Silvana Battaglia and the art of leaving a chair ready

The new name on the organization chart arrived with a date: July 13, 2026. The old name stayed to help. After seven years as Cencora’s chief human resources officer, Silvana Battaglia moved into a special advisor role while Samantha Hammock took over. Their handover was scheduled to continue through the end of the year. For an executive whose working life has included succession planning, that overlap makes an apt final assignment.

A leadership announcement is easy to recognize. It has titles, congratulations, and a photograph suitable for a press release. The transfer of understanding is harder to photograph. Someone must explain how decisions get made, where responsibilities meet, and which conversations are still unfinished. The organization chart, admirably concise, does not provide footnotes.

Battaglia’s career has repeatedly brought her close to that less visible work. Across several employers, her responsibilities have included talent, compensation, labor relations, organizational development, and change. Those subjects can sound like separate departments until a company needs to do something difficult. Then they tend to arrive at the same meeting.

The interesting question in her story is how a specialist comes to see the whole organization. Her route offers several answers: spend time with different kinds of responsibility, work across borders, teach, and take a seat where the questions belong to an entire business.

A marketing degree, then a different kind of audience

Battaglia earned her undergraduate degree in marketing at Temple University and a master’s in human resources at Widener University. Her academic route places two business disciplines next to each other that organizations often keep apart. Marketing concerns how people understand an offer. Human resources concerns the conditions under which people agree to work, contribute, develop, and stay.

That connection is an observation about the disciplines, rather than a claim about why she chose them. Her subsequent career is easier to establish. Early positions at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Colorcon preceded leadership roles at Merck between 1998 and 2008. She then served as chief human resources officer at Day & Zimmermann from 2008 to 2011.

The chronology is useful because it shows the accumulation of responsibility before the most recent corporate title. A decade of leadership roles, followed by a chief HR position, preceded her arrival at Aramark. The Cencora chapter came later still. There was considerable work before there was a seven-year tenure to celebrate.

She also served as an adjunct faculty member at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Teaching gives this career another setting: a room in which understanding has to be communicated to people who are there to learn. Her university connections also include the Haub School of Business advisory board. Philadelphia appears throughout her education and professional affiliations, even as the work itself acquired an international scope.

The distance between a policy and a working day

At Aramark, Battaglia served as senior vice president of global field human resources from May 2011 until August 2017. She then became senior vice president of global compensation, benefits, and labor relations, remaining until December 2018. The sequence brought field responsibilities and the design of rewards into the same career.

Those are two useful viewpoints on an employer. A company can describe its priorities in a policy. Employees encounter them in schedules, managers, pay arrangements, and opportunities. Field HR and compensation approach that relationship from different directions. Having responsibility for both supplies a practical reason to examine whether the language and the arrangements agree.

Aramark’s workforce numbered more than 250,000 in the account of her responsibilities. At that scale, the word “people” carries an enormous amount of variation. A global policy must survive contact with different jobs and local circumstances. The challenge is to make an organization intelligible without pretending that everyone’s working day is identical.

Battaglia joined AmerisourceBergen in January 2019 as executive vice president and chief human resources officer. The business later became Cencora. Her remit extended across more than 50 countries and included recruiting and managing talent, rewards, and organizational development. This placed her at the meeting point of an international company’s ambitions and its ability to put people behind them.

The building and the working arrangement

One unusually concrete moment came in September 2021, when AmerisourceBergen opened its headquarters in Conshohocken. Battaglia discussed the building in terms of employee engagement while also affirming continued flexibility between office and home. A new headquarters and flexible work shared the same announcement. The square footage did not settle the question of how people should use it.

That pairing makes the episode more revealing than a ribbon cutting usually manages to be. Buildings offer visible evidence of investment. Working arrangements demand decisions that remain in use after the ceremony. An office can provide meeting places; an organization must still decide when gathering helps and how people elsewhere participate.

The same subject surfaced in her April 2024 appearance on The Talent Pool with Alan Kaplan. The conversation examined hybrid work and social issues affecting the balance of power in the workforce. The episode’s subject carries the headquarters question forward: where work happens belongs alongside the wider question of what workers and employers expect from one another.

For a global HR executive, these questions resist a single picturesque answer. A meeting room is a setting. An arrangement is a set of choices. Battaglia’s public comments and interview subjects put attention on both, which is more useful than asking the office furniture to do all the work.

Nine minutes on what gets rewarded

Her September 2023 Talent Pool episode took up executive compensation and the place of environmental, social, and governance considerations in corporate performance. It was a nine-minute conversation on a subject that can occupy considerably longer meetings. The brief format provides a useful doorway into an area already familiar from her Aramark responsibilities.

Rewards make organizational priorities tangible. The choice of what to measure affects the meaning of success; the choice of whom to reward affects whose contribution is recognized. Those are reasons to treat compensation as a business question. A list of values and a set of incentives both tell employees something about an organization. Consistency between them deserves attention.

An earlier appearance, in May 2023, covered culture, performance management, and communication in a changing talent market. Taken together, the episode subjects show the breadth of her public professional interests. Communication concerns how expectations are understood. Performance management concerns how they are assessed. Compensation concerns what follows from the assessment.

None of those steps can be made satisfactory merely by giving it an impressive name. The interest lies in the connections between them. Battaglia’s interviews give listeners several starting points for thinking about those connections, without requiring them to begin with an annual report or a committee charter.

A board seat widens the view

On June 22, 2023, Battaglia was appointed an independent director of agilon, with a place on its Compensation and Human Capital Committee. She had earned NACD Directorship Certification that April. Her appointment brought an experienced people executive into a role with responsibilities to the business as a whole.

In describing her search for a board position, she has emphasized asking former colleagues for help and examining a board’s working habits. She wanted to understand the opportunity to contribute across subjects. Her advice on initiating those conversations was characteristically practical:

“But you must be courageous and make the initial ask.”

Silvana Battaglia

She also led the integration following Cencora’s acquisition of Alliance Healthcare, taking responsibility for financial and cultural objectives. The assignment provides a concrete example of work extending across a functional title. A transaction requires the acquired and acquiring organizations to operate together; the integration makes that requirement someone’s daily responsibility.

Her own public argument for CHRO participation in governance includes workforce skills, artificial intelligence, and culture as issues affecting an organization’s ability to execute strategy. That is a useful way to understand the boardroom interest running through her career: decisions about a business eventually require people able to carry them out.

The chair she is leaving ready

In 2025, a professional succession program paired Battaglia with Stephen Miles for a fireside conversation on CEO succession. The setting brought her into a discussion about leadership transitions before the announcement of her own. Succession was already part of her professional vocabulary, with an audience of other people responsible for helping organizations prepare.

At Cencora, the announced overlap with Hammock gives that subject a defined period of work. By June 2026, the company described an employee population exceeding 51,000. The responsibility being transferred therefore involved an organization larger than the one represented in earlier biographies. The handover is a task with scale as well as a calendar.

It would be tempting to end this story with a retirement announcement and leave everyone smiling beside their titles. The advisory period offers a more interesting ending. Battaglia’s responsibilities have changed, while her experience remains available during the transition. For a career spent considering how people take responsibility, helping the next leader take hers is a fitting piece of work to finish.