TL;DR

↗️ Founders don’t escape performance reviews. They get reviewed too

🧩 Recalibrate your mid-year HR strategy like a CPeO

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

Founders don’t escape performance reviews. They get reviewed too

Have you ever wondered who evaluates your founder's performance? Or, be honest (says David Beckham), have you ever thought: founders kind of get away with it. They're the one person in the company we never ask to write a self-reflection, submit a performance review, or be included in the calibration where everyone debates whether the founder “meets expectations” or “strongly exceeds”. 

I rejoined Notion Capital this year (for round two 😆). Halfway through an investor biannual meeting, while listening to a portfolio review, my HR brain lit up. Hang on….this sounds exactly like a performance review for founders. Actually, no. It is a performance calibration for all companies across an entire fund.

And what I was observing had more clarity, rigour and commercial discipline than most of the performance systems we build inside companies. 😬

How founders actually get reviewed

1. Performance calibration (biannually)

Every founder’s company in a fund is calibrated against every other company in that same fund. If a VC has deployed £500m across a 3-year investment window, every company in that cohort is reviewed together — performance ranked, patterns identified, outliers discussed.

Sound familiar? It's the same calibration model we use for employees😅. But there are 2 things I noticed in this calibration that I don't see often enough inside organisations:

1. The focus is on results, and

2. Results are objective

When a founder’s company performance is calibrated, the conversation starts with the metrics that matter: ARR, NRR, gross margin, revenue versus forecast, Rule of 40, cash burn and whichever revenue efficiency metrics the investors use. And none of this is a surprise to founders. They know exactly what they're being measured on.

The only question that matters is:

Only once the objective metrics have been assessed does the conversation shift: What's causing this? What have they tried? What support do they need?

This sequencing, I realise, is key. In most performance calibrations, we spend too much time arguing about ‘effort’ instead of objective results. "But she worked really hard this quarter." By the time we've settled whether someone deserves a 3 or a 4, the meeting is over.

When results are evaluated objectively first, the conversation is quick. And that frees up time for the part that actually improves performance: diagnosing context, then designing targeted support based on what isn't working and what's needed.

2. Regular feedback and review (monthly)

Investors and founders have regular board meetings, typically monthly or quarterly. A good board meeting runs like a well-run 1:1. It creates a continuous feedback loop, where the founder shares how the business is performing, the numbers are reviewed, support is provided, and next steps are agreed.

Again, the anchor is objective metrics. The conversation is grounded in what has happened, what the data is showing, what needs to change, and what comes next. #Nosurprises for the founder or the investor.

 3. Long-term progression & reward (5-10 years)

A founder's company performance is not evaluated twice a year in isolation. It is tracked across a 5–10 year arc, because their job is to build a company that creates lasting value, secures future funding, and delivers on the original vision.

You might read this and think: “It’s all about revenue efficiency. Isn't this just capitalism optimising for returns?”

Fair challenge🙂. But hold that thought alongside this: most founders started their business with a vision to solve a specific problem — whether it’s making healthcare more affordable, finance more accessible, the world more sustainable, or day-to-day life more seamless for millions of people.

But for that vision to survive long enough to reach those people, the financial metrics have to work. Revenue, margin, funding, and growth are the fuel that buys runway. And without a runway, the mission never reaches the people it was built for. 

That's why clarity of financial performance matters to keep the collective vision alive — the same vision your employees joined for, and the same reason your best people choose to stay.

The founder's performance review sets the expectations for the whole business 

The biannual calibration, monthly feedback loop and long-term progression arc all run on the same rails: objective metrics, #nosurprises, and results-focused.

But this review does not just evaluate your founder; it sets the performance expectations for the whole business. The metrics your founder walks into the board meeting with are the metrics the company needs to build towards. 

For HR, this matters on 2 fronts. First, those metrics should shape the performance system you build, so teams are measured against the outcomes the business actually needs. Second, they should shape your HR strategy, so your priorities, hiring plans, capability focus and reward decisions are aligned to what the business is being evaluated on. 

Sponsored: 92% of HR leaders won't let AI make their hardest calls. Should they?

Founders are evaluated on objective results. Not effort, not instinct. 

As AI changes what decisions look like, knowing where to draw that line matters more than ever. 

Ruth Buscombe spent years making split-second calls in F1 pit lanes. She's joining Rippling to talk about exactly that.

SAVE YOUR SEAT →

Recalibrate your mid-year HR strategy like a CPeO 

I'm going to start with a confession. In my early days as a Head of People, whenever my founder and CoS were preparing the board pack, I went straight to the section tagged for me… 🏷️the people and org update. I filled in my part, and that was it. I didn't read the revenue metrics. I didn't look at the ARR trajectory or the cash burn. I skimmed past the forecast versus actuals. 

In my head, that was the CFO’s role. They would make sure we were on track. I had enough on my plate, so it didn’t feel like my priority. When I shared this at a recent STEP UP Bootcamp, I saw the recognition on everyone’s faces. Then, one by one, some of the sharpest HR leaders I know admitted they do the same thing.

If this is you too, don’t panic. There is always a moment when you realise you need to step up and become more strategic, more commercial, and more connected to the business. Let this be that reminder.

Mid-year is a business recalibration point 

By now, your investors will likely have reviewed your start-up’s performance, and your founder will be in active conversations with them about how the business is really doing. Are you ahead or behind the plan? Is revenue tracking? Is the burn under control? Do you need to pivot, pull back, or double down? 

This is not just a founder/investor update. It is a business recalibration, and if the business recalibrates, your HR strategy needs to recalibrate too. Priorities, hiring plans, capabilities, leadership focus, performance expectations, reward decisions and where teams spend their energy should all be reviewed through that lens. Otherwise, you risk running an HR strategy based on assumptions that are already out of date.

Step 1: Start with the founder’s metrics

If you have not started this conversation with your founder yet, mid-year is the perfect moment. You still have 6 months to influence whether the company hits its goals.

Start simply. Ask your founder:

• “What are you being evaluated on by your investors right now?”

• “What has changed since the start of the year?”

• “What matters most in the next 6 months?”

• “Where do we need the business to perform differently?”

Then read the board pack from page one. I know it can feel intimidating, so set a realistic expectation for yourself. You are not trying to become a finance expert, nor are you expected to have opinions on every commercial decision suddenly. You are simply trying to understand what the business promised, what it is delivering, where the pressure is building and what has changed since the original plan was set.

Step 2: Audit your HR strategy against business reality

From there, audit your HR strategy against the current business reality. If the founder’s performance review is shaping the direction of the business, your HR strategy needs to respond to that direction too.

Look at your priorities, hiring plans, capability gaps, leadership focus, performance expectations, talent review, reward principles and where your team is spending time. Then ask:

If the answer is yes, you have alignment. If the answer is no, you have drift. 

And if your answer is, “I’m not sure how to connect HR to business impact,” here is a guide to get you started: 🔗 Linking HR work to business impact is simpler than you think 

And I will hazard a guess. At mid-year, your investors and founder are probably looking hard at whether revenue is on target. And if the business is missing revenue, the conversation often turns quickly to cost-cutting… sigh😔. 

So let me remind you of something: HR is better positioned to drive revenue growth than we often realise. Behind every stalled pipeline, rising churn stat or missed upsell opportunity, there is usually a people problem in disguise.

And where there is a people problem, there is an HR solution. I wrote more about this here: ✂️ Refocus HR for growth, not just cost-cutting

This is your moment to step up like a commercial CPeO 

Your business is recalibrating at mid-year right now. That conversation between your founder and their investors, where priorities shift, expectations reset, and the direction of the business gets re-pointed, is probably already happening.

Which means this is your window.

The HR leaders who step up at moments like this already understand what the business is being held accountable for. They show up to every conversation already aligned to what it needs.

Make sure your HR strategy reflects the business your founder is being evaluated on today, not the business you planned for at the start of the year. If there is a gap, mid-year is your moment to close it.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

Chiefs of Staff and Heads of Ops, this is for you 

I’m running a special edition of STEP UP Bootcamp in October

Ops leaders who own HR as part of their remit already join my regular STEP UP Bootcamp. So, I’ve decided to run a bootcamp exclusively for you… in collaboration with Operations Nation 🥳 

That means you’ll learn alongside other ops leaders who understand your world, your constraints, and the ever-growing list of responsibilities that somehow ended up on your desk… including HR 😅. 

STEP UP your strategic HR leadership

The bootcamp helps you lead your HR team beyond operational support, so HR becomes a strategic lever for scaling the business.

This is the only strategic HR training designed for the speed and pressure of scaling start-ups.

You’ll learn how to:

• Drive business results by building the right structure, capabilities and ways of working for the next stage of growth after Series A or B funding.

• Avoid costly scaling mistakes by aligning HR strategy with business strategy before they cost the business growth momentum. 

• Influence founders and C-suite peers with confidence, so you can lead the step change your scaling business needs.

This is right for you if: 

• Your ops role includes owning HR strategy as part of your remit

• You’ve moved from ops into leading the HR function

30% off for the first 5 newsletter subscribers

This is the first time I've run a STEP UP Bootcamp exclusively for Chiefs of Staff and Heads of Ops.

There are only 12 seats available, and the first 5 people to secure their place will receive 30% off using code: OPSLEADER30.

If you're thinking about joining, I wouldn't leave it too long.

• Dates: 15, 16, 22 & 23 Oct 2026

• Time: 09:00 –17:30 GMT

• Format: Fully virtual (max 12 participants)

Please make sure this is right before you sign up 

This is a significant investment, so please make sure the content and level are right for you. 

Or, if you want to talk it through first, book a call with me. It will just be a conversation about where you are and whether this is the right fit. And if it isn’t, I’ll tell you that too (ask Paulina 😉).

💛 JooBee

TL;DR

👀 Inside Octopus Energy’s No-HR model: What it actually looks like

✅ Want a No-HR model? 5 tests to see if you’re ready

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

Inside Octopus Energy’s No-HR model: What it actually looks like

In the previous newsletter, we learned from Cynthia Chan (Head of People Ops) at Octopus Energy that their HR team doesn’t have People Partners. They don’t run a performance cycle. They don’t coach leaders on engagement surveys. They don’t guide managers through ER cases. 

Because at its core, Octopus Energy's No-HR model is a separation of 2 things: 

1. People accountability: Owned by leaders 

2. People infrastructure: Owned by HR 

With that separation in place, the HR team has to be designed differently. It’s not as simple as removing the People Partner role😅. 

So, I'm running Octopus Energy's HR team through my 6 Foundations framework (Strategy, Structure, Capabilities, Processes & Systems, Data, and Values & Principles) to understand how the team is designed and how they operate. 

How Octopus Energy designed its HR team 

1. STRATEGY: The problems HR will and will NOT solve

At Octopus Energy, they believe everyone in the business is either serving customers, or serving the people who serve customers. When HR absorbs people accountability from leaders, it creates distance from the very thing the business is built around. The closer leaders are to their teams, the closer they are to customers and HR stepping in breaks that chain. 

So HR drew a deliberate line: their team is not where people problems land. Their job is to build the infrastructure that keeps leaders close to their people, their decisions, and their customers — so they don’t need to call HR in the first place. 

That strategic clarity is what the other 5 foundations are built on. 

2. STRUCTURE: The shape of the team that runs this model 

At Octopus, the structure is built to push work out, not take it in. They run: 

• a lean People and Talent Ops team across 8 UK businesses and multiple countries

• a generalist Talent Partners own end-to-end hiring across every function, and

What they don’t have are People Partners or People Advisors. In most companies, these roles sit on the front line to guide, support and advise leaders. At Octopus, these roles don’t exist in HR because the job is not there in the first place. Guidance, support and advice are expected to come from the leader’s manager, not from HR.

Their team structure is designed to enable leaders, and sometimes, that means removing a role entirely. 

