Inside MongoDB: Leading Change and Growth as a Chief People Officer

We recently sat down with Harsha Jalihal, Chief People Officer at MongoDB, to discuss what it really takes to lead in moments of change. She described how her team has woven leadership principles and core values into the fabric of MongoDB—making sure culture isn’t just talked about but actively lived as the company grows. She also offered candid reflections on building leadership accountability, thoughtfully exploring AI in HR, and why the best people leaders today bring a balance of curiosity, empathy, and sharp business sense.

I didn’t think of transformation as a superpower. But, I am a problem solver at heart. When I see something that needs to be addressed, I tend to take control and do something about it - which has a positive and negative side. For the most part, it has helped me throughout my life. It allows me to be a bit more resilient through all the transformations I’ve faced.

An analogy I always use with my team is that I view my role as the navigator of the car that my CEO is driving. As an HR function, we’re the ones telling leaders if there’s a hard left coming up, a stream, or if it’s a rocky pathway ahead and we should pull over and pause because visibility is zero. Yes, HR is a support function; but ultimately, we are helping our leaders drive the business.  

At MongoDB, we are built for change. When you're able to drive change in an organization, you are growing as an HR professional because you're pushing yourself. You're moving into an uncomfortable but necessary space, and you're helping your leaders get there, too. 

There are a couple of key ways to keep a pulse on the organization and support the CEO effectively.  

One is through data. I help my CEO see and understand the mood of the company—attrition, ability to attract talent, engagement, and other measures of the general organizational health, which often demonstrates the temperature in the company. One of the things we do at MongoDB is run an engagement survey twice a year to get real data on what people are thinking and feeling, so we always have a sense of the temperature. 

The second is showing impact. For example, I recently wrote a two-page narrative for our CEO to articulate what we’re going after as a company. CEOs usually have a vision — mine does — the magic is helping them put that vision to paper. Sometimes, you actually have to write it out to make sure both feel comfortable with it. It seems like a simple thing, but many times people don’t do it. Just because the vision is in your head does not mean a large organization will understand it and you have to find a way to get it out to them. Writing that vision down is a critical first step.  

The third is storytelling. Once you have the data and the written vision, you need to build a narrative around it. I've found that employees are most energized when leaders speak plainly and authentically about their own experiences. One of the most effective ways to do this is through a storytelling campaign.

This question is very close to my heart. When I joined MongoDB five years ago, I asked every executive I interviewed with: What keeps you up at night when it comes to people? Almost all of them said culture. They knew they had built something special and were deeply concerned about preserving it as the company grew. 

Our values were already in place, as they were co-authored by the executive team. We’ve only slightly updated the language to keep them relevant. But as I saw it, culture is a set of human behaviors—and as the people change, culture naturally evolves. That means we have to be intentional about maintaining it. I joined during Covid, when people weren’t meeting in person. That’s when I realized we needed to actively teach and reteach our culture. 

So, we created a values workshop to help employees connect their personal values with the company’s. We also defined what good leadership looks like at MongoDB by introducing leadership principles. Together with our values, they form our leadership commitment—what we do, why we do it, and how we do it.  

To me, HR is the custodian of culture, but every employee and leader is a keeper of it. Culture is both top-down and bottom-up. The values workshop supports the bottom-up approach, while leadership commitment drives the top-down.

Our ongoing goal has been to embed the Leadership Commitment into everything we do. Our Leadership Commitment is the relationship between our values, leadership principles, and business outcomes. 

The first year was about creating the commitment and building awareness. Since then, we’ve worked to integrate it across the employee lifecycle—from recruiting to exit. We ask: How do we ensure our values and principles show up everywhere? 

We found the answer starts with awareness. We launched the values workshops and introduced the leadership commitment top-down to ensure people understood it. Then we embedded it into performance management, leadership development, recruiting, recognition, and even how we handle exits—with respect, transparency, and intellectual honesty. 

We also created leadership stories, a workshop where leaders identify their core values, connect them to their leadership brand, and reflect on how they show up. I’ve done it with my own team, and it’s a powerful way to humanize leadership and show how personal experiences shape who we are.  

That storytelling has helped embed our values into our culture. It’s now part of our language. You’ll hear people in meetings say things like, “I want to be intellectually honest with you…”—they’re using our principles in real time. We talk about embedding this into our DNA, and it starts with aligning all our people processes to speak the same language.

To be honest, I think being a leader today is more challenging than ever. Covid changed everything, particularly interactions that are done on a personal, hybrid, or virtual front. 

