Emma Leonis-Hughes, Client Executive Director
Emma specialises in global, large-scale and complex end-to-end HR change programmes. She spent over 10 years at Deloitte before joining LACE Partners in early 2018 as Client Executive Director. Emma works with Chief People Officers and their leadership teams to develop their people strategies and help them drive business value – be that designing the HR operating model around the employee experience, optimising HR service delivery through improved use of digital tools or through building HR’s capability.
She is passionate about HR and challenging, inspiring and motivating HR leaders to achieve more. As part of this, Emma leads LACE’s thought leadership into the future of HR service delivery and operating models. For example, LACE’s bi-annual HR Shared Services trends reports which began in 2020, the ‘HR on the Offensive’ whitepaper and currently LACE’s ‘Demystifying the HR operating model’ campaign.
Skills
- HR operating model assessment and design
- HR operating model implementation
- HR transformation
- Business case development
- Shared services
- Solution design
- Employee experience
- Organisation design
- Change management
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Insights. Our latest thought leadership, including blogs, webinars, podcasts and videos.
Why the workforce stalls and how a skills strategy can solve it
In brief Early careers and over 55s face different barriers, which squeezes the middle layer and slows decisions, development and resilience. A skills‑based approach helps unblock this. Looking at work as tasks underpinned by skills allows smarter deployment, fairer...
Starting your AI in Payroll journey: How to get the data foundations right
In brief Learn how AI in payroll is shaping processes, roles and data strategy. Hear practical advice from Lace Partners and Sage on starting small and building confidence. Understand the foundations needed to adopt AI safely and effectively. ...
The AI + Human Network: The real shift in HR has already started
Most organisations are adding AI to HR. Leaders are redesigning HR around AI. For all the noise about AI and HR, the real transformation in HR is happening underneath the surface: a shift to an operating model where humans and AI agents work together side-by-side as a...