3. CAPABILITIES: Generalist vs. specialist 

Octopus builds its HR team's capabilities more like those of full-stack engineers. Instead of relying on narrow HR specialisms, they build a team that understands the whole system and can move to where the work is needed.

For example, their Talent Partners are not confined to tech, commercial or GTM hiring. They hire end-to-end across different functions, so when hiring slows in one area, they can shift to another, for example from services to finance, or from sales to credit.

The same applies to People Ops. Rather than splitting the team into narrow parts of the employee lifecycle, they build systems, tools and processes that work across the full employee journey.

In short, their HR capabilities aren’t built around typical HR career progression lanes. They challenge the status quo and build roles and capabilities that meet the business where it actually is. 

4. PROCESS & SYSTEMS: The steps, rituals and technology that replace HR's presence 

Many HR processes rely on HR being present – guiding, tracking, and following up. Remove HR, and the process falls apart 😱. At Octopus, every process is built to work without HR in the room.

Their HR team builds self-serve tools, instant access to data, and enablement content (face-to-face, video, and written guidance) so managers can handle people decisions confidently, without needing HR beside them. They also build automatic triggers, for example, if there’s been no salary increase in 12 months, an inflationary rise happens by default.

The system does the prompting, and leaders own the decision and the action.

5. DATA: The information leaders need, without an HR filter 

At Octopus, HR’s role is to make data visible to leaders so they can act on it without being dependent on HR to interpret what’s happening. 

For example, engagement data is shared through Workleap and goes directly to leaders every one to two weeks. No HR summary or quarterly deck. If something drops and a leader does nothing, they cannot say they didn't know. Pay benchmarking works the same way. Leaders use market data, speak to candidates, run their own benchmarking. HR might provide the tool but the interpretation and the decision? Theirs.

More recently, Cynthia’s team noticed a gap. At 10,000 people across multiple countries, the organic “I know who knows what” starts to break down. So they’re now building an internal skills matrix, giving leaders better visibility so they can tap into talent across teams and borders. 

HR’s key role is to keep designing the system so the right data reaches the person accountable for acting on it. 

6. VALUES & PRINCIPLES: The philosophy that holds it all together 

Greg Jackson (Founder and CEO of Octopus Energy) believes in the principle of the dry stone wall: each person is a different shape and size, not perfectly formed together — but when you put them together, it works, it stays, it's strong. 

That principle of treating people as individuals shows up in the decisions Cynthia’s HR team makes. It’s why there are no uniform frameworks. Why each team operates on its own timeline. Why the same engagement data can be handled differently by two leaders in completely different contexts and still be “right”.

Their principles guide how they translate HR strategy into the day-to-day execution.

The HR team at Octopus is designed to make leadership accountability possible

Each foundation reinforces the same separation: HR owns the people infrastructure, leaders own the people accountability. 

The 6 Foundations don't operate independently: 

• strategy sets the boundary

• structure holds it

• capabilities enable execution 

• processes and systems make it self-sufficient

• data makes it self-correcting, and 

• values and principles stop it reverting back HR as the dumping ground the moment a leader finds it easier to just call HR.

Octopus HR team is intentionally designed to own the infrastructure that makes leadership accountability possible.

Sponsored: When data moves fast, who makes the call?

HR teams that let AI handle the operational layer free themselves up for the decisions that actually need a human. But where's the line? 

Join Rippling and F1 for a conversation about AI, data, and where human judgment still has to win.

REGISTER NOW →

Want a No-HR model? 5 tests to see if you’re ready

Octopus Energy’s No-HR model sounds interesting. Also… terrifying 😅 And maybe, for a tiny second, tempting. 

Because almost every HR leader I speak to is exhausted from chasing managers, translating business problems into people processes, being pulled into every difficult conversation, while the workload grows and the team doesn't.

Before we jump to "How do we copy Octopus?", it is very important to start with:

"What would need to be true in our business before this would work?"

Because removing HR from the middle doesn't automatically create leadership accountability. Sometimes it just removes the only thing holding the mess together… yikes! 😬

5 tests to know if your organisation is ready for No-HR 

1️⃣ The trust test

“Do you actually trust your leaders to make people decisions?”

Pay. Promotions. Performance calls. Hiring trade-offs. Engagement interventions. Conflict.

If the answer is no, be honest. Because "we want leaders to own people accountability" sounds great… until a leader makes a decision their manager disagrees with, and sends it straight back to HR for "guidance."

A high-trust model means leaders make decisions close to the work, explain their logic, and carry the consequences – even when the decision looks different from what HR, or the founder, would have made. That's a very different muscle.

2️⃣ The consequence test

“When leaders get it wrong, who feels the consequence?”

Many companies say they want leadership accountability, but keep HR as the rescue route. At Octopus, when a leader gets it wrong, accountability moves up the chain. Not sideways into HR, and that distinction matters.

Leaders only build the accountability muscle when they have to live with the outcome of their own decisions.

3️⃣ The capability test

“Can your leaders carry the accountability you want to give them?”

Can they have difficult conversations early? Explain pay decisions clearly? Spot performance patterns before they escalate? Interpret engagement data without waiting for HR to translate it?

More accountability doesn't automatically create better leaders. The capability has to be there first.

4️⃣ The visibility test

“Can leaders see what they need to act on, without waiting for HR?”

If engagement drops, can they see it? If pay is drifting out of line, can they check it? If performance is slipping, can they spot it? 

A No-HR model only works when leaders have direct access to the information they need.

5️⃣ The discomfort test

“Where is HR absorbing discomfort that leaders should be learning to carry?”

This is probably the most important test, because most HR teams are unconsciously absorbing leadership discomfort:

• The discomfort of a leader avoiding conflict.

• The discomfort of a manager not knowing how to give feedback.

• The discomfort of a founder wanting consistency without doing the hard work of alignment.

• The discomfort of a team being unclear, frustrated or under-led.

A word of warning: Shaky foundations don't scale 

It’s tempting to copy the parts that personally resonate with us — such as removing People Partners, cancelling performance reviews, or decentralising pay decisions. But remember, this is not a pick-and-mix model 🍬. The No-HR model works at Octopus because their 6 Foundations reinforce each other.

• High-trust principles support decentralised structure.

• Decentralised structure requires leadership capability.

• Leadership capability is supported by systems.

• Systems produce data.

• Data enables local decisions.

• Local decisions serve the strategy.

Pull one Foundation out, and the whole system breaks. As Cynthia put it at the end of our conversation: "Really challenge why you do certain things. Ask yourself: what value does this add? Should we even be doing it?"

If you want the benefits of a No-HR model, the work isn't about copying one Foundation. It's about examining the whole system and being willing to change it.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

👥 Help your founder build the exec team an AI-native business needs 

Fresh from an article I co-wrote with True and Notion Capital on building AI-native leadership teams, I’ve pulled out the bite-sized takeaways that you can use right away.

If your company is talking about AI, hiring AI talent, or trying to become “AI-first”, this is your reminder:

The hard part is not the AI, the hard part is building the leadership team, operating system and culture that can turn AI into a sustainable business.

💡 The big idea summarised

AI-native companies cannot be built with pre-AI assumptions. These are companies where AI sits at the core of the product, business model and operating system from day one. That means they operate under different rules: how you hire, when you hire and which leadership capabilities matter most.

The article breaks leadership hiring into 3 stages:

The builders: months 0–12
Leaders who can prove the technology works and solve a real customer problem.

The validators: months 12–18
Leaders who can prove customers will pay, and the business model works.

The scalers: months 18–24
Leaders who can standardise operations and prepare the company to scale.

The sequence matters because hiring every senior leader at once does not make your business more mature. Sometimes, it just makes failure more expensive 😱. 

🔍 Before you hire another CxO, check this first 

In the next 72 hours, map your leadership team against the stage your business is actually in:

• Are we still proving the product works?

• Are we proving customers will pay?

• Are we trying to scale what is already working?

Then map the leadership gaps against the answer. 

• If you are still proving the product, your business may need stronger product and technical leadership before adding more senior commercial layers.

• If you are validating the model, your business may need GTM and finance leadership to sharpen pricing, revenue quality, runway and unit economics.

• If you are scaling, your business may need leaders who can build systems, shape culture and design the organisation without adding unnecessary complexity.

Micro-frameworks to save (deeper breakdown in the article )

✅ Stage before title: do not hire the role until the business has earned the need.

✅ Builders, validators, scalers: match leadership hiring to the work the business must prove next.

✅ Potential over pedigree: in fast-moving markets, learning speed matters as much as past experience.

✅ Culture as a system: in AI-native companies, culture cannot be left to chance because the speed will expose every weakness.

✅ AI-native vs AI-adoptive: plugging tools into workflows is not the same as building the company around AI.

The subtext running through my head when we wrote these lines…

“Hiring senior leaders across functions all at once speeds up failure.” 

🤔 Nothing says “we have clarity” like hiring 6 senior people to find it for you.

“The hardest part isn’t the AI itself.” 

🤔 AI can process data at speed. It still cannot align your exec team over a 67-minute meeting with no agenda.

“Past experience quickly loses its relevance when the landscape evolves as fast.”  

🤔 Experience still matters. But in AI, “this is how we’ve always done it” ages in dog years unless you can extract the principles, not just repeat the playbook. 

💜 BtS with JooBee: Why I co-wrote this article

Companies keep talking about AI as a technology shift, but I think many are underestimating the leadership shift. AI changes the shape of the team, the cost model, the speed of decision-making, the skills that matter and the way people need to work together. 

For HR leaders, this is where the opportunity sits, because the right leaders who can set direction, mobilise the organisation and move people through change are your biggest driver of progress. 

👀 Read now

With True and Notion Capital, we unpacked who to hire when, what leadership profiles matter, how to think about AI-native talent and why the future of leadership is as much about adaptability as expertise.

Hopefully, it gives you a useful lens for your next leadership team conversation, especially if AI is already changing what your business needs from its leaders.

With love, Joobs 💛

TL;DR

🐙 The No-HR model at 10,000+ people. Welcome to Octopus

🗑️ HR dumping ground? 5 systems that stop it

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

🐙 The No-HR model at 10,1000+ people. Welcome to Octopus

"My billion-pound company has no HR department," Greg Jackson (Founder and CEO of Octopus Energy) famously told the BBC. Octopus Energy employs 10,000+ people globally. The biggest energy retailer in the UK, operating across multiple countries.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with Cynthia Chan… their Head of People Ops. Hmmm, for a company with "no HR department." 🙄

We were catching up over Korean BBQ. Somewhere between the banchan and the seafood pancake, the conversation landed on that quote. I looked at her across the table and teased her.

So… what are you then?

Is Greg just doing what all the 'progressive' founders do? Hating on the word ‘HR’ and renaming the function People Ops?

She laughed.

"No. The concept is we are all HR."

No-HR, because "we are all HR" 

Octopus Energy’s No-HR model is, at its core, a separation of 2 things: 

1. People accountability: Owned by leaders

2. People infrastructure: Owned by HR 

The key purpose is to remove the HR dumping ground. 

Ah yes, HR leaders, we know that dumping ground very well 😅. When leaders (and even founders) avoid the difficult performance conversations… avoid the conflict brewing with their peers… keep someone who's no longer right for the team… they come to us. 

And slowly, without meaning to, we absorb the problem. I'm using that word intentionally – absorb. We absorb the discomfort, the consequence, the emotional labour. We process it, write the script, join the meeting, manage the risk, guide the outcome…

…until eventually, the problem disappears.

And the leader learns nothing. Because they never had to own the consequence.

No HR, just radical leadership accountability 

Most of us would agree leaders should own the people accountability — hiring, developing, having the hard conversations. And HR coaches, advises and guides them.

Not at Octopus.

"We do not have People Partners. Our team do not step in when people issues happen."

You don’t? I nearly choked on my kimchi🥬. Because for most HR leaders, that IS the job. That is the bit we believe we add value in. 

So I pushed.

