Let’s be honest, most CHRO groups out there are bad. They are expensive, filled with vendor pitches, and loaded with “fluff” resources that are outdated by the time they are published. That’s why I put together Future of Work Leaders. A CHRO group for people leaders who are moving beyond traditional HR to focus on the future of work and employee experience. No pitches, no selling, no fluff.
The community is focused on discussions, candid Q&A sessions, and sharing of resources and insights. Members include Lego, Novartis, PwC, Saks Global, and dozens of others. I’m just in the process of planning our annual in-person forum which will be at the end of March. if you want to learn more and request an invite go to Future of Work Leaders or email me directly Jacob[at]thefutureorganization[dot]com.
Walk into most high-performance companies, and you will find two separate conversations happening. One is about results. The other, quieter, more uncertain is about people. Rarely do they happen in the same room, at the same time, with the same urgency.
Veronique Subileau, Senior Vice President of HR at UGI Corporation, is changing that. UGI is a 140-year-old propane and natural gas company with nearly 10,000 employees across the US and Europe. Not the obvious place to look for a bold rethinking of how leadership works.
And yet, in our recent conversation on the Future Ready Leadership podcast, Veronique laid out a philosophy that every CHRO and people leader should hear: the invisible things (how people feel, how they connect, how real they can be at work) are what make the visible things (speed, output, results) possible in the first place.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
Here are the most important ideas from that conversation.
Culture is what separates high performance from burnout
Most companies chase high performance by adding more: more tools, more processes, more metrics. Veronique’s starting point is different. She argues that sustainable performance is not built on what you add. It is built on what already exists underneath: the quality of how people relate to each other, how safe they feel to be honest, how much they actually trust the people they work with every day.
She calls all of that culture, and she is precise about what it means. Culture is not the values on the wall or the tone of the all-hands meeting. It is everything invisible in a company. The roots, not the fruit. And at UGI, those roots are what the customer-first transformation the company is undertaking will either run on or run out of.
This is the reframe worth sitting with. You can optimize the visible: the KPIs, the org chart, the engagement scores. But if the invisible is weak, the performance ceiling stays low. Veronique’s entire approach at UGI starts here: get the roots right, and the results follow.
‘Touch the Heart’ Before You Talk About Results
Before Veronique discusses objectives or performance with anyone, and before she encourages UGI managers to have those conversations, she asks four questions in order:
- Do you have fun at work? Her threshold is 70 percent. If someone cannot genuinely enjoy that much of what they do, something is worth examining, and she does not skip past the question.
- Are you learning? Not just skills. She means learning about the team, the business, the people around you, and yourself as a professional.
- Do you feel recognized? Not just compensated, recognized. Is there honest feedback? Does someone say thank you? Does the culture around you fit who you actually are? She uses a pointed analogy: some flowers grow in certain soil and not others. It is not about right or wrong. It is about fit.
- Do you feel a sense of purpose? Are you just completing tasks, or are you “building the casserole”? This is the one that makes people stop.
These four questions do something no engagement survey can replicate. They signal to a person that they are being seen as a human being, not just a contributor. And when people feel that signal, they drop their armor. The real performance conversation becomes possible only after that happens.
High standards and authenticity are not opposites
Authenticity gets used loosely in culture conversations, and Veronique is precise about what she means by it at UGI. It is not a blank check. UGI recently developed a values framework they call POETIC: Problem-solver, Owner (owning your area of responsibility is not a question), Ethics (where integrity is non-negotiable), Together, Innovate, and Courageous. These are the non-negotiables.
Inside that frame, people are genuinely expected and encouraged to show up as themselves, a standard captured by their internal mantra: “Be You, Be UGI.” The expectation is not that people always feel positive. It is that they arrive at neutral. Do not walk into a room and drain the energy of the people around you.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
Presence is a trainable skill, and most organizations are not training it
UGI has partnered with Gap International to run a breakthrough environment program. The exercises are intentionally uncomfortable. One of them: two people look at each other in silence for two minutes. No agenda. No talking. Just presence, in person or through a screen.
The point is not to be theatrical, but to build a muscle that most leaders have never been asked to develop. Because most leaders are physically in a room while mentally already in the next meeting. That gap costs more than it looks like in trust, in team confidence, in the quality of decisions that get made.
For CHROs building leadership development programs, this is a real gap. Organizations invest heavily in communication skills. Almost none train for presence. And the absence is showing up in culture data everywhere.
The Shadow a Leader Casts is the Culture a Team Lives In
Veronique’s CEO coined a phrase she has made central to how she develops leaders at UGI: the shadow you cast. Leaders do not shape culture through the values they post on the wall or the speeches they give at all-hands meetings. They shape it through how they consistently show up day after day, meeting after meeting.
She draws a direct parallel to parenting: children do not behave the way they do because they were told to. They behave the way they do because of what they observed. Organizations work the same way.
This is the operational logic behind Veronique’s push for leadership development at every level inside UGI, a push the company has backed. One leader who is genuinely present and invested lifts everyone they touch. One leader who is performative, checked out, or consistently negative can quietly dismantle a team that looked fine on paper. The data on this is not ambiguous.
CHROs often concentrate leadership development at the senior level. The shadow argument makes the case that priority should be at every level, because every leader is casting one.
AI as an Opportunity to Reclaim Human Time
Veronique is not skeptical of AI. She is specific about what it is actually for. She argues that AI should free time, and that time should be reinvested into thinking, connecting, and the kinds of decisions that require intuition alongside data, not into producing twice the output. The use case she’s after is AI clearing the path so humans bring more of themselves to what remains.
She is also clear about the risk. Veronique shares walking into a meeting and saw a deck full of bloated, flat, AI-generated language. Her response was direct: put yourself into it. Three slides with genuine thinking behind them are worth more than twenty that the tool produced on its own.
This introduces a new critical leadership skill: the “human prompt.” As teams lean on tools like Claude to generate first drafts, leaders can no longer just review the work. They have to “prompt engineer” their people, asking challenging questions to extract the unique human creativity, judgment, and insight that the AI missed. For CHROs managing AI adoption, that standard is worth making explicit early.
The New Premium is Human
For decades, organizations have been designed to maximize efficiency, often asking people to operate a lot like the machines they use. But the landscape has permanently shifted. When tools can generate a strategy, build a framework, or draft a presentation in seconds, efficiency is no longer the ultimate differentiator.
The real premium is now the one thing you cannot prompt or program: the human capacity for intuition, connection, and courage. The question for every leader is: Are you creating the space for your people to be human?
If you want to explore the rest of Veronique Subileau’s insights, listen to the full episode on the Future Ready Leadership podcast. The conversation covers even more on breakthrough environments, AI adoption, and what it really takes to build a human-centered culture inside a large organization.
Organizations around the world have lost their way. It’s time to get back to basics and focus on what really drives people and performance. This is why I’m so very excited to share that after 2 years of research and writing, my new book The 8 Laws of Employee Experience: How to Build a Future-Ready Organization is finally available. Grab a copy at 8exlaws.com
