That gap is what I keep running into.

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HR practitioners are having more ideas about AI than almost any other function. We are attending the sessions, listening to the podcasts, collecting the use cases. We are genuinely curious and genuinely engaged. And most of us are still not shipping anything.

I have been sitting with why that is, because “I’m too busy” is not an honest answer. “I’m not technical” stopped being a real excuse about eighteen months ago.

Zachary Parris named something useful on the Modern People Leader podcast. He said it comes down to mindset, not tools, not capability. The people who are building things have made a specific internal shift. The people who are not building have not made it yet, including me, until recently.

The shift is not about knowing more. It is about tolerating the gap between the idea and the messy, imperfect first version of the thing. Parris framed it directly: you do not pitch the workflow. You build the workflow and show it running.

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We are trained to get things right before we put them in front of people. Every piece of guidance, every framework, every communication has to be approved, reviewed, considered from multiple angles. That instinct is useful in a lot of HR work. It is death to building. The version you will actually learn from is the one you made in two hours and put in front of a real person to watch them use.

There is a cost to staying in ideas mode, and it is not just missed opportunity in the abstract. It is credibility. HR has been talking about being strategic, about demonstrating value, about having a seat at the table for twenty years. Building is the clearest way to make that case right now. When you ship something, even something small, you are not describing what HR could become. You are showing it.

What Parris also said, and what I keep returning to, is that the problem statement has to come first. Before you touch a tool or a prompt or a prototype, you have to genuinely understand what you are solving for. That discipline HR actually has. We know how to diagnose. We know how to ask what the real problem is underneath the stated one. That is a real edge. Most of us are just not using it to build anything.

So here is the honest question. You have had at least one idea in the last ninety days that could have become a real tool, a working agent, a prototype someone could actually try. What is still sitting in a note somewhere? And what would it take to give it a deadline?

Most AI enablement at work is a lunch-and-learn with a lot of “coming soon,” or a vendor demo where everything works perfectly and nothing looks like your actual problems. People leave those sessions having watched something happen to someone else. That’s a different experience than being in the room when a thing gets made.

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What happened in our session was different, and I didn’t plan it that way. I was building live. When something broke, they watched me debug it. When I wasn’t sure which direction to go, I asked the group. Their questions weren’t softballs. They pushed on things I hadn’t thought through. One person asked something that completely reframed what the agent should actually do. We changed course mid-build because of it. That’s what made it work.

When AI stays only in demos and decks, the people closest to the actual work never develop a feel for what it can do. They wait to be told what to do with the thing. In HR, that has real consequences. We have data problems, process problems, capacity problems. Priorities sitting in a slide deck that nobody has time to fully address. If the people on the team who understand those problems intimately never get close enough to AI to imagine a solution, we leave the gap open.

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Building in front of people feels vulnerable. Something might not work. The demo might fail. Most leaders default to presenting things that are already polished because polished things protect credibility. That instinct costs something. When you only show people finished products, you accidentally communicate that building is beyond them. You create an expert-audience dynamic instead of a collaborative one. And you miss the chance to find out that someone on your team will ask the question that makes the whole thing better.

Share the screen. Build something you actually need. Pick one real problem your team is sitting on, something tied to actual work and actual priorities, then build toward it out loud, with them in the room. Let them steer. Let them see you figure it out in real time.

When the session ends, you’ll have something real. And a team that was part of making it. That changes how they relate to the tool.

I ran it. What came back hit harder than I expected. Not because it was cruel. Because it was close.

The things it got right, it got uncomfortably right. Patterns I’d named out loud but hadn’t fully reckoned with. Tensions I’d described as external circumstances rather than choices. The gap between who I say I’m building toward and what I actually spend my days doing. It wasn’t reading my mind. It was reading my own words back to me with no incentive to soften them. That’s a different experience than journaling. That’s a different experience than a performance review. It’s closer to what a really honest friend would say if they weren’t worried about the relationship.

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But here’s the part I didn’t expect. Some of what surfaced weren’t things I already knew and had been avoiding. They were things I had been struggling to name at all. Vague discomforts I’d been carrying around without being able to articulate them clearly. Seeing them written out plainly, without hedging or diplomatic softening, gave me language for something that had just been static. That clarity felt like a release more than an indictment. Sometimes the most useful thing isn’t a new insight. It’s finally being able to name the thing that’s been sitting just out of reach.

What made it land even harder was that some of what came back had also come up in therapy. Recently. I’d already done the work of naming certain patterns with someone trained to help me see them. And here was the same thread showing up again, surfaced from nothing but my own words in a work context. That kind of convergence is hard to dismiss. When the same truth finds you from two completely different directions, it’s probably not a coincidence.

Where it missed, it missed because it’s only seeing part of the picture. It doesn’t have access to my full life, just the slice I’ve shared in a particular context. So some of what it offered felt incomplete rather than wrong. A diagnosis without the full chart. Still worth something, but worth holding loosely.

What makes this hard isn’t the feedback itself. It’s that once you’ve read it, you can’t unknow it. The comfortable move is to treat it like an interesting exercise, take a screenshot, share it as content, and move on without sitting in what it actually said. Most of us will do exactly that.

So what do you actually do with it? I don’t think there’s a clean answer. But I’ve been sitting with the idea that the value isn’t in the list. It’s in picking one thing, just one, and asking whether the way I’m spending my time right now is consistent with wanting to change it. Not a plan. Not a framework. Just that one honest question applied to one pattern that showed up on the list.

The prompt is worth running. But running it is the easy part. The harder question is what you do the day after, when the sting has faded and your calendar looks exactly the same as it did before.

FULL PROMPT:

“Based on everything you know about me from our conversations, tell me 10 brutal truths about myself that I probably don't want to hear. Be completely honest, don't sugarcoat anything, and tell me exactly what's holding me back.”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debhaasai/

That invoice isn’t a flex. It’s a blueprint. AI spend functioning as headcount is no longer a thought experiment. It’s a live operating model, and it’s running right now inside companies that didn’t ask your workforce planning team for permission. A CPO put it plainly in the comments: the question she’s fielding isn’t “how many people do we need?” It’s three questions at once. What work requires a human? What gets augmented? What gets fully replaced by an agent? And critically, what does each of those cost? That reframe matters because it moves the conversation out of replacement anxiety and into something more honest: capacity modeling. We’ve always planned for human capacity. We just haven’t built the muscle to plan for agent capacity alongside it.

Workforce planning built on headcount alone is going to produce bad answers. Not eventually. Now. If a four-person team can operate with the output capacity of a much larger organization by routing $113K through an API, then every headcount model that doesn’t account for agent capacity is already working with incomplete inputs. The decisions that flow from that, hiring plans, org design, succession, skills investment, will be structurally miscalibrated. And the gap between what leaders think they need and what the work actually requires will keep widening until someone names it. By then, the cost isn’t just strategic. It’s credibility.

Because workforce planning has always been a headcount conversation. The tools are built for it. The mental models are built for it. Adding agent capacity as a real variable, with its own cost structure, output metrics, and reliability envelope, requires rethinking infrastructure that most HR functions haven’t had to question before. That’s not laziness. It’s gravity.

Start with the CPO’s ratio: human capacity plus agent capacity versus the work that needs to get done. Not AI spend versus revenue. That’s a finance metric. The people metric is about coverage, capability, and judgment. A practical place to begin is mapping where agents are already operating inside your organization, even informally, before anyone built a policy around it. Most teams are further along than their workforce plans reflect. From there, the question becomes what you actually track. Token spend by function is a start, but it doesn’t tell you much on its own. The more useful layer is mapping that spend against what the agent is reliably producing, and where a human is still catching errors, making judgment calls, or providing the context the agent can’t hold. That margin is where your real workforce planning data lives.

If an agent is functioning like headcount in your organization, is it in your workforce plan? If not, what are you actually planning?

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what that means for people like me. People who aren’t writing books or giving keynote talks. People who just have strong perspectives on their own experience in the working world.

Thought leadership, as we’ve known it, has always been aspirational and polished. The big ideas. The frameworks. The insights delivered from a stage or published in a carefully edited article. It’s impressive. It’s also increasingly useless.

Because what most people actually need isn’t another framework. It’s someone showing them how they tackled a messy problem and got it over the finish line. Not the polished version where everything worked perfectly. The real version where half of it didn’t work and they had to figure it out anyway.

In a world where anyone can use AI to generate polished-sounding insights, what becomes valuable is the stuff AI can’t create. The specific experience of actually doing something. The decisions you made when the path wasn’t clear. The thing you tried that completely failed and what you learned from it.

That’s thought doership. And I think we need a lot more of it.

People consume endless content about best practices and big ideas, but they still don’t know how to actually implement anything. Because the distance between “here’s a compelling framework” and “here’s how I made this work in my specific messy context” is massive.

We keep elevating people who sound authoritative over people who are actually doing the work. The person who writes beautifully about organizational change gets more attention than the person who just led a successful restructure and could tell you exactly what went wrong and how they recovered.

I’m frankly tired of reading highly polished insights that don’t tell me anything about the reality of getting things done at work. I want the tips and tricks. The workarounds. The conversations that unlocked progress. The real mechanics of how someone moved something forward.

Thought leadership became valuable when access to expertise was scarce. AI has changed that equation. Anyone can now generate something that sounds like thought leadership. Well-structured arguments. Compelling frameworks. Professional polish.

What is scarce is specificity. The details that can only come from actually doing something. AI can’t generate that because it didn’t live through it.

But there’s also a cultural barrier. We’re conditioned to think sharing knowledge means having all the answers. That admitting what didn’t work makes you look incompetent instead of honest.

We need to value thought doership over thought leadership. That means sharing how you had an idea and ran with it, even if it didn’t turn out perfectly. Being specific about the decisions you made and why, including the ones that turned out to be wrong.

It means showing the real side. Not the version where you had it all figured out from the beginning. The version where you were uncertain, made mistakes, adjusted, and eventually got to something that worked.

I want to see more people bringing their version of thought doership. The HR person who can explain how they built a process that actually got used. The designer who can show the five iterations that didn’t work before landing on the one that did.

You’ve done things at work that other people could learn from. Not because you’re an expert. Because you’ve navigated situations and learned from what happened.

What’s something you’ve done recently that didn’t go perfectly but taught you something worth sharing? And what would it look like to share the real version instead of the polished one?

They’re calling it efficiency. What they’re actually doing is destroying the only place where future leaders learn how to lead.

Middle management is where people learn to lead before the stakes are existential. It’s where you figure out how to give difficult feedback when it’s one team member, not an entire division. Where you learn to navigate organizational politics when the consequences are manageable. Where you make mistakes that teach you how to lead without those mistakes taking down the business.

Eliminating this layer doesn’t just reduce headcount. It removes the training ground for everyone who’s supposed to run the company in five years.

I’m watching this play out across industries. Companies cut middle management to reduce costs, then three years later they’re scrambling because they have no one ready to step into senior leadership roles. The gap between individual contributor and executive is so wide that people can’t make the jump. They’ve never managed people. Never navigated cross-functional conflict. Never had to make decisions with incomplete information.

