The Diary of a CPO - Chapter 8

Why are so many HR leaders leaving their jobs at an alarming rate?

Have you ever heard the phrase, “HR is a thankless job?” 

How about, “HR is the complaints department?”

Or this one, “HR is not for the faint of heart?”

For anyone who ever thought going into HR would be fun (how difficult could it be to manage culture in the organization), I say you haven’t done enough of the hard things to be a credible HR leader. Because unless you have occasional bouts where you want to quit your job and contemplate something vastly different, you have only touched the surface of HR.

I once wrote a LinkedIn post on a whim after a very bad day at work. I didn’t put a lot of thought or effort into my post. I simply picked up my phone and typed in how I was feeling that day.

Without planning to, that post generated 2.3 million views, 23,000+ likes, 1,000+ comments and 2,000+ reposts. (If you’re curious about the post, you can read it here).

My opinion is that HR is one of the hardest jobs out there because you have to deal with people. While most jobs focus on one prime thing - sales, technology, product development, finance, etc. HR deals with people. The good, the bad, and the extremely ugly. This is their job and I often call it the “customer service department” of organizations. And we all know customer service is damned hard (insert image of bad customer behaviours throwing coffee at baristas or having a temper tantrum because a customer couldn’t get a refund for their purchase from last year). You know exactly what I’m talking about, and we always secretly think the same things when we witness these incidents, “These customer service agents don’t get paid enough to tolerate this.” We also all know now…the customer is not always right. And neither are all employees.

I remember I once had a coffee chat with a founder/CEO who was building a business and wanted to see how he could build a great culture. I was honest about the things you need to do as a CEO and as a leader to build a thriving company that creates a great culture - and I don’t mean great as in happy employees that are hugging each other all day and being besties. I mean building a great culture of accountability, performance and success. You don’t get all of that just by being nice and giving your employees anything they want, whenever they want. Leaders build accountability, performance and drive success through honest conversations, courageous actions and by challenging people to grow. If you don’t have the courage to do those difficult things, you will ultimately build a company of entitlement, complacency and self-serving motives.

His reaction to my feedback was a smirky grin. He responded by saying, “Oh, I get it, you’re jaded and burnt out.” His confident smirk showed me that he felt he knew better. He continued by sharing that he believed if you create the right type of environment, culture will find its place nicely. Oh, if only it were that easy. A few weeks later, I saw that his company posted a job description for an HR manager. One of the requirements of the job was “to be happy.”

Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash

Honestly? Like some sort of creepy toxic positivity mask that their HR leader must wear while going around stocking the snack drawers and booking the pizza parties for lunch so everyone is happy? That one line completely turned me off. This was not a credible job description and you would never add a line like that if you were hiring a finance manager or a marketing manager. 

Well, that company made their hire and things seemed to be going well but in time, their high engagement scores dropped (everyone knows that when you’re small, your eNPS is often high, but when you grow, it’s difficult to keep the momentum going). Employees started to complain, bad behaviours set in and company reviews started to go down. The biggest complaint was that the leadership team didn’t know how to lead apparently. It appears that having a happy HR manager didn’t help their cause afterall.

So without trying to sound jaded, I’d love to share a CPO’s top 5 things that leaders should not be doing and my advice for what to do instead. Side note, I only share 5 because this article can only be so long, but I could easily share 20.

# 1. You don’t create greatness by showering rewards without earning them.

This is every lesson a new founder or new leader ever learned about culture (the hard way). This is in fact, the worst thing you can do for people. It’s like a toxic form of gentle parenting where you give anything their heart desires without the ability to cope with the hard things that come their way (and they always do). If you have a habit of just giving out trophies without developing the muscles and the minds that receive them, these folks will be in jobs they can’t scale with empty titles, and they will ultimately never be able to compete for similar jobs in the real world where experts are skilled and credible at what they do (remember that Aussie break dancer at the Paris Olympics?).

Rather, leaders should develop skills like critical thinking, conflict management and disciplined approaches, so that people can experience challenges that allow them to thrive in adversity. That is a far greater gift for your employees than just handing out rewards that weren’t fully earned. Honestly, think about some people at your workplace - do their titles really justify their experience? I’ve met COOs that were 25 years old and CTOs that were glorified IT support managers. Giving in to entitlement ultimately hurts the ones that you care about the most because unless the rest of the world is willing to roll out red carpets for them everywhere they go, they will ultimately crash and fail. 

#2. You don’t reward bad behaviours (even when they’re winning at their jobs).

In HR, we often call these folks “brilliant jerks” because most people in this bucket do their jobs really well - they hit their revenue targets and manage their projects with ease. However, their greatest downfall is their bad attitude and behaviours, often showcased to their peers, their teams and even their managers. They create drama (but it’s never their fault) and they lash out to those around them because they feel a sense of entitlement. They are smug in thinking, “Why would anyone punish me if I’m doing a great job at my work?” In the world of assessing who should stay and who must go, these are the first ones that leaders should remove from the company, even before poor performers because they negatively impact so many people.

I often give the advice that if you can’t get them to recognize their behaviours and how it impacts the team in a harmful way, then your only option is to release them. Being terminated from a job that they were doing well in is jarring but it might be just that which will get them to change. The alternative reaction is that they will blame the company and everyone but themselves. Eventually, they join a new company, and guess what happens? History will repeat itself.  The reason why releasing is often the best way to tackle bad behaviour folks is that you can’t force someone to change their behaviour if they don’t want to. The onus sits with that person alone.

