BlackRock’s Former Exec Jeff Smith on Elevating HR’s Strategic Role in the Workplace

Until recently, human resources departments have operated in the shadows of corporate America, often viewed as necessary, but peripheral, functions. Jeff Smith has spent his career challenging this perception.

“HR has broadly not been a respected profession and has often been seen as just there for administrative purposes and to support the business,” Smith says. “I think HR is a business in its own right and literally enables every single thing that happens in a company.”

As BlackRock’s head of global human resources, he helped the department contribute to business success.

From Soccer to C-Suite

Jeff Smith’s path to HR leadership began unexpectedly at the University of Connecticut, where he initially enrolled to play soccer. There, an influential professor introduced him to industrial-organizational psychology, a discipline that would shape his approach to leadership throughout his career.

“I think being ‘psychologically minded’ is very helpful for thinking through interpersonal dynamics,” Smith explains, noting that his background provided advantages beyond interpersonal skills. “The other thing that is very useful that people often don’t associate with psychology is you actually have to be good at math, statistics in particular,” adds Smith, who joined BlackRock through the merger with Barclays Global Investors in 2009.

The Five Priorities Modern HR Needs To Embrace

When asked about current priorities for HR departments, Smith doesn’t hesitate. He identifies five critical areas: leader and manager development, HR technology and data analytics, creating intentional culture, managing careers, and building the HR talent pool.

“Leaders need to drive change and help with strategy and create culture,” Jeff Smith emphasizes, describing his first priority. For Smith, leadership development extends beyond skill-building to role design and incentive structures that motivate high performers to embrace leadership responsibilities.

On technology and data analytics, he maintains a balanced perspective. “It is critical to have exceptional technology to make processes better and more efficient,” he acknowledges while cautioning against blindly adopting established platforms. Instead, he advocates for careful evaluation aligned with specific organizational needs.

This measured approach extends to Smith’s view on artificial intelligence in HR. “In its best form, it will enhance decision-making through providing insights and data analysis in a faster, more efficient way to ideally be processed and used by humans,” he says. “AI should augment human abilities.”

While acknowledging the possibility of job displacement through automation, Smith stresses that the ethical dimensions of AI implementation require careful consideration — a perspective that distinguishes him from uncritical enthusiasts and categorical detractors of workplace automation.

The Culture Imperative

Smith’s third priority — intentional culture-building — has gained new urgency in the era of hybrid work. “Culture is everything. It is what you stand for, how you do work, what you are held accountable for, and how it feels to be somewhere,” he says.

For Smith, culture isn’t accidental but requires deliberate design: “Talk about it, say it out loud, then try to implement practices that create the culture you want. Don’t just let it happen — which it will anyway.”

Smith’s fourth priority represents perhaps his most forward-looking perspective: Moving away from “traditional linear career paths, static job descriptions and inflexible structures” toward “more flexible and iterative career journeys that allow people to use their skills and build.”

This transformation “is very hard and takes a lot of experimentation,” he notes, but it represents a necessary evolution in how organizations develop and deploy talent.

Strengthening HR Itself

Finally, Smith believes that the often-overlooked priority of HR is talent. “The job of HR is hard enough, one of the hardest, and without great talent it has no chance of success,” he notes, cautioning HR leaders against becoming so focused on business needs that they neglect their own department’s development.

During his tenure at Time Warner and BlackRock, Jeff Smith demonstrated this commitment by “hiring the best of the best and ideally making HR a destination for great people in the business to come and make an impact.”

Jeff Smith Weighs in on Hybrid Work Balance

On the contentious issue of remote work, Smith has a characteristically balanced attitude. “I am a believer in hybrid,” he states, acknowledging that flexibility demonstrates trust and allows employees to prioritize effectively.

However, he also recognizes in-person interaction’s unique cultural value: “It is easier to have random moments of learning or mentoring or coaching or ideation and innovation if people are walking the halls and interacting with each other.”

For Smith, the fundamental question isn’t where work happens but whether it achieves intended outcomes — including cultural ones.

Getting the Basics Right

For Jeff Smith, effective HR leadership requires both vision and pragmatic implementation. “I think getting the basics right and executing them is far more important before you are innovating,” he advises.

“Pay people right, have great hiring practices, develop your leaders, have a culture of feedback, ensure leaders know their expectations, have good solid processes, then innovate on top of that where it is important to the business and where it is going to work because there is a foundation to innovate on top of.

“I prefer to work in and grow companies that actually care about people as much as most companies pretend to care about people.”