Leslie Rohrbacker is a CHRO and lawyer with extensive experience in transformational human resources and change management in all types of businesses, with a record of building global teams and service delivery.
She is particularly passionate about leveraging diversity and values to create an engaged, high performing and innovative culture.
As Fragomen’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Leslie is responsible for the worldwide human resources function, including talent acquisition and management, total rewards, learning and development, employee relations, HRIS and related technologies, and internal communications. In this role, Leslie has redesigned the firm’s global human resources team and function into a strategic business team delivering best-in-class talent and human capital management aligned with Fragomen objectives.
Prior to joining Fragomen in 2013, Leslie held several roles at a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, including Chief Human Strategy Officer, Vice President, Head of Human Resources, and multiple positions in the Office of General Counsel, including Deputy General Counsel. Prior to this, Leslie practiced law for 10 years in large, private law firms where she specialized in employment litigation, counseling, and training for corporate clients. She held a faculty position as Adjunct Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law from 2001 – 2003 and is a trained mediator. Leslie was also the founder of a 100% woman-owned consulting firm that provided creative and strategic talent management solutions for all types of businesses and organizations. Early in her career, Leslie was the Special Assistant for Governmental Affairs for a Member of the United States Congress. She is a published children’s book author and blogger.
Leslie is on the Board of Directors of NP2, a startup, non-profit pharmaceutical company, and on the Board of Trustees of the Academy of Holy Angels, a college preparatory high school dedicated to empowering young women to lead. She is actively involved in several philanthropic causes in New Jersey, where she resides with her husband and twin sons.
More from Leslie…
Leslie is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Fragomen, a large immigration law firm. She fits in well at a law firm because she, too, has a law degree.
She says her law degree helps her as an executive. But she had to change her mindset when it came to consensus building, something that’s extremely important for the HR profession. She explains in more detail:
“I think I talked about the law degree before as really being what I think has enabled me to be the executive that I am but I think one of the things I’ve had to learn over the years is that consensus building.
When you’re a lawyer, you’re trained to be right. Because that’s what your clients want. Your clients are not necessarily paying you to make everybody happy. They’re paying you to win. And so you really develop a focus on winning and being right.
I think when you come into an executive role, where you have a number of different constituencies, you have to learn how to build consensus. And I think, in general, particularly in the polarized society in which we’re living right now, we’ve lost sight of the importance of consensus building. It feels like losing, it feels like compromise. And it is to some degree, and that’s how I used to feel when I was still kind of in my lawyer mindset. Was [that] compromise is losing, [and] I should win because the facts are on my side.
So it’s really the skill that I’ve had to work on the most. As an executive, and I’ve had to calibrate the desire to win with the desire to get buy-in, and that’s often not a linear objective process. In HR, you have to be able to sell your ideas. And your ability to influence is not just going to be based on sort of empirical data and facts, but it’s going to be based in part on your relationships with people and your ability to build that consensus. So that’s definitely something that I’ve had to work on over the years.”