• But what if a leader hires the wrong person and needs to manage them out? 

• "They go to their manager."

• But what if their manager doesn't manage it? 

• "Their manager's manager needs to own it."

• But what if their manager's manager doesn't? 

• "Their manager's manager needs to own it."

That's when I saw the pattern.

At no point does HR step in to break the chain of leadership accountability. If a leader makes a poor decision, their manager holds them accountable. 

No HR dumping ground

At Octopus, HR is not there to “help” with difficult people issues. HR exists to build the infrastructure that enables leaders to do their job (more on this in the next edition).

HR does not step in to manage the discomfort of leadership on behalf of leaders. The discomfort stays with the leaders, and that’s how the accountability muscle gets built. 

So what does that actually look like in practice?

Below👇, I'm breaking down exactly how leaders own people accountability at Octopus across each of the 5 Operating Systems every business runs, whether they've named them or not.

Sponsored: Most AI talks about the work. Rippling AI does the work

HR absorbs too much because the operational layer never stops demanding attention. 

Rippling AI takes it off your plate — running onboarding, payroll, and engagement surveys automatically — so HR can step out of the reactive and into the strategic accountability it was always meant to own.

First 10 sign-ups will get a £100 Amazon voucher!* 🎁 

See Rippling AI in action →

*Terms apply

HR dumping ground? 5 systems that stop it

Cynthia Chan

A few weeks after our dinner, Cynthia and I sat down to record a proper conversation. I wanted to see what it looked like without HR.  "Alright… let's dig into the details. How do leaders actually own people accountability?" What I found was a practical, intentionally designed system: 5 Operating Systems (accountability, decision-making, performance, communication, and feedback) that complement and reinforce one another to prevent any gaps in ownership.

OS1️⃣: The accountability system

Octopus doesn’t have People Partners or HR Advisors. So, I started with employee relations (ER), because that is the hardest one to imagine without HR. 

A leader receives a formal grievance letter. They’ve never handled one before. What happens?

Their first call is to their own manager, Cynthia said. The person above them has the context, is accountable for how it lands, and has probably seen something similar before. And if they haven’t, another leader in the company will have. 

So I pressed a little further. What about mistakes? The wrong promotion, a poor hiring decision, bias in a pay call?

She didn’t flinch.

“Of course that happens. But the balance of having a high-trust environment for our leaders outweighs having to deal with the minority where it doesn’t work out. If they don’t have to live with the consequences, they would never feel the accountability to get it right.”

OS2️⃣: The decision-making system

Then we moved to pay, promotions, and budget. This is where most organisations build the strongest fences. Everything from salary bands, budgets, promotion, approval chains to HR and Finance sign-off. 

At Octopus, leaders benchmark their own market. They search the market, speak to candidates, or use benchmarking tools. And the decision sits with them.

“It’s completely localised,” Cynthia said. “There’s no set budget, no set max percentage, no restrictions as such.”

Naturally, I asked the obvious question: Doesn’t this terrify Finance? Or maybe HR… just a little? 😱

She laughed.

"Where leaders aren't given that red circle, those restrictions, they have a sense of responsibility. You trust them to make the right decision for their team and for the business. It is a high, high trust environment."

OS3️⃣: The performance system

When we got to performance management, I had to ask twice:

• No career framework?

• No review cycle?

• No calibration?

• No ratings?

• No HR-owned performance calendar?

Cynthia smiled. Correct. 

In Octopus, every leader and every team runs on their own schedule. It could be four months. It could be seven. It could be nine. It could be three years. There’s no waiting until the annual review or until the cycle opens. They make promotion and salary calls whenever it's right for their team.

So I asked, what happens when the leader gets it wrong? Such as a missed recognition, a delayed progression or a poor career conversation.

“Leaders know their teams best. They are responsible for their growth, role and career progression. That means lifting people up, but also having the hard conversations. Ultimately, how they lead their people is a reflection of them," says Cynthia.

OS4️⃣: The communication system

At Octopus, communication does not rely on HR as the central broadcast tower. Instead, they use a champions network across the business, from leaders to individual contributors. When something changes (e.g. a new AI feature in an engagement tool, process update or system change), it goes to the champions first. They carry it into their teams.

So I asked, what if 20 champions receive the same information and communicate it differently? Different timing? Different emphasis? Different tone?

Cynthia’s answer was simple: “The context is different. The same information landing in one team isn’t the same situation as it landing in another. The leader who knows their specific team will handle it in the way that’s right for them. That is part of the accountability of leaders who own the relationship with their team.”

OS5️⃣: The feedback system

We can't talk about the feedback system without talking about engagement surveys. At Octopus, HR does not work on eNPS initiatives or action planning with leaders. They maintain the system (new features, technical issues, AI updates) — and that's it. 

Leaders have direct access to a pulse survey every one to two weeks through Workleap. They interpret the data and act on it with no HR enablement. 

I'll be honest… this is where I was most curious. Because we all know the reality. Even when HR actively works with leaders on engagement data, it often struggles to become a priority. So, what actually makes leaders act on this? 

Cynthia's answer came back to the same pattern. "There is no HR layer to absorb the accountability. The data is visible. The leader can see it, and the leader’s manager can see it. The trend is there every week."

HR’s role is to remove barriers so leaders can see team sentiment in real time and act quickly. Sentiment shouldn’t fester for a quarter. Leaders own the relationship with their teams, and responding is part of their accountability.

The 5 Operating Systems (OS) that bring "We are all HR" to life

Octopus puts people accountability where it belongs: with leaders. 

The 5 Operating Systems are intentionally designed to keep accountability with leaders, so when something gets hard, it escalates up, not outwards to HR.

In that sense, the no-HR model removes the dumping ground and creates a clear separation of ownership: 

• People accountability: owned by leaders

• People infrastructure: owned by HR

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
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TL;DR

😶‍🌫️ HR built performance management. Managers used it to hide

👂 How exceptional managers use AI differently to manage performance

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

😶‍🌫️ HR built performance management. Managers used it to hide

Good question. Wrong problem😅. Let’s take a step back.

Being a great manager is a tremendous amount of work.

Prepare for the 1:1. Listen intently while simultaneously thinking about the right coaching question. Take notes. Summarise afterwards. Set individual goals. And if the manager is genuinely strong, those goals come from observations built across months, not a single conversation. Capture feedback from multiple stakeholders. Write it up carefully. Think about how to deliver it verbally. Then, when review season arrives: revisit every 1:1, analyse the performance trend, write the formal review, and plan how the conversation needs to land.

Are you tired just reading that? 😅 (And we know that's not even half of it!)

Every single action exists in service of 3 things: 

• help people grow

• help them perform, and 

• make them feel like someone genuinely gives a damn about their progress

Performance management was built to solve a 2-layer problem and only fixed 1 layer

Managing performance well requires 2 fundamentally different things. I call this The 2-Layer Problem.

• Layer 1 - The Cognitive Constraint: capturing, organising, and surfacing information about your team member consistently over time. Memory, patterns, trends, evidence.

• Layer 2 - The Capability Gap: knowing what someone needs to perform and grow — and having the conversation that helps them understand where they stand, what's expected, and what needs to change.

For decades, HR built systems to solve Layer 1. We called it performance management. What we might not have admitted is that we hoped Layer 1 would somehow carry Layer 2 as well…it didn't.

I've worked with exceptional managers. The great ones put in e.v.e.r.y. bit of that effort, and it costs them significant time. The ones with good intentions but not enough bandwidth? The system becomes governance: “HR told us to do it, so we did.” The ones who fundamentally don't care? They ignore it anyway. 🤷🏻‍♀️

So in HR, we built structures to compensate. 1:1 templates. Feedback tools. Goal-tracking frameworks. Mid-year check-ins. The theory was sound: build the right system, documentation follows, better management follows.

But what we actually built was a paper trail that let managers say: "We completed the process." Not: "We were great managers."

And that's why we've been "solving" performance management for decades…and it still feels unsolved. 

AI is solving Layer 1 and exposing Layer 2

The managers I know using AI are using it to solve the cognitive constraint, such as tracking trends, surfacing patterns, and capturing what our brain naturally drops in favour of the most recent or most “memorable” moment.

With AI handling Layer 1, a manager can walk into a 1:1 and actually think about the person in front of them. Notice a growth trend across 8 weeks, rather than reacting to whatever happened most recently. Have the conversation about the why behind a pattern. Give recognition that feels specific and earned. Give feedback grounded in actual evidence.

And here's where it gets uncomfortable for managers – and for us. 

When AI removes the cognitive constraint, and the manager still isn't having good conversations, there's nowhere left to hide. Not behind the template. Not behind "we followed the system." For the first time, we'll see clearly whether Layer 1 was ever the real problem. Or whether it was always Layer 2 all along: the capability gap we never truly developed in managers.

The performance management design challenge facing HR

AI is now solving the cognitive constraint, the Layer 1 problem that's been consuming HR's attention for decades. That clears the path to Layer 2: the question we actually wanted to answer all along: do our managers know how to understand, develop, and get the best out of their people?

That's always been the real problem. We just never had the chance to solve it properly.

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How exceptional managers use AI differently to manage performance

Lukasz Barcikwoski

I want to introduce you to Lukasz, engineering leader at Tem Energy, and one of the exceptional managers I've worked with since 2019. When he joined my Effective Manager Bootcamp recently, he shared how he was using AI as a people manager, so I asked if we could have a deeper conversation about it. I thought I was going to hear a story about efficiency. Less admin. Faster prep….that's not what he said👀.

Layer 1️⃣ in action: How Lukasz solved the cognitive constraint

Lukasz has built a system. Not a complicated one, but a deliberate one.

Every 1:1, he uses AI to transcribe the conversation. But he doesn't use the transcription as the note. He takes his own notes alongside it, such as keywords, phrases, moments that stood out and feeds those highlights back to the AI as a lens.

"If you take that list and give it to AI with the full transcription, it will summarise in a much more meaningful way because it knows what to look for."

Before every 1:1, his system pulls the last session's summary, flags any agreed actions, and surfaces the trend across 8 weeks, sometimes longer.

He also tracks something he calls a Tem’s Sustainability Score, a simple 1 to 4 scale he asks every team member at the start of each session. 

"4 means I could do this indefinitely. 1 means I'm pretty much burned out. The score itself, I don't care about that much. What I care about is when I ask them to explain why."

That question ‘why’ is Layer 2. The conversation that moves someone forward. But it only happens consistently because Layer 1 is handled. The pattern is surfaced and the context is ready. The manager arrives with evidence, not recollection from memory.

Layer 2️⃣ in action: The managerial capability that was always the point

For feedback, Lukasz goes further. He works with each team member to design their own feedback questions, tailored to their development plan, their strengths, and the specific areas they want to grow. Not a standard form and definitely not the same 5 questions for everyone.

For one senior developer, Szymon, he sends the feedback request on Szymon's behalf. Because Szymon had noticed something: when he asked for feedback himself, people were warm, encouraging, but not candid. The authority bias was too strong.

When Lukasz sends it (anonymised, framed as developmental), the responses change entirely.

"I can already see it's getting much more candid. Most people sign their names. But the ones who didn't — they were constructive in a way they wouldn't have been otherwise."

That's Layer 2. Knowing what Szymon needs. Designing the conditions that make honest feedback possible and having evidence-based conversations that actually move him forward.

What actually changed and what didn't for Lukasz

So I asked Lukasz the question I really wanted answered.

Before AI, I said, I know you were already a good manager.

He said with a modest smile. "I'd like to think so. When I applied myself fully, yes."

And after AI, what actually changed?

"The quality of a singular conversation? Not much. What changed is consistency. I have fewer weaker moments. If I had a hectic 2 weeks, I'd skip prep for one or two 1:1s. Now that doesn't happen. AI doesn't get tired. It does exactly the same thing every time."

