occupy multiple seats at the leadership table. The conversation highlights common pitfalls where business leaders either underutilize HR by treating it as a transactional service or fail to recognize its strategic value, contrasted with ideal scenarios where leaders actively seek HR counsel for culture, vision, and employee engagement. Green emphasizes that the 2020 pandemic and heightened focus on racial justice have made HR’s role even more critical, requiring leaders to listen to employee sentiment, communicate transparently, and support vulnerable leadership. The episode concludes with practical take‑aways for leaders on how to partner effectively with HR to navigate crisis, sustain culture, and drive performance.
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You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you will get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Stacy Green, EVP and Chief People Officer for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Stacy has been a client and friend for many years, and I've had the privilege of partnering with her as she has built HR teams at NBCUniversal, A&E, Group Nine, and now Sony. Stacy is continually looking for ways to make sure that her team and her function best support her organization's success. in ways both traditional and new. So welcome to the show, Stacey.
Thank you, Erika.
So glad to have you. So you and I have had a lot of conversations over the years about the changing role of the people function in organizations, and I thought that it would be valuable for our listeners to benefit from your insight and experience in this realm since it's been so broad, especially during these times when People and the impact of all that's happening on people is so paramount. So the first thing I want to ask is kind of a foundational question. How has the function we've known as HR changed in the past decade from your point of view?
So when I think about the changes in HR, I usually start with the changes in the workplace in general, which have been drastic over the last 10 years. I often refer to it as the cultural revolution. for people who are not normally HR people in that, you know, we over the last 10 years, especially with the influx of more of a millennial workforce, I think as one of the drivers, employees have completely different expectations of their work environment.
Yes.
You know, whether it's, you know, whether you think of it as a shift from I'm just so pleased to work for a company to really having very, very high expectations of their company when they work there. But now people are really seeking a place where they feel aligned to a mission.
Mm-hmm.
They're inspired. They feel like they're part of something that's bigger than themselves. And they're also looking for a place that believes in them and is looking for what's important to them in developing their own career and fits with their own career aspirations. And I think the combination of the employees' change in expectations and what the HR function has to provide has been very linked in the last 10 years.
Right.
So this high bar, you know, we've gone to a very high bar for what's expected of employers, has shifted the function from more of a narrow administrative specialty function to having to be broad and visionary and strategic. And sort of the expectation for being flawless with your administration is now the baseline.
Yeah.
And sort of like, what can you do beyond that? That's hugely impactful.
That's a great way to frame it. So what used to be the function of HR is now just table stakes. You just— that administrative stuff has to happen well. And I love how you're talking about that HR supports and enables this new contract, this new mental contract, emotional contract of mutual benefit that employees expect. Now, I think that's exactly right. And it makes complete sense that HR would be the driver of that in some ways. So what are just— what are some of the indications of that? Like, what are some of the ways in which HR's— the expectations of HR have changed from your point of view? I'd love some examples.
Yeah, it's funny. This week we were having a conversation about HR itself. So, you know, you often hear that HR was born sort of out of the Industrial Revolution, you know, and it was about people management and effectiveness and measurement and how compensation relates to performance. And I would say the last 10 years I would call the HR adolescence. It's sort of like a growth spurt that, just like the teenage years, I feel like some companies were more precocious. I think companies that understood this change in employee expectations early were quite precocious with them, whereas some were a little bit later bloomers. But I would say that the biggest impact I think it has on HR professionals is that shift from specialist to generalist. It's the HR professional themselves in playing this role now. It went from being a role where if you had a deep knowledge of HR specialties, you were in an okay place. But now you really have to be one part a business leader. You have to understand the business that you're working in and—
Yes.
You know, how important the aspects of that specific business are. You have to be one part lawyer, one part marketing and communications person. You need to be one part psychologist. You have to have a lot of understanding of individuals and what motivates them in a way that crosses over all of those things.
Yes.
So I would say that the idea— we talked a lot about, I want the seat at the table. I need the seat at the table from the perspective of HR. But what's really happened is that they almost play all the seats at the table at the same time.
Yeah.
Obviously in partnership with the leadership team. But if you have an HR professional who can't step up in these areas fairly fluidly, then they get left behind by their business leader, which is a really unfortunate piece of how this has played forward. You're really asking a lot of particularly your HR business partners who are sitting in the business to be experts in a tremendous amount of areas that maybe they never had to be before.
That makes a lot of sense. A much more broadly supportive consultative role versus just, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, I'll execute on the thing that you want me to execute on. Yeah. Okay. Yes.
Wow.
That's very different. Well, so that's a great lead into my next question, which is, what are the ways— I mean, you've been doing this for a while and seeing good news, bad news, and Everything in between. What are some of the ways— this is a kind of cautionary tale— in which you see business leaders most often either misusing or underusing their HR partners?
