Top 10 HR Execs to Watch in 2019

Frank Peloso

Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Vectrus

Frank Peloso has served as the chief human resources officer for Vectrus since 2010, charged with all HR activities and strategies. Previously, he was the vice president and director of HR for the Exelis Mission Systems business, the predecessor company to Vectrus.

Vectrus recently celebrated its 5-year anniversary as a publicly traded, government services contractor. Despite its relative youth, the company has a long 75-plus-year legacy of providing maintenance sustainment and operations support for U.S. government facilities, vehicles, equipment, ranges, networks and systems.

The challenge as Vectrus spun off from its parent company, Exelis (formerly ITT) was to build on the company’s rich history to define a new culture that aligns its roughly 7,000 global employees. A key differentiator for Vectrus is that its employees and the culture they embody are the company’s chief asset.

Under the current President and CEO Chuck Prow, Vectrus has embarked on a journey of cultural transformation to move from a siloed, command and control environment to one that fosters agility, collaboration and accountability. This ongoing transformation supports Vectrus’ strategic objectives of growth and margin expansion over the next five years.

Why Watch:

With a relentless focus on employee engagement, Vectrus conducted an all-employee survey in 2017 — the results of which provided insights into areas for improvement. Vectrus then developed customized training modules and platforms to achieve these improvements.

In 2017, the transformation focused on transparency, collaboration and courageous communication. In 2018-2019, it focused on the company’s cultural imperatives of agility, accountability and engagement.

The training — which targeted leaders at all levels across 18 countries — focused on these culture imperatives and featured a mix of classroom training and “leader-led” training. This design ensured every leader at Vectrus not only understood each of these imperatives but also taught and modeled the way for his or her employees.

To round out this holistic approach to cultural transformation, Vectrus aligned its performance management system to set employee expectations regarding cultural imperatives and to assess individual competence in those areas.