The executives who talk about removing layers to “empower people” aren’t acknowledging what happens when you skip crucial developmental experiences. You don’t empower people by giving them more responsibility without the scaffolding to learn how to handle it. You set them up to fail.

This shows up in succession planning conversations that go nowhere. Leadership looks at the organization and realizes there’s no one ready to take over when executives retire. Not because people aren’t talented, but because they haven’t had the experiences that build executive capability. And you can’t manufacture ten years of leadership development in six months when someone suddenly needs to step up.

Middle managers aren’t just executing strategy from above and managing work from below. They’re learning how to translate vision into action. How to build teams. How to develop people. How to handle the complexity of competing priorities. These are the capabilities that make someone ready for senior leadership, and you don’t learn them by going straight from individual contributor to executive.

Organizations that eliminated middle management in the name of efficiency are going to face a leadership crisis. Not today. But soon. When their current executives retire or leave and there’s no one prepared to replace them.

You can hire senior leaders from outside. But external hires don’t have institutional knowledge. They don’t understand your culture. They don’t have relationships built over years. You’re trading long-term leadership development for short-term cost savings, and that trade-off will eventually break you.

What companies need to understand is that middle management isn’t just a cost center. It’s an investment in future leadership. Cutting it saves money now and creates a catastrophic gap later.

If you’ve already eliminated these roles, you need a different plan for how people develop leadership capabilities. Stretch assignments. Acting roles. Formal development programs. Something that replaces what middle management used to provide naturally.

If you haven’t cut these roles yet, think carefully about what you’re actually eliminating. It’s not just organizational layers. It’s the mechanism that builds the leaders you’re going to need.

Does your organization have a leadership pipeline? Or did you eliminate the layer where leaders were supposed to develop?

People can now engage with AI at any moment to generate ideas, solve problems, and produce output at speeds that weren’t possible six months ago. We’re treating this as a productivity breakthrough. In reality, we’re creating the conditions for a new kind of cognitive burnout that traditional wellness programs aren’t designed to address.

I’ve noticed something in my own work that contradicts what we keep hearing about AI and efficiency. Short sessions with AI tools drain me faster than hours of traditional work ever did. I can accomplish more in 30 minutes than I used to in three hours, but I hit a wall quicker than I ever have before.

This isn’t about capacity or discipline. It’s about cognitive load.

When you work with AI, you’re not just completing tasks. You’re evaluating exponentially more information, weighing more options, and making rapid decisions about what’s good enough versus what needs refinement. The intensity of processing is fundamentally different from traditional work, even when the output looks similar.

Traditional work had natural constraints that created built-in recovery periods. You could only research so much in an afternoon. You could only draft so many versions before running out of time. The limits weren’t ideal, but they forced cognitive breaks.

AI removes those constraints entirely. You can iterate endlessly, research infinitely, and generate option after option without the tool ever signaling that it’s time to stop. Your brain doesn’t get natural pause points because the technology never gets tired.

This dynamic is showing up across roles and industries. The content creator producing three times the volume but feeling completely depleted by noon. The developer coding faster than ever but unable to think clearly by mid-afternoon. The strategist generating insights at unprecedented speed but lacking the clarity to evaluate which ones actually matter.

Productivity metrics are up. Cognitive sustainability is collapsing. And most organizations are celebrating the former without measuring the latter.

Companies are about to face a form of burnout that doesn’t fit existing frameworks. This isn’t about working too many hours or lacking work-life balance. It’s about brains processing volumes of possibility that exceed what we’re built to handle.

If organizations don’t build wellbeing strategies specifically for AI-augmented work, they’ll watch their people crash in ways that meditation apps and mental health days can’t address. The problem isn’t stress management. It’s cognitive overload from working with infinitely generative tools that never signal when enough is enough.

What companies actually need are policies around AI usage that go beyond data security and productivity optimization. We need frameworks for when to engage with AI and when to step away from it. We need work structures that build in cognitive recovery, not just task completion. We need protected space for human connection that allows brains to slow down and be present instead of constantly processing outputs and evaluating options.

Organizations need to foster moments where people aren’t optimizing, iterating, or generating. Where they’re simply thinking. Or deliberately not thinking at all.

This shift requires intention and foresight. The companies that will succeed in five years won’t just be the ones that adopted AI fastest. They’ll be the ones that figured out how to use it sustainably, without burning through their people’s cognitive capacity in the process.

Does your organization have a wellbeing strategy designed for how people actually work with AI? Or are you measuring productivity gains while ignoring the cognitive costs that will eventually show up in your retention and performance data?

Leadership is thrilled about the productivity gains. But my friend is watching something else happen. People are starting to ask questions they didn’t ask before. “If AI can do this part of my job, what am I actually here for?”

The efficiency gains everyone celebrates are creating an identity crisis nobody planned for.

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Companies seeing explosive AI adoption are facing a challenge most haven’t named yet. Their people are going to demand a new value proposition when the fundamental nature of their work is changing this rapidly.

This isn’t about job security. It’s about purpose. If significant portions of someone’s role can now be handled by AI, the parts that remain need to matter more.

At the same time, employees are being asked to show up differently. Not just to use AI tools, but to bring ideas and new ways of thinking. The implicit contract is shifting from “execute your responsibilities reliably” to “think creatively about how we should be working.”

That’s a fundamentally different value proposition than most organizations were built on.

Your best people leave because they can’t articulate their value anymore. They’re productive. They’re using AI effectively. But they feel like they’re operating tools instead of contributing something that matters.

Engagement drops even as productivity rises. People are accomplishing more but feeling less connected to the work. The metrics look great. The culture feels hollow.

You create a divide between people who adapt and people who resist. The organization fractures because there’s no shared understanding of what work means now.

Culture changes slowly. AI adoption is happening fast. The gap between how quickly the tools are changing work and how quickly organizations can evolve their culture is massive.

Most organizations don’t know what they actually value in human contribution yet. We’re still figuring out what humans should do when AI can handle tasks we used to think required human intelligence.

Leadership is often disconnected from how AI is actually changing day-to-day work. They see productivity gains in dashboards. They don’t see the designer questioning whether their creative judgment matters when AI can generate a dozen options instantly.

Companies need to redefine what they’re asking from employees in the AI era. If AI handles execution, what does the organization need from humans? Judgment? Creativity? Strategic thinking? Whatever it is, it needs to be explicit and valued in how people are measured and rewarded.

This means having honest conversations about how roles are changing. Not in the abstract. Specifically. “Here’s what your role used to require. Here’s what it requires now. Here’s what we value from you that AI can’t provide.”

Culture has to shift from valuing productivity to valuing contribution. When AI can generate infinite output, volume stops being meaningful. What someone adds that AI can’t becomes the measure that matters.

Your organization is probably already in the middle of this shift whether you’ve named it or not. AI is changing how work gets done. People are questioning what their role means.

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The question isn’t whether your culture needs to change. It’s whether you’re going to shape that change intentionally or let it happen to you.

What does your employee value proposition actually look like when AI can handle much of what people used to do? And are you having that conversation, or hoping it resolves itself?

Everyone congratulated her. Leadership was excited. She seemed excited. Big title. More money. Recognition for years of excellent work.

Three months later, she’s on the phone with me. Miserable.

“I spend all day in meetings. Client calls. Team check-ins. Budget reviews. I haven’t actually designed anything in weeks. This isn’t what I wanted.”

I ask the obvious question. “Did you want to be a creative director?”

She looks at me like I’m missing the point. “I wanted to advance my career. This was the only way to do that.”

And that’s the problem. In most agencies, the only path up is into management. If you want more money, more influence, more recognition, you have to stop doing the work you’re good at and start managing people.

For some roles, that works. Account people often want to manage. They like the coordination, the client relationships, the strategic oversight.

But creatives? Strategists? Producers? Most of them got into this work because they love the craft. And management takes them away from it.

Your best creative becomes a creative director. Your top strategist becomes a strategy director. Your senior producer becomes a production lead.

Now they spend more time in meetings than doing the work they love. They’re managing teams, reviewing work, handling client politics, sitting in status updates.

And they’re miserable. Because the skills that made them great at their craft, curiosity, attention to detail, love of the work itself, don’t automatically translate to being good at management. And even if they could be good managers, many of them don’t want to be.

But agencies keep pushing people into management because that’s how career progression works. Individual contributor roles top out. If you want to keep growing, keep earning more, keep having influence, you move into leadership.

From my perspective, this creates multiple problems at once.

You lose your best practitioners. The designer who elevated every project they touched is now directing others instead of designing. The strategist who could see insights nobody else saw is now in budget meetings. Their craft suffers because they’re not doing it anymore.

You gain mediocre managers. Just because someone’s great at design doesn’t mean they’re great at managing designers. The skills are different. And when you promote people into management because they’re good at the work, not because they’re good at leading people, you get managers who struggle.

The person who got promoted is unhappy. They thought advancement meant doing more of what they love at a higher level. Instead, it means doing less of what they love and more of what drains them.

Their team suffers. A reluctant manager who doesn’t want to be managing can’t effectively develop people, give good feedback, or create the conditions for great work. The team feels it. They don’t get the leadership they need because their manager would rather be doing the work themselves.

I’ve watched this play out across every discipline. Creatives who became creative directors and stopped making. Strategists who became strategy leads and stopped doing deep thinking work. Producers who became production managers and spent all their time in administrative tasks they hated.

And in almost every case, there was a moment where they wished they could go back. But they couldn’t, because going backward felt like failure. And the agency needed them in that leadership role, even if it wasn’t right for them.

Here’s what happens when you force people into management they don’t want.

You lose talent. Your best people leave because the only way to advance is into a role they don’t want. They go to places that let them stay in the craft while still growing. Or they go freelance so they can do the work without the management burden.

I watched an agency lose a brilliant strategist who’d been there for seven years. She was being groomed for a director role. Managing a team. Overseeing multiple accounts. She didn’t want it. She wanted to do strategy. But that wasn’t an option at her level. So she left for a consultancy that had principal-level IC roles. The agency lost her expertise because they couldn’t create a path that fit what she actually wanted.

Quality declines because your best practitioners aren’t practicing anymore. They’re managing. The work gets done by less experienced people without the same level of oversight or craft because the person who used to do it brilliantly is now in meetings all day.

You create a management layer that’s ineffective. People who don’t want to manage don’t do it well. They avoid difficult conversations. They don’t develop their teams. They micromanage because they’d rather just do the work themselves. And the people reporting to them suffer for it.

Culture gets weird when people are promoted into roles they’re not suited for. Everyone can tell when someone’s a reluctant manager. It creates resentment. The person in the role resents being there. Their team resents not getting real leadership. And everyone else wonders why the agency keeps promoting people who clearly don’t want the job.

During one particularly bad stretch, an agency promoted three people into leadership roles within a few months. A designer to creative director. A strategist to strategy lead. A producer to production manager. Within a year, all three were struggling. The teams weren’t performing. The newly promoted people were burned out. And morale was terrible because everyone could see the promotions weren’t working.

So why do agencies keep doing this?

The traditional career ladder only goes one direction. Up means management. That’s how it’s always worked in most industries. And agencies haven’t figured out a different model.

There’s also an assumption that your best practitioners should lead. If you’re great at the work, you should teach others to do it. You should set the standard. You should guide the next generation. That sounds logical until you realize teaching and managing are different skills than doing.

