Chief Human Resource Officer

Job Description

Job Description

Position Summary:

The Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) is a business executive and trusted adviser to the Chief Executive Officer, Board, and executive leadership team. The CHRO translates Upstate Niagara Cooperative’s strategy and farmer-owned values into a disciplined people system that strengthens leadership, culture, capability, accountability, and performance across a complex, multi-site manufacturing organization.

This leader will set clear direction, establish sound policies and standards, and ensure consistent execution. The CHRO must combine enterprise-level judgment with frontline credibility—knowing when to operate strategically, when to engage directly in a critical issue, and when to empower capable leaders to own the work. Success requires authenticity, confidentiality, courage, business and financial acumen, and an unwavering commitment to follow-through.

Leadership Mandate 

• Build a high-performance culture in which expectations are clear, leaders are accountable, employees are respected, and results and values reinforce one another.
• Create an enterprise talent system that consistently identifies, attracts, develops, deploys, and retains exceptional people for critical roles—from the frontline through the executive team.
• Strengthen management quality by coaching capable leaders, confronting poor leadership promptly, and establishing practical training and consequences that raise performance to a clearly defined standard.
• Bring operating discipline to Human Resources through clear priorities, SMART goals, visible measures, assigned ownership, rigorous review cadences, and reliable closure of commitments.
• Serve as a trusted, independent voice who protects confidentiality, gives candid advice, and balances employee, business, farmer-owner, legal, and reputational considerations.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise People Strategy & Executive Partnership

• Develop and execute a multi-year human capital strategy aligned with the Cooperative’s business plan, operating model, growth agenda, and financial objectives.
• Advise the CEO, Board, and executive leadership team on organization health, leadership effectiveness, workforce risk, executive talent, succession, compensation, culture, and organizational design.
• Use business, operational, and financial insight to prioritize people investments and quantify their expected impact on productivity, retention, capability, risk, and profitability.
• Translate strategy into annual priorities and SMART goals; establish owners, milestones, scorecards, and disciplined operating reviews to ensure completion.

Culture, Culture, Leadership & Accountability

• Define, model, and embed the desired company culture through leader expectations, operating routines, talent decisions, recognition, performance management, and consequences.
• Demonstrate the credibility to spend meaningful time in plants and with frontline employees, understand manufacturing realities, and translate those realities into practical people solutions.
• Assess leadership behavior objectively; address ineffective or values-inconsistent leadership directly, fairly, and promptly, with a clear improvement standard and appropriate accountability.
• Act as a leader, mentor, and coach to executives, HR leaders, plant leaders, and emerging talent; build their capability rather than creating dependence on HR.

Talent, Succession & Organizational Capability

• Build an enterprise talent philosophy and pipeline for hourly, skilled-trades, professional, plant leadership, and executive roles, including workforce planning for hard-to-fill capabilities.
• Lead rigorous talent reviews and succession planning for critical roles; identify readiness, development actions, retention risks, emergency successors, and longer-term successors.
• Apply exceptional judgment in selecting and assessing talent; raise the quality, consistency, and speed of hiring and promotion decisions.
• Design practical leadership development, onboarding, mentoring, and frontline supervisor programs tied to defined competencies and measurable business outcomes.
• Ensure performance management differentiates performance, provides timely feedback, rewards contribution, and resolves persistent underperformance.

HR Operating Discipline, Policy & Service Delivery

• Establish, maintain, communicate, and consistently apply clear employment policies, standards, decision rights, and governance across all locations.
• Ensure the HR team adheres to the same policies, service standards, controls, timelines, and accountability expected of the broader organization.
• Build a capable, service-oriented HR team; set clear roles and outcomes, delegate real authority, remove barriers, and hold each leader accountable for doing the work of the role.
• Know where to ‘play up’—personally engaging in high-risk, high-impact, confidential, executive, or precedent-setting matters—while empowering the team to resolve routine matters at the appropriate level.
• Create disciplined workflows, service levels, dashboards, audits, and follow-up mechanisms for recruiting, employee relations, investigations, performance, development, payroll/HRIS interfaces, benefits, and compliance.
• Use people analytics and external benchmarks to identify trends, test assumptions, anticipate risk, and improve decisions.
• Champion the modernization of HR technology, data, analytics, automation, and service delivery by supporting strategic investment, removing barriers, and empowering functional leaders to drive transformation and execution.

Labor Relations, Compliance & Risk

• Set the strategy for constructive labor relations and collective bargaining; ensure consistent contract administration and credible relationships with union representatives and operational leaders.
• Ensure compliance with employment, labor, benefits, affirmative action, equal employment opportunity, privacy, recordkeeping, and other applicable laws and regulations.
• Oversee fair, timely, well-documented investigations and employee-relations decisions; protect confidentiality and ensure consistent treatment without avoiding difficult conclusions.
• Partner with Legal, Finance, Operations, Safety, and Quality to identify and mitigate workforce, conduct, compliance, and reputation risks.