I did not see that coming. And as someone who loves consistency — I should have. 😅

Not faster. Not smarter. More consistent.

Before AI, Lukasz spent the majority of his prep time on Layer 1; pulling notes, tracking patterns, and processing feedback. Now he spends that time on Layer 2. Thinking about the person. Reflecting on what they need. Deciding what the data actually means.

#nosurprises – from managers

For the employee on the receiving end of a manager like Lukasz, that's exactly what it feels like. Reviews arrive without surprises. Recognition lands when it's earned. Just consistent, evidence-based conversations that make growth feel inevitable, and performance feel fair.

AI doesn't make a good manager better in the moment. It makes them consistently good across every moment, and that is what changes the experience for the people they manage.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

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Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

🎫 You’re invited to The Strategic HR Archetype session

You’ve completed the new 5 Strategic HR Archetype quiz.

Now you know what you're brilliant at, what might be holding you back, and what you're growing into. A bit like Pokémon evolution, but for strategic HR leaders (yes, I do occasionally have interests outside BTS 🙃). 

A strategic HR leader can operate as a:

1. Strategic navigator

2. Trusted advisor

3. Business driver

4. Confident challenger

5. Empowered leader

Your archetype helps you understand 3 things: 

• Where are you now?

• What is getting in your way?

• What are you growing into?

The report also gives you practical tips from me to start working with. 

What it can't give you is a room full of people on a similar journey that you can learn from. People who can share what they’ve tried. What worked, what didn’t, and what might be right for you too. 

So I’m bringing a small group of newsletter readers together, live with me, to do exactly that. 

STEP UP together: The Strategic HR Archetype session

In this 60-minute live session, we’ll work through what your archetype means in practice. 

We'll look at what your archetype is costing you right now. What the next stage genuinely requires. And what's sitting between you and it.

I'll facilitate, you'll think 😉, so you leave with something useful you can take back into your work straight away. 

This is capped at 40 people so it stays interactive and conversational.

• 📅 Date: 4 June 2026 (Thursday)

• ⌚ Time: 3pm London | 4pm Berlin | 10am New York | 10pm Kuala Lumpur 

Secure your spot now

Spaces are limited to 40. Priority goes to HR leaders actively working in a scaling startup, so if that's you, don't wait. Claim your spot below 👇

STEP UP Together: The Strategic HR Archetype session

A 60-minute live session to turn your quiz result into something practical you can use at work.

One important note: This session won't be recorded or shared afterwards. So if you can’t attend live, please kindly leave the spot open for someone who can 🙏 

TL;DR

💔 Redundancies: The 1 thing that sounds kind but isn’t

😥 Can you promise redundancies won't happen again?

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Screenloop 💛

Redundancies: The 1 thing that sounds kind but isn’t

When redundancies happen because the business needs to cut costs to survive or extend its runway, most leaders tend to default to words of comfort to soften the pain.

I understand the instinct😓. It feels like the kind thing to do, especially when our hands are tied financially (no enhanced package, no extended notice, nothing beyond what's statutory). Words of reassurance feel like the only currency we have left.

However, vague comfort rarely feels kind to the person receiving it. 

The invisible damage of vagueness

It might seem like a small thing…being a little imprecise, a little soft on the detail. But what we underestimate is how much this shapes employees' beliefs about leadership.

I've met so many people who, the moment they hear the word "redundancy," immediately disengage from the process. They’ve learned not to trust it because they've been burned before. They assume the decision is already made. That the consultation is box-ticking. That nothing they say will change anything.

That cynicism is the residue of being managed through hard moments instead of being partnered through them.

It becomes a partnership when leadership gives clarity and means it

I was in this situation once. The calculations were done. The forecasts were clear. The cost we needed to reduce was not going to change😔.

But the leadership team made a deliberate choice: we were not just going to support employees through a difficult time. We were going to treat them as partners in the company's survival.

We shared the goal and the org structure we believed would get us there, and then we listened. Really listened.

Because the goal was clear and shared, employees came back with a counter-proposal. They argued that certain roles were critical to the business's survival — and they were right. Leadership accepted it, which meant some roles that were originally safe became impacted, and some that were at risk were retained.

Nobody was happy about the outcome. But people could see the respect in how it was handled. The partnership was genuine, and it showed in the actions.

The way we communicate and act in this moment doesn't just affect how people feel today. It shapes what they expect from leadership for the rest of their careers.

Keep the 🧭Communication GPS in mind to give clarity

G = Goal: Be honest about the business reality. For example: "We need to reduce costs by 30% to ensure the company can operate for the next 18 months. We are doubling down on [core product / key ICP / path to profitability], and that means stopping everything that doesn't directly move that forward."

That's not harsh. That's respecting your employees as adults who can handle the truth, rather than shielding them with language that protects us more than it protects them.

P = Process: How will decisions be made? Who is involved? When will people know? If you're running a formal consultation, say so and mean it. Don't let it become a formality that everyone knows is just a compliance checkbox.

S = Support: How will people be treated throughout? With transparency, respect, and practical support: e.g. financial where possible, emotional and career transition support where not.

Clarity of goal, process, and intent (even when the outcome is hard) is how we lead with integrity. It's what allows people to trust what we say next. It's what lets them grieve without being strung along. And it's the difference between a redundancy that permanently damages trust and one that allows a company to move through a hard moment together.

Give your employees a higher standard of leadership than they've been shown before

When we're facing this, the instinct is to make it as painless as possible — for everyone, including ourselves. Vague comfort feels kinder than clarity. But real care requires courage. The courage to name the reality. The courage to hold space for people's grief while staying anchored to the goal. The courage to lean into the discomfort together rather than manage people through it from a distance.

We can't always give people more money. But we can always give employees higher expectations of management than settling for less in their careers.

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Can you promise redundancies won't happen again?

Someone will ask this question. If not in the all-hands, it will come up in the conversation with the employee representative. In a one-to-one with a line manager. In a Slack message sent at 11 pm from someone who couldn't sleep.

"Can you promise redundancies won't happen again?"

HR leaders, prepare your founders and leaders for this. Because their instinctive answer? It's the same trap as Part 1 above: vague comfort.

"I can promise we will do everything in our power to make sure this never happens again."

Or a version of it:

• "We don't expect this to happen again."

• "This should put us in a stable position."

• "We're confident we won't need to do this again."

The intent is kindness.

But if any of those statements turn out not to be true (and in a start-up, they might), as leaders, we don't just lose trust. We lose credibility. And credibility, once lost in a moment like this, is very hard to earn back.

Instead of a promise, give confidence

Our employees know how start-ups work, especially those building to scale in today's environment. They know we operate in uncertainty: market shifts, funding changes, strategy pivots, bets that don't pay off.

They are not expecting a guarantee. They are not naive.

What they need is not a promise, it’s confidence. And confidence, unlike a promise, can be grounded in something tangible — something they can act on too.

Luana Pinto, an HR leader, captured it precisely when she was preparing her leaders for a round of redundancies recently: "Are we in a position to really cascade that down properly, and answer questions to give confidence? Our job is to give people enough clarity that they don't fill the gaps with fear."

That’s the distinction. A promise is for the communicator = it soothes the discomfort of the moment. Confidence is for the receiver = it gives them enough clarity that their questions don't turn into fear.

Name the conditions, not promise the outcome 

Instead of promising that redundancies won't happen again, name what would need to be true for them not to. For example, when redundancies are the result of runway preservation or cost-related survival, 3 conditions worth naming are:

The revenue threshold: What does the business need to bring in (and sustain) for this not to happen again? Name the number. "We need to reach £X in ARR and hold it for 2 consecutive quarters." That's not a promise, it's a target your employees can now watch alongside you and act on to help you reach.

The runway floor: What does financial stability look like for your company? How many months of runway do you need in the bank before you feel secure? Say it out loud. "We won't feel stable until we have at least 12 months of runway at any given time." Now they know what you're building towards (and so does your business 🎯).

The early warning system: What signals will tell you, before it becomes a crisis, that something needs to change? And will you share those signals with your people, or carry them alone? This is the question most founders never ask themselves. The ones who do earn something rare: a team that feels like a partner in the outcome, not a casualty of it.

(The above are examples, not a checklist. Name the conditions that are most relevant to your business.)

Accountable leaders retain the people you need most

Ask any HR leader what they notice in the months after a redundancy. They will say the same thing: some of the people the business most needed to stay…left.

How founders and leadership answer "Can you promise this won't happen again?" matters more than most realise. When done well, it does 3 things at once:

• It gives the people staying confidence that there is a real plan behind the decision with numbers attached.

• It gives them a reason to rally. When we name the conditions, we are not just reporting the situation. We are inviting them into the mission of preventing it.

• And it gives them autonomy. The difference between feeling powerless and feeling able to influence what happens next.

That is the difference between our best people updating their CV this weekend – and deciding to stay.

You can’t promise redundancies won't happen again

But you can give your employees confidence by naming what would need to be true for it not to.

That is not a lesser answer. It is a more honest one that allows them the autonomy to determine their own fate – and yours.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

TL;DR

👣 When someone is hired above you, should you stay or leave?

🙋🏻‍♀️ How I built my HR career by knowing exactly when to leave

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Screenloop 💛

When someone is hired above you, should you stay or leave?

We know this moment is coming before almost anyone else in the business does. We sit in the leadership meetings. We build the org design. We hire the CTO above the Head of Engineering, or the VP of Finance above the Head of Finance.

But knowing it is coming does not make it hurt any less when it is our turn.

The feeling that you helped build this company before the product worked, before the revenue came in, before anyone knew your start-up existed, and now someone else gets to lead the people function you built. That stings. And it's okay to say so.

In this newsletter, I want to focus on a specific scenario: the one where the role has genuinely outgrown your experience and capabilities. Not where you've been overlooked unfairly. But where, if we're honest with ourselves, the business has grown into something that now requires a different set of skills than the ones you were hired to bring.

The 2 career inflection points in start-ups

In my experience coaching HR leaders at scaling start-ups, this typically happens at 2 moments.

1️⃣ Between the Start and Build stages. The Start stage is about product-market fit, where everyone does everything, boundaries are loose, and experimentation is the job. The people who thrive here love the ambiguity. They're energised by experimentation, by wearing ten hats, by the sheer breadth of problems they're solving on any given Tuesday.

The Build stage is different. The business now needs a repeatable go-to-market motion. That requires depth, not breadth. Structure. Specialisation. Optimised systems. The profile of the person the business needs has shifted.

2️⃣ Between the Build and Scale stages. The Scale stage comes when the business is expanding into new markets, diversifying its product, acquiring other businesses or preparing for exit. The HR leader profile shifts again: from someone extraordinary at building structure, to someone who can navigate a fundamentally different level of complexity.

Start, Build, and Scale are not small step changes. They are fundamentally different businesses, with fundamentally different skill requirements. 

The 4 career IKIGAI questions

When I'm coaching an HR leader at this inflection point, the first thing I do is ask them to zoom out. It is very easy to make a short-term decision — look at current situations and decide based on how it feels right now. 

So, before you answer the questions below, hold it in that wider context.

📊 What does the business need?

A Start-stage company needs breadth. Build needs depth. Scale needs complexity. Knowing what the business needs at the next stage is important. But not as a signal to immediately start developing ourselves to move with it. The harder question is whether you want to work in that environment. 

And that's what the next 3 questions are really asking.

💜 What do you love and what are you naturally wired for?

This is not just about skills. It's about personality and energy. Do you love the speed and chaos of zero-to-one? Or do you come alive when you're building systems that work at scale? There is no wrong answer. But there is a right one for you. Don’t let short-term title or prestige distract you from choosing what energises you every day, because it will cost you more than you expect.

⚖️ Breadth or depth: What do you want to get good at?

Do you want to grow the breadth of your experience — to have been the Head of People who took a company through Start, Build, and Scale to exit? That's a rare and powerful career story. 

