ROM CHRO Manuelita Cherizard on leadership and change in a not-for-profit, cultural organization
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto is a great place for people who want to learn about the world around them and cultivate their curiosity.
For Manuelita Cherizard, the Chief Human Resources Officer at ROM, those are the kind of characteristics that are key for HR and organizational leadership.
“Curiosity and an agile, learning mindset is essential, because we’re in times where there's a lot of uncertainty,” says Cherizard. “So for people to move along and develop, they really need to be open to it, be curious, and be willing to be in a zone of discomfort as they're growing and opening up.”
Cherizard describes her entry into HR as driven by her curiosity and fundamental desire to understand organizational dynamics. “HR was particularly attractive to me because I felt like HR was involved in everything,” she says. “Observing the people who took care of HR in my earliest work experiences, I thought this was a way for me to know what's going on because I'm very curious, but at the same time to get to help people while supporting and understanding the business.”
HR strategy in a constrained environment
Her current role at ROM may be a bit different from that of many other HR leaders — she has filled HR roles at private, public, not-for-profit, and Crown corporations — due to the museum’s status as a not-for-profit agency of the provincial government while also serving as a cultural institution. This creates the necessity for the museum’s leaders to strategize within a constrained environment where many stakeholders must be considered, she says.
“ROM has a responsibility and an obligation to the community and to people who come to ROM wanting to discover, to explore, to really be amazed and to learn,” says Cherizard. “Challenges for the leadership and the organization are around responding to all of those expectations as well as the very particular and specific requirements, guidelines, and restrictions associated with being a government agency — while at the same time dealing with all of the changes within society, within the economy, and within what people are expecting of us as an employer and as a community member.”
“All of those forces and influences together are really creating a number of challenges across different pillars,” she says, adding that her passion for understanding and influencing the entire organizational system fuels her approach.
A deliberate and open approach to change
Within these challenges and constraints, public agencies such as ROM are faced with constant need to adapt — something most HR leaders are facing in a time of frequent change such as AI adoption and organizational restructuring. Cherizard believes that effective change strategy must be thorough, and she takes her time to ensure change management in her organization is deliberate, well-planned, and well-communicated. It’s also important to identify champions in the organization who are change-agile and can support and guide people at their own level, she says.
“What's been effective is helping people to understand what the change is, the impact on them, the benefits of the change — particularly the benefit for them personally,” says Cherizard. “There needs to be a thread through the communication and the implementation of the change that helps them understand that, to reduce or lower some of the resistance.”
What can derail a change strategy is going too quickly, not communicating effectively, and not bringing everyone in the organization along with it, she adds.
Supporting diversity and mentoring as a leader
As a public organization, diversity is also a key organizational value for ROM. It’s something the hits close to home for Cherizard, and her position as an HR leader provides her with a platform to make a difference.
“My heritage is very multicultural and that really helps me when I focus on being a role model around DEI and accessibility,” she says. “It has given me a good foundation to try and understand and be curious about different people with different backgrounds, different profiles, different ways of thinking.”
Beyond her core role, Cherizard also emphasizes supporting vulnerable talent pools. “I'm passionate about helping those who are looking for opportunity, whether it's because they're newly graduated from school, newly arrived in Canada, or newly getting into HR from another career,” she says. “My role, very fortunately, enables me to help, whether it's through a volunteer opportunity through which people can come into the organization, or they're actually looking for mentors and I'm able to help.”
HR’s transformation to a strategic role
Working with other organizational leaders to address factors that can pull the organization in different directions, planning and implementing change, and promoting diversity through her leadership position are all elements of being an HR leader that showcases the transformation of HR during Cherizard’s more than three decades in HR.
“At the very beginning [HR] was very much transactional, very much administration,” she says. “And I've seen changes throughout the years towards a more strategic role, especially since COVID — that, as a global phenomenon, really called on organizations and HR professionals who were focusing on the people in the organization to exercise muscles that we hadn't before, to learn new skills around how to handle this global pandemic and all of the impacts it had both on the organizations and their people.”
HR learned and developed from that historical event, according to Cherizard — an event that might someday be studied in a museum.