Total Rewards, Engagement & Governance

• Design and govern compensation, incentive, benefit, recognition, and wellness programs that are competitive, financially responsible, performance-oriented, and aligned with the Cooperative’s values.
• Use engagement listening, retention data, site-level insight, and leader accountability to improve the employee experience and strengthen commitment.
• Support the Board’s compensation and succession responsibilities with accurate analysis, sound judgment, clear materials, and strict confidentiality.
• Serve on the company retirement committee and provide appropriate oversight of retirement-plan administration and fiduciary processes.
• Represent the Cooperative professionally in relevant community, industry, and talent-market relationships.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Organizational Leadership, or a related field; advanced degree strongly preferred.
• At least 15 years of progressive HR leadership experience, including enterprise responsibility in an organization of 1,000 or more employees.
• Substantial leadership experience in a multi-site manufacturing, food, agriculture, consumer products, distribution, or comparably operational environment; unionized experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated success changing culture, improving leadership quality, and building a sustained high-performance environment with measurable results.
• Proven expertise in executive and critical-role succession, talent assessment, leadership development, organization design, performance management, labor relations, and total rewards.
• Strong command of employment law, collective bargaining, investigations, HR governance, and policy development and administration.
• Strong business and financial acumen, including the ability to interpret financial and operating results, build business cases, evaluate tradeoffs, and link people decisions to enterprise value.
• Executive presence and communication skill sufficient to influence a Board, CEO, senior leaders, plant management, union leaders, and frontline employees.
• Ability and willingness to travel regularly among company locations and maintain visible engagement in manufacturing operations.

Leadership Attributes

Attribute and what it looks like:

Authentic and trustworthy - Acts consistently with stated values; communicates candidly; earns confidence through judgment, fairness, discretion, and follow-through.

Confidential and independent - Protects sensitive information, maintains appropriate boundaries, and delivers objective counsel even when the message is difficult.

Operationally disciplined - Creates clarity, establishes routines, measures progress, closes loops, and does not confuse activity with results.

Empowering and accountable - Sets outcomes and guardrails, gives capable people room to lead, provides support, and holds owners responsible for commitments.

Courageous and constructive -Addresses poor leadership, policy violations, conflict, and underperformance promptly while preserving dignity and procedural fairness.

Manufacturing credible -  Understands the pace, constraints, labor realities, safety expectations, and economics of plant operations and earns respect at the frontline.

Exceptional judge of talent - Recognizes capability, potential, character, and fit; makes disciplined selection and succession decisions without lowering the standard.

Korn Ferry Core Competencies

Competency and application to CHRO Role

Strategic Mindset - Sees future possibilities and translates them into a differentiated, practical people strategy.

Business Insight - Applies knowledge of the business, manufacturing economics, markets, and financial drivers to advance organizational goals.

Drives Results -Consistently delivers commitments through priorities, SMART goals, disciplined execution, and persistent follow-through.

Builds Effective Teams -Creates strong teams with clear purpose, complementary capability, productive norms, and shared accountability.

Develops Talent - Builds capability and succession depth through coaching, challenging assignments, feedback, and deliberate development.

Instills Trust - Gains confidence through honesty, authenticity, confidentiality, consistency, and sound judgment.

Courage - Addresses difficult issues directly, challenges poor leadership, and says what needs to be said with respect and conviction.

Measures of Success

• A credible human capital strategy and annual operating plan are approved, translated into SMART goals, and reviewed through a reliable scorecard cadence.
• Critical roles have viable emergency and long-term succession coverage, with explicit readiness and development plans and a demonstrably stronger internal pipeline.
• Leadership quality and accountability improve, including timely action on weak or values-inconsistent leadership and stronger frontline-manager capability.
• Engagement, regrettable turnover, time-to-fill, internal promotion, retention of high performers, labor outcomes, and HR service delivery show measurable improvement.
• Policies and employee-relations decisions are clear, consistently applied, legally sound, well documented, and trusted across locations.
• The HR team is viewed as capable, responsive, business-minded, and accountable—able to execute independently while escalating the right issues.

Working Conditions & Administrative Information

• Executive office and manufacturing-plant environments; regular travel among company facilities is required.
• The role may require availability outside normal business hours for urgent employee, labor, safety, operational, or crisis matters.
• Supervises: Enterprise Human Resources function and designated direct reports.

Pay:  $265,000 - $325,000 a year*

* The salary range listed for this position represents the good faith and reasonable minimum and maximum pay for this role at the time of posting.  Actual compensation may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, training, knowledge, education, and overall qualifications.  The posted salary range reflects just one component of our total rewards package. Other components of the total rewards package may include participation in group health and/or dental insurance, retirement plan, wellness program, paid time away from work, and paid holidays.

Upstate Niagara Cooperative, Inc. is committed to equal employment opportunity for all, without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.