Or do you want to grow the depth — to become the person who specialises in the Build stage, who can do it faster and better than anyone else? That's a different kind of rare. 

Both are valuable career paths. But they come with very different trade-offs. For breadth, you need to be prepared to learn from the person hired above you and bootstrap your own growth in the process. For depth, you need to be prepared to leave the company you built and go back to do it all over again somewhere else. 

💰  What will you be paid for (what’s the trade-off)?

We know better than anyone what the market pays. If we choose breadth, there is an opportunity to grow our earnings because the role becomes more complex, and the compensation follows. If we choose depth, we are essentially doing the same job with greater efficiency, which means our earnings will sit within the band for the stage of company we choose to specialise in.

All 4 questions come from the Japanese concept of Ikigai: 'a reason to live' or 'a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.' 

Our careers take up almost a third of our lives. We spend so much of it helping others make better decisions about theirs. We owe ourselves the same rigour.

Career strategy is also a choice

When you’re standing at this inflection point, and someone has been hired above you, it stings. But it also gives you something important: a moment to make a deliberate choice.

As you decide whether to stay, what to negotiate, or what your next move looks like, there is only one question that matters:

Strategy is about making a choice that serves your long-term goal.

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How I built my HR career by knowing exactly when to leave

Let me bring the 4 questions above to life by sharing with you my own career Ikigai.

I love the Build stage. As a former systems engineer, it is the problem I am wired to solve; building organisations with structure, systems, and ways of working that scale. I am good at it, and it brings me joy. And it pays at a level I am comfortable with. 

I am not one for “big houses, big cars, and big rings” (Eeks, the BTS lyric escaped. It happens when I'm left unsupervised 😅). What I want is security, my mortgage paid, and enough flights home to see my family in Malaysia.

So across my start-up career, the choice has always been depth in the Build stage. And I want to share what I chose to do each time I reached an inflection point between Build and Scale.

I was good at building systems, but not at driving change

My background was in OD (the ‘back-end’ of HR) where I built people experience products. But I kept hitting the same roadblock: adoption. So, I made a deliberate move into people partnering (the “front-end”) to understand what employees and leaders were actually dealing with day-to-day, and how to increase adoption.

I learnt to let go of my ego of “this is the best thing I’ve built” and replace it with genuine empathy for busy employees and leaders. I also learnt how to influence and drive change at different levels of the organisation.

I still remember my first month. I askedmy CPeO: "What do you want me to achieve in two years?"

He said: "Why two?"

I said: "Because I'm leaving in two years."

He was curious rather than offended, so I told him: “I want to increase adoption and grow my influencing skills. Once I have that, I want to go back and build again, but do it better.”

💡 Takeaway: Just to be clear, telling your manager you want to leave in two years is not the key takeaway here. Not every manager appreciates that level of honesty😅. The key is being clear on what you want to grow over the next two years, then making deliberate choices to gain those skills and experiences.

I wanted to build an HR team with product-led principles

Two years later, I left with a new skill and a new idea. I wanted to test building an HR team with product principles; the way the team is structured, the way it thinks, the way it works.

With that goal in mind, I joined a company I believed would let me do exactly that. Three months in, I realised I was wrong. It was a genuinely exciting company. The highest talent density I had ever worked with. Backed with £80M at Series B. We had the budget. But the founder proved difficult to work with in the way I needed. So I was at a crossroad:

• Do I stay, knowing my development would be delayed?

• Or do I leave, knowing the thing I wanted to test might never happen there?

So I left after six months. This time, I joined a company that truly gave me the space to build a product-led HR team. (You can read about how I did that in Season 2 of my blog: click here).

💡 Takeaway: When you have clarity on your career goal, it becomes easier to see whether an environment will help you grow into it. And if the environment does not allow the work to happen, your next step becomes much clearer.

I wanted to do it all over again, but faster

By year 2, the foundation had been built, and the business was heading into Scale. I was ready to leave again. But this time, I had a different goal: I wanted to help start-ups move through the Build stage faster, with fewer roadbumps, by building the right foundations even quicker.

During contract negotiations for the next role, I told my founder: "I'll leave when we hit around 400 people. And I'll help you hire my backfill."

He asked why.

I said: "It's a different problem the business will be solving at that stage, and I don't have those skills."

He said: "You never know. You could grow into it."

I said: "I don't want to."

He was taken aback. So I explained: “I love building to scale. I do not love the complexity of scaling to exit. I wanted to go back and do it again. That is the skill I wanted to keep sharpening.”

When we started to hit 400 people, and the business started acquiring other companies, the signs were there. So I kicked off the backfill hiring process myself. Here’s the LinkedIn outreach message I sent to our ideal next CPeOs:

💡 Takeaway: When you know the career you want to build, you feel more in control of your choices. You also make yourself more valuable because you are choosing the work you are genuinely good at, enjoy doing, and want to keep getting better at.

The goal is long-term career clarity

I want to be open about something. Leaving deliberately is a tactic, not the goal. The goal is to grow your career with intention. The choices you make to get there could look very different to mine.

The reality right now is different; the job market is harder, AI is reshaping HR, and every move feels riskier. Which is exactly why clarity on the career you are building is not a luxury. It is what makes you harder to replace and more valuable in a market moving faster than any of us expected.

At every inflection point, there is an opportunity to get clear on that bigger picture. In the current climate, that clarity is your most important career asset.

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TL;DR

🗺️ Your start-up is expanding globally. Your culture isn't ready

🌏 How to build a high-performing culture - globally?

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

Your start-up is expanding globally. Your culture isn't ready

When a founder announces, “We’re hiring in a new country,” and you’re a stand-alone HR leader, you’re probably thinking:

“Oh no😱.”

Employment contracts. Payroll. Benefits (pension, insurance, tax). Compliance across multiple jurisdictions. The list is immediate, practical, and genuinely important. Get any of it wrong, and you're looking at financial penalties or delayed hires. Both cost real money. Both are easy to calculate. Both are relatively easy to get a budget for,  because you can put a number on the risk.

Culture is harder to sell.

It's intangible. The risk is harder to quantify. So it gets deprioritised…until the breakdown happens.

And HR leaders who have helped start-ups scale without getting the cultural foundations right know exactly what that breakdown looks like: poor communication, conflict, misunderstanding...and my personal favourite (not), the us vs. them mentality.

One team in Paris. Another in New York. And slowly, almost invisibly, 2 different companies are forming inside the same one.

Make culture tangible and the risks visible

Culture is your way of working. The network of people communicating and collaborating to get things done. And what most founders don't appreciate: even if you only ever hire in ONE country, ONE culture, complexity doesn't grow in a straight line as your headcount increases.

Each new person adds relationships, communication channels, interpretations, and assumptions. Not ONE new connection — M.A.N.Y.

Metcalfe's Law: The line of communication grows exponentially

That is just communication complexity in one location, one culture, one time zone.

Now add country-specific cultural differences: how people give feedback, how they challenge a decision, what "urgent" means, and what "done" means. Add time zones. The complexity doesn't just increase. It compounds.

That is the environment you are preparing to build your organisational culture as part of global expansion. So before we talk about how (see Part 2 below), let's talk about whether you're ready to.

Strategy is a choice. So let's start there

When I asked this HR leader why they were expanding, she said: "We need sales and customer teams on the ground, closer to our clients."

That is a business reason. A typical one once you have product-market fit and want to grow market share. But not every expansion decision is😬. There are 2 types, which I call:

🎯 Business reasons:

• You need sales or customer success teams closer to your customers

• You're struggling to hire niche, critical talent in your current location

• You're keeping costs low by locating specific teams in a lower-cost market

🤷🏻‍♂️ 'Feel like it' reasons:

• "We have an entity in New York, let's hire a product manager I know there" (Hmm..)

• "We can hire engineers faster" (Can we, really?)

• "It would be good to have a presence in the US" (Good for who, exactly?)

Strategy is a choice, and choices made because someone 'feels like it,’ rather than business rationale, will cost your start-up the speed, focus, and coherence needed to grow revenue. So, this is where I want HR leaders to push 👉 clearly, commercially, without apology.

Be intentional about which borders you're crossing and which you're not

If your business reason is getting sales and customer teams closer to clients, start there. Hire the roles that are necessary in the market. Keep everything else at your hub, for now.

If you're based in Paris and you need customer coverage in the US and Brazil, ask the hard questions:

• Does marketing need to be in the US? Or can your Paris-based team operate globally from there?

• Does your CTO's engineering contact need to be hired in New York…or is that just convenient for one person and complex for everyone else?

Every role you add in a new geography adds to that connection count.

Keeping certain roles at your hub isn't a limitation 

It buys you the time to build the cultural foundations that make global expansion actually work.

So make a choice: Which roles truly need to be in the market and which ones are you holding back until you're ready?

Start from your strategy, and culture follows from that choice.

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How to build a high-performing culture - globally?

When I built my team from 7 to 40 (and no, not the whole company… just the HR team😅), we met 3 times a week. HR leadership met twice more on top of that. Every quarter, the whole HR team came together in person. And every other week, I had lunch or dinner with one direct report or one skip level.

I can already hear you…“Too many meetings. Shouldn't they be focused on doing the work? This is death by meeting.”

I put the solution in front of you first deliberately. Because it's easy to react to a ‘solution’ — to agree if it matches your preference, to dismiss it if it doesn't.

So instead, let me give you the why because the why is what travels across borders. This solution is one of many possible ways to solve it.

Start with what builds a high-performing culture anywhere

To build a high-performing team, one that can have healthy conflict, commit to a collective goal, and deliver results that move the business, we need trust.

Yes, this is straight out of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni.

But trust is a vague concept. And the way most companies try to build it? A quarterly team day. An annual offsite. Some kind of activity that someone on the team secretly dreads🙄.

We know it doesn't work. But why? The trust equation can help us shed some light here.

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) ÷ Self-interest

Let's look at what your organisation already has a structure for and what it doesn't.

Credibility and reliability are usually covered in your recruitment process. You hire people with the credentials to do the job, and your performance reviews evaluate whether they deliver. Structure exists for both.

Self-interest is (hopefully😅) covered through shared goals, team bonuses, or values that reinforce winning collectively rather than individually.

Intimacy, a.k.a. the touchpoints that build strong relationships, empathy, and understanding, is often missing. Except for the occasional offsite that happens once, maybe twice a year.

That is the gap. And across time zones and country cultures, that gap gets wider.

The Trust Equation

Build trust intentionally and systematically

When my team met 3 times a week, it wasn't about the volume. It was about what we built inside those meetings, very deliberately, consistently, over time.

Intimacy happens in repetition.

Small moments, accumulated across dozens of interactions, allow people to understand how each other thinks, what each other needs, and where each other's edges are. That understanding builds empathy. And empathy is what creates the psychological safety for someone to say "I disagree", "I don't understand", or "I need help,"  without fear of how it lands.

(We reduce the touchpoints once we have the intimacy and increase them again when a new team member joins.)

So the question isn't: Should we have more meetings?

The question is: Where are your current rituals and are you building relationships inside them, or just getting through the agenda?

2 moves, depending on where you are

If your team already has regular meeting rituals: Don't add more. Build relationships into what already exists. Open with a personal check-in — one genuine question that isn't about work. Rotate who runs the meeting. Create space for disagreement before decisions land. The structure is already there. Make it do double duty.

If your team doesn't meet that often: Think about what frequent touchpoints you can create that serve both work results and relationships. A weekly async update that invites one personal line. A fortnightly call that starts with 5 minutes of nothing business-related. Small, consistent, low-effort. The frequency matters more than the format.

And across borders specifically, be intentional about creating moments where time zones aren't a barrier to relationships. Async video updates. Rotating meeting times so the same people aren't always the ones dialling in at 7 am. Small signals that say: you are not an afterthought in this team.

