Ulli Dittgen-Noweski · Fractional CHRO
Change rarely fails in the strategy. It fails in the part of the organisation nobody drew on a chart: the interaction of the people, the culture and the everyday reality where strategy has to work.
I join your leadership team as a Fractional CHRO: senior People leadership for the stage you're in, without hiring a full-time CHRO.
What worked with fifty people rarely works with a hundred and fifty.
What worked with an organisation of 10k employees might not any longer after a merger with a firm the same size.
You might call me when…
That's the point where a company either builds the organisation to carry its next stage, or keeps running on the people who have always made it work.
Change creates responsibility that doesn't have a home yet.
A merger, new technology, a new leadership team. Things change, but responsibility doesn't automatically move with them.
Every organisation runs on an invisible architecture: routines, relationships and unwritten agreements that quietly decide who takes care of what.
AI is a good example. The technology arrives quickly. The organisation that has to work with it doesn't. Who decides what, who is accountable, what people need in order to trust it: those questions don't answer themselves. I write about this in my series on Organizational Intelligence.
Every organisation has things that are clearly someone's job. And things that aren't.
I have spent much of my career picking up exactly those things. Not because they were mine, but because I saw them, and because people trusted me with them. Good People work is often invisible: you remove the obstacle before anyone sees it, and afterwards nobody knows it was there.
It took me a while to understand that this isn't the solution. The real work is to find out where responsibility belongs now, and to make sure the people it belongs to can actually carry it.
Three ways in.
Fractional means part-time, not partial: one or two days a week, fully embedded in the leadership team.
Senior People leadership as part of your leadership team, not beside it. I begin by listening, to people at every level, openly and in confidence. From there, we decide together what actually needs to change.
One or two days a week, for at least six months. From the first day, part of my job is to make myself unnecessary: by hiring or developing the People leader who takes it from there.
For the moments when growth, restructuring or new technology have outgrown the way you work. We work out what needs to change, where responsibility belongs, and how to make the new way of working hold.
A confidential space for the decisions and questions that don't belong in the leadership meeting.
Clarity alone isn't the point. It has to hold in everyday work.
In one of the companies I worked for, the CEO made a decision most CEOs never make: the important calls would be taken by the C-level together. Not discussed together. Decided together.
Over the following years, revenue more than quadrupled, headcount tripled, and the company became profitable without additional budget. It was carried by a team, not by one person at the top.
I was responsible for People and Communications, later for Technology as well. And I learned what shared responsibility requires — and where it becomes uncomfortable.
Three people who worked with me at different points, in different organisations.
"Being involved and interested in the people and business, she understands what is going on and therefore what is needed. … She is the type that is honest and direct not withholding her opinion, providing a different perspective when it is needed."
"She listened, and then she actually acted on what she heard. She never treated hierarchy as a reason not to be humble, or not to say sorry when it was needed. People felt safe enough with her to say what they really thought, and that changed how we worked together."
"Always energetic, driven to have 'things' done and fundamentally focusing on people. She has an attitude of wanting to challenge the status quo."
Trust isn't a cultural value. It's organisational infrastructure.
We tend to talk about trust as if it were a feeling. In organisations, it behaves much more like a load-bearing wall. Before anyone can take responsibility, a few quiet questions need an answer:
And underneath all of them: do you trust me to do it? Where the answers stay unclear, responsibility drifts upwards, and the change stays on paper.
Often the most useful question I ask a CEO is a simple one: why are you carrying this?
People problems are rarely only people problems. A decision problem may be a question of design. A performance problem may be a question of leadership. A communication problem may be a question of trust. And sometimes, honestly, it really is HR.
I didn't come to HR through HR. I came to it through change.
I wanted to be a journalist. I was curious, I wanted to uncover things, and I wanted to help people understand what usually stays beneath the surface. It didn't take long to realise how rarely you are free to write what you see. So I moved into communications. At least there, everyone knows what they are reading.
A role in pharma followed, one in which, as I had been promised, I learned in a year what would have taken seven elsewhere: working alongside the General Manager, between the country leadership and the US headquarters. Then Schering-Plough acquired Organon BioSciences, and I was asked to coordinate the integration across Europe. Different countries, different cultures, two companies, a great deal of uncertainty, and the task of keeping the people who mattered.
Since then I have led HR, Communications and Technology, in global corporations and in fast-growing companies, through mergers, growth and restructuring. Along the way: growing BMG’s global organisation from 450 to 850 people, harmonising payroll across 12 countries, and working on HR operations and process excellence for 20,000 employees across Europe. I’ve also been through several mergers and integrations.
If an organisation stops learning, it has usually stopped listening first. Not to the market. To each other. It keeps doing what once worked, and is slowly carried in a direction that made sense years ago.
Learning is not the same as optimising. What it takes is clear priorities, real alignment, and enough trust that nothing depends on a single person.
Let's talk.
When I begin working with an organisation, I start by listening. I usually open those conversations the same way: this is your chance to tell me honestly what you see. Critical, frustrated, whatever it is. I will assume it comes from the right place. Honesty is what makes this work, and the only way I can really help.
The same applies when you get in touch. You don't need to know exactly what you need. Tell me what is really going on.
Which part of your organisation is carrying something nobody has named yet?
A first conversation takes 30 minutes and needs no preparation. Afterwards, we'll both know whether it makes sense.