When Alex Zea was advising CHROs on what the next HR operating model could look like, she ran into a problem familiar to anyone trying to lead a transformation from the outside: it is hard to ask others to go first.
So she decided to do it herself.
“The best way I could move the industry forward was to lead by example,” Alex says.
Now Executive Leader, People & Digital Transformation at GE HealthCare, Alex is helping redesign how HR operates while building the capability to guide broader changes to work across the enterprise.
In her conversation with Siobhan Savage on The Work Blueprint, she explained why the shift starts with a deceptively simple question: not what activity does this team own? but what outcome are we trying to achieve?
Alex had already spent years working on digital transformation when she and her colleagues began exploring what a future HR operating model could look like.
Their first instinct was conventional: rethink business partnering, then rethink centers of excellence.
“We didn’t get anywhere,” she says.
The breakthrough came when they stepped back from the existing HR structure and examined the assumptions underneath it.
Traditional operating models were designed around scarcity: limited time, money, capacity and expertise. That encouraged organizations to standardize work, streamline jobs and specialize roles.
AI changes some of those constraints. For Alex, that means the question is no longer simply how to make the existing activity more efficient. Leaders can reconsider how the outcome should be achieved in the first place.
“Today we’re activity oriented and tomorrow we have to be outcome oriented.”
Take hiring. A leader might ask HR to recruit someone, but the outcome they really need may be a fully staffed team. Once the outcome becomes the starting point, the organization can consider a wider set of ways to get there.
That same logic now guides Alex’s approach to redesigning work: define the value first, decide what people should do, then determine where technology can support the rest.
At GE HealthCare, that thinking is changing the structure of HR itself.
Alex describes moving centers of excellence toward leaner domain expertise teams focused on strategy, policy, program design and enterprise guardrails. Delivery is being brought together through a colleague experience and delivery capability designed to work digitally wherever possible while retaining human support where it is needed.
The change is also intended to reshape business partnering.
Rather than senior HR partners being pulled into every transaction or fire drill, Alex wants them focused on workforce outcomes: talent capability, organizational design, human-machine teaming and systemic issues that affect the business.
That distinction matters. You cannot simply tell an HR business partner to become a strategic workforce advisor while leaving all their existing work in place.
“You have to pull the work out,” Alex says.
The operating model has to create the conditions for people to contribute at that higher level.
Alex is clear that getting there has not been frictionless.
Changing established transformation processes can create concerns about deadlines. Finance leaders still need to understand the economics. Business leaders need to see why giving up familiar ways of working will lead to something better.
Her approach has been to make the change tangible.
She has used lessons from previous transformations to show where a different approach to work could have improved the outcome. Within GE HealthCare, she has also gone directly to business leaders to understand their priorities and ask where her team can help redesign the work around them.
Her analogy is finding the “puppies” in transformation: the thing compelling enough to get people moving toward the change rather than beginning with what they have to give up.
That approach has created more interest in work redesign than Alex initially expected. The next challenge is how to support that demand without making one central team responsible for every redesign.
For Alex, the long-term model cannot be a small transformation team doing all the work.
The team needs to lead the most important initiatives, but also teach others how to apply the approach through frameworks, templates and repeatable methods.
She compares it with change management: build deep expertise centrally, then develop enough capability across the organization that smaller changes do not always require the central team.
That becomes especially important because the work itself will keep changing.
Alex argues that organizations need to understand tasks and how they connect, not only maintain static lists of jobs and skills. Skills data becomes much more useful when it can be connected to the actual work people perform.
At the task level, leaders can examine where technology can contribute and where human expertise should remain central. That makes work redesign less about attaching AI to an existing job and more about reconstructing the workflow around the outcome.
Alex’s urgency comes partly from experience.
Early in her career at Time Inc., she watched the publishing industry try to respond to the shift from print to digital. Smart people could see the transformation happening, but the organization struggled to move quickly enough.
She does not want HR to repeat that experience with AI.
For Alex, acting early is not about cutting people out of the picture. Some HR work will shrink as agents take it on, but acting early gives the organization more ability to shape the change deliberately: where human expertise matters, how roles evolve, what new work emerges and what meaningful careers can look like as technology becomes more capable.
“I really believe that if HR is at the forefront of this, we can do it with a human lens.”
But HR cannot claim that leadership role without changing itself.
“We have to walk the walk to guide this,” Alex says.
That may be the most important lesson from her move inside GE HealthCare. HR’s opportunity is not simply to manage the people consequences after AI changes the work. It is to build the credibility, operating model and expertise to help the organization design that change well from the beginning.
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