So that's an interesting one. I think that for the most part, it goes back to that shift in the culture of the workplace. Some business leaders really understand that. They really understand that the demands on their leadership is changing at the same time as the world is changing. And those are the business leaders that you can watch better understand themselves as leaders and how the people around them can help support them to be better leaders.
Mm-hmm.
Those are the shining moments, right? When you have a business leader who says— who either knows or believes that they can learn so much from the team around them And they fit those pieces together. And you'll find that— I find that HR leaders do really well in those environments where they have a business leader who's looking to them for that advice, counsel, you know, honest feedback that you get uniquely from being in the position of an HR leader, both the feedback from their people and then also the setting of the strategic vision of where they're going and how they communicate it. You see that those are the— I always start with the good parts, right? But those are the dream situations. You have an HR leader who's sitting next to their business leader. They're driving a vision, a strategy. They're attracting and engaging their employees together, and they understand the chemistry that comes from those different viewpoints. Then you get the sort of opposite side of that where you have maybe a more traditional business leader, maybe a business leader who believes that those skills aren't unique to theirs. who are trying really hard to play all of those roles by themselves.
Oh, yeah.
That's the hardest business leaders, the business leaders who are, you know, I'll— my HR person's there for when I have questions about our benefits or our compensation or maybe how to hire a person or maybe even as drastic as I'm only looking for them when I'm trying to get rid of somebody and I want to understand performance management or what the restructuring strategy looks like for my company or my— the rules look like.
Yeah.
When you have that, usually I find it's a business leader just not recognizing the value that can come from having somebody with the skill set sitting on their leadership team, sitting next to them. Either they've never experienced it before, maybe they've experienced it Poorly before, or they are just so convinced that they can find and lead and communicate the best that, you know, better than anybody else, and so they kind of drive forward independently.
Wow. As with all things, it sounds like it comes down to expectation and mindset. So if a business leader kind of assumes that HR is this limited function that it used to be, A, or B, I can do all that people stuff myself, then they're much less likely to take advantage of me.
I usually think of the best intent with everyone.
Yeah.
And I think that some people just, you know, they're signed up and they get it. And it's wonderful to see. And sometimes they just, you know, don't realize what they have sitting next to them that can really be a difference for their leadership.
Well, so, and you talked about this some, a bit ago, but I want to frame it especially now, you know, in the midst of the pandemic and With all the concerns, legitimate concerns, finally coming to the surface about racial justice, what are some of the ways that good business leaders can take best advantage of their HR partners, especially now?
Yes, well, it's funny. Part of the conversation I was mentioning before about HR being in its adolescence, I think that most HR leaders would agree that 2020 is college graduation. You're coming to the job— No matter how prepared you are or not. I think that what's interesting about this moment is it almost requires business leaders to go through that transition.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's not a question now if you have a seat at the table. In most cases, your HR leader is sitting right next to your CEO or maybe on the other end of the table, as you would say. And it's in times of drastic change and a drastic insecurity in your workforce that HR is there to step up and show what we can do. And I think that I'm very, very pleased to say that I have a CEO who's been phenomenal in that way, has really been the kind of person who has said, this is a moment that we need to know as much as we possibly can about how our employees are feeling. And we need to find the ways to address how they're feeling and how to keep them engaged and how to keep them productive and also okay, you know, just feeling okay.
Right.
And a lot of people are turning to HR after many years of us talking about the importance of culture and the importance of all the aspects that go into culture and communication. And I think that if you look across the board, so many of the HR leaders have, have been showing what that means, whether it is determining how to discuss looking forward, thinking about vision, thinking about stability, thinking about how do we provide for our employees the important things they need right now when it comes to communication, when it comes to acknowledging the fear or the dissatisfaction that is amongst our employees on all these important subjects.
Yeah.
And then the vulnerability that our leadership has to go through, that we can support them through the vulnerability of talking through not knowing what the answers are for maybe the first time in their career. So it's been very interesting. I think it is If there's ever been a moment in time where the function and HR leadership is most needed, it's now. And I think if there's ever going to— I hope and I believe if you ever look back at a time where it was the most essential to how companies manage through this time period, it will be the same. So I think that mostly answers your question, but it's a very difficult one.
Right. And as always, when you and I talk, I feel like, oh, let's just keep talking for another 3 or 4 hours. And I always promise our listeners that this is going to be quick and practical. And I feel like you've given us a lot of really good, clear food for thought. Those who are business leaders are trying to take best advantage of the HR professionals that they have. So thank you so much. This is great.
Thank you.
And listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about how Proteus can support organizations to evolve to meet the future, often in partnership with our HR friends, feel free to go to ProteusLeader.com/topics and click on Leading Change. Thank you for listening, and until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.
We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at ProteusLeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.
