The Diary of a CPO - Chapter 10

When your soul wants to do a hard pivot.

Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash

I’ve worked as an HR leader at 7 startups in my career, mostly in the tech industry. The majority of these companies were also led by founders which allowed me to learn so much about what it takes to build a company from the ground up. It’s truly a massive feat and I have such profound respect for each of them.

I recently joined an amazing tech startup and had the opportunity to work with a wonderful co-founder CEO whom I have known and respected for many years. The company had all the usual “problems” that you’ll find in any high-growth tech startup - the need to scale operations, systems, and processes to optimize velocity and agility. The need to stand behind their strong values and adopt a leadership style that could bring out the best in their people. And the need to “unlearn” how things were done in the past so they could “relearn” how best to position themselves for this new phase of growth and maturity.

It was an immensely fortunate opportunity for me, but after 30 days, I felt that maybe this wasn’t the best work that I could be doing at this point in my career. The truth is, I was doing work that I’ve done over and over again for the last 7 companies I worked at. There’s something about the predictable repetitive motion of doing things over again that feels like my soul is slowly dying. That excitement of doing things for the first time, even fixing an ugly problem, was gone. For someone who loves to be curious, try new things, and take massive risks, turning the page on the same playbook became a difficult pill to swallow. My desire to build a company felt strangely like I had built this Lego building before - the anomaly was no longer there because I was managing the same function over again. HR.

And to be honest, HR has beaten me down over the past decade as I found myself doing more of the “hard” things in HR vs the rewarding things. Over the past 5 years alone, the HR function has been mandated to oversee a global pandemic (aka COVID), support team “culture” while witnessing extremely polarizing world events, and deal with the outcomes of economic and political issues that threaten our livelihoods resulting in massive mental health issues. We were all facing this at work together because we are all “employees,” but one function had to own the strategy to deal with all of the above, and that was HR. There’s really no training for this stuff and no one graduates from “HR business school” with a playbook for these critical issues. We’re not talking about a P0 bug that can be fixed in a few hours. And there will certainly be more, fresh new crises to be had, which means the playbook is a living document that grows annually. HR becomes the lucky leader to deal with all of the above because HR “deals with people.”

When a leader loses her temper and yells an F-bomb at her team - it becomes an HR problem. When the company Glassdoor page blows up because a reduction in force occurred due to excessive burn - it becomes an HR problem. When a high performer suddenly becomes a low performer - it becomes an HR problem. When HR has the leanest team in the company because they’re considered “overhead” vs a “revenue generator,” and the work still needs to get done (regardless if the company size has doubled over the past 12 months) - it’s still an HR problem.

Photo by zhenhao Liu on Unsplash

I understand why many CPOs are either “burnt out” and choose to leave the industry for something entirely different, or they deliberately go into “fractional” HR so that they can “go in, do their thing, and go out” (or as my fractional CPOs like to call it, “get the fuck out”). With fractional work, you rarely take any baggage home, you don’t feel emotionally depleted at the end of the day, and you have less of an attachment to the human problems in an organization. It just becomes a “job” which I guess allows you to stay in the profession longer, but it sure does feel transactional because you’re not really working for impact, you’re just checking in and checking out. Which is why it doesn’t really appeal to me…but neither do all of the HR issues I mentioned above.

So going back to my original story, I recently departed this amazing company and CEO (that I really, really admire and respect) so that I could take a step back and dream of what I truly want to do. Choosing to depart a company is one of the hardest things you’ll do in your career, but it’s better than staying somewhere you feel won’t benefit both sides equally. I didn’t leave the company for another job. I left to discover what I wanted to do next.

So I asked myself, if anything were possible, what would I want to do that could be vastly different from what I’ve done in the past? What role could I play where I could do something challenging but exhilarating (is that even possible or are all jobs just hard but predictable)? I mean, maybe HR wasn’t supposed to be my thing forever. Maybe HR is asking me to do a hard pivot. Feels like it…

This will be my time to take a break, reconnect with my closest peers, and find my love for people again. That’s right, sometimes you start to dislike people in general because HR becomes such a thankless job. When was the last time you thanked anyone in HR for the things they do? You probably don’t because you assume they’re just doing their job. While that’s true, it’s the only job at a company where the ink for the “duties & requirements” for the role never dries but rather, grows.

If you know me personally but we haven’t connected in a while because I’ve always been too busy at work, feel free to DM. I’d love to just talk and rebuild some great relationships once again. And thanks for reading.

Photo by Raychan on Unsplash