Brooke Campbell - Skyline | From HR Leader to Enterprise Leader

Brooke Campbell’s career has taken her from HR specialist to a role spanning people, corporate affairs, communications and sustainability across an international business.

In this episode of HR Unlocked, Brooke joins Lisa Oakley to unpack what she has learned along the way, including why some of the most valuable development for an HR professional happens when they become curious about what sits outside the traditional HR remit.

As Chief People and Corporate Affairs Officer at Skyline Enterprises, Brooke is part of the executive leadership team helping shape organisational capability, culture, stakeholder engagement and sustainability as the New Zealand-headquartered business continues to grow internationally.

For Brooke, becoming an enterprise leader meant moving beyond the mindset of only contributing when the conversation was explicitly about people. She argues that the “magic” happens when People leaders are thinking about marketing, P&L and commercial opportunities, while operational and finance leaders are also thinking about people.

That does not mean HR should take ownership of everything.

Brooke describes the trap of becoming the organisational “letterbox”, taking an issue, doing the work and handing the answer back. Instead, she encourages HR teams to focus on supporting outcomes by coaching, challenging, questioning and providing expertise while leaving leaders accountable for leading their people.

The conversation then looks at what those ideas mean across a global workforce.

Brooke shares Skyline’s experience of taking a New Zealand business and culture into international markets, while recognising that values may be expressed differently across locations. Skyline’s core values, “We’re brave. We care. We do.”, were surfaced through employees rather than created solely in a boardroom, and became particularly important as the organisation navigated COVID across multiple jurisdictions.

Brooke and Lisa also discuss talent attraction in Queenstown, the importance of aligning the external employer brand with the lived employee experience, and the wider ecosystem required to attract people and their families to a region.

Her legal background brings another dimension to the conversation. Brooke argues that HR professionals need to understand how to apply the law, rather than simply follow a process, recognising that the legally safest answer may not always be the best people answer.