Intention is the only thing that travels without a visa

You cannot build culture across borders without first understanding what builds culture in the first place. Trust isn't a team day. It's the accumulation of small, intentional moments. Repeated often enough that people develop the empathy to understand each other, the familiarity to challenge each other, and the safety to be honest with each other.

That works in Paris. It works in New York. It works in São Paulo. 

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension Tool Different national cultures carry different values, e.g. hierarchy, conflict, directness, when to speak up. Most teams don’t realise this, so when friction appears, it gets read as a personality clash.  I use this tool to create a neutral way to understand why people think and behave differently as part of building awareness and better collaboration. Click here for the tool

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

TL;DR

👀 HR impact doesn't speak for itself: Here's how to make it visible

🔗 Linking HR work to business impact is simpler than you think

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

HR impact doesn't speak for itself: Here's how to make it visible

I agree with Thomas. If an HR Leader says: “Restructuring the CS and Product teams will increase revenue….,” it almost sounds like we’re asking the business to just take a leap of faith  (and we’re not in that kind of business 😅).  

That’s a hypothesis with a VEEEERY long jump in the causal link between what we do and the business outcome. When that chain is invisible, stakeholders are left choosing between belief and scepticism….and most will go with scepticism. No surprise there.

Start with the business bet, not the HR rationale

Before HR can connect its work to commercial outcomes, we must understand something most HR leaders miss: how the business has decided to grow.

Say your business has set a target to grow revenue by 40% this year. The leadership team has made a bet: 50% of that growth will come from existing customers, through a new product you're launching into your current customer base.

From that, your business lays out some assumptions. For example, it may forecast that a certain percentage of existing customers will buy the new product and that the customers will do so if they can experience value quickly and adopt it easily.

These assumptions translate to specific lead measures. These are the metrics that (if they move) tell you the strategy is most likely working before the revenue lands. In this example, they might be:

• Upsell rate: What % of existing customers buy the new product

• TTV (Time to Value): How quickly new customers get to their first meaningful outcome

• CES (Customer Effort Score): How easy the experience is, which drives retention and word of mouth

These 3 metrics are the business's hypothesis of how it gets to 50% of its revenue growth. They are the chosen levers — and the first step in connecting HR’s impact to the business.

Because if we can influence these levers, we’re no longer guessing at revenue. We’re working on a real part of the chain that gets there.

Revenue is the outcome. The system in between is where HR makes an impact

Revenue growth is a lag outcome. It sits at the end of a chain of: 

HR work ➡️ change systems (process/structure/capability) ➡️ change in individual & org execution ➡️ dept/business outcome (lead) ➡️ business outcome (lag)

So when HR jumps straight to connecting our work directly to revenue, we skip the ENTIRE system (value chain) in between😱.

Once you understand how the business actually works (the bets it’s making and the measures it’s tracking), the question is no longer generic: "What people initiatives will increase revenue?"

It becomes far more precise: "What people conditions need to exist for these lead measures to move?"

That’s a different level of thinking. And more importantly, it’s one HR is already equipped to answer.

Make the chain visible; this is where credibility comes from

Let’s build the causal chain using the example above: 

We are betting on 50% revenue growth from existing customers
➡️ that requires an upsell rate to move
➡️ but our current CS team hasn’t done this before and lacks the skills, structure or incentives to drive upsell
➡️ so HR is hiring, upskilling, restructuring and redesigning incentives to close that gap
➡️ and we will know it's working when the upsell rate moves.

That is no longer a leap of faith. That is a causal chain made visible.

If we can’t connect to the business strategy, we’re asking for a leap of faith

What I shared above isn’t about HR “getting better at storytelling,” this is about HR stepping up as a commercial leader. 

If we can’t connect our work to how the business achieves its goal, we’ll always be squeezed into the last 10 minutes of the agenda in exec meetings. The people agenda should be part of every business conversation from the start, woven into every part of business discussions.

HR work enables business strategy — make the chain visible, and make our impact visible. 

PS: The business example above is simplified to make the point. Your business will have its own bets and therefore its own lead measures. The key takeaway is how to look at the problem and build the causal chain.

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Linking HR work to business impact is simpler than you think

A couple of weeks ago, I was coaching Sara, a Head of People, whose goal is to think more commercially.

As we started, she told me about genuinely exciting work she had been doing inside her high-growth fintech start-up. Over the past 6 months, she had led the AI transformation. She was proud of it, and rightly so! 😊

With her career goal in mind, I asked her a simple question.

"Build product, sell product, make revenue and profit. Which of the 3 has your AI transformation work impacted?"

She said: build product.

"Tell me more."

Where most HR leaders’ impact stops

She went straight to the people's side. She told me how the team worked differently. How PMs were communicating better. How agents had taken over operational tasks so people could focus on what mattered.

I stopped her✋.

"I don't want to know how the people work (yet). Tell me what changed in the business?"

Silence. Then: "I think I focus on people too much."

Sara wasn't wrong about the impact. The work was real. But for her, the people change was the end of the story (and she had stopped building there).

As I asked her questions from a business perspective, the fuller picture emerged. 

The causal chain was there, just not visible

Before the transformation, each team could release one feature per quarter.  Now, the product team has increased that to 2–3 features per quarter. They were releasing with more certainty too; features were landing with higher user adoption because they were building closer to real customer needs. That is a meaningful business result.

But Sara had never said it that way. Not once. Not to her founder, not to her SLT, not even to herself – until I teased it out of her. 

She had the chain. She just hadn't built it. So, I replayed back to her – the whole picture, every link visible:

👀 When she heard it back that way, she said, "It sounds so obvious when you say it like that."

It always does. After😜.

Build the causal link to build HR’s credibility

The issue wasn’t that she was not commercial; it was where she stopped.  

She stopped at ‘people.’ And when HR leaders end there, your stakeholders can't see the link between what we did and what changed in the business. At that point, we haven't shown an impact on the business. We have a story. And stories, however good, still sound like a leap of faith. So remember this:

Last but not least, if you can’t build that chain, you have to ask: “Should this work be done at all? Is it actually a business priority?”

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

TL;DR

🪞 AI reveals the people issues you can’t just say ‘We’ll fix later’

💡 Lessons from Pleo's former CTO: Scaling tech teams in the age of AI

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

AI reveals the people issues you can’t just say ‘We’ll fix later’

When a non–AI-native business begins its AI transformation, especially at the building-to-scale stage, the first shock isn’t the technology. It’s the mirror the technology holds up 👀🪞.

You’ve probably heard this often enough: what got you here won’t get you there.

Once you’ve achieved product market fit, you’re building the growth engine of the business by creating repeatability in 3 core areas:

• Customer lifecycle: how your product reaches the customer, efficiently

• Strategy-to-execution cycle: how direction becomes delivery, fast

• Employee lifecycle: how you find, grow, keep (and exit) talent, with consistent experience

This is already a high-stakes transition for any start-up.

And while I’m SUPER excited about what AI makes possible at this stage, I’m equally SUPER curious about the mirror it holds up to people and organisations — exposing the organisational design needs we can no longer brush aside with, “we’ll fix that later.”

3 mirrors AI holds up (to our organisation)

🪞1. ORG CAPABILITY: Clarity becomes the constraint 

Early teams run on tacit knowledge. “Ask John” is a perfectly legitimate workflow when you’re 15 people.

But with AI in the mix…who or what is John? 🤔

Tools trained on messy inputs produce messy outputs a.k.a GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out…a lesson from my engineering past that AI has politely resurrected 😅).

If your organisation lacks clarity on who owns what, how decisions are made and what "good" looks like — AI will amplify confusion, not solve it.

• In strong systems, AI accelerates leverage.

• In weak systems, AI amplifies the chaos.

🪞2. INDIVIDUAL CAPABILITY: Judgement becomes the scarce skill

AI can produce almost anything: code, slides, job ads, strategies, prototypes, process drafts. In secs! 

But it can’t tell you what’s useful, that’s still a human job. I heard someone say this recently: “When output is cheap, judgment becomes expensive.”

• The question is no longer: “Can they produce more?”

• It’s now: “Can they produce the right thing?”

The skill premium is shifting to those who can:

• Interpret what AI produces and know what’s missing

• Distinguish what’s needed from what’s merely available

• Design systems that scale, not just prototypes that work today

🪞3. CUSTOMER & COMMERCIAL IMPACT: Speed comes with a hidden cost

When org capability lacks clarity (Mirror 1) and individual capability lacks judgment (Mirror 2), AI doesn't just move faster — it moves without guardrails.

Yes, AI reduces the cost of creation. Speed sounds attractive until it creates:

• Security risks → GDPR fines 😱

• Messy architecture → Delayed launches 😱

• Unstable platform → Customer churn 😱

This is where org design really shows up. We don’t design organisations in isolation — we design them to create impact, to serve customers and deliver commercially viable outcomes.

The ultimate test isn’t: “Did we ship faster?”

It’s: Did this improve the customer experience and can we sustain it?"

When speed outpaces judgment and system design, the hidden cost shows up in rework, risk, and recovery. We're not saving time. We're borrowing it — and paying interest later.

The mirror is a gift for HR

The mirror AI holds up reveals where clarity is missing, where judgment isn’t being developed and where speed is being mistaken for progress. These were always there; AI just removes the buffer of time and tolerance that allowed us to say, “we’ll fix that later.” 

For HR leaders, the rise of AI has turned the so-called ‘soft stuff’ into the strategy. People and organisation are the infrastructure for scale.

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Lessons from Pleo's former CTO: Scaling tech teams in the age of AI

Meri Williams, former CTO at Pleo and Monzo, joined our STEP UP Boardroom community's Business Intel session to explore how these mirrors play out in real tech teams that are building to scale — where old scaling problems meet the new challenge of AI. Here are 3 key takeaways from Meri.

🪞1. TECH ORG CAPABILITY: Clarity becomes the constraint

Early stage, most start-ups run one tech team on one architecture, what Meri calls "a big ball of spaghetti." Everyone knows everything. Institutional knowledge is everywhere.

But scaling requires evolution: multiple teams shipping in parallel. That means clear ownership, modular design, and well-documented pathways — not tribal knowledge.

Here's where AI makes it urgent; new engineers need to be independently productive within six weeks. Not shadowing for three months. Not figuring it out as they go.

With rapid scaling, the majority of your team will have been there less than three months. If onboarding isn't systematised, you're operating with a team that can't function independently.

Add AI to that chaos? You're training tools on unclear processes and undocumented decisions. GIGO multiplied.

The payoff when you get this right. Meri's teams at Pleo went from a 5-day cycle time to under 3 (40% faster) while doing 4x the work with the same size team.

🪞2. ENGINEERING CAPABILITY: Judgment becomes the scarce skill

Engineers used to spend 2-3 years building muscle memory before reviewing others' code. Now, entry-level engineers review AI-generated code from day one.

They need to:

• Understand what "good" looks like, even when they didn't write it

• Spot gaps, risks, and architectural problems (not just syntax errors)

• Think in systems, not scripts

A lot of engineers are spending most of their time reviewing code that they didn't write rather than writing code. When AI can generate anything in seconds, the bottleneck isn't “Can you produce it?” It's “Do you know if it’s any good?”

This makes user-centricity non-negotiable. Great teams were always user-focused. The proportion of engineers who need to show that capability is much higher now.

Because AI can build almost anything. But it can't tell you what's worth building. The skill premium is shifting away from syntax knowledge toward business understanding, architectural thinking, and user empathy.

🪞3. COMMERCIAL & CUSTOMER IMPACT: Speed is not free

Meri painted a picture: imagine a stunning house. Beautiful facade. Impressive from the street. Now walk around the back. It's propped up with bits of wood. Not structurally sound. Not safe to live in.

That's what Meri calls "vibe coding" — when AI lets you bash out something that looks polished and sort of works, without any of the below-the-waterline work: security, maintainability, performance, scalability.

