A letter to HR
Somewhere along the way, the HR profession stopped pressure testing its own thinking.
I’ve spent more than 30 years in HR in large corporates. Nearly four years ago I left the corporate world for consulting.
What that shift has given me is far greater exposure to the broader HR profession outside of my own teams and organisations, and it’s time we seriously lift the game.
HR should be one of the most commercially influential and future focused functions in a business. Instead, too often what I see is:
clinging to outdated practices
recycling the same leadership models
measuring activity instead of impact
confusing process with progress
Somewhere along the way, HR became good at talking about innovation while resisting it.
What frustrates me most is that the profession often lacks the intellectual curiosity we expect from everyone else. We tell leaders to seek feedback, challenge assumptions and embrace diversity of thought, yet within HR there can be a real ego that nobody talks about.
A certainty.
A belief that we already know.
A comfort in familiar theory and practice.
Increasingly, consultants are wading into complex territory they have little real experience in, creating more noise than value.
Some of the advice now being delivered on critical issues, like psychosocial safety as one example, should genuinely concern HR leaders. Not everyone talking about leadership, culture or psychosocial risk is qualified to do so, and the profession’s unwillingness to challenge this is, in itself, another example of the problem.
Ego is holding HR back.
In strategy, finance, operations and technology, ideas are constantly pressure tested, experts are consulted. Debate is expected. Commercial outcomes matter.
But HR can sometimes feel like an echo chamber of recycled thinking:
the same conference topics
the same LinkedIn quotes
the same frameworks just reinvented
the same “new” ideas that aren’t actually new at all
inexperience being supplemented by AI
We’ve digitised outdated practices and called it transformation!
Formal performance reviews still broken and still entrenched (read here)
Culture surveys are still over relied upon (read here)
Leadership development done the same way (read here)
Talent acquisition lacking strategic thinking (read here)
And HR metrics still focus on the same stuff.
The irony is that HR speaks constantly about diversity of thought, yet the profession can be remarkably uncomfortable with perspectives that challenge HR orthodoxy.
I love my chosen profession, I know how hard the role is, and but I also know HR is capable of far more. We should be leading the future of work, not repackaging the past. We should be commercially courageous, not process protective. We should be challenging leadership thinking, not hiding behind safe language.
And maybe that starts with us being willing to challenge ourselves first.
Throughout my career, one thing I never allowed within my own teams was the comfort of believing we had all the answers simply because we worked in HR. I actively pushed my teams to challenge the status quo, challenge accepted thinking, challenge me, and most importantly, challenge themselves.
Because the moment HR becomes too confident in its own expertise is the moment it stops evolving.
The best HR leaders are the most commercially curious, the most open to being wrong, and the most willing to rethink what good could look like.
I genuinely believe our profession needs more of that.
Less ego. More curiosity.
Less repetition. More reinvention.
Less protection. More evolution and risk taking.
