Spotlight on Ron Thomas, Fractional CHRO, Strategy Focus Group

Ron Thomas' mantra of Business First, HR Second, has taken him from delivering programmes to designing systems, and developing the The Workforce Architect Method™ connecting the workforce directly to business strategy.

SPOTLIGHTS & INTERVIEWS

Ron Thomas

11/5/20268 min read

Let's start with you. What brought you into HR, Learning, Talent or your particular area of expertise, and what has kept you passionate about it?

My career started in sales with IBM-Office Products Division in NYC. I stayed in sales for at least s5 plus years. After a stint as an entrepreneur, I returned to IBM as a Microsoft Office trainer. Eventually, I ended up running the entire division for the East Coast. However, when they closed that business, I became the technology training manager for Martha Stewart Living.

While there, I was asked to work in Human Resources and as the company training Manager. That was my first foray into HR. It was amazing, kind of like a mad scientist in a lab. I worked with each department, and I realized it was a perfect fit. When I left, I was VP of HR. From workforce planning, change management, strategic talent acquisition etc. My motto was business first, HR Second.

I discovered early on that every people decision is, at its core, a business decision. Hiring, developing, promoting, restructuring: each one either moves the strategy forward or quietly holds it back. That realisation has shaped my whole career and has become the motto I still work by today: Business First, HR Second. I live by the mantra that every Business Metric has a Business Twin.

I have been fortunate to see that principle from many angles: as VP of HR and a Board Director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in New York, as CHRO at Al Raha Group in Riyadh, and as CEO of Great Place to Work® MENA, where we measured culture at a scale few people get to see. What keeps me passionate is the moment a leader stops seeing their people as a cost to be managed and starts seeing them as the architecture that delivers the strategy. When that clicks, organisations change, and so do careers.

Your business has evolved over time. What has changed most about the products, services or solutions you offer to clients — and why?

The biggest change is that I have moved from delivering programmes to designing systems. Earlier in my career, a client would ask for a leadership workshop or a two-day training course. It would be well received, and then, six months later, very little would have changed, because the programme was never connected to how the business actually runs.

Today my work is built around architecture rather than events. The Workforce Architect Method™ connects the workforce directly to business strategy: which roles are critical, which skills are needed, where the gaps are and how leadership must evolve to close them. The Symphonic C-Suite® does the same at executive level, helping a leadership team operate as one orchestra rather than a collection of soloists. I also do more fractional CHRO work and multi-cohort leadership programmes, such as the one we are currently running for a major energy operator in Angola, because sustained engagement is where real capability is built.

The why is simple: clients no longer want to buy activity. They want measurable change in how their organization performs. Business Strategy must connect to People strategy it is as simple as that.

AI and technology are fundamentally changing the HR and Learning landscape. How have they changed what you offer, and what are clients asking you for today that they weren't asking for three years ago?

AI has changed both the content and the conversation. Strategic Workforce Planning, once a largely spreadsheet-driven exercise, is now AI-infused. Earlier this month, together with my partner P World, I delivered a two-day AI-infused Strategic Workforce Planning program in Lisbon as well as Finland. The questions in the room were completely different from those of three years ago.

Three years ago, clients asked me for leadership development, engagement and succession plans. Today they are asking: Which tasks in our organisation will AI absorb, and which roles will change shape? How do we redesign work, not just reskill people? How do we plan for a workforce that includes both people and digital capability? And, increasingly, what should our HR Business Partners become?

My answer to that last question is the Workforce Architect: a role anchored on connecting the workforce to business strategy, rather than on administering HR processes.

Are you seeing organisations genuinely embracing AI, or are many still trying to understand where it can actually add value?

Honestly, both. The enthusiasm is real, particularly in the Gulf, where national transformation agendas have created genuine urgency and ambition. But enthusiasm is not the same as architecture.

What I see most often is organisations that have an AI tool strategy but not an AI workforce strategy. They have bought licenses, run pilots and launched a few chatbots, but they have not yet asked the harder questions: what work is changing, who does it, what skills are now required, and how leadership must operate differently. The organisations that are genuinely getting value are the ones that start with the business problem and the work itself, and treat AI as a way to redesign that work, not as a technology project handed to IT. Strategic Workforce Planning will anchor organisational health.

I am heartened about the approach that IKEA took in venturing into AI. They analysed the job family that would or could be impacted, which was customer service. They reskilled/upskilled that family and converted them to Interior Design analysts. That strategic move enabled the organisation to generate $ 1.5 billion in revenue

What do you think AI will make redundant in your particular area of HR, Learning or Talent — and what will become even more important?

AI will make redundant much of the transactional layer of HR and Learning: report building, first-draft policies, routine queries, generic course catalogues and the annual, static workforce plan that is out of date the day it is approved. Much of what the traditional HR Business Partner spent their week on will be automated, and that is a good thing.

