I rolled my eyes at HR leadership advice

(And now I wish I’d listened)

When I started, everyone kept saying:

• Get the right people on the bus
• Hire for attitude, aptitude, and appreciation
• Don’t keep average players around. Move fast

And I thought, yeah, that makes sense. We’re a fast-growth company. I just need people with strong resumes and experience.

So that’s what I did.

• I hired people with impressive resumes
• I prioritized experience over fit, every single time
• I kept players around longer than I should have because replacing them felt hard

It cost me.

I missed my numbers for the first time in my career.
I dreaded going into the office.
We had infighting, CYA behavior, and real toxicity spreading through the team.

Eventually, I had to turn over the entire group. All of it.

The advice I ignored the most

“Don’t hire for resume. Hire for attitude, aptitude, and appreciation.”

I thought I needed people who had been there and done that.
That a great resume me...

Coinbase recently shared that it is rebuilding the company around AI, fewer layers, faster decisions, and “no pure managers.”

One line really got my attention:

Every leader is expected to also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

I understand why this sounds appealing.

It sounds practical.

It sounds lean.

It sounds like the kind of thing a high-performance company should say.

But I disagree with it more than I can probably say politely.

What is the risk of “no pure managers”?

The risk is that the player part of the job almost always wins.

The client deadline wins.

The urgent deliverable wins.

The revenue pressure wins.

The manager’s own workload wins.

And coaching gets pushed to the side.

That is the part CEOs and CHROs need to be very careful about as they redesign organizations for the AI era.

Fewer layers may be the right move.

Faster decisions may be the right move.

Most executives think better decisions come from better data.

They don’t.

They come from a clear point of view.

And at the CHRO level, that difference shows up fast.

Some leaders walk into a room and decisions accelerate. Others walk in and things stall. It’s rarely about intelligence or preparation.

It’s about clarity.

If you don’t have a clear stance, one of two things happens:

• You hesitate
• Someone else defines the direction

Either way, you’re reacting instead of shaping the outcome.

Why CHROs Struggle in High-Stakes Decision Moments

Question: Why do smart, experienced CHROs still get stuck in executive decisions?

Answer: They rely on data instead of forming a clear position ahead of time.

Most CHROs think:

• “I need more data”
• “I need more alignment”
• “I need more time”

That’s not the real issue.

The issue is walking into the room without a defined belief about what should happen and why.

Data should support your thinking. It should not replace it.

 ...

Many CHROs are trying to figure out how to use AI in HR without increasing risk or overwhelming their teams.

But here’s the pattern I’ve seen over the last 30 days:

HR teams are adding AI tools on top of already broken processes.

And instead of freeing up capacity…
it’s making things worse.

More tools.
Same bottlenecks.
No real impact.

Not because executives don’t care.
Not because they’re behind.

Because they haven’t experienced how AI actually drives business results yet.

And when you haven’t experienced something…
you don’t respect it.

It’s like chocolate.

If you’ve never had really good chocolate, you don’t crave it.

That’s where a lot of executive teams are right now with AI in HR.

What is actually keeping CHROs up at night with AI in HR?

Short answer: It’s not AI itself. It’s everything around it.

What I’m seeing across CHRO and CPO groups:

• Executive teams pushing for AI without understanding the risk
• HR teams already at full capacity
• Data that is fragmented,...

AI doesn’t feel urgent to most CHROs. That’s the real risk.

Most executives don’t think AI is urgent.

That’s what should worry you.

Not because they’re careless.
Not because they’re behind.

Because they haven’t experienced what AI can actually do to their business.

And if you haven’t experienced it… you don’t respect it.

Why doesn’t AI feel like a priority right now?

Because it hasn’t been tied to business outcomes yet.

In most organizations, AI is not clearly connected to:

• Revenue growth
• Cost reduction
• Productivity gains
• Operating model changes

So it gets deprioritized.

It doesn’t show up in the SWOT.
It’s not framed as a real threat.
It’s not treated like a real opportunity.

There’s also a quiet assumption happening inside leadership teams:

“If we haven’t figured it out, our competitors probably haven’t either.”

That assumption is dangerous.