#3. You don’t give preferential treatment to poor performers just because you like them as a person.

This one is something that every leader I’ve ever worked with struggled with. In this scenario, there is always someone that either the founder, the CEO, or a senior leader feels strongly attached to. We build relationships all the time as humans and this especially happens at work where we spend the most amount of time with the people we work with. What typically happens is that this leader hires someone that becomes a fixture at the company - they’re often long-standing in tenure, they spent many long nights working on big problems together and they probably made a pact a long time ago that they would take the company to wild success together. They are essentially bonded at work.

But somewhere along the way, this person can no longer keep up with the job. Perhaps they’ve been promoted too quickly, too many times and the job got bigger than them, or they became disengaged and complacent in their belief that they have life-long security in their job. Regardless if it’s the former or the latter, both scenarios not only harm this person’s ability to develop themselves further but the seat that they continue to sit in at the company hurts the company. Any hires you make below them rise up to the level of their leader, and if their leader is an incompetent B performer, they will often hire a C performer under them. This person prevents their own team’s ability to develop and achieve greatness, or they will take advantage of their team by delegating all the work to them while they sit comfortably in their office planning their next vacation or social outing (I’ve spoken to so many employees who claimed they had no idea their boss wasn’t actually doing work during work hours). At the worst, this creates morale issues for the team(s) they lead and for the ones who are doing the work. What’s the fastest way to create an environment of nepotism, preferential treatment and unfairness? Keep rewarding these folks who are only doing 50% of their job.

#4. You don’t have difficult conversations because you want to be liked.

Who doesn’t want to be liked? I think everyone prefers to be liked and keep the boat steady. Why spend an afternoon sharing constructive feedback with a colleague on knowing that they’re going to ruin your weekend (and theirs). But if you’re in the position of a leader, this is what you signed up for. I’m not sure people realize this but as you climb that ladder of management, the more senior you become, the more your job consists of people and problem managing all day, like up to 80%. It doesn’t get easier which is why building up your ability to have really difficult conversations is so critical to your success. HR is there to help and guide you along the way, but this is not their responsibility. It’s yours. Any organization or leader that relies on HR to share bad news are the ones who create the bad reputation of HR as an industry, not to mention you are not worthy of the title of “leader.”

This also goes back to why you need to develop your skills to move up. Being an expert in Finance or Marketing isn’t going to make you an excellent leader if you don’t know how to manage people and give direct feedback, navigate difficult relationships and communicate hard things. Your desire to be liked should be trumped by your desire to be respected.

#5. You always counter an offer when someone threatens to leave.

This is something every manager has had experience with. They have an employee on their team that wants something (a promotion, a salary increase or more vacation time). The person gets declined at this time and then a few months later, they come back to their manager threatening that while they “weren’t looking,” their profile was noticed by a recruiter and they are offering them xx% higher salary or a much more senior position so they felt compelled to bring this forward. The manager runs to HR to state they cannot lose this person and they don’t have time to hire/train their replacement at this time. HR does not advise counter offering this employee, sharing real stats that claim the following:

• 80% of employees who accept a counter offer end up leaving within six months.

• 50% of employees who accept a counter offer regret their decision.

• Only 3% of employees who accept a counter offer stay with the same company for more than two years.

The manager will not be swayed and gains the approval to counter the offer. The employee accepts and if the story ended here happily, there would be no issues regarding counter offers. But the reality is that counter offers rarely succeed in the long run. While the offer may temporarily make the employee happy, eventually their reasons for being dissatisfied in the role or at the company have not changed (if anything, they don’t have the opportunity to complain anymore since they were given what they wanted with the counter offer). So in the end, the employee ends up leaving anyway and in the meantime, the department now has a manager with a reputation of divvying out higher compensation and promotions to keep people. You’ve now set a very loud precedent within your team and your company.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering why I shared my top 5 things that leaders shouldn’t be doing? 

Going back to the beginning of my article, there are reasons why HR leaders are leaving their jobs at accelerating and alarming rates. It’s not easy dealing with people, especially when they’re managing the complaints, the problems, the issues and the negative opinions directed their way all day, but when leaders (who are the business partners for HR) choose to disregard the advice that HR leaders proactively provide, the issues that follow are inevitable and they are often pivoted back to HR to fix once again. It’s like advising someone not to proceed with a business deal until they’ve read the contract thoroughly but they decide not to heed your advice because they know this person. And then they get bamboozled out of millions for a corrupt deal that could have been avoided and now you’re the one being asked to get this person out of this dilemma. Do you know how many times an HR leader wishes they could say, “I told you so….”

I guess when you’ve been in HR for so many years, you’ve gained a lot of experience not just through solving endless problems and finding creative solutions, but also how to avoid predictable situations in the future. While we can’t all see the future, one thing is certain - the more you deal with people, the more you understand the psychology of people (the good, the bad and the oh so ugly) as well as organizational behaviours. While nothing really surprises HR people anymore (they’ve often seen it all), they are also wiser for it and realize that they also have a choice…to continue repeating the crazy over and over again, or to not. They can choose to leave the company or the industry altogether. And they are, in droves.

The next time you see your HR leader cleaning up someone else’s mistake (maybe yours), consider how to avoid this circumstance in the future because that could possibly retain your HR leader a little longer.