Financially, it’s easier to justify paying someone more if they’re managing a team. Leadership roles come with bigger budgets. IC roles, even senior ones, have caps. If you want to pay someone what they’re worth, putting them in a management role is the clearest path.

And honestly, agencies need managers. Someone has to lead the teams. Someone has to interface with clients at a strategic level. Someone has to make decisions about staffing and priorities. If your most experienced people won’t do it, who will?

But just because you need managers doesn’t mean everyone should become one.

Here’s what I think needs to change. Agencies need to build real IC career paths that don’t top out at mid-level.

Create senior IC roles with real authority and compensation. Principal designer. Lead strategist. Lead senior producer. These aren’t just fancy titles for people who don’t want to manage. They’re roles with influence, autonomy, and pay that competes with management track roles.

These people should be the craft leaders. They set the standard for quality. They mentor junior people, not through formal management but through their work and guidance. They’re on the most important projects. They have a voice in how the discipline evolves.

But they’re not managing teams. They’re not in operational meetings about utilization and budgets. They’re doing the work at the highest level and making everyone around them better through their expertise.

I’ve seen a few agencies do this well. They created parallel tracks. One for people who want to manage. One for people who want to stay in the craft. Both tracks go high. Both have compensation that reflects seniority. Both have influence. They’re just different paths.

The management track leads teams, handles operations, interfaces with clients on strategic relationships. The IC track does the highest-level work, mentors through craft, and sets the quality bar.

Make the choice explicit early. Don’t wait until someone’s been promoted into management to ask if they actually wanted it. Have conversations earlier in people’s careers about what they want. Some people want to manage. Some people want to stay in the craft. Neither is wrong. But knowing which path someone wants helps you develop them appropriately.

One agency I worked with started doing “career pathing” conversations with everyone at the senior level. Not performance reviews. Just conversations about where they saw themselves in three years. Did they want to lead a team? Did they want to be the go-to expert in their craft? Did they want to move into strategy or client relationships?

The conversations were simple. But they changed how the agency promoted people. They stopped automatically pushing everyone toward management and started creating paths that actually fit what people wanted.

Recognize that managing is a skill that needs development. If someone does want to move into management, don’t just promote them and hope they figure it out. Train them. Coach them. Give them support as they learn a completely different set of skills.

Too many agencies promote someone to creative director or strategy lead and then act surprised when they struggle. Managing people is hard. It requires skills most people don’t have naturally. If you’re going to put someone in that role, invest in helping them succeed.

Let people try management without it being permanent. Create project lead roles or interim leadership opportunities where someone can test whether they like managing before fully committing. If they discover it’s not for them, they can go back to IC work without it being a demotion.

Picture this. Your senior designer has been with you for five years. She’s incredibly talented. You want to promote her. Instead of automatically making her a creative director, you ask what she wants. She’s not sure. She likes the idea of more influence but doesn’t know if she wants to manage.

You create a six-month trial. She leads a small team on one major project. Gets coaching on giving feedback and developing people. Tries the management side while still doing some hands-on work.

At the end of six months, she knows. She doesn’t want to manage full-time. So you create a principal designer role for her. She’s the go-to for the agency’s most important design work. She mentors junior designers. She has significant influence on creative direction. But she’s not managing a team day-to-day.

She’s happy. The agency gets to keep her expertise. And the junior designers have someone setting a high bar without a reluctant manager forcing them into a structure they don’t want.

You know who on your team doesn’t want to manage but is being pushed that direction because it’s the only path up.

The question is whether you’re going to keep forcing people into roles they don’t want, or whether you’re going to build paths that actually match how people want to grow.

Not everyone should manage. And that’s okay. The best designer doesn’t automatically become the best creative director. The best strategist doesn’t automatically become the best strategy lead.

What do your IC career paths actually look like? And are they real paths with compensation and influence, or are they just consolation prizes for people who don’t want to manage?

The creative concept was bold. The strategy was solid. The presentation was polished. When they walked out of the pitch meeting, they felt good. Really good.

Two days later, we get the call. We didn’t win.

The creative director asks for feedback. The prospect is vague. “We went in a different direction.” “It just wasn’t the right fit.” “We loved the work, but…”

Nothing concrete. Nothing actionable. Just rejection.

Now I’m watching the team try to process it. The designer who worked 80 hours that week looks defeated. The copywriter who nailed the concept is questioning whether they’re any good. The account team is already pivoting to the next pitch like nothing happened.

And I’m stuck figuring out how to help people move forward when the rejection has nothing to do with their performance.

In agency work, the team pours everything into a pitch. The work is brilliant. And you lose anyway.

Not because the work was bad. Not because the team didn’t execute. You lose because the prospect’s CEO liked the other agency’s founder better. Or because the other agency was cheaper. Or because they had a relationship you didn’t know about. Or because of reasons you’ll never fully understand.

This happens constantly. And it’s brutal on morale.

In most jobs, if you do great work, you get rewarded. Close the deal. Hit the target. Solve the problem. There’s a clear line between performance and outcome.

In agency pitches, that line doesn’t exist. You can do everything right and still lose. The work can be objectively strong and it doesn’t matter. Because the decision isn’t just about the work. It’s about chemistry, timing, politics, budget, relationships, and a dozen other factors you can’t control.

From my perspective, this creates a specific kind of demoralization that’s hard to manage. When someone fails because they didn’t perform well, you can address it. Coach them. Help them improve. Give them a path forward.

But when someone does brilliant work and loses anyway, what do you say? “It wasn’t your fault” sounds hollow when they just spent three weeks of their life on something that went nowhere. “The work was great” doesn’t help when great work didn’t win.

And you can’t just move on like it didn’t happen. Because to the team, it did happen. They invested themselves. They cared. They believed this was the one. And now they’re supposed to just shake it off and do it again for the next pitch.

Here’s what happens when you don’t help people process pitch losses well.

People stop caring as much. If great work doesn’t win, why kill yourself on the next pitch? They start holding back. Doing good enough instead of great. Protecting themselves from the disappointment of going all-in and losing again.

I watched a senior designer completely change after a big pitch loss. Before, they’d push for the bold idea. After, they played it safe. “Clients never pick the brave work anyway, so why bother?” The cynicism spread. Other designers started following their lead. The quality of pitch work declined because nobody wanted to put their heart into something that might not matter.

Team morale crashes, especially if losses pile up. One pitch loss is disappointing. Three in a row feels personal. People start questioning whether they’re good enough. Whether the agency is good enough. Whether any of this is worth it.

During one particularly rough stretch, an agency I worked with lost five pitches in two months. The creative team was demoralized. People started job hunting. Not because they were being treated badly. Because they couldn’t handle the constant rejection of work they were proud of.

Leadership loses credibility if they don’t acknowledge the impact. If leadership treats every loss as “on to the next one” without recognizing how hard the team worked, people feel disposable. Like their effort doesn’t matter. Like they’re just resources to be deployed on whatever’s next.

You also create a culture where people are afraid to take risks. If bold work doesn’t win and safe work doesn’t win, people default to safe because at least they didn’t stick their neck out. The agency’s creative reputation suffers because everything starts looking the same.

So why is this so hard to manage?

Pitch decisions are rarely about the work alone. They’re about relationships, budget, timing, internal politics at the client, who presented well, whether the chemistry felt right. The team can control the quality of work. They can’t control any of that other stuff.

And prospects rarely give real feedback. They say nice things. “We loved your approach.” “The work was strong.” But they don’t tell you the real reason. Maybe you were too expensive. Maybe their CMO wanted to work with their former colleague at another agency. Maybe you reminded the CEO of someone they don’t like. You’ll never know.

That ambiguity makes it impossible to learn. If someone tells you “your work wasn’t strategic enough,” you can address that next time. If they just say “it wasn’t the right fit,” what are you supposed to do differently?

There’s also pressure to keep moving. Agencies can’t afford to dwell. There’s another pitch next week. Another opportunity. Leadership needs the team focused forward, not processing backward. So they minimize the loss and push everyone to the next thing.

But humans don’t work that way. You can’t just switch off disappointment because there’s another deadline.

Here’s what I think actually helps. You can’t eliminate the pain of losing pitches. But you can create space for people to process it and move forward without becoming cynical.

Acknowledge the loss before moving to the next thing. Don’t rush past it. Don’t minimize it. Give the team a moment to actually feel disappointed before you pivot to “here’s what’s next.”

This doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can be as simple as the creative director saying, “That one hurt. You did great work. I know you put everything into it. Take the rest of the day. We’ll regroup tomorrow.”

That acknowledgment matters. It tells people their effort was seen. That the loss is real, not just a blip to ignore.

Separate the work from the outcome in your debrief. Help the team understand that the work being good and the work not winning are two different things. Both can be true. The work can be brilliant and still lose because of factors outside the work.

I’ve seen effective creative directors do this by reviewing the pitch work as if it won. “Here’s what was strong about this concept. Here’s where we nailed the strategy. Here’s what we’d absolutely do again.” That reinforces that the work had value, even if it didn’t get chosen.

Then separately, talk about what might have influenced the decision beyond the work. Not as excuses. As reality. “They might have gone with someone cheaper. They might have had a relationship we didn’t know about. We’ll never know for sure.”

Create rituals around pitch losses that give people closure. Some agencies do a post-pitch drink. Some do a team lunch where they talk about what they learned. Some literally archive the work in a “great work that didn’t win” collection.

The specific ritual doesn’t matter. What matters is marking the end of that effort so people can actually move on instead of carrying the loss with them.

Be honest about the pitch win rate. If your agency wins 30% of pitches, tell people that. Help them understand that losing is normal. That even when you do great work, you’re statistically likely to lose more often than you win.

This doesn’t make individual losses hurt less. But it helps people not internalize every loss as a personal failure.

One agency I worked with started sharing their pitch win rate transparently. When they lost, leadership would remind people, “We win about one in three. This was one of the two we don’t win. It doesn’t mean the work wasn’t good.”

It sounds simple. But it helped people separate their performance from the outcome.

Protect people from pitch fatigue. Don’t put the same people on every pitch. Rotate who’s involved. Give people breaks between pitches so they’re not in a constant cycle of intense work and potential disappointment.

This is hard because you want your best people on every pitch. But if those people are constantly pitching and constantly losing, they burn out faster.

Find ways to celebrate the work even when it doesn’t win. Enter it in award shows. Share it internally as a case study of great thinking. Feature it in portfolio reviews or recruiting conversations. Give the work a life beyond the pitch so it doesn’t feel like wasted effort.

Another way to think about it is if your team just lost a pitch they worked incredibly hard on. Instead of immediately assigning them to the next pitch, the creative director sits down with them. They review what was strong about the work. They talk about what probably influenced the decision beyond quality. They acknowledge the disappointment and give people permission to feel it.

Then they take the work and submit it to a few industry awards. Not because it’s guaranteed to win. But because it gives the work another chance to be recognized. And it tells the team their effort mattered, even if this particular prospect didn’t choose it.

A few months later, the work wins an award. The team that created it feels validation for what they made. The loss still stung. But it didn’t define the work.

Your team is going to lose pitches. Probably more often than they win them. That’s the reality of agency work.

