Summary
Dessalen Wood has led people teams across retail, entertainment, and HR tech, from Disney Stores, Hudson's Bay, Reitmans, and Cineplex to CPO of ThoughtExchange, and now serves as Global Chief People Officer at Syntax, where she leads people strategy for 3,000 employees across 15 countries. On The Human Element, she and host Barb Bidan dig into how CHROs can separate real change from imagined emergencies when the function is constantly told it is about to be reinvented.

Dessalen explains why the fundamentals of autonomy, feeling valued, and development matter more than any perk, why remote work alone never fixed retention, and how she buys time when a leader insists HR is behind. She also walks through the four stage AI maturity map Syntax used on its way to training 90% of employees and building more than 1,000 functional agents, and closes with lightning round views on assertiveness, career paths, and the question every CHRO should be asking.

Chapters
00:47 Meet Dessalen Wood
01:59 Why she went back into the CHRO seat
06:27 What the vendor side revealed about HR
08:43 Autonomy, value and development as the fundamentals
11:50 Remote work and the perks that stopped working
13:42 Picking a few things and never rolling them back
18:58 Handling imagined emergencies
22:06 The lifeguard chair view of the CHRO role
25:53 A four stage AI maturity map at Syntax
32:00 Lightning round and the final word

Takeaways
- Design every people program around autonomy, feeling valued, and development, and test anything new, including AI enablement, against those three needs.
- Flexibility or perks that mainly make leaving harder are not a culture; differentiate on a few things and keep them consistent in good years and bad.
- When an imagined emergency lands, neither defend nor panic and agree; buy time so your executive function comes back online before you respond.
- Keep your antenna out on the industry and the whole organization so big changes rarely arrive as a surprise.
- Move through AI maturity in order: tooling and guardrails, enablement with clear expectations, measurable P&L impact, then reimagined roles and products.

Connect with the Guest
Dessalen Wood LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dessalen-wood-b1192513/
Company Website: https://www.syntax.com

Sponsor
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Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

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