Unilever’s ANZ & APAC Chief Human Resources Officer on Leading Through Ambiguity

Shruti is Chief Human Resources Officer for Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific at Unilever, a global consumer goods business. Shruti has previously held senior HR, business and talent roles in major organisations over the last 20 years.  

Our CPO Leadership Matters series highlights the complex and far-reaching role of Chief People Officers, as their role in the boardroom becomes increasingly prominent. Through the voices of top people leaders, we discover how the CPO can align the people function with commercial objectives and transform conventional practices into strategic assets.  

What Are Some Of The Key Leadership Areas Unilever Are Focusing On Right Now? 

We are focusing on courageous leadership and shifting towards a high-performance culture. This means encouraging leaders to hold people accountable, have honest and courageous conversations and balance team wellbeing with performance.

We have partnered globally with academic and podcaster Brené Brown on courageous leadership and we plan to apply this work across our entire organisation, beginning at the senior leadership level before being filtered throughout the company. 

Looking Back On Your Career, How Has Your Perspective On Effective People Leadership Evolved Over Time? 

Great HR business partnering starts with deeply understanding the business, its strategy, growth agenda and commercial priorities. HR can’t operate as a standalone function with isolated initiatives. Instead, every HR action should be clearly linked to the organisation’s commercial strategy: the capabilities required, the culture needed, and the organisational design that enables high performance. 

At Unilever, improving performance and shareholder returns is directly tied to building a performance culture - HR’s role is identifying the levers that make that possible. Excellence in HR is about ensuring every intervention serves the business’s strategic drivers, rather than running separate HR or wellbeing strategies in isolation. 

Over the last several years, the impact and influence of HR leaders on business partners has only grown. Leadership today is harder with complex environments, greater ambiguity and faster decision-making demands. In this context, HR plays a crucial role in enabling leaders to succeed.  

How Is Unilever Aligning People Initiatives With Business Strategy? 

Understanding the company’s current priorities or ‘hot cells’ is really key. At Unilever, for example, personal care products are a major focus both globally and locally. Once you know which categories matter most, the HR question becomes: how do we support that growth? 

That might mean ensuring the right talent is in critical roles, building the capabilities needed, or reshaping ways of working. We’re shifting toward social-first, influencer-led marketing and moving away from traditional TV-led models. For HR, that means developing new skills in our marketing teams, partnering with different agencies to bring in content-creation expertise or hiring external talent with digital marketing experience. 

What Are The Key Elements To Managing The HR Function In A Global Business, Taking Into Account Cultures, Workforce Profiles And Compliance Environments?  

As we roll out new initiatives, like our review of the HR operating model, what becomes clear is how differently change lands across markets. We’re looking at how HR can be set up more efficiently, use technology better and shift more responsibility to leaders so HR can focus on strategic work. A big part of this change is helping leaders rely less on HR for every question and helping more junior HR team members feel confident redirecting routine queries to tools like chatbots while focusing on higher value support. 

What’s been striking is how cultural context shapes adoption. In markets like Australia and New Zealand, the shift has been smoother in comparison to more hierarchical cultures in Asia; HR teams may find it more difficult to say “no” and leaders can take longer with the mindset shift due to long-established ways of working. 

Which Workforce Or Leadership Trends Do You See As Most Influential For The Future? 

Leadership today is about navigating ambiguity and balancing the human side of leading with the operational demands of the role. With constant change, many people feel real fatigue, but resilience has become an essential skill. It’s something we may not have built strongly in the past, but now everyone needs to develop it. 

Digital and AI are also major priorities, not just for individual productivity and upskilling, but at an enterprise level across functions like R&D and marketing. The question is how we equip people and teams to adopt these capabilities and embed them into the way the organisation operates. 

What Advice Would You Give To Aspiring Chief People Officers Who Want To Build A Meaningful Career And Make A Lasting Impact? 

• Stay curious and stay connected to the business with an understanding of what's happening both in the business, external trends and global industry. 
• Continue to challenge your assumptions. I think when we make any decisions, we all have our own preconceived ideas of views because of where we come from and our own experiences.  
• Keep building your breadth of experience across different HR streams as I believe this serves a CPO role very well.  

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