The question is whether you’re helping them process those losses in ways that keep them engaged and willing to try again. Or whether you’re creating a culture where people protect themselves by caring less.

You can’t control whether prospects choose your work. But you can control how you help your team navigate rejection that has nothing to do with their performance.

How are you acknowledging pitch losses? And what are you doing to help people separate the quality of their work from outcomes they can’t control?

“We just won three new clients. We need to hire. Like, now. Can we bring on five designers and three copywriters in four weeks?”

I start talking through the reality of hiring that fast. Sourcing. Interviews. Offers. Onboarding. The executive is barely listening. They need people working or we can’t deliver the work.

We hire aggressively. Twelve people in six weeks. The team is stressed but excited. New projects. Growth. Momentum.

Three months later, the same executive pulls me aside again.

“Two of those clients put projects on hold. Another one’s scope got cut in half. We don’t have enough work to keep everyone busy. What do we do?”

This is the cycle. Feast or famine. We need everyone yesterday. We have too many people today. And HR is supposed to somehow staff for both realities at the same time.

Agencies go from “we need 10 people yesterday” to “we have no work” in a matter of weeks.

It’s not because leadership is bad at planning. It’s the nature of the business. Clients are unpredictable. Projects get delayed. Scopes change. New business wins create sudden demand. Client losses create sudden gaps.

You can’t smooth this out with better forecasting. You can try. But a client can cancel a project with two weeks’ notice and suddenly you have five people with nothing to do. Or you can win a pitch on Friday and need a full team staffed by Monday.

From my perspective, this creates impossible staffing decisions. Do you hire full-time for the busy periods and risk having people sitting idle during slow times? Do you rely on contractors and risk not having the talent you need when things pick up? Do you keep a lean core team and scramble constantly?

None of these options are great. And whichever one you choose, you’re going to be wrong sometimes.

The full-time approach means you’re paying people during slow periods when there’s not enough billable work to justify their salary. Leadership gets anxious about utilization. People get anxious about job security. And if the slow period lasts too long, you end up doing layoffs, which destroys trust and makes it harder to hire the next time you need people.

The temp approach means you have flexibility. When work drops, you just don’t renew agreements. But good temps/freelancers get booked up. When you suddenly need them, they’re not available. And the temps you can get on short notice are often not the quality you actually want on your clients’ work.

The lean core team approach means you’re always understaffed during busy periods. Your full-time people burn out from overwork. Quality suffers because everyone’s stretched too thin. And you lose people because they’re tired of the constant chaos.

When you don’t figure out how to staff for volatility, you lose institutional knowledge constantly. If you’re hiring and laying off based on project flow, people stop trusting that their jobs are stable. Your best talent leaves for companies with more predictable work. And you’re stuck in a cycle of constantly training new people who leave as soon as they’re fully productive.

I watched an agency go through three rounds of layoffs in eighteen months. Each time, they cut people during a slow period. Each time, they scrambled to rehire when work picked back up. By the third round, their reputation was shot. Good candidates wouldn’t even interview because they’d heard the agency was unstable. The agency ended up hiring less experienced people and the quality of work declined.

Quality becomes inconsistent. When you’re staffing up quickly, you don’t have time to be selective. Many times you hire whoever’s available. Some of them are great. Some of them aren’t. And clients notice when the quality of work varies wildly from project to project depending on who happened to be available.

Team morale crashes during slow periods. When there’s not enough work, people start worrying about layoffs. They stop collaborating and start protecting themselves. They hoard whatever billable work exists. The culture shifts from “we’re in this together” to “I need to prove I’m valuable so I don’t get cut.”

During one particularly slow stretch, I watched an agency’s culture completely change. People who’d been collaborative started competing for assignments. Managers started exaggerating how busy their teams were to protect headcount. Nobody wanted to admit they had capacity because it felt like admitting they were expendable. The trust never fully recovered.

You also burn out your core team. If you’re trying to keep a lean staff and rely on contractors to flex up, your full-time people carry the burden of the volatility. They’re working 60-hour weeks during busy times and then expected to just recover during slow times. Except slow times often mean they’re pitching new business or doing internal work, so they never actually get the break they need.

So why is this so hard to solve?

The business model is inherently volatile. Agencies depend on clients who can change their minds, shift priorities, or cut budgets with minimal notice. You can try to diversify your client base or get retainer agreements, but you’re still at the mercy of client decisions you can’t control.

There’s pressure to say yes to everything. When a potential client comes to you with a project, saying “we don’t have capacity right now” feels like turning down revenue. So agencies say yes and figure out staffing later. Which means you’re constantly reacting instead of planning.

Leadership often overestimates pipeline stability. They see potential projects in the pipeline and staff as if those projects are guaranteed. Then half of them don’t close or get delayed, and suddenly you’re overstaffed. Or they underestimate how much a new client win will demand and you’re scrambling to find people.

There’s also no good answer to the temp vs. full-time question. Full-time gives you consistency and culture but creates risk during slow periods. Temps give you flexibility but you sacrifice quality and institutional knowledge. Most agencies end up with some mix, but getting the ratio right is a constant guessing game.

You can’t eliminate volatility. But you can build systems that make it more manageable.

Build a tiered staffing model with clear criteria for each tier. Your core team should be people you need regardless of project flow. They’re your strategic thinkers, your client relationship owners, your quality bar. These are full-time roles and you protect them even during slow periods.

Your flex team is contractors and freelancers you have relationships with. Not randos you find on Upwork when you’re desperate. People you’ve worked with before. Who know your standards. Who you can bring in when you need them and who understand the work is project-based.

Then you have your growth layer. These are full-time roles you only add when you have sustained increase in work. Not one big client win. Sustained. Multiple quarters of growth that suggests you need permanent additional capacity.

The key is being disciplined about which tier people fall into. Don’t make someone full-time just because you like them and there’s work right now. If the work isn’t sustained for more than 6 months, they should be a temp. Don’t keep someone as a temp forever just to avoid commitment if they’re actually core to how you operate.

Create real work for slow periods that isn’t just busywork. Internal projects that matter. Process improvements. Skill development. Pitching new business. These can’t just be things people do when there’s nothing else. They need to be valuable enough that people feel productive, not like they’re killing time until the next client project.

I’ve seen agencies use slow periods to redesign their own website, build case studies, develop new service offerings, or create thought leadership content. The work was real. It contributed to the business. And it kept people engaged instead of anxious.

Build a bench of trusted temps and treat them well. Pay them fairly. Give them interesting work. Keep them in the loop even when you’re not actively using them. If you treat temps like disposable labor, the good ones won’t come back when you need them. If you treat them like valued partners, they’ll prioritize your work when you call.

This means sometimes paying a little more than the market rate. It means being honest about project timelines so they can plan. It means giving them feedback and development just like you would for full-time staff. The investment pays off when you need someone great on short notice and they’re available because they actually want to work with you.

Get better at forecasting by tracking leading indicators, not just current work. What’s in your new business pipeline? What renewal conversations are happening with existing clients? What industry trends might affect client spending? You’ll never have perfect visibility, but you can get better at seeing what’s coming.

One agency I worked with started doing monthly pipeline reviews that included HR. Not just “here’s what we might win” but “here’s the probability and here’s what roles we’d need if it closes.” It didn’t eliminate surprises, but it meant we weren’t starting from zero every time something changed.

Be honest with people about the business model. Don’t pretend work is stable when it’s not. If you hire someone, tell them the reality. Sometimes we’re slammed. Sometimes it’s slow. Here’s how we handle both. People can handle volatility if they know it’s coming and see that you have a plan for it.

Think about when you win a big new client. Instead of immediately hiring five full-time people, you bring in three temps you’ve worked with before to handle the initial surge. You give it a quarter to see if the work stabilizes. It does. You convert one of those contractors to full-time and keep the other two on as ongoing flex capacity. The client is happy. The work gets done. And you didn’t overcommit to headcount based on one client win.

You know your agency’s workload is volatile. You’ve lived through the feast and famine cycles. You’ve seen what happens when you staff wrong in either direction.

The question is whether you’re going to keep reacting to every swing or build systems that let you navigate volatility without destroying your team or your culture.

You can’t make agency work predictable. But you can make your approach to staffing more intentional.

What does your tiered staffing model actually look like? And when work inevitably swings, do you have a plan, or are you just scrambling?

Not the glossy version. The real version.

The tensions, the trade-offs, the problems that don’t have clean solutions. If you work in an agency or you’re curious about what makes this environment different, this is for you.

I had an account director come to me recently and she was worried. One of her best designers is at 110% utilization for the third month in a row. Billing nearly every hour of every week, plus some. The metrics were what we strive for. Having employees billable and fully utilized.

But the designer is clearly struggling. Exhausted. Snapping at teammates. Missing details they’d normally catch. Talking about needing a break but not taking one because there’s too much work.

I ask the obvious question. “Can we reduce their workload?”

The account director looks at me like I suggested we just stop doing all client work. “They’re billable. We need them on client work. That’s how the business runs.”

And that’s the trap. The thing that makes the agency profitable is the same thing that’s burning people out.

Creative agencies run on billable hours. Generally, the more hours your team bills to clients, the more revenue you generate. And in other cases, where you’re on a retainer, it’s more about capacity within the business. Regardless of the model, utilization rates are the metric that matters. High utilization with 100% billability means you’re efficient, profitable, running a tight ship.

But creatives burn out fast when they’re constantly “on the clock.”

There’s no built-in recovery time. No space between projects. No room to think or explore or recharge. Just client work. Back to back. Week after week. Until someone breaks.

I’ve watched designers go from excited about the work to exhausted and resentful in six months. Not because the work itself was bad. Because there was too much of it without any breathing room.

The challenge isn’t just workload. It’s that billable hours incentivize the exact behavior that leads to burnout. Fill every hour. Stay busy. Keep your utilization high. Because that’s what the business needs.

And when someone’s utilization drops because they need recovery time or want to work on internal projects or just need space to think, it shows up as a problem in the numbers. They’re “underutilized.” Which sounds like they’re not pulling their weight, even when the reality is they’re trying not to collapse.

From my perspective, this creates an impossible situation for HR. Leadership wants sustainable performance and low turnover. But they also want high utilization. And you can’t always have both.

When you optimize for billable hours without accounting for well-being, your best people burn out and leave. Not the mediocre ones who coast. The high performers who care about the work. They’re the ones billing 100%+ because they’re good and clients want them. They’re also the ones who hit their limit first because they’ve been running at over capacity for too long.

When they leave, you lose institutional knowledge, client relationships, and the talent that was actually driving the work. Then you scramble to replace them, which takes months and costs significantly more than it would have cost to just manage their workload better in the first place.

Quality drops before people leave. The designer who’s exhausted starts making mistakes. The copywriter who’s overworked turns in decent work instead of great work. Clients notice. They don’t always say something, but they do notice. And eventually, they start asking for different team members or they leave for another agency.

Team morale suffers. When one person is consistently at 95% utilization, everyone else sees it. They see that person struggling. They see leadership doing nothing about it. And they start wondering when it’s going to be them. It creates anxiety across the team, even for people who aren’t currently drowning.

