A common business mantra you may have heard before is “do more with less.” Whether it’s avoiding fake work, managing your revenue and expenses to make sure you’re getting the most for your money, or consolidating departments into each other, the idea of making the most of what you’ve got is an alluring one. Shouldn’t companies always want to get more out of their expenses, employees and assets? If the mantra is to do less with more, what were businesses doing before?

Enter the CPO, a recent addition to the executive repertoire. The positions of CPO came into prominence after President Obama added the position to his stable and named Jeffrey Zients his first CPO with the goal of having him “streamline processes, cut costs, and find the best practices throughout our government.” The CPO is the answer to all of the “do more with less” needs, but what exactly is a CPO? How do they help maximize your businesses’ talent and finances simultaneously? How do you get one?

CPO vs. CPO: What’s the difference?

Before we begin to define what a CPO is, we should clear up a bit of the alphabet soup. “CPO” can mean a number of things, but for our purposes, it means two things: Chief Procurement Officer, and Chief Performance Officer.

A Chief Procurement Officer is effectively the leader of the HR department at a company. They handle all the human resources issues and handle talent acquisition matters. They’re responsible for how employees are treated, how they work, and how to find (procure, if you will) new hires. A Chief Performance Officer, on the other hand, takes a bit from the Procurement field and adds a bit of finance. Mark Feffer (@markfeffer), President of Tramp Steamer Media, does a great job of defining the role of the CPO.

"CPO takes an organization-wide view of performance, developing measurements to gauge the results of various units, working with stakeholders to improve them, and reporting on performance to the organization’s chief executive... In essence, the CPO becomes the go-to person for issues related to an organization’s performance in all aspects of its operation.”

A Performance Officer would take the idea of talent and turn it into something that helps inform ideas of performance, then taking both of those ideas and measuring them against expenses.

A Chief Performance Bump

But why are these CPOs necessary? Because businesses around the world are constantly motivated to improve their performance, and to do this, one needs a keen understanding of both the financial and human aspects that drive it.

According to a recent survey, 57% of HR departments have increased spending on analytics, the kinds that help them understand how their employees are performing. Additionally, 70% of CEOs are concerned about finding the right kinds of candidates for positions they need filled, and 58% worry about the rising labor costs associated with entering high-growth markets. This tells us that the ideas of big-picture finances and talent management are intertwined much more closely than we thought, and order to maximize both, a company needs someone who can dip their hands in both.

Now we have to figure out who that is. If you’re looking to promote from within, look no further than some of your top-performing employees, who may already be doing some of the things necessary to become a valuable CPO. Top performers don’t get where they are alone; 83% of them use big data to gain insights about their business, which is the exact kind of thing a CPO would need to do. They also know how to bring different departments together, and 88% of top performers can collaborate well with others, including people outside their enterprise. Finally, a Good CPO knows which way the winds are blowing, and 73% of top performers do too, adapting to changing market conditions on the fly.

So when asking your company to do more with less, start at the top and implement a CPO who can merge performance with finance and give you the performance increase you’ve been looking for. Your CPO may already work at your company or it may be someone you bring in from the outside, either way, with an executive focused solely on performance and procurement, you maximize talent and efficiency.

Bio: Sean Pomeroy

While selling other companies software solutions, Sean worked with Michael Warden to design over a dozen applications for different organizations and industries over the years. Sean now focuses on the vision for the company, business development, and continues involvement in the software design of ATS and LMS: Cyber Recruiter and Cyber Train. Want to see what Visibility Software has to offer? Take a demo now.

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