What becomes more important is everything that requires judgement. Sense-making: helping leaders interpret what the data is actually telling them. Work design: deciding how humans and AI should share the work. Ethics and trust: making sure decisions about people remain fair and explainable. And leadership itself: the ability to hold a real conversation, build alignment and lead people through uncertainty. AI will raise the floor; human capability will set the ceiling.

From your experience working with organisations across the Middle East, what are HR and Learning leaders getting right at the moment — and where are there still significant gaps?

What leaders in the region are getting right is ambition and investment. There is a serious commitment to building national talent, developing leadership pipelines and adopting new technology faster than many mature markets. Learning budgets are real, and senior leaders are increasingly willing to put their names behind people initiatives.

The gaps are in connection and measurement. Too much learning is still measured by activity, such as hours delivered and courses completed, rather than by business outcomes. Workforce planning is often still headcount planning. Succession is frequently a list of names rather than a pipeline of ready leaders. And many HR Business Partners are still operating transactionally when the business needs them to be strategic architects. The organisations that close those gaps will turn their investment into a genuine competitive advantage. The entire People Function has to be viewed through the business lens again, connecting Business Strategy/Challenges to People Strategy

Has the Middle East market become more sophisticated in the way organisations buy your type of product or service? What are today's clients looking for that perhaps wasn't important five years ago?

Absolutely. Five years ago, many buyers were looking for a well-known name, an engaging session and a certificate at the end. Today the conversation starts with the business problem and ends with the question: how will we know this worked?

Clients now expect solutions designed around their strategy and context, not off-the-shelf content. They want measurable outcomes linked to performance, practitioners who have actually held the executive roles they are teaching about, and capability transfer so the organisation is stronger after the engagement ends rather than dependent on it. AI integration is now an expectation rather than an add-on, and procurement is far more rigorous. That is a healthy evolution, and it rewards providers who can genuinely deliver.

My approach is that I don’t do off-the-shelf training, especially Leadership Development. I study the industry. I do a full diagnostic of the organisation, its strategy, its industry. I take that approach and build our session based on those key points. Think of it like buying a suit: buying one off the shelf vs. going to a custom tailor. That is our approach

What is one misconception about your area of expertise that you would like to change?

The misconception I would most like to change is that HR is a support function that sits beside the business. HR is a business function that happens to specialise in people. That is what Business First, HR Second means.

A closely related misconception is that Strategic Workforce Planning is a headcount and budgeting exercise. It is not. It is the discipline of translating strategy into the capabilities, roles and leadership an organization will need, and then building them before the need becomes a crisis. When HR leaders start speaking the language of revenue, productivity, risk and growth, they stop being invited to the table and start being expected at it.

If you could give one piece of advice to an HR or Learning leader trying to prepare their organisation for the next five years, what would it be?

Learn the business before you learn the next HR trend. Sit in the finance reviews and the operations meetings. Understand how your organisation makes money, where it is exposed and where it intends to grow. Then build your workforce architecture backwards from that strategy: know your critical roles, your critical skills and your critical gaps.

And invest in your HR Business Partners. Move them from administrators to Workforce Architects who can connect people decisions to business outcomes. The next five years will reward HR leaders who can design the workforce of the future, not just manage the workforce of today.

Looking ahead, what is the one development, trend or change that you believe will have the biggest impact on your profession or your business?

The shift from jobs to work. For a century, organisations have been designed around fixed jobs with fixed descriptions. AI is breaking that model apart, task by task. The unit of planning is becoming the work itself and the skills needed to do it, whether that work is done by a person, a team, AI or a combination of all three.

That changes everything about our profession: how we plan, hire, develop, reward and lead. It is also why I believe the HR leaders who thrive will be those who think like architects, designing how people and technology work together to deliver strategy, rather than simply filling roles on an organisation chart.

What are you working on right now that you're particularly excited about?

Several things, and they are all connected. I am expanding the Workforce Architect: Executive Leadership Program and our AI-infused Strategic Workforce Planning work, which is resonating strongly across the Middle East, Europe and Africa. I am also working with organizations on redefining the HR Business Partner role into the Workforce Architect, which I believe is the most important evolution in HR right now.

Alongside that, I am continuing The CEO Series, my interview programme with chief executives about leadership and the people side of strategy and the challenges of their prospective industry. I am also excited about my role as an adjunct professor at American University in the Emirates. Being in the classroom keeps me honest: the next generation of leaders always asks the questions that matter most.

And finally, outside of work, what is something your colleagues or clients might be surprised to learn about you?

People are often surprised to learn that my greatest passion outside of work is reading, and I mean reading the old-fashioned way. Research papers, business books, journal articles: nothing I enjoy more than printing them out, sitting down with a pen, and filling the margins with notes. Even in an age of AI summaries, I find that is how ideas really stay with me.

I owe that to my mother. She was a housewife, and every spare moment she had went into reading two or three newspapers a day. I grew up watching her do it, and without ever being told to, I picked up the habit. It has shaped my whole career. Much of what I bring to clients today started as a note scribbled in the margin of something I read.

Ron’s profile: linkedin.com/in/ronthomashr