I watched an agency lose three senior creatives in four months. All cited burnout. All had been billing over 100% for extended periods. Leadership was shocked each time. But from where I sat, it was completely predictable. The metrics had been screaming that these people were overworked. We just weren’t set up to do anything about it because billable hours were the priority and the only way we could support our business.

(Side note to this experience: This happens often, and what I usually see is a creative leaving because they are burnt out, but going to another large agency or holding company. They are told things are better at the new company. Told they have better perks. Promised more money. In the end, it ends up being the same. The faces may change, but the agency model is the same. No matter what spin you put on it.)

So why does this keep happening?

The business model demands it. Agencies make money by selling time. The more time you sell, the more money you make. High utilization isn’t just a goal, it’s survival. When utilization drops, revenue drops. And when revenue drops, there’s pressure to cut costs, which usually means cutting people, which makes utilization problems worse for everyone who’s left.

Leadership often comes from account or business backgrounds. They understand client relationships and P&L. They don’t always understand the creative process or how burnout builds. To them, 95%+ utilization looks like efficiency. They don’t see the person behind the number who’s about to break.

There’s no clear benchmark for “too much.” In other industries, you might have clear standards. Manufacturing has safety limits. Healthcare has maximum shift lengths. Agencies have... nothing. So we’re making it up as we go, and usually defaulting to “as much as possible until something breaks.”

Recovery time isn’t billable. If someone takes a day to work on internal projects or just recharge, that’s lost revenue from a P&L perspective. Which creates pressure to minimize non-billable time, even when that time is what keeps people functional long-term.

Here’s what I think needs to change. Agencies need to build recovery into how they operate, not treat it as an exception when someone’s about to quit.

Start by redefining what sustainable utilization actually looks like. It’s not 95%+. It’s probably not even 85%. From my experience, when people consistently bill above 80% for extended periods, you start seeing quality drop and burnout increase. That doesn’t mean 80% is the magic number for everyone, but it’s a starting point for asking whether someone’s workload is sustainable.

Have regular conversations about workload that go beyond utilization numbers. Sit down with people and actually ask how they’re doing. Not in a performative “how are you” way, but genuinely. Are they sleeping? Are they able to disconnect? Do they feel like they have any control over their schedule? Do they have time to do good work or are they just churning through tasks?

Build non-billable time into expectations. Internal projects. Learning. Exploration. Whatever makes sense for the role. But make it explicit that this time matters and isn’t just “nice to have when we’re slow.” Because if it only happens when you’re slow, it never happens.

Create circuit breakers for high utilization. If someone’s been above 85% for two months, that triggers a conversation. Not a “what’s wrong with you” conversation. A “how do we adjust your workload” conversation. Maybe you staff them differently on the next project. Maybe you bring in another team member to absorb some of the work. Maybe you just acknowledge they need a lighter month and plan for it.

Think about it like this. A senior designer has been at 90% utilization for six weeks. Instead of celebrating their productivity, their manager flags it. They sit down together and look at what’s coming. They identify that the next project would push them even higher. So they bring in a mid-level designer to take some of the execution work, letting the senior designer focus on the strategic pieces that actually need their expertise. Utilization drops to 75% for the next month. The work still gets done. The designer doesn’t burn out.

That’s not complicated. But it requires valuing sustainability over maximizing every billable hour. And it requires leadership seeing high utilization as a warning sign, not just a win.

You already know who on your team is overworked. You can see it in the utilization reports. You can see it in how they look and how they’re performing.

The question is whether you’re going to do something about it before they burn out and leave. Or whether you’re going to keep optimizing for billable hours until you lose the people who make those hours valuable.

The business model doesn’t have to destroy people. But it will if you let utilization be the only metric that matters.

What does sustainable utilization actually look like in your agency? And are you measuring it, or just hoping people can keep up?

The CFO immediately started talking about pricing implications. The head of product jumped in about feature gaps. Sales wanted to discuss how to position against them.

Then the CEO turned to me. “What does this mean for our talent strategy?”

I had no idea. I didn’t know what the competitor was doing. I didn’t know if they were hiring aggressively or what they were offering people. I had nothing to contribute to the conversation.

That moment made it clear. If I didn’t understand our business competition, I couldn’t be a strategic partner. I was just reacting to problems instead of anticipating them.

HR leaders should understand their business competition. Not as a nice-to-have. As a fundamental part of doing the job strategically.

Most HR people I talk to can tell you about their internal challenges. The retention issues. The hiring struggles. The engagement scores. But ask them about the competitive landscape and you get blank stares.

Who are we competing with for talent? What are they offering? Where are they expanding? What’s their reputation as an employer? How are they positioning themselves?

These aren’t nice-to-know facts. They’re critical intelligence that shapes almost everything HR does.

Talent attraction and retention depends heavily on competitive awareness. You need to know what competitors offer in terms of compensation, benefits, work arrangements, and career development. Without this knowledge, you risk losing top performers to competitors or failing to attract the talent needed for strategic initiatives.

I’ve watched organizations lose multiple people to the same competitor and act surprised every time. Meanwhile, that competitor had been systematically targeting their talent with better comp packages and remote flexibility. HR didn’t see it coming because they weren’t paying attention.

Understanding which companies are competing for the same talent pool helps you craft compelling value propositions. Not generic employer brand messaging. Actual reasons why someone should choose you over the company down the street that’s also trying to hire them.

Strategic workforce planning requires insight into competitive moves. If competitors are expanding into new markets, acquiring certain capabilities, or downsizing in specific areas, you should be preparing your workforce accordingly.

This might mean hiring ahead of anticipated needs. Developing skills that will create competitive advantage. Restructuring teams to respond to market shifts before they hit you.

But you can only do that if you know what’s happening in the competitive landscape. If you’re caught off guard by every competitive move, you’re always playing catch-up.

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Here’s what happens when HR doesn’t understand the competition.

You build compensation packages in a vacuum. You benchmark against survey data from two years ago while your competitor just raised their base salaries by 15% and added signing bonuses. Then you wonder why you can’t close candidates.

You lose talent you didn’t know was at risk. Your top performer gets recruited by a competitor you didn’t realize was hiring aggressively in your market. By the time you find out, they’ve already accepted the offer. You scramble to make a counter that’s too little too late.

You miss opportunities to differentiate. You’re investing in perks and programs that every other company offers while missing the things that would actually set you apart. Because you don’t know what competitors are doing, you can’t figure out what makes you different.

You can’t contribute strategically. When leadership is discussing competitive threats and opportunities, you have nothing to add from a talent perspective. You’re waiting to be told what to do instead of helping shape the strategy.

I saw this play out at a company where a major competitor opened a facility nearby. Leadership knew it was coming. They’d been tracking it for months. But HR wasn’t looped in until the competitor started poaching employees.

Suddenly it was a crisis. Retention bonuses. Counter offers. Emergency culture initiatives. All reactive. All expensive. All because HR wasn’t paying attention to the competitive threat early enough to get ahead of it.

If they’d known six months earlier, they could have identified flight risks, had proactive conversations, adjusted comp where needed, and created stickiness before anyone was being recruited. Instead, they spent three times as much trying to fix it after people were already interviewing.

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So why don’t more HR leaders pay attention to competition?

Some think it’s not their job. That’s what business leadership does. HR focuses on internal people stuff. Strategy is someone else’s domain.

Some don’t know where to start. Competitive intelligence feels like something you need a team or a budget for. It seems complicated or outside their expertise.

Some are too busy. There’s always a fire to put out. Spending time researching competitors feels like a luxury when you’ve got open roles to fill and performance reviews to finish.

But here’s the reality. If you’re not thinking about competition, you’re not thinking strategically. You’re operating tactically. Solving today’s problems without understanding the context that’s creating tomorrow’s problems.

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Understanding your competition doesn’t require a research team or a big budget. It requires intention and consistency.

Start by identifying who you’re actually competing with. Not just direct business competitors. Talent competitors. The companies that hire the same roles you hire. That recruit from the same schools. That target the same skill sets. That show up in your exit interviews when people tell you where they’re going.

Make a list. Five to ten companies that matter from a talent perspective. They might overlap with your business competitors. They might not. What matters is whether you’re fighting them for the same people.

Then track what they’re doing. Set up alerts for their hiring announcements. Follow their careers pages. Watch their LinkedIn presence. Pay attention when they make news about expansion, layoffs, or major changes.

Talk to your recruiters. They’re hearing what candidates are considering. They know what other offers people are weighing. They see what’s resonating and what’s not. Mine that intelligence regularly.

Talk to your hiring managers. They know the competitive landscape for their function. They can tell you which companies are hiring aggressively. Which ones have reputations for great development or terrible culture. Which ones are poaching their people.

Talk to people who are leaving. Not just “why are you leaving us” but “why are you going there.” What did the other company offer that you couldn’t? What did they say that resonated? What’s their reputation that attracted this person?

And talk to people you’re recruiting. Even if they don’t join you, they can tell you what other companies they’re considering and why. What’s compelling about those opportunities? What are those companies doing well?

Once you have this intelligence, use it. Don’t just collect information. Apply it.

If three competitors have gone fully remote and you’re requiring five days in office, that’s data. Maybe your position is justified. Maybe it’s not. But you should at least know you’re making a choice that puts you at a competitive disadvantage for certain talent.

If competitors are offering signing bonuses for a role you’re trying to fill, you need to know that before you extend offers that get declined. You can decide not to match. But deciding without knowing what you’re up against is just gambling.

If a competitor is expanding into a market where you have talent, you need to get ahead of retention risks. Have conversations. Understand who might be vulnerable. Figure out what would keep them before they’re being actively recruited.

This is what benchmarking and market positioning actually mean. It’s not just survey data. It’s real-time intelligence about what competitors are doing and how that affects your ability to attract and keep people.

Picture this. Your CEO mentions a competitor is launching a new product line. Because you understand the competition, you know that product line requires skills you have on your team. You flag the retention risk. You work with leadership to create a counter-strategy. Maybe it’s development opportunities. Maybe it’s comp adjustments. Maybe it’s giving those people visibility into your own strategic initiatives so they see a future here.

The point is, you’re not reacting after people leave. You’re anticipating and getting ahead of it. That’s strategic HR.

Think about the last time someone on your team left for a competitor. Did you see it coming? Did you know what that competitor was offering? Did you have a retention strategy in place or were you caught off guard?

If you were caught off guard, that’s a sign you’re not paying enough attention to competition.

HR’s effectiveness as a strategic partner depends on understanding the same competitive dynamics that drive business strategy. When you can speak the language of competition and tie your initiatives to competitive positioning, you demonstrate business acumen. You earn a seat at the strategic table.

When you don’t, you’re just responding to problems leadership hands you. You’re executing tactics without understanding strategy.

Who are your top three talent competitors? What are they doing right now? And what does that mean for your talent strategy?

If you can’t answer those questions, start there. Because understanding competition isn’t optional for strategic HR. It’s the foundation.

I didn’t have an answer. The project died in that room, not because it was a bad idea, but because I’d pitched it like an HR person instead of a business leader.

HR knows our initiatives will make business impact. We can feel it. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t invest in people programs, when managers are overwhelmed, when processes break down. But when it’s time to pitch the solution, we talk about employee engagement, culture, and experience. We use HR language for an audience that thinks in revenue, cost, and efficiency.

