The Steady Hand of Leadership

ounded in 1968, Intel—the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer by sales for decades—has faced challenges in more recent years. Although it remains a leading manufacturer of semiconductors and central processing units worldwide, the company’s disappointing financial performance this past year led it to announce 15,000 layoffs in 2024—more than 15% of its global workforce. That put a lot on the shoulders of the company’s executive vice president and chief people officer, Christy Pambianchi.

Yet Pambianchi, who joined Intel in August 2021 and heads an HR team of approximately 1,250 employees, speaks about recent times at Intel in hopeful terms. “I’m so excited we’re having a vibrant and active dialogue again about how important the manufacturing sector is in the economy,” she says. 

Pambianchi touts the well-paying jobs provided by the manufacturing sector, in which she has worked for most of her 35-year career. “There is nothing I love more than opening a factory,” she adds. “I love bringing good, high-paying jobs into communities.”

Still, Pambianchi has led Intel’s people function during undoubtedly challenging times. “Christy has had to help navigate significant changes in leadership and strategic direction while keeping the wheels on,” says Kevin M. Close, corporate vice president of total rewards at Intel. 

The company had “a tremendous growth in employee population” in 2021 and 2022, Close says, but in late 2022, it announced several rounds of layoffs. In 2023, Intel implemented austerity measures, such as reducing salaries for executives, suspending both merit raises and bonuses, and slashing the 401(k) match for lower-level employees.

Pambianchi has shepherded Intel’s HR function through this turbulent time, Close says, by “leading with decisive actions and clear communications.” At Intel, and throughout her career, Pambianchi says she has navigated times of change by staying focused on business strategy and aligning the HR function with it. 

“Everything Christy does is clearly aligned with our strategy,” says April Miller Boise, executive vice president and chief legal officer at Intel. “As a general matter, I haven’t seen other HR leaders operate at that same level of strategic recognition and alignment.”

Pambianchi gained her appreciation for strategic alignment after she joined PepsiCo in 1990—her first HR job and first experience with a company transformation. She recalls that Brenda Barnes, Pepsi-Cola North America’s chief operating officer at the time, created a transformation initiative that turned the company’s organizational chart upside down—placing leaders at the bottom and front-line workers at the top. 

For Pambianchi, the organization’s adoption of a servant-leadership model was a lightbulb moment. “That stuck with me over the course of my career,” she recalls. After 10 years at PepsiCo, Pambianchi carried the servant-leadership approach with her to Corning, where she worked for about two decades; to Verizon, where she was the CHRO for more than two years; and now to Intel.

As part of its new strategy to surpass its competitors, Intel has recommitted to its core values, Pambianchi says, by re-embracing objectives and key results (OKRs)—a framework first developed at Intel in the 1970s that emphasizes clearly defined goals and measurable results.  

“We reinstated the entire underpinning of the OKR process, cascading from the company strategy all the way to individual objectives,” Pambianchi explains. To that end, compensation is now tied to employees’ ability to help realize the OKRs that Intel spells out.

Driving Change in HR 

By overhauling Intel’s HR department, Pambianchi helped the company change direction in its people management practices. When she joined Intel, she encountered “very, very siloed” HR functions. In its place, Pambianchi implemented a structure she developed in her previous HR leadership roles in which department generalists and specialists closely collaborate.

While it’s the job of HR generalists to have a strong grasp of a company’s overall business strategy and the hiring needs of each department, it’s impractical for each employee to be an expert in all of the HR functions at a company of Intel’s scale, Pambianchi says. That’s why she implemented HR centers of excellence. These centers comprise HR specialists who are subject-matter experts with deep knowledge in cross-departmental areas such as talent acquisition, employee relations, compensation, and diversity. “They have to be the best in the world at what they do,” Pambianchi says. 

