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.
Black History Month: How to turn awareness into lasting change at work
As part of Black History Month in this episode of The People Agenda podcast we are raising awareness of how organisations can be more inclusive. Host Chris Howard and Christina Adeniyi from our DE&I team speak to Lildonia Lawrence, a Diversity and Inclusion...
Reflections from the conference room floor: UNLEASH 2025
AI owned the air at UNLEASH Paris 2025. “GenAI.” “Copilot.” “Assistant.” And the ever-present: “Buy or build?” You couldn’t queue for coffee without hearing at least one story of a pilot gone right - or wrong. But this year felt different. The success stories sounded...
EU Sustainability Reporting: What is the latest and what steps should companies take now to prepare?
The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are part of the European Commission’s efforts to standardise sustainability reporting (more info here), covering environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG), with the overall aim of improving transparency...