When speed outpaces structural integrity, commercial impact starts showing up:

• Support tickets spike

• Customer trust erodes

• Customer service teams work weekends fixing preventable issues

This is where tech leaders must speak business:

• “This shortcut could lead to 10% revenue lost under GDPR”

• “This mess will slow every feature we ship for the next 6 months”

The mirror is still a gift

AI doesn't create these problems in scaling tech teams. AI removes the buffer time that lets us ignore them, making them too expensive to ignore.

So, before you ask what AI can do for your organisation, ask what AI is revealing about your organisation.

The mirror is a gift. Use it 😉

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

We're not quite there yet (but we could be)

We’re halfway through the March BHAG challenge, and I’m reaching out for a little help.

I only feel comfortable asking because I genuinely believe this newsletter helps HR leaders influence strategically, drive impact at the exec table and move closer to the goal we all share — making HR indispensable.

What happens if we don’t hit 6,000?

Honestly? Nothing terrible 😅. Life goes on.

But we’ll miss the chance to do something slightly ambitious together, and I’d rather not miss that.

The BHAG goal is still absolutely possible…

We just need a small collective push. So here’s my simple ask:

✅ If you've already referred someone: Thank you 🤗! Your reward is locked in as soon as we hit 6,000.

❌ If you haven't yet: Absolutely no pressure, life happens🙃. But if you've got 2 minutes today, grab your referral link and send it to one person.

That’s it. One person. One message. And collectively, we help one more leader stop drowning in HR admin and start driving business outcomes.

2 quick observations:

1. The HR leaders who’ve shared their links aren’t doing it for the gift

(Though the rewards are great 😉). They’re sharing because this newsletter has genuinely helped them think more strategically and they know exactly who else could benefit. That’s the only reason I feel comfortable asking.

2. Right now, Option 1 is leading as the favourite reward for this challenge

1️⃣ JooBee’s pocket ebook: Your cheat sheet to sound strategic & commercial
2️⃣ JooBee’s BeeBot: Your quick answers from my content library when you’re stuck
3️⃣ Career coaching with JooBee: Your personalised advice to unlock your next move

 (If you haven’t cast your vote, you can still do so here 👉 click here)

Thank you for being here, truly 🙏. Let’s give this one more nudge together and see what happens.

With gratitude, 
💛 JooBee 

Who to share with? Here are some ideas:

TL;DR

😯 The career advice you probably didn’t get — especially for women

🎭 HR’s disproportionate impact on employees’ careers — for better or for worse

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

What’s this? A mission worth joining. A prize you don’t want to miss.

The career advice you probably didn’t get — especially for women

Sadly, this happens a lot. HR leaders in start-ups get replaced halfway through their progression. And no, it’s not always fair. But it is almost predictable in a scaling journey.

When it happens, the advice HR leaders receive is familiar: “Be more assertive. Be more visible. Build your confidence.”

Not wrong…just incomplete.

It reminded me of a TED Talk I heard years ago by Susan Colantuono: we’re missing 33% of the advice required to reach the executive level — especially for women.

The unspoken assumption that derails careers 

In her talk, Susan shared what executives list when asked what they look for in high-potential future executives:

• resilience, hard work, trustworthiness (personal greatness = 33%)

• stakeholder skills, empowerment, communication (people greatness = 33%)

And then they stopped ⛔.

When Susan asked why they didn’t mention business acumen, the reply was:

A given!?! 😑 A baseline so obvious they didn’t even think to say it out loud.

But when Susan asked 150 women in the room whether they had ever been told explicitly that business acumen is the door-opener to senior leadership, only 3 (⁉️) raised their hands.

HR leaders know personal greatness (33%). We excel at people greatness (33%). But what is systematically underdeveloped (for women and for HR) is: Business acumen.

The part no one tells us is required because they assume we should already know 🤷🏻.

We need to prepare for the inflection point in our careers

As HR leaders, we’re often the ones helping the business redefine roles as it scales. But we rarely pause to check how our own role is evolving…or whether we've kept pace with the shift.

When a start-up raises funding to scale, the business strategy changes🎯. 

Investors now expect repeatability, predictability and a clear pathway to profitability. So the HR role expands from “supporting the team” to designing the operating system that shapes every hire, every manager, every organisational decision — all to enable business growth.

This is where many early-stage HR leaders hit a ceiling. Not because they lack capability, but because the role has changed beneath their feet. And suddenly we’re told we need to “be more strategic”.

The most unhelpful sentence in career development

Your founder probably can’t articulate what “be more strategic” means either.

From my experience, here’s what they actually need from their HR exec:

• Someone who understands the business model

• Someone who connects people decisions to financial outcomes

• Someone who scales systems, not just sentiment

Ask yourself:

• Can you explain how your company makes revenue?

• Do you understand how headcount impacts runway?

• Are your HR priorities tied to revenue, margin and market share?

If the answer is no, you will struggle to own your seat at the table — even if you’re invited to it.

Now that you can name it, you can close the 33% gap

HR leaders get replaced when the organisation outgrows the version of the role they originally stepped into. 

Once we understand this, the question shifts from: “Why is this happening to me?” to “What would change if I build the very capability no one told me I needed?”

Closing that 33% gap is how we protect our own trajectory, shape the organisation’s future and unlock the potential of every future leader watching how we lead.

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The SLT needs more than "HR support", they need a strategic partner in HR. Yet as admin piles up, HR’s impact fades.

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HR’s disproportionate impact on employees’ careers - for better or for worse

For this section, let’s apply something businesses do constantly: scenario modelling.

But instead of forecasting revenue or market conditions, let’s model a scenario based on Susan Colantuono’s research: that we may be missing the 33% of leadership capability required at the executive level, especially for women.

Hypothetical scenario:

It’s not a comfortable thought — but stay with me.

We build for the 66%, not the 100%

If we, as HR leaders, were never explicitly taught the missing 33% (business acumen), then the talent development strategy we build naturally emphasises the capabilities we do understand deeply:

1️⃣ Personal greatness (33%)
2️⃣ People greatness (33%)

And that leads to a predictable pattern in our HR work:

• We design development programmes that improve communication, collaboration, and confidence ➡️ but not commercial fluency.

• We build performance frameworks that reward behaviours and values ➡️ but say little about business impact.

• We promote early-career talent who excel in two-thirds of leadership ➡️ but not the full three.

But when the last missing 33% (business acumen) isn’t understood, it won’t be: ❌ assessed, ❌ taught, ❌ rewarded, ❌ measured or ❌ embedded.

And then, as leaders move toward executive roles, they hit a ceiling — not because they lack ability, but because our HR strategy never equipped them for executive responsibilities.

When HR leaders have a blind spot, our HR strategy inherits it

If HR isn’t commercially fluent, the organisation won’t produce commercially fluent leaders. Our blind spot becomes the organisation’s blind spot, we unintentionally scale the very gap we hope to close. 

And when start-ups began scaling:

• Strategy execution becomes complex

• Cross-functional misalignment increases

• Financial discipline matters more than ever

• The cost of unclear leadership becomes a real P&L risk

This is the moment founders start saying: “We need to hire new execs.”

Because…the leadership bench we’ve built isn’t ready.

The implications are uncomfortable, but ultimately significant AND positive

If this scenario is true, then my message is not “HR has failed”. The message is: we now know what to fix.

1️⃣ Personally for HR leaders: Strengthening our business acumen increases our readiness for executive leadership. It deepens our influence, sharpen our impact and enables us to own the seat we’ve earned.

2️⃣ Organisationally for talent development: It elevate the impact impact we can have. We stop developing people in 66% of the equation and hoping the rest appears by luck. We build HR strategy that prepare people (especially women) for the executive roles the business requires.

And that, to me, is genuinely good news for how this scenario plays out.

TED Talk by Susan Calantuono

Susan’s talk stayed with me. This newsletter draws on her insights, along with patterns I’ve seen (and felt) in my own experience developing executive leaders.

Click here for her TED talk 👉

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

🍽️ You’re invited to… 

The People Systems Dinner 2026

Co-hosted by Christopher Priebe (Founder of Zelt) and JooBee (you know me...I hope😅)

💡Theme: "Balancing Agility & Scale”

The most resilient organisations are built where two distinct strengths meet: 

1. The agile innovation of high-growth startups

2. The operational excellence of larger organisations.

One is able to create something new; the other can see what already works

Join a curated group of 20 People & Culture leaders for a private dinner designed as a cross-industry exchange. We will discuss:

• Cultural Velocity: How to preserve decision-making speed as headcount explodes.

• Operational Rigor: Building scalable structures that move quickly.

• The People Factor: Managing the human side of growth and scale.

This is an opportunity to hear from a different scale of business and learn from peers at different stages of growth. 

The Details

• Date: 19th Mar 2026

• Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

• Venue: Hawksmoor Borough

This is a free of charge, invite-only gathering with limited places.

Click the box below to secure your place before we’re fully booked.

The People Systems Dinner

Join a curated group of 20 People & Culture leaders for a private dinner designed as a cross-industry exchange.

Register here →

See you there!

💛JooBee

Psst…a little throwback to our last dinner in June 2025 👉 click here

TL;DR

💹 HR Leaders belong in QBRs: How to add strategic value

😎 Who says HR can’t run QBRs? Here’s how

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

What’s this? A mission worth joining. A prize you don’t want to miss.

HR Leaders belong in QBRs: How to add strategic value

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱 (Yup, that was my first reaction.) 

HR leaders, if you are not in the QBR, you’ve already vacated your strategic seat.

I’m saying this without judgment, because I’ve made this mistake myself.

Early in my career, when a QBR invite landed in my calendar, my internal reaction was: “Eurgh. Another meeting I have to show my face in. I could read the summary later.” (I never did.)   

I remember one session vividly. The leadership team was debating 2 customer segments and struggling to expand into one of them. Not people stuff, I thought — so I switched off and started drafting an engagement report instead. 

When HR leaders think, “I don’t have anything to add in the QBR,” what they usually mean is: “I’m treating HR as downstream execution, not upstream strategy.”

A strategic HR leader cannot afford to be absent from the QBR

Because a QBR isn’t just a meeting. It’s a direction-setting and prioritisation ritual for the next quarter, aligned to the annual goals.

It exists so the business can answer one core question: 

While the business is deciding whether to increase revenue by doing X, pivot product by doing Y, or grow market share by doing Z...this is exactly when HR should be in the room, contributing.

In newsletter #26, I shared that I decided I no longer wanted to sit at the corner of the exec table, feeling like an outsider, so I chose QBRs as one of my training grounds. I stopped trying to multitask during QBRs and made a conscious decision to be part of the conversation.

It was daunting at first, but I started by focusing on doing 3 simple things:

1. ADD insight that shapes decisions

2. ASK questions others aren’t asking

3. ALIGN decisions to operational reality

(I call it the 3A’s 😉. Easy for you to remember when the next QBR rolls around.)

Contribute and add value to QBR with the 3A’s 

Let’s say the business decides to ‘increase revenue and prioritise enterprise expansion next quarter.’

Here’s how a strategic HR leader shows up in that conversation:

1. ADD insight that shapes decisions

“Our revenue growth projection for next quarter assumes a time-to-first sale of 5 months. Based on our last 9 months of onboarding data, Enterprise AEs typically close their first deal in 6 - 9 months. We therefore need to either revisit the projection assumptions or prioritise initiatives to reduce ramp-up time.”

📌 Your insight slows the room down just enough to make better decisions. 

2. ASK questions others aren’t asking

“Our enterprise AEs have flagged difficulty closing deals due to a lack of ISO certification. I don’t see this prioritised next quarter, how does that affect our confidence in this target?”

📌 You’re asking an executive leadership question; it doesn’t belong to Sales or Product alone. 

3. ALIGN decisions to reality

“Our Customer Success team is already at capacity. Without additional support, onboarding enterprise clients will create delivery risk.”

📌 You’re ensuring good decisions don’t become bad execution.

But what if you don’t have QBRs?