She also put in place programs to help realize what her company refers to as “IDM (integrated device manufacturing) 2.0,” which was former CEO Pat Gelsinger’s vision for expanding Intel’s manufacturing business. To help meet the manufacturer’s talent needs by promoting internally, Pambianchi in 2021 launched a two-year effort to build a career-planning platform for employees that replaced outdated job summaries. Previously, employees had little visibility into the opportunities they could pursue across the enterprise or even within their own departments. Now, employees seeking new positions can access the platform at any time and view all internal jobs available to them. Soon, the platform will leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest to individual employees the jobs that might be of interest to them.

Pambianchi says this function of AI is just one of many that will transform HR in the years to come. “My advice to HR professionals is to run toward [AI], not away from it,” she says. “Figure out how the technology can allow you to do your work better.” 

Pambianchi has tasked her team members with creating an AI road map for Intel’s HR department. They conduct focus groups with HR employees around the world who experiment with AI to identify the technology’s “low-hanging fruit,” she explains. For example, some employees are experimenting with using AI to collect and summarize copious amounts of people data—such as thousands of comments on employee experience surveys—to free up time for HR employees to concentrate on higher-level analyses.

Pambianchi is also helping Intel become a diversity leader in the industry. While women currently make up approximately 25% of Intel’s technical staff, the company aims to have more than 40% of its technical roles filled by women by the end of this decade. In another effort to cultivate a more diverse workforce, the company offers a program at community colleges called Quick Start, a 10-day simulation of a technician’s role at Intel to give students a sense of what the job is like. 

“We know that groupthink kills innovation,” Pambianchi explains. “So, to be successful, we need to have diversity of thought and inclusive teams that can helpfully debate and push forward breakthrough innovation.”

Growing Up Fast 

Pambianchi credits some of her professional success to a childhood that forced her to grow up and mature quickly. When she was 11 years old, her mother was killed in a car accident. As the eldest of four girls, Pambianchi suddenly had to shoulder an enormous weight for her family. 

“My dad really struggled and relied on me a lot, and so did my sisters,” recalls Pambianchi, who grew up in Brewster, N.Y. “It was a very, very challenging time, and I became an adult really fast.” 

Characteristically, when Pambianchi discusses this time in her life, she describes not just what she lost, but also what she gained.

“When you experience loss that dramatically at a really young age, and you don’t have any warning or planning, you go from ‘Everything is stable and great’ in your life to ‘Everything is upside-down,’ ” she explains. “So, I became someone who seeks to make order out of chaos. I like systems and processes. The other thing is, you realize how every single day is a gift and you might not have it tomorrow.” The early loss also left Pambianchi “super resilient,” she says. 

After her mother’s death, Pambianchi’s aunt and grandmother moved in with the family, and her grandmother didn’t let the sisters dwell on what they had lost. “If we were feeling down, she would remind us there were so many reasons to be satisfied and happy,” Pambianchi remembers, adding another upside of this period. “It was a household of six women and my dad, so the idea that women couldn’t do everything a man could do never crossed our minds at all.”

During her high school and college years, Pambianchi’s future HR career began to take shape. In the 1980s, she saw how her father’s and other family members’ professional lives were upended after the government broke up their employer, AT&T, and this inspired her to study labor relations at Cornell University. 

“I realized through studying labor history and seeing what happened in my family that the work you do re- ally shapes everything in your life—where you live, what schools your kids go to, what social mobility you have,” she says. This led Pambianchi to her career choice. “I wanted to work on the world of work,” she says. “How are people satisfied in their job? Does it have meaning to them?”

While at Cornell, Pambianchi worked in the dining hall, sometimes alongside fellow crew members and sometimes as their supervisor. “I adopted the belief that people need leaders who enable them to be successful,” she says. During an HR internship at General Electric during her junior year, Pambianchi realized she’d found her profession. 

Today, Pambianchi, like her own mother, has four children. “My No. 1 job is to be the mom,” she says. “I want my kids to have what I didn’t get.”

At her other job—the one at Intel—Pambianchi says she continues to hone the leadership and skills she learned early in life. 

“Christy never shies away from a leadership moment; she is a warrior,” Close says. “In the most challenging of times, that’s when Christy is at her best. She understands what it takes to lead others through that moment.” 

Novid Parsi is a freelance writer based in St. Louis.