Ola Snow, CHRO at Cardinal Health, an Ohio-based company with 50,000 employees, will retire in Feb. 2026, the company revealed to HR Brew.
Snow, who spent 24 years with Cardinal Health and became CHRO in 2018, will be succeeded by Val Pitteroff on Feb. 16, 2026; she joined the company as an HR director in 2002. Pitteroff will work closely with CEO Jason Hollar, and oversee Cardinal Health’s HR, DEI, and community relations efforts.
Cardinal Health has grown its business in recent years, as it focuses on more digital tools and acquisitions, with three acquisition announcements since last fall.
The plan to find Snow’s successor began informally years ago. “You should start thinking about your transition the day that you take the job,” Snow told HR Brew. But she wasn’t serious about retiring until last year. She wanted to stay with the company until Hollar, who took over as CEO in 2022, had been in the role for some time. “I really made a commitment to the organization and the board and to him [Hollar] around helping with this transformation that the company has gone through, and how could culture really accelerate this turnaround situation.”
Snow said she knew that Pitteroff would make a good successor about three years ago, after the two began working more closely together. “[I] started talking to Jason. Started making some plans with our board of directors and really amping up Val’s development,” she said. The transition accelerated in January, when Snow had a gut feeling it was the right time. “A mentor of mine told me one time, ‘You’ll just know when you know.’”
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Snow said that the company “charts a course” for executive succession planning, which helps the process go smoothly. The plan is customized to each executive so they can build the skills and experiences they need to take over.
“Development just doesn’t happen once we decide that Val is gonna be the person. We’ve been doing development for her for several years,” Snow said. Pitteroff was behind the scenes in compensation cycles, board of directors meetings, and with the company’s management incentive program.
“The fly on the wall opportunities I’ve had…kind of behind the scenes, it really has brought what it looks like applied to our business versus just a theoretical, maybe more formal classroom training,” Pitteroff told HR Brew. “Those two things coupled have eased [the] anxiety of things that I didn’t have visibility to before direct responsibility for because it just makes it more real and more real for our ecosystem here.”
Snow is excited to publicly announce Pitteroff’s new role so the entire organization can get to know her over the next several months. “For any CHRO, it’s a proud moment when you’re able…to be able to have somebody ready to go,” she said. “It’s super warming for me, knowing that I’m walking out with an internal successor that I truly believe will be even more successful.”