HRM sat down with Benjamin Morris, Group General Manager of Human Resources at Mirvac, to learn how a career of considered risk-taking landed him in an HR leadership position.

I’m not sure I buy the cliché that people just “fall into HR”. While it wasn’t something I set out to do in high school, looking back, the career choices I’ve made and the skills I’ve acquired have clearly shaped a purposeful path towards HR leadership. But that’s not where I started.

My career began as a chartered accountant.  My dad was a chartered accountant, so I followed in his footsteps, taking on a cadetship with PwC, which meant balancing full-time work and study from day one.

A year into my cadetship, I made my first bold career move by putting my hand up to pursue a law degree alongside my accounting studies. It wasn’t part of the program, so I had to convince the partners.

I said, “Let’s make a deal. If you let me take on law, I promise I won’t fall behind. I’ll finish in step with my peers.”

So I worked really hard and was able to do just that. Then something unexpected happened. I was seconded into the Office of the CEO. I found myself in a junior chief of staff role, at around 24 years old, sitting at the centre of the firm’s leadership.

That’s where I started to understand how a billion-dollar organisation worked. Culture, governance, competitive tension, change – I was seeing it all up close.

This was the moment my career shifted. I was encouraged to join the executive remuneration consulting team. This role laid the foundations for my commercial approach to HR, as I was forced to learn about how the business made money and how executive incentives aligned with that.

It was also an excellent crash course in stakeholder management, as I had to factor in what management, the board and investors wanted to see.

That’s how my journey into HR began – with a sense of curiosity and trust in the leaders who saw something in me.

Benjamin Morris recently shared his insights on how HR earns influence and credibility with the C-suite in an episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline. Listen to the full episode below.

On reframing career risks

Looking back, many of my biggest career leaps came from rethinking what risk really meant.

At one point, I left PwC after nine years without a job lined up, partly because I wanted to get the legal experience I needed to practise. I’d invested so much in my law degree, and I wasn’t willing to leave that unfinished.

That decision meant taking a significant pay cut to become a junior lawyer. It was a real bet on myself to broaden my skill base. But I gained gritty litigation experience that I still draw on today – especially when complex industrial issues crop up. 

Eventually, I decided, while I liked the law, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. So I came full circle, back to consulting in a senior role with Deloitte.

That career side-step reshaped how I think about career risks. We often overestimate the downside. Yes, I was stepping into the unknown, but I gained valuable skills that continue to serve me today. 

I’ve often said to early career professionals, “What’s the actual worst-case scenario? If the job doesn’t work out, you’ve still grown.” That mindset has helped me move forward, even when the path wasn’t clear.

On backing yourself when you’re the youngest in the room

After my time at Deloitte, I was approached to lead the executive remuneration consulting practice at Hay Group, one of the world’s leading HR consultancies.

I was 29, and one of the first things I did was grow a beard. It sounds trivial, but I wanted to look older. I was pitching to boards and leading a team of people, many of whom were older than me.

On my 30th birthday, I even took the number off my cake because I didn’t want anyone to know how young I was. I share that because with every major career leap, there’s been a healthy dose of self-doubt. No one ever feels completely ready; you grow into the role by doing it.

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On becoming the role model he always needed

One of the most defining moments in my career came when I was seconded to the Office of the CEO at PwC. I was 24, just coming to terms with my sexuality, and for the first time, I saw a professionally successful, out gay man in a senior leadership role.

The moment I saw someone like me in leadership, everything changed. His leadership gave me the confidence to be myself. It showed me the power of visible leadership, courage and allyship. I carry that lesson with me today – not just with LGBTQIA+ groups, but for anyone in the workforce who doesn’t have the same representation and voice as others.

I try to lead with that same authenticity because now I’m that person in a position of visibility and influence. Everything you choose to do or not do gets noticed. In the new starter orientations, which all executives at Mirvac attend, I’ll usually reference my partner, Chris, in a casual way – nothing performative, just a signal that this is a place where people can be who they are.

I remember what it felt like to tell a different version of your weekend just to fit in. No one should have to do that. Also, this isn’t just a DEI initiative. It’s about business performance.

When people feel included they speak up and share perspectives, leading to better innovation, problem-solving, and business outcomes.

“The importance of being an HR practitioner who knows how the business makes money, and understands how risks emerge and how to mitigate them, can’t be understated.”

On bolstering HR talent with external perspectives

One of the biggest risks for HR today is that we keep hiring from the same talent pool – people with similar experiences and traditional HR backgrounds – or we don’t think outside the box when building-out the skills of our existing teams.

But the nature of HR has fundamentally changed. What we need now are new capabilities, not just more of the same.

Think of HR as a product function. Our product is the employee experience. If we were in FMCG, we’d be hiring marketers, brand strategists, customer experience experts, and people obsessed with innovation, testing and improving the product. Why not do that in HR?

HR needs to be bold enough to look beyond the usual suspects and build truly diverse, future-fit teams.  At Mirvac, we deliberately bring in people from outside HR to bring fresh thinking into our team. 

One example is Angus, who came from a customer experience background. His input on engagement has been transformative.  He helped shift us from a traditional engagement model to a continuous listening approach – using tools like internal NPS to measure impact in real time. We might’ve got there eventually, but his perspective accelerated the change significantly.

We also hired an engineer with a procurement background who spent five years with us. He constantly challenged our assumptions, questioning language, processes and communication styles that our HR team had never thought to interrogate. Sometimes it takes that outside-in view to push HR forward. Honestly, we need more of it.

On critical skills to add to your HR toolkit

My background in accounting and law has meant I was fortunate to learn about the commercial side of business early in my career.

The importance of being an HR practitioner who knows how the business makes money, and understands how risks emerge and how to mitigate them, can’t be understated. Do you understand the risks and opportunities for your sector? Are you curious about investor sentiment? Do you actively seek out this information?

My pathway is unusual – you don’t need to have an accounting degree. But I encourage my entire HR team to dial in every time Mirvac releases results to the market, including listening to the questions analysts ask.

It’s a great way of understanding the business from an investor lens.   Secondly, position yourself not as a reactor, but an anticipator. Develop an understanding of where the business is at – commercially, culturally and strategically – so you can proactively go to business leaders and say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, and I think we need to get ahead of this by doing A, B and C.”

That’s how HR earns influence. Once you understand how the business makes money and where the risks lie, your people strategy should be designed to either accelerate growth or mitigate those risks.  Anything less is a missed opportunity for HR to drive real impact and position the function as a value creator. 

A longer version of this article first appeared in the 2025 August/September edition of HRM Magazine.