What changes when AI actually shows up in the business?

Everything.

Once AI is applied in a real way, it st...

Most CHROs think they’re not ready for AI.

That’s not the real issue.

The real issue is this…

Your HR systems are not set up in a way that AI can actually work.

Onboarding is just where this shows up first.

But it’s happening everywhere.

Why this shows up so clearly in onboarding

I hear this all the time:

“We’re investing heavily in hiring… but new hires are slow to ramp.”

Most companies assume onboarding is broken because they don’t have enough content.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is onboarding is designed like an event instead of a system.

Here’s what it usually looks like:

• Day 1 sessions
• A checklist
• A shared drive full of documents
• Then… figure it out

New hires come in excited.

Within weeks:

• They’re confused
• They’re searching for answers
• They’re getting inconsistent guidance

Even your strongest hires start to lose confidence early.

And that kills momentum before it ever starts.

This is not an onboarding problem

Let’s be cle...

Most CEOs think the problem is talent.

It’s not.

It’s the system the talent operates in.

I learned that the hard way.

At one point, I had a team where maybe 20 percent were true top performers. The rest looked strong on paper but didn’t operate like a high-performing team.

There was backstabbing. Finger pointing. Low accountability.

And I own that.

I overvalued resumes. I undervalued attitude, aptitude, and appreciation.

We also didn’t have a strong employer brand. We were early, not well known, and didn’t have big benefits.

So we couldn’t rely on inbound talent.

We had to build differently.

Years later, I took a seven-week sabbatical as CEO.

Nothing broke.

Here’s what actually changed and what CHROs should be doing right now.

What actually allows a team to run without the CEO?

A team runs without the CEO when decision-making, accountability, and priorities are built into the system, not dependent on the leader.

Before, everything flowed through me.

After, it d...

The other day I was reviewing someone’s LinkedIn profile and saw the phrase:

“20 years of experience.”

For most of my career, that number signaled credibility.

But lately I find myself reacting differently.

And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this is not a commentary on age. Ageism is alive and well in many industries, and dismissing people because they have decades of experience would be just as misguided as dismissing someone because they are young.

But something else has changed.

If you are a CEO or CHRO building an executive team today, the real question is not just how much experience someone has.

The real question is this:

How do you know you are selecting leaders who will stay relevant?

Because in a world where technology, AI, and business models are evolving this quickly, the shelf life of knowledge is shrinking.

Research from organizations like BCG and Harvard Business Review suggests that the half-life of many professional skills is now less than five years. In ...

A few days ago I was talking with Loni Markman, who will be facilitating a session at the upcoming CHRO Reset Retreat.

At one point she asked me to do something incredibly simple.

Close my eyes.
Put my feet on the floor.
Take a breath.

That’s it.

So I did.

And it took almost twenty minutes for my brain to calm down.

Twenty minutes.

All I was doing was sitting in a chair with my eyes closed.

My mind was firing like a caffeinated squirrel.

Which is funny, because I do not even drink caffeine.

What struck me was not just how wound up I felt.

It was how normal that feeling had become.

And it reminded me of something I learned years ago when I was training for marathons.

Professional athletes train hard.

But they also recover intentionally.

If they trained at maximum intensity every single day, they would break.

Yet most executives do exactly that.

Quick insight for busy CHROs

• Many executives operate in a constant stress response without realizing it
• Traini...

The shift most CHROs underestimate

There is a moment in a CHRO’s career when the rules change.

You are no longer leading individual contributors.
You are leading leaders.
And those leaders are leading other leaders.

You now sit above multiple layers.

At this level, effort does not fix misalignment. Executive communication does.

Based on years of working alongside sitting CHROs inside our Mastermind Groups, one pattern is clear:

The biggest bottleneck at this level is not strategy.
It is executive communication that does not scale across layers.

Why leading leaders of leaders requires a different operating system

When you lead individual contributors, alignment is direct.

You can:
• Correct misunderstandings immediately
• Inspect decisions personally
• Reinforce expectations one conversation at a time

When you lead leaders of leaders, clarity must travel without you.

You cannot personally coach every interpretation.
You cannot personally fix every drift.

Your communication bec...