I’ve sat in budget meetings where HR leaders presented compelling ideas, truly valuable work, and watched them get deprioritized because they couldn’t translate the value into terms that mattered to the decision-makers. Someone pitches a leadership development program and talks about “building capabilities” and “strengthening our culture.” The CFO nods politely and moves the conversation to the sales team’s request for new CRM software, which comes with a clear ROI projection.

It’s not that the leadership program isn’t valuable. It’s that we didn’t speak the language of business impact. We assumed our audience would connect the dots from “better leaders” to “better business outcomes.” They won’t. That’s our job, and most of us have never been taught how to do it.

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After my pitch failed, I watched what happened over the next six months. The HR team kept drowning in operational work. Manager escalations increased. We missed two critical talent retention conversations because we were too buried to notice the warning signs (although, these were partly on the managers). Both people left for competitors.

In the next budget cycle, leadership approved an expensive HR technology platform that promised to “streamline processes.” It cost three times what my proposed role would have cost. And it didn’t solve the problem because the problem wasn’t technology, it was capacity and strategic support.

The really painful part? I could have prevented all of it if I’d just framed my original pitch differently. If I’d walked in talking about the cost of turnover for those two critical roles, the revenue impact of delayed manager support, the efficiency gains from redistributing work. The business case was there. I just didn’t know how to tell that story.

Six months later, the CFO mentioned in passing that he wished we’d solved the HR capacity problem sooner. I truly wanted to throw my hands up and walk away. We’d tried. But I’d pitched it like an HR professional asking for resources instead of a business leader proposing an investment with clear returns.

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I know why we struggle with this. Most of us came up through HR, not finance. We learned to think about people and culture, not P&L statements and cost-benefit analyses. When we try to speak the CFO’s language, it feels inauthentic, like we’re reducing human work to spreadsheets.

There’s also this belief that our work should speak for itself. That leadership should just understand why investing in people matters. But that’s not how budget decisions work. Every function is competing for limited resources, and the ones that win are the ones that can clearly articulate their impact in business terms.

We also don’t want to be seen as the HR person who only cares about numbers. We got into this work because we care about people. But if we can’t get our initiatives funded, we can’t help anyone.

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If you know me, you know I wasn’t done with my original idea. So I took my failed pitch and put it into an AI chat. I explained what I was trying to accomplish in creating a new role that would reduce pressure on HR and improve manager support. Then I asked it to help me think like a CFO.

The conversation took about an hour. The LLM asked questions I hadn’t considered: “What’s the current cost of the problem you’re trying to solve?” I calculated the hours the team spent on reactive work that could be redistributed. “What’s the revenue impact of delayed manager support?” I looked at the two people we’d lost and their contribution to key projects. “What’s the efficiency gain if this role handles X instead of the current team?” I worked through the time savings and what the team could focus on instead.

By the end, I had a completely different pitch. Instead of “we need help,” it was “we’re currently spending $150,000 in team hours on reactive operational work that could be handled by one dedicated role at $80,000. That redistribution frees up capacity for strategic work that directly impacts retention and manager effectiveness. Based on last year’s turnover in critical roles, preventing just two exits pays for this role twice over.”

Same initiative. Different story. The AI didn’t make up numbers, it helped me find the business impact that was already there and frame it in terms that resonated with the people holding the budget.

You can do this next week. Take your next proposal, the program or role or initiative you know will help. Open ChatGPT or Claude and say: “I need to pitch this to my CFO. Help me think through the business impact.” Let it ask you questions (This is the key!). Work through the cost of the current problem, the value of the solution, and the ROI. Spend an hour getting the story right before you ever walk into that meeting.

Every time HR gets deprioritized in a budget meeting, it’s not because leadership doesn’t value people. It’s because we didn’t make the business case clearly enough.

You can complain that you shouldn’t have to translate your work into dollars and cents, or you can accept that this is how decisions get made and learn to speak that language. It’s like money. We all wish we didn’t have to work for it, but it’s the means to get the things we want. In this case, we want programs that support employees. To get there, we need to think in business impact.

AI can teach you to think like a CFO without becoming one. It can help you find the financial story that’s buried in your HR initiative. The question is whether you’re going to use it or keep losing in budget meetings.

What pitch are you going to reframe first?

It’s done. Everyone’s exhausted. And the immediate reaction from leadership?

“Great. What’s next?”

No pause. No reflection. No conversation about what worked or what we’d do differently next time.

Just straight into the next thing.

This happens constantly. We finish projects, close out initiatives, survive busy seasons. And we immediately move on without ever stopping to ask what we actually learned.

I don’t think we take enough opportunities for retrospectives at work. We never go back to look at things that went well. And more importantly, things that didn’t go well.

For HR, these moments can be the most important. They help us gather valuable insights we wouldn’t otherwise get.

Think about the last major project you worked on. A system implementation. An organizational restructure. A company-wide policy rollout. Whatever it was.

When it was over, did anyone sit down and ask what actually happened? Not just “did we hit the deadline,” but what went smoothly and what was a mess? What decisions helped and which ones created unnecessary problems? What would we do completely differently if we had to do it again?

Probably not. Because by the time something’s done, everyone’s ready to move on. The team is tired. Leadership wants to focus forward. And suggesting we spend more time talking about something that’s already finished feels like dwelling on the past.

But here’s what happens when you skip the retrospective. You repeat the same mistakes next time. The things that caused friction in this project will cause friction in the next one. The process that didn’t work will get used again because nobody officially acknowledged it didn’t work.

You also miss what actually created success. Maybe something worked really well and you don’t even realize why. Maybe someone found a workaround that saved the project but leadership never heard about it. Maybe there’s a practice worth replicating but it stays buried because no one took the time to surface it.

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I watched a company roll out a new performance management system. It was rocky. Really rocky. Managers were confused. Employees were frustrated. HR spent weeks putting out fires.

When it was finally over, everyone wanted to forget it happened. Leadership declared it a success because it got done. HR was too burned out to push for a debrief. And the team moved immediately to the next project.

Six months later, they rolled out a new compensation structure. Same problems. Same confusion. Same fires for HR to put out.

Because nobody ever stopped to ask what went wrong the first time. Nobody captured the lessons. Nobody documented what should have been done differently.

So they repeated it. And it was just as painful the second time.

Here’s what that costs you beyond just repeating mistakes. Your team stops improving. They’re working hard but not getting better because there’s no mechanism to learn from experience. They’re stuck in a cycle of just getting things done without ever refining how they get done.

Your best people get frustrated. The ones who see the patterns, who notice what’s not working, who have ideas for how to do it better next time. They’re watching the same problems happen over and over while leadership keeps declaring things a success and moving on.

Eventually they stop speaking up. Or they leave for places that actually want to learn.

And you lose institutional knowledge. The person who figured out the workaround leaves. The insight about what almost derailed the project never gets documented. The next time you do something similar, you’re starting from scratch instead of building on what you learned.

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So why don’t we do retrospectives?

Time. Everyone’s already behind on the next thing. Taking time to look backward feels like a luxury we can’t afford when there’s so much ahead.

Discomfort. Retrospectives mean acknowledging what didn’t work. And that means someone made a decision that caused problems. Someone dropped the ball. Someone’s process created friction. Nobody wants to be that person in the conversation.

The illusion of forward momentum. Looking ahead feels productive. Looking back feels like dwelling. Leadership especially wants to focus on the future, not rehash what’s already done.

From my perspective, this is short-term thinking disguised as urgency. We think we’re saving time by skipping the retrospective. But we’re actually wasting time by repeating the same problems.

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Here’s what I think needs to change. Make retrospectives a non-negotiable part of finishing anything significant.

Not a nice-to-have if there’s time. A required step before you close out the project and move to the next thing.

And don’t make them complicated. You don’t need a formal process or a consultant or a three-hour workshop. You need a conversation. Ninety minutes with the right people in the room asking three questions.

What actually worked? Not what was supposed to work according to the plan. What actually worked in reality. What decisions made things easier? What practices should we keep? What surprised us in a good way?

Get specific. “Communication was good” doesn’t help. “The weekly fifteen-minute check-ins between the project lead and department heads caught problems early” is useful. That’s something you can replicate.

What didn’t work? And be honest about it. What created unnecessary friction? What decision seemed right at the time but turned out to be a problem? What would we absolutely not do again?

This is where the discomfort comes in. But frame it right. You’re not looking for who to blame. You’re looking for what to learn. The goal isn’t to make someone feel bad. It’s to make sure you don’t repeat the mistake.

What would we do differently next time? This is where you turn observation into action. Based on what we learned, what’s the concrete thing we’d change? What’s the process we’d adjust? What’s the decision we’d make earlier or differently?

And then document it. Not in some elaborate report that nobody will read. In a simple summary that lives somewhere accessible. So the next time someone’s planning something similar, they can actually benefit from what you learned.

Picture this. You just finished a difficult hiring process for a critical role. It took longer than expected. There were miscommunications. Some steps felt redundant while others got skipped.

Instead of just being relieved it’s over, you schedule a retrospective with the hiring manager, the recruiter, and HR. You spend an hour walking through what happened.

You realize the job description was too vague, which led to misaligned candidates early on. You discover that the hiring manager would have appreciated more coaching on what to look for in interviews. You identify that the feedback loop was too slow, which extended the timeline.

You document this. And the next time you’re hiring for a similar role, you start with a more specific job description. You build in time for hiring manager prep. You tighten the feedback timeline.

The second search is smoother. Not perfect. But better because you learned from the first one.

That’s the power of a retrospective. It’s not complicated. But it requires someone to actually do it.

Think about the last major thing your team finished. An initiative. A busy season. A difficult project.

Did anyone stop to ask what you learned? Or did you just move immediately to the next thing?

If it’s the second one, you’re probably going to repeat whatever went wrong. And you’re definitely missing whatever went right that’s worth doing again.

You don’t need permission to run a retrospective. You just need to schedule it before everyone forgets what actually happened.

What’s the last thing your team finished that you never debriefed? And what are you still repeating because nobody ever stopped to ask if there was a better way?

By the time we figured out she was in the wrong seat, we’d wasted a year and a half of potential, and she’d already started looking elsewhere.

Most (not all) managers have no idea what their people are actually capable of. Not because they’re bad managers, but because they’re drowning in the day-to-day work of keeping projects moving and putting out fires. Strategic people development, the kind where you really understand someone’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, falls to the bottom of the list.

I’ve seen this pattern play out dozens of times.

Someone’s great at their job, so we leave them there. We don’t ask if they could be great at something else. We don’t check if they’re building new capabilities. We don’t track if their strengths have shifted. We wait for the annual performance review, fill out the form, and move on.

Meanwhile, HR tells leadership we need better succession planning and talent mobility. We create competency frameworks and skills matrices. We talk about playing to people’s strengths. But we’re making all these decisions based on data that’s six months old, or twelve months old, or based on the role someone was hired for three years ago.

The only time we get a real update on someone’s KSAs is during the annual review cycle, when managers are rushing to complete fifty forms in two weeks. That’s not assessment. That’s checkbox compliance.

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Here’s what happens when you only assess people once a year.

