Here's something that doesn't get said often enough in corporate governance circles: the proxy season is no longer a quiet, procedural ritual that the legal team handles in the background while the rest of the company gets on with actual business. It hasn't been that for a while now. But in 2026, the stakes feel different. The room feels different. Shareholders are showing up with sharper questions, better data, and in some cases, a genuine appetite to make noise. Activist in

A few years ago, most CHROs could afford to treat shareholder proposals as someone else’s problem. They lived with Legal, surfaced briefly in a Compensation Committee deck, and were handled largely through technical arguments about disclosure, thresholds, or procedure. HR might be asked for data or a quick point of view—but rarely to lead. That world is gone. Today, shareholder proposals are landing squarely in the middle of conversations about how companies pay people, rewar