Fractional Chief People & Culture Officer

Q: We are not in a transaction. Is this still for us?

Yes, and most of this work is not transactional. Deals are the clearest example because the timeline is visible and the money is on the table. The same thing happens with a new chief executive, a growth spurt, a founder stepping back, or a workforce you cannot compete for on wages.

Q: How is this different from a consultant?

A consultant delivers what you asked for and leaves, which is right when you already know what you need. Fractional work is ongoing and needs somebody to carry it.

Q: How long does an engagement run?

As long as the work takes. Sometimes ninety days, sometimes three years.

Six situations where this usually starts

Almost nobody comes to me saying they need fractional culture work. They come because one of these is happening and the usual answers aren’t working.

Situation one, the loudest one

You’ve been acquired, or you’re about to be

A sponsor bought the company. There’s a deal thesis, a hundred-day plan, a value creation plan with workstreams and owners, and a systems conversion with a date on it. None of it says who owns whether people actually work the new way once the integration team moves on.

Diligence covered the financials, the contracts and the liabilities. It assessed the management team, asking whether this CEO can execute this thesis, and stopped there. That’s five people. It’s not the organization.

Then the retention agreements expire and everyone finds out at once. The full sequence is below.

Situation two

Your owner is somewhere else

The parent company is in another state or another country. They see the numbers, not the plant floor. Decisions about your people get made by people who have never met them, and you spend real energy explaining why what works here works here.

Somebody has to translate in both directions, and it usually falls to whoever has the least time.

Situation three

Your industry is consolidating around you

Firms your size are being bought or merged into something larger every quarter. Clients are asking what your plan is, and your best people are reading the same news you are.

You may not be in a transaction. You’re still in the weather system.

Situation four

You can’t solve it with money

Your rates are set by somebody else. A reimbursement schedule, a contract, a council budget. When someone offers your best supervisor two dollars more an hour, you can’t match it and you both know it.

What you can compete on is whether it’s worth staying for, and that gets built, not announced.

Situation five

You’re growing faster than the relationships can form

Headcount is up. Locations are up. The people who built this know each other, and the people who joined last year don’t know anybody. What used to happen in a hallway now needs a process, and nobody has written one.

The trust that made the growth possible is quietly thinning underneath the speed the growth demands.

Situation six

The seat exists and nobody is in it

Maybe you never created the role. Maybe the person who held it left. Maybe your HR team is buried in benefits, compliance and payroll, which is real work, and is not this work.

Almost no organization needs a permanent executive whose entire job is culture. Plenty need somebody in that seat for the stretch where it decides things.

However you got here, let me meet you where you are

Four ways people arrive. Same answer to all four.

You’re searching for someone permanent

You want to take your time and get the hire right. The work can’t sit still until you do.

You don’t know what you need yet

Something is off. You can feel it. You’d rather find out than keep guessing.

You know exactly what you want

It’s specific. It’s not a full-time hire, and it’s not a project you hand to a vendor.

You want somebody more involved

Not a consultant who delivers and leaves. Someone on your team rather than a piece of your team.

All four roads lead to the same place.

And if it is a transaction, here is the sequence

This runs the same way almost every time. The expensive part is the one nobody puts on a plan.

Twelve to twenty-four months before close

The quiet window

Advisers are engaged. The books get cleaned up. Quality of earnings, legal, commercial, IT. Every category of risk gets a workstream and a specialist.

This is the cheapest hour that will ever exist to look at the culture, and it’s almost never used.

Close

The green light

The announcement goes out. Somebody says the cultures align and the personal service will continue. Systems get a conversion date. The hundred-day plan has an owner, a budget and a reporting line.

That’s the structural finish line, and it’s the easy one. It has a date, money, and a name attached.

Day one to day one hundred

The plan runs out

Integration does what it was built to do. Reporting lines drawn, platforms merged, synergies tracked, town halls held. Then the plan closes out, because plans do, and the team rolls to the next deal.

Nothing is scheduled for what comes after, because what comes after has no owner.

Month eighteen to twenty-four

Year two

Retention agreements expire. The people who were paid to stay are free to leave, and a good number of them do.

The ones who stayed quietly stopped saying “we” and started saying “they.” Nobody logged the week that changed, because nobody was watching for it.

This is where the value actually goes. Not at close. Eighteen months later, in a hundred quiet departures nobody traces back to the deal.

74%of acquirers saw moderate to high leadership or critical-talent turnover within twelve months of a deal

18%believe their organization is effective at protecting culture and talent, though 81% call those assets critical to deal success

60%of an acquired company’s top executives are gone within five years of the deal

9 yrshow long executive departures stay above normal rates after an acquisition

RGP, The Human Value Gap in M&A (2026). Survey of 100+ CFOs and CHROs at North American companies above $500M in revenue. Krug, Wright & Kroll (2014). Krug, Executive Turnover in Acquired Firms, Journal of Management and Governance (2003). 12,000+ executives across 473 target and non-acquired firms over fifteen years.

Fractional means different things to different people. Here is what it means to me.

This is the work

Culture
Values
Training and development
How you plan for succession

This is not

Benefits
Payroll
Employee relations
The back office

Those are real jobs. They’re just not this one.

And this isn’t consulting. A consultant does the thing you asked for and hands it back. Fractional means you’re getting a piece of me to run something ongoing. I’m on your team, not a vendor to it.

Which means you get to commit without committing. You’re not promising to build this in-house. You’re promising to look at it honestly and do something about what you find.

Three words for what I’m actually there to do

A transaction, a new owner, a new leader, a growth spurt, or a workforce you can’t outbid. The job doesn’t change.

Protect

What’s working. The fastest way to lose it is to assume it survives on its own.

Preserve

What makes you you. Especially the parts nobody wrote down, which are usually the parts that mattered.

Integrate

Whatever’s coming. Not by announcing it, by building it into how people work, so it outlasts whoever introduced it.

Questions people actually ask

We’re not in a transaction. Is this still for us?

Yes, and most of my work isn’t transactional. Deals are just the clearest example, because the timeline is visible and the money is on the table. The same thing happens with a new chief executive, a growth spurt, a founder stepping back, or a workforce you can’t compete for on wages. Anywhere the way people work is meant to change and nobody owns whether it did.

Where does this sit against an operating partner or a PEO?

Different jobs. An operating partner owns the value creation plan across a portfolio. A PEO gives you HR infrastructure: benefits, payroll, compliance. Both are useful, and neither tells you whether behavior actually changed. That’s the part I do, and it’s the part nobody measures.

How is this different from a consultant?

A consultant delivers what you asked for and leaves. That’s the right answer when you already know what you need. Fractional is for work that’s ongoing and needs somebody to carry it. I’m in your meetings rather than presenting to them.

How long does an engagement run?

As long as the work takes. Sometimes ninety days. Sometimes three years. I’ve done both, and I’d rather tell you honestly which one you need than sell you the longer one.

What happens when you leave?

That’s the whole point. If it falls apart when I go, I did the job badly. The work gets handed to a network of people inside your organization rather than held by one champion, because champions get promoted, move away, and take everything with them.

What does the first conversation cost?

Nothing. Thirty minutes, no pitch. I’ll ask what’s actually happening and tell you honestly whether I can help. Sometimes the answer is no, and that’s useful too.

Somebody has to own whether the people actually changed.