We had a critical project that needed someone with strong analytical skills. Leadership wanted to move fast, so they brought in a consultant. Expensive, but they delivered.

Four months later, I was reviewing development plans from the annual review cycle. Buried in the comments, a manager had noted that one of his direct reports had been asking for more analytics work and had completed a business analytics certification on her own time. The timing lined up perfectly with when we’d hired the consultant.

I called the manager. “Why didn’t you tell us she was developing these skills?” He was genuinely confused by the question. “I noted it in her review. I figured if HR needed to know, they’d ask.”

We’d paid a consultant $80,000 to do work we had someone ready and eager to do. She didn’t even know the project existed. By the time we connected the dots, she’d accepted an offer at another company where they’d noticed her potential faster than we did.

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I understand why this happens. Managers are busy.

Really busy.

Asking them to provide quarterly updates on their team’s KSAs feels like one more thing on an already impossible list. And let’s be honest, most managers don’t know how to assess skills in a way that’s useful to HR. They know if someone’s doing their job well, but translating that into “what else could this person do?” requires time and thought they don’t have.

There’s also the fairness concern. If we’re assessing some people quarterly, shouldn’t we assess everyone? And if we’re collecting all this data, what’s our obligation to act on it? What if we identify someone’s strengths but don’t have a role for them?

These are real constraints. But they’re not reasons to stick with a system where we only formally check in on people’s development once a year, when it’s already too late to make timely decisions.

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Taking this problem, I had an idea to reengineer the solution. What if we used an AI agent to gather quarterly KSA assessments from managers.

Set up an agent that reaches out to managers every quarter with a simple prompt. “Let’s talk about your team’s development.”

It asks preset questions, like “Who’s developed new capabilities in the last three months?”

“Who’s ready for more complex work?”

“Who’s showing strengths outside their current role?”

“Who’s struggling and needs support?”

The manager responds conversationally. The agent follows up with, “You mentioned Sarah’s showing strategic thinking. Can you give me a specific example?” The manager recalls, “She restructured our client onboarding process and reduced time-to-value by 30%. She didn’t just execute, she redesigned the whole approach.”

That response gets logged. Not in a performance review form that sits in a system until next year, but in a spreadsheet that HR reviews monthly. Now when a strategy role opens up, you’re not guessing who might be ready. You have recent data showing Sarah’s already operating at that level.

This isn’t surveillance. Managers aren’t being asked to do more work, they’re having a five-minute conversation with an agent instead of trying to remember twelve months of performance in December. And it’s not replacing the annual review, it’s making that review actually useful because you’re working with current information, not stale observations.

Start with one team next month. Build a simple agent. Write a prompt with five questions about team development. Have the agent ask the questions, capture the responses, and put them in a spreadsheet. Review it with leadership and ask: “What decisions could we make differently if we had this data every quarter?”

I’m betting you’ll identify at least two people who are ready for different roles and one critical skill gap you didn’t know existed.

If you’re only formally assessing your people once a year, how many opportunities are you missing while you wait?

How many high performers are sitting in the wrong roles because no one’s checking if their strengths have evolved? How many external hires are you making when you already have someone internal who’s ready? How many people are leaving because they developed capabilities you never noticed?

You can’t claim to care about talent development if you’re only paying attention one month out of twelve. You can’t build a high-performing organization on year-old data.

AI agents aren’t adding bureaucracy. They’re creating the visibility you’ve always claimed you wanted but never had the capacity to build. The question is whether you’re going to use them or keep pretending the annual review cycle is enough.

What are you actually going to do differently?

HR squirming in their seats. Legal checking their notes for the third time. Leadership delivering practiced talking points that answer nothing.

And then someone asks the question everyone’s thinking. “Why is this actually happening?”

The room goes quiet. Everyone suddenly very interested in their laptops.

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I get it. There are things you can’t say. Legal constraints. Competitive concerns. Information that’s not public yet.

But the silence costs more than the transparency would.

In my experience, when someone understands the business reality and can see the “why” behind the decisions, it helps them move on to what’s next.

Not immediately. Not without anger or disappointment. But eventually.

What breaks people isn’t the layoff itself. It’s the vague corporate speak that treats them like they can’t handle the truth.

“We’re realigning our strategic priorities.” “We’re optimizing for efficiency.” “This reflects our commitment to sustainable growth.”

Translation: we’re not going to tell you what’s actually happening.

I’ve watched people get laid off and leave with dignity because someone was honest with them. “Revenue didn’t come in where we expected. We overbuilt the team. We made a bet that didn’t work out.”

And I’ve watched people get laid off and leave bitter because all they got was corporate nonsense that insulted their intelligence.

The difference wasn’t the outcome. It was whether someone treated them like adults who could handle reality.

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Here’s what happens when you’re not transparent.

The people who stay don’t trust you. They watched you lay off their colleagues while saying everything’s fine, the business is just “evolving.” They know that’s not the whole story. And now they’re wondering when you’re going to lie to them too.

They start job hunting. Not because they think another layoff is coming. Because they don’t want to work for leaders who won’t tell them the truth.

The morale doesn’t recover. You can’t rebuild trust when people feel like they’re being managed instead of informed. Every town hall after that feels performative. Every “we’re being transparent” statement rings hollow.

And you miss the opportunity to actually solve the problem.

Because here’s what most leaders don’t realize. Your employees probably already know the business isn’t doing well. They see the missed targets. The cancelled projects. The hiring freeze that’s been in place for months. They’re not stupid.

What they don’t know is what you’re going to do about it. And whether they can help.

I watched a company do layoffs without explaining the real situation. Morale tanked. Six months later, they did another round. Then another. Each time with the same vague language about “strategic realignment.”

The people who were left felt like they were just waiting for their turn. Nobody was innovating. Nobody was taking risks. Everyone was in survival mode.

Meanwhile, the problems that caused the first layoff never actually got solved because nobody brought the team into solving them.

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So why do we keep doing this?

Legal tells us to say as little as possible. That every word is liability. That transparency creates risk.

Leadership worries that honesty will panic people. That if you tell them the business is struggling, everyone will leave. That maintaining confidence requires maintaining the appearance of control.

HR gets stuck in the middle. We know people deserve the truth. But we also know we’re not the ones making the call on what gets said.

So we end up delivering messages we don’t fully believe, answering questions with non-answers, and watching people lose trust in real time.

From my perspective, we’re solving for the wrong risk. We’re worried about legal exposure or employee panic. But we’re not worried enough about the long-term cost of dishonesty.

2025 was a rough year for layoffs across the US. And 2026 might not be better. So I want to challenge leaders to be more transparent with employees about where things actually are.

If the business is not doing well, say that. Not in corporate speak. In actual words. “We expected revenue to be X. It’s Y. Here’s why. Here’s what that means.”

People can handle bad news. What they can’t handle is being treated like they’re too fragile or too stupid to understand reality.

If the business needs changes, say that too. And then ask for help. You may get some of your best ideas for change from your employees.

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Picture this. Instead of announcing layoffs with vague language about strategic priorities, you tell your team the truth. “We’re not hitting our numbers. We built a team for growth that didn’t materialize. We need to get our costs in line with revenue. That means we’re reducing headcount.”

Then you tell them what you’re trying to protect. “We’re making these cuts to preserve the core team and the work that matters most. We’re trying to avoid death by a thousand cuts where we just keep bleeding people slowly.”

And then you bring them into what happens next. “We need ideas. We need to operate differently. If you see ways we can be more efficient, more effective, better, tell us. We’re listening.”

Here’s what happens when you do that.

The people who stay know where they stand. They’re not wondering when the other shoe will drop. They know the situation. They can make informed decisions about their own careers.

They actually help solve the problem. Because you’ve given them context and permission to think differently. Some of your best ideas for change will come from mid-level ICs who see things leadership doesn’t.

While leaders are paid a lot to push the direction of the business, it’s like only allowing one part of your brain to make decisions. Instead, think about how you engage more areas. Bring more people into the tent. Ideas can come from anywhere.

I’ve seen how even people without fancy titles can bring game-changing ideas. But only when they understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Only when someone’s honest with them about what’s actually happening.

Make transparency the default, not the exception. In your town halls. In your team meetings. In the one-on-ones where people ask the hard questions.

You don’t have to share everything. But you should share the truth about the things you do share. No corporate speak. No practiced talking points that say nothing. Just honesty about where the business is and what you’re trying to do about it.

Train your leaders to have real conversations. Not to hide behind HR or legal. Not to deflect with vague language. To actually answer the question someone’s asking, even when the answer is hard.

And for HR and legal, push back when the guidance is “say as little as possible.” Ask what we’re actually protecting by staying silent. Ask what we’re risking by losing trust.

You know whether your team trusts you to tell them the truth. You know whether people feel like they’re being managed or informed.

If you’re heading into a difficult conversation, a restructure, a reduction, anything where people are going to ask hard questions, ask yourself this.

Are you going to treat them like adults who can handle reality? Or are you going to give them corporate speak and hope they stop asking?

One of those builds trust even in hard moments. The other destroys it.

Which one are you choosing?

They were right. We were busy.

Running programs, fixing problems, responding to escalations.

But we’d never once asked them, or anyone else, if what we were doing was actually working.

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HR treats employees and managers like customers we never survey. We build performance review processes, run engagement programs, roll out new tools, and we never stop to ask “Is this working for you?” We just assume the silence means success.

I’ve sat in countless HR team meetings where we debated whether our new feedback process was effective. Someone would say “I think people like it.” Someone else would counter with “I heard a few complaints.” And we’d make decisions based on vibes and the three people who happened to email us.

Meanwhile, every other function in the company obsesses over stakeholder feedback. Sales talks to customers constantly. Product runs user testing. Marketing measures everything. But HR? We launch a new goal-setting process and if no one actively revolts, we call it a win.

The annual engagement survey doesn’t solve this. By the time people fill it out, they’ve been sitting on frustrations for months. They’re answering questions we wrote, not telling us what actually matters to them. And half the organization doesn’t even bother responding because they’ve learned nothing changes anyway.

I watched this play out with a performance review process we spent six months building. The CoE was proud of it. We’d simplified the forms, clarified the ratings, added better manager training. Launch day came and went without major issues.

Three months later, a senior manager pulled me aside. “This new process is a disaster for my team. The timeline doesn’t work with our project cycles. The questions don’t fit what we actually do. I’ve had four people ask me if they can just skip it.”

I asked why he didn’t say something sooner. He shrugged. “I figured you all knew what you were doing. And honestly, I didn’t think it would matter.”

That’s the cost. Not just a broken process, but an entire organization that’s learned their feedback doesn’t matter, so they stop giving it. We lose the signal we need to actually improve. We keep investing time and money into programs that don’t work, wondering why engagement scores stay flat.

And when people finally do leave, they tell us everything in the exit interview. When it’s too late to fix anything.

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I know why we don’t ask. We’re scared of what we’ll hear. If we actually asked employees whether our performance review process is useful, some of them would say no. If we asked managers whether our training programs help, we might not like the answers. It’s easier to keep moving, keep building, keep assuming we’re on the right track.

There’s also the practical reality.