But even before that, with the advent of technology and the fact that you have the world at your fingertips in the form of a smartphone, those lines have blurred. What happens is your work demands become more constant because it's harder to separate, and you can burn out faster. If you're not able to create the boundaries you need, it becomes difficult.  

Working from home, on one hand, is great—if you've got a 4 o'clock basketball game for your kid, you can go do that. But it may mean you have to be back online at 9 o'clock to get something done. People are definitely struggling to balance that, while still being grateful for the flexibility. But the demands are more constant. 

The muscle that leaders really need to build now is navigating complexity; meeting people where they are and managing with empathy. Work doesn’t stop at the office door anymore. When I started working, I didn’t even have a laptop. I had a flip phone. You can work from anywhere now, and because there’s no separation, your family is impacted by your work more than ever. And on the flip side, your leaders are impacted by your home life and personal situation just as much. 

This reality forces leaders to really get to know their people, to exercise more empathy, and to understand where they’re coming from—not just in terms of work. Back in the day, management was more about telling people what to do, and they just did it. But now, you really need to spend time getting to know your people as humans before you get to know them in terms of the job they’re doing for you. 

The role of HR in business is growing because so many business challenges are actually people challenges. This is why the first critical skill HR leaders need to develop is the ability to not just manage change, but to drive it.  And this requires a strong understanding of human behavior. That realization is becoming stronger among the business leaders I’ve worked with. Our CEO often says his job is mostly about people: hiring, motivating, resolving conflict. That’s why having a strong HR partner is essential, especially in a world where change is constant. 

The second skill I would highlight is that HR leaders need strong business acumen. That doesn’t mean if you work in tech, you need to know how to code. It means understanding how value is generated in a business and what impact business decisions have on people. That business acumen earns you a seat at the table and builds trust with your business leaders. They want you to understand their world and their problems. 

The third is that HR and people leaders need to become more tech-savvy—especially with the rise of AI. We need to think about how it will affect our work and how we can leverage it in a productive and safe way. Yes, there are risks, but we can use it to enhance our people’s capabilities and free them up to do the work only humans can do. We need to start engaging more in that space. 

Those are the three key areas I believe HR leaders should focus on for the next decade of evolution.

Yes, we are currently experimenting a bit with AI. At the moment, we're using it in our recruiting function to help with sourcing, and we’re about to launch a pilot in HR to support what we call an employee support chatbot. 

For example, when an employee is looking for information about employment policies or programs they’re eligible for—like wanting to know the maternity leave policy in the U.S.—instead of having to search through the employee handbook, they can just ask the chatbot. It can tell them how much leave they’ve accrued, or answer other simple questions that don’t require a human. 

Right now, people are often doing that work manually, and even with an intranet, it can be hard to find the right answer. The chatbot gives you the answer quickly and can personalize it to a large extent. That’s powerful because it frees up HR teams to focus on more complex work, and employees don’t have to wait for someone to get back to them. 

Of course, our go-to-market and R&D teams are doing even more experimentation. But I want to do a lot more—there’s so much potential, and we’re just scratching the surface. 

There are many things we've delivered as a team that I'm very proud of. I see them coming to life in the company, and it makes me proud to know that our fingerprints—my team's fingerprints—are on them, for example the leadership commitment I mentioned earlier. 

But the thing I'm ultimately most proud of is the value the HR function provides at MongoDB. We have a seat at the table here, and I know that’s not yet common—though it’s becoming more so. I truly believe our leaders recognize the value my team brings. They want more of my team. They want them at the table all the time. 

And to me, that’s what I’m most proud of—because it means we’re having an impact. It means we’re helping leaders run the business in the best way possible. If we're not helping leaders better run their business, we're not providing our greatest value as an HR function. 

Yes, there are lots of great programs and initiatives we’ve rolled out. But ultimately, what makes me proudest is that my people have a seat at the table—and their leaders want them there, need them there, and call on them. That, to me, is the most meaningful thing. 

You'll survive—more than survive. You'll thrive. 

You'll thrive if you prepare. Preparation is important. You can't just wing change. If you prepare, if you stay grounded in whatever it is that grounds you, and if you keep the big picture, the purpose, at heart - because you must have something bigger to hang your hat on - I think you’ll be OK. 

It may be daunting in the moment, so you’ve got to learn to step back sometimes and ask yourself: What am I really trying to accomplish? What’s at the end of the tunnel? 

And you need to find your sources of energy. You need to find what grounds you. Because it’s very easy to get swept away—like the proverbial tree in the wind. You don’t want that. You don’t want to get blown away, so you’ve got to keep building those roots.