We don’t have People Analytics teams in most organizations. We don’t have the capacity to run regular check-ins, analyze the feedback, and do something with it. So we stick with the annual survey and convince ourselves it’s enough.

But the bigger truth?

We’ve confused activity with impact. We measure how many training sessions we ran, how many policies we updated, how many tickets we closed. We don’t measure whether any of it actually helped the people we’re supposed to serve.

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Here’s what changes when you use an AI agent to run regular pulse checks with your stakeholders.

An employee responds to a quick check-in with, “I’m frustrated with communication from leadership.” A standard survey would log that response and move on. You’d get a data point that says “communication is a problem” along with fifty other data points, and you’d have no idea what to do with any of them.

An AI agent asks the follow-up questions like, “What specific communication are you missing?”

The employee explains, “I don’t know how my project connects to the company’s priorities. My manager doesn’t know either.”

The agent digs deeper, “When’s the last time you felt clear on priorities?”

The employee thinks, “Probably the all-hands in September, but that was four months ago.”

Now you have something actionable. Not just “communication is bad,” but “people lose clarity on priorities between quarterly all-hands meetings.” That’s a problem you can actually solve.

This isn’t about replacing human connection. It’s about creating a bridge between “everything’s fine” and “I’m leaving because nothing ever changes.” The AI agent gives people a safe space to be honest without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings or seeming like they’re complaining. It asks the follow-up questions that humans often don’t have time for. And it does this regularly, not once a year when grudges have piled up.

Start small.

Next week, set up a simple AI agent. (I promise it’s easy to get one going. Take your time.) Write a prompt that asks your stakeholders one question: “What’s one thing about [specific HR process] that’s not working for you?” Have the agent follow up with “Can you give me a specific example?” and “What would make this better?”

Send it to ten managers. See what you learn. I’m betting you’ll discover at least three things you had no idea were problems.

If you’re not regularly asking your stakeholders whether your work is actually helping them, how do you know you’re not wasting everyone’s time?

You can’t claim to be strategic if you’re building programs in a vacuum. You can’t claim to care about employee experience if you never measure whether your processes make that experience better or worse.

AI agents aren’t coming for People Analytics jobs. They’re giving the rest of us a chance to finally do what we should have been doing all along: listening at scale, digging into the real problems, and fixing things before people give up and leave.

So what are you going to ask first?

These are the meetings we all hate.

No one comes prepared. Everyone has “better” things to be doing. And in the end, everyone continues to sit in the silo of their business area without raising their hand to tackle the issue.

Sound familiar?

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I think the silos we set up in businesses are one of the most detrimental structures. But not for the reason you might think.

Most people preach that you need to breakdown all the silos. That you need to get everyone at the IC level connecting with each other. Cross-functional teams. Collaboration workshops. Matrix structures.

Don’t get me wrong, we need some of that. But I don’t think that alone will ever be successful.

Instead, we need better bridges between the silos.

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From where I sit as an HRBP, I hear from so many people about their frustrations with problems that never get solved. I’ll talk to an employee who’s having an issue with a process. I ask if they’ve told their manager.

Of course they have.

Then I check with the manager. They tell me they’ve laddered up the concerns to the department lead. They’re having the same issues themselves.

So my final stop is with the department lead. And I bet you can guess what I hear. They’ve gotten an earful from everyone and they’re discussing it with the other leads, but there still hasn’t been any progress.

This happens constantly. In every organization I’ve worked in. Problems get identified, get escalated, and then sit there while everyone waits for someone else to fix them.

Here’s what happens while everyone’s waiting.

The employee who raised the issue stops raising issues. They decide it’s not worth the effort if nothing changes anyway. They stop trusting that problems get solved.

The manager gets burned out playing middle management. Hearing complaints from their team, escalating them up, getting nothing back. Repeat. They start to feel like a message relay instead of someone who can actually make things happen.

The department lead gets overwhelmed. They’re collecting problems from multiple teams, trying to coordinate with other leads who are equally overwhelmed, and nothing moves because everyone’s waiting for perfect alignment before acting.

Meanwhile, the actual problem, the thing causing friction in the business, just keeps causing friction. Day after day. Week after week. Until it’s so normalized that people forget it’s even a problem.

I watched this happen with a reporting process that everyone knew was broken. ICs complained. Managers escalated. Leaders discussed it in their meetings for months.

Nothing changed until someone finally left over it. Then suddenly it became urgent. Suddenly there were resources to fix it. But by then, we’d already lost the person and damaged trust with everyone else who’d been screaming about it.

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So why does this keep happening?

To me, there are two things going on.

First, there isn’t the right incentive to reduce friction in the business. Leaders are measured on their silo’s output, not on solving cross-functional problems. So cross-functional problems sit at the bottom of everyone’s priority list.

But the second, and bigger, concern is that it takes so many people noticing an issue to only bring it up to the next level. And even then, it just sits there. We’re missing a very important link. If we continue to stick with the status quo, things will never get better. They will only get worse.

Businesses are missing a system of bridges. Bridges between the current silos we have.

Breaking down silos is too ambitious. So instead, we need to build collaboration bridges between different levels.

In the example above, why couldn’t the manager who saw the issues reach out to their counterpart in the other silo to help break down and implement a solution? Why does it have to go up two levels, across, and back down before anyone can act?

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Here’s what this looks like in practice.

Give managers permission to solve cross-functional problems without waiting for leadership alignment. Not everything needs to be escalated. Some things just need two managers in different departments to talk to each other and figure it out.

Create regular touch-points between peer managers across silos. Not big collaboration workshops. Just recurring conversations where they can surface friction points and solve them before they become escalations. Make it part of the role, not an extra thing they have to fit in.

Measure leaders on whether problems in their area get solved, not just whether they escalate them properly. If the same issue keeps coming up month after month, that’s a failure. Even if they’re “communicating well” about it.

Empower people at every level to build their own bridges. The IC who notices an issue should be able to talk to the IC in the other department. The manager should be able to coordinate with their peer. The leader should be able to make a decision with their counterpart without needing three layers of approval.

Picture this. A manager notices a process issue that’s affecting their team and another department. Instead of escalating it and waiting, they reach out to the manager in that other department. They spend thirty minutes talking through it. They identify a simple fix. They implement it. Problem solved.

That’s not breakdown of silos. That’s bridges. And it works because it doesn’t require restructuring the entire organization. It just requires giving people permission and incentive to solve problems at the level where they’re happening.

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You already know where the friction is in your organization. You know which cross-functional issues keep coming up in meetings without getting solved.

The question is whether you’re building bridges or just escalating problems and hoping someone else fixes them.

Remote or in-person, silos will always exist. The question is whether people can cross them when they need to. Or whether they’re stuck waiting for permission that never comes.

What’s one bridge you could build this week?

They knew the company priorities.

They knew her role.

But connecting those two things?

That’s where the meeting died.

They ended up copying last year’s goals, changing a few words, and calling it done.

This happens in every organization, every January, and we pretend it’s fine.

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The worst goal-setting outcome isn’t bad goals. It’s no goals at all. I’ve reviewed employee files where the goal section is blank, not because anyone refused to do the work, but because no one could figure out how to make their daily work connect to the business strategy.

The manager didn’t know.

The employee didn’t know.

HR sent reminders, held training sessions, provided templates.

Nothing changed.

We ask employees to set goals that ladder up to business objectives, but we give them zero tools to actually make those connections. We hand them a strategy deck full of corporate language about “driving operational excellence” and “fostering innovation,” then we’re surprised when they write goals like “complete projects on time” or “improve communication skills.” These aren’t goals. I hate to say it but they’re participation trophies in document form.

The manager-employee conversation that’s supposed to solve this?

It usually starts from zero because both people are equally lost about how the employee’s actual work connects to what the CEO talked about in the all-hands. We’ve been running this same broken process for decades, just moving it from Word docs to performance management systems, acting like the problem is the software.

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Let me tell you what happens when employees don’t have real goals connected to real business outcomes.

An account lead spent six months building a program that the team and client was excited about. Beautiful execution. On time. Under budget. Then it launched and no one cared because it didn’t connect to the actual problem the business was trying to solve. In her year-end review, her manager said “great work, but not quite what we needed.” She left three months later.

The exit interview was polite. She talked about wanting new challenges. But I’d seen her goals from the beginning of the year. They were generic. “Deliver high-quality work.” “Collaborate with cross-functional teams.” Nothing about the client or the retention problem that was actually keeping executives up at night. Her manager had approved those goals because they sounded fine, and neither of them had a way to test whether they actually mattered.

We lost someone talented, not because she couldn’t do the work, but because we never helped her understand which work to do. That’s a failure of process, not people. And it’s expensive. The cost of rehiring, the lost productivity, the institutional knowledge that walked out the door. All preventable.

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I know why we’re stuck here. Goal-setting is subjective, and HR hates subjectivity because it creates fairness problems. If we give employees tools that generate different suggestions based on their role and the business context, what happens when two people in the same job get different guidance? What if the AI suggests something that conflicts with what their manager thinks? What if there’s a legal risk we haven’t considered?

These concerns are real. But they’re also excuses for inaction. We’re so afraid of the edge cases that we’re accepting a process where the median case is failure. Most employees struggle to set meaningful goals. Most managers don’t have time to help them properly. Most HR teams spend January through March in an endless loop of reminders and check-ins that don’t actually improve the quality of anyone’s goals.

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I’ve started building something new, and it’s changing how I think about this entire process.

I created an AI agent and fed it my 2025 goals and the 2025 business priorities to test it. Within minutes, it asked me questions I hadn’t considered.

“You said you want to improve employee engagement, how does that connect to the company’s focus on operational efficiency this year?” It pushed me to be specific.

“What does ‘improve’ mean in measurable terms?” It surfaced connections I’d missed.

“Based on the strategic priorities, have you considered how your work on engagement could reduce the time managers spend on performance issues?”

This isn’t theoretical. This is a working tool. And it completely reframes what the manager-employee conversation should be.

Instead of starting from scratch, trying to translate corporate strategy into individual work, the employee shows up having already explored the connections. They’ve tested different versions of their goals. They’ve seen how their work could ladder up to different business priorities. The manager’s job shifts from “help me figure out what I should do” to “here’s what I’m thinking, help me choose the right focus.”

The time savings for HR are real. Fewer employees asking for help. Fewer managers escalating confused employees. Fewer rounds of “please update your goals” because people actually understand what they’re supposed to write in the first place.

This doesn’t replace the manager-employee relationship. It makes it productive. The AI doesn’t decide what the goals should be. It helps employees think through the options so they can have a real conversation about priorities instead of a guessing game about what words to put in the boxes.

Next week, you can try this. Take your business strategy document, your team’s priorities, and build a simple prompt in the AI chat where you explain your role role and what you want to accomplish. Have it question your assumptions. Have it suggest connections. See what happens when AI can help employees come to goal-setting meetings prepared.

How are you using AI to reengineer your processes, not just digitize them?

Because if your answer is “we’re still figuring out the legal implications” or “we’re waiting to see what other companies do,” you’re already behind.

Your employees are using AI anyway. They’re just not telling you about it. The choice isn’t whether AI gets involved in your HR processes.

The choice is whether you’re going to shape how it happens or let it happen to you.

What are you actually reengineering?