You’re not alone. Many start-ups building to scale haven’t formalised this yet. And if it doesn’t exist, don’t wait for the CEO, COO or CFO to create it.

Because scaling isn’t about doing more HR. It’s about helping the business make better decisions — earlier, and with fewer surprises down the line.

Sponsored: Don’t be the only person at QBR without a dashboard

Nothing feels worse than being the only leader without hard data. When goals are scattered or unclear, HR has failed the business.

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📺 Watch the demo to see how →

Who says HR can’t run QBRs? Here’s how

Too many QBRs feel like extended exec meetings. Same updates, same slides, same polite nodding around the table. Just…longer🤯.

Before the calendar invite goes out, ask: “What must be different after this meeting?”

If the answer isn’t clearer priorities, explicit trade-offs or deliberate decisions — repeat after me: don’t bother running the QBR. 

Wait, isn’t there a QBR agenda template?

👉 Click here if you’re looking for QBR template. Honestly, ChatGPT could whip one up before you can say “admin” 😉.

But that’s not what makes a QBR valuable.

What’s hard is the tight facilitation and shared understanding needed to make your QBR genuinely valuable. That’s where most QBRs fail — a sloppy attempt to tick the “best practice” box without driving real alignment, decisions or commitment.

3 Non-negotiables to run a valuable QBR that moves the business

I’ve learned that must come to life for a QBR to do what it’s meant to: move the business forward.

1️⃣ Set clear expectations, BEFORE the meeting begins

It’s easy to assume your execs know what’s expected. After all, they’re experienced leaders, right?

Err…wrong. We made that assumption once and the result was a derailed QBR. Different people came in with different expectations — some ready to present polished progress updates, others hoping for strategic discussion. The tension in the room was palpable. Worse, when the mismatch was called out, people got defensive.

Since then, I’ve always align expectations upfront. Here’s what we make explicit:

• This is outcome-focused, not activity-focused.

• This is not a presentation of department’s progress, but holistic business progress.

• We care about what moved the business, not ‘busywork’.

• Trade-offs are expected, this is where we make them.

• We’re here as one leadership team, not as function reps. (This one’s my favourite. I send this Lencioni video before every QBR — yes, every time. Because there’s always a new face, and alignment isn’t a one-off.)

It might sound basic. But making it explicit ensures the QBR starts with alignment, not assumptions.

2️⃣ Only discuss business-level metrics

QBRs are not a showcase for every department’s dashboard. You need to zoom out and focus.

At the business level, we typically anchor on one key metric from each of the 3 core pillars:

• Product / Customer (e.g. time to value, NPS)

• Commercial Growth (e.g. revenue, market share)

• Business Health (e.g. gross margin, EBITDA, productivity)

(These should reflect your biggest business bets, the metrics that matter most this year.)

If you have strong business clarity, you may only need one clear north star metric. That’s rare, but powerful.

A simple rule of thumb: If a metric doesn’t influence a business decision, it doesn’t belong in the QBR.

Department-level metrics still matter — but only as supporting insight to help illuminate business-level priorities. They’re context, not the main event.  

3️⃣ A good facilitator is a must

The best QBRs I’ve attended had one thing in common: excellent facilitation.

Not someone who simply moves the agenda along. But someone who:

• Holds the room to the intended purpose

• Surfaces tensions and forces trade-offs, not smooths them over

• Knows when to pause the conversation and ask, “What decision are we trying to make here?”

Ideally, this is the CEO. In reality, that’s often not possible in start-ups, especially for first-time founders or leaders who’ve never run a QBR before. So choose someone else who can hold the room to the outcome. A senior exec with a strong cross-functional understanding works. Even better, a neutral third party (like a trusted advisor) who isn’t afraid to challenge and redirect when needed.

QBR is not “someone else’s priority”

HR leaders, this is a strategic leadership ritual. If you don’t have one, this is your guide to creating it. If you do have one, this is your guide to making it better. 

Either way, don’t leave it to “someone else on the exec team” and limit yourself to HR-only rituals. 

This is your strategic contribution. 

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

If I could give you one thing this March... (you choose)

1️⃣ JooBee’s pocket ebook: Your cheat sheet to sound strategic & commercial
2️⃣ JooBee’s BeeBot: Your quick answers from my content library when you’re stuck
3️⃣ Career coaching with JooBee: Your personalised advice to unlock your next move

Why this? Why now?

My BHAG (big hair audacious goal) this year is: 

And honestly...the best way to do that is with you.

Many of you already recommend my newsletter to friends, founders, and fellow HR leaders. I see the quiet referrals. I hear "My colleague sent me this!" all the time.

So I thought…what if we made this official? What if we went a little ambitious...together? 🙌

Here's a crazy thought…

Let's get to 6,000 readers together by March 31 🎯

Is it a big number? Yes. Is it absolutely possible? Also, yes. All we need is…

Because if each of you recommends the newsletter to just one person who would genuinely benefit... we get there. (And if more than one? Even better!)

🎁 If by Mar 31 we hit 6,000 readers together…

EVERYONE who makes at least one successful referral will win the MOST-voted gift:

• 1️⃣ JooBee’s pocket ebook: Your cheat sheet to sound strategic & commercial, or

• 2️⃣ JooBee’s BeeBot: Your quick answers from my content library when you’re stuck, or

• 3️⃣ Career coaching with JooBee: Top 3 referrers get coaching (everyone gets a real-life video of how I positioned HR to the business when I was a CPeO).

🚨 Use your personal referral link

That's the only way I can track your referral and send your reward. When your friend subscribes through your link, it counts. As simple as that.

This is a global challenge...so, what do you say?

One reader, one recommendation…and we double the number of HR leaders who think commercially, act strategically, and stop burying themselves in operational chaos.

I'd love to build this with you. 🎯 One shared goal. 🎁 One big thank you.

With gratitude, 
💛JooBee 

Who to share with? Here are some ideas:

TL;DR

🤨 Everyone thinks they can do HR’s job (here’s what to do about it)

🪞 Confidence at the exec table: Why you hesitate and how to lean in

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

Everyone thinks they can do HR’s job (here’s what to do about it)

It’s not just one frustrated VP of People, I’ve heard it from countless HR leaders. When it comes to people stuff, everyone has an opinion and it often feels like the rest of the exec team is always ‘marking our work.’

I get it. It’s annoying. Very annoying.

But you know me – I like to poke the bear sometimes 👉🐻. 

So my first instinct is: “Why don’t you mark their homework back?”

Yes, I’m that annoying😆. When someone meddles in my stuff, I meddle right back.

(But there’s a serious point underneath that cheeky comeback.)

Same behaviour, different label

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture. If you sit at the exec table as an HR leader, that is your team.

And what do high-performing teams do?

• They give feedback.

• They share opinions.

• They challenge assumptions.

Now…what does “marking HR homework” look like?

• Giving feedback.

• Sharing opinions.

• Challenging assumptions.

It’s the same behaviour, just a different label.

The difference is not what they do, it’s how we see it

If I want my exec peers to care about my work, I want them to challenge me. That’s what good collaboration looks like.

So here’s the honest check-in:

Or are we sitting back quietly, thinking “that’s not my lane”?

Not from pride. Not as revenge. But because that’s what cross-functional leadership looks like.

I didn’t mark their homework either, and it was a mistake

Let me be the first to raise my hand 🙋🏻‍♀️ 

In my first exec role, I didn’t mark anyone else’s homework. There were 2 reasons:

1️⃣ I didn’t understand the business enough

So, of course, I couldn’t challenge anything meaningfully.

2️⃣ I didn’t think it was my job

I was a first-time Head of People. I thought I was there to lead HR. Sales handle sales, tech handles tech, and so on. So I stayed in my lane.

Which, in hindsight, was the biggest mistake of my early career. 

The moment we sit at that table, we are no longer a functional leader. We’re a business leader with one shared goal: make the business successful through enabling people.

Strategic HR challenges the business (not just the people stuff)

So this week’s newsletter is not about blaming others. It’s about us. Our mindset. Our missed opportunities. And what we can do differently — starting now.

So go on. Mark their homework. 

• Ask Sales if that next 2-quarter forecast makes sense, given the slow ramp-up time.

• Ask Product how they plan to scale if they keep prioritising custom solutions.

• Ask Finance if we pivot to X, how does it impact our funding narrative in the next 12 months?

Ask the hard question. Share your observation. Challenge the assumption. 

You’re not “meddling”. You’re doing your job — as a strategic, commercial, equal member of the exec team.

Sponsored: Captain the Exec table with Zelt

To "mark the homework" of your exec peers effectively, you need objective data. Without it, challenging a colleague is a confrontation; with it, you are providing facts.

HR is uniquely positioned to captain this cross-functional alignment. With Zelt’s Company Goals and OKRs, you define department-level targets and track measurable key results for every owner. By structuring company goals and tracking results regularly, you gain the evidence needed to challenge assumptions and ask hard questions through a professional, objective lens.

Book a demo to learn how →
 

Confidence at the exec table: Why you hesitate and how to lean in

If you’re thinking, “Yes, I’m ready to mark the other execs’ homework… I want to ask that question… I want to challenge that assumption…,” but then a little voice whispers:

“It’s probably already been asked.”
“You should know this already.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself.”

So you stay quiet — silenced by a dip in confidence.

Confidence: A competence problem? Or a perception problem?

Lack of confidence usually comes from one of 2 places:

1️⃣ A real lack of competence (you genuinely don’t know enough yet). 

2️⃣ A perceived lack of competence (you fear people will think you don’t know enough).

If you’re in the first category, like I was, and your confidence wobbles because you’re afraid someone will discover you don’t fully understand the business… good news: that’s fixable. You can learn it.

And yes, here comes a shameless plug — the STEP UP Bootcamp and STEP UP MBA were built exactly to close that gap. Business fluency is straightforward to build when someone shows you the shortcuts.

But if your hesitation comes from the second category, the fear of being perceived as incompetent, the internal monologue sounds like this:

• What if this question makes me sound stupid?

• What if they already said this and I missed it?

• What if I say something wrong and lose credibility?

If that’s the case, let me say it clearly:

And that fear is what’s holding you back.

What’s really behind the fear and how to tackle it

👌 Expecting yourself to be ‘perfect’

People say perfection is unattainable, I think it’s worse – it’s dangerous. If we’re “perfect,” there’d be nothing left to learn. That’s not perfection… that’s preventing us from growing.

Remind yourself: You’re learning. So, instead of saying, “This might be a stupid question,” try:

• “Can I clarify something?”

• “I want to check I’ve understood the risk correctly…”

Curiosity sounds confident — because it is.

😨 Fear of vulnerability and mistakes

We often treat mistakes as proof of incompetence. But do you think others are incompetent when they ask clarifying questions? Do you judge leaders for wanting more context? Of course not. 

Yet when we make a slip or admit we don’t know something, our inner critic screams: “Everyone will see I’m not good enough” or “I’ll look foolish.”

Remind yourself: You give others grace, give yourself the same. Speak to yourself the way you'd support someone you lead.

🔦 The spotlight effect

We wildly overestimate how much others are watching or judging us. They’re not. They’re too busy worrying about themselves.

Back in college, I used to point out my love handles to a friend. One day, she said: “If you didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t have noticed at all.” That moment stuck with me. 

Remind yourself: No one cares more about your “imperfections” as much as you do. (Yes, tough love — but true.)

Confidence comes from action

If you're holding back because you’re worried about how you’ll be seen, you’re not alone. But confidence doesn’t come first, it follows action.

Start small. Ask one business question this week, then two, then three.

Your confidence builds, and your influence grows every time you choose to lean in.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help:

Buzzbytes is part of JooBee’s newsletter. Think of it as the bonus track🎶: a break from the usual format with behind-the-scenes updates, reflections and the occasional fun extra.

🏗️ Before AI, fix the org 

Recently, I wrote ‘Before AI, Fix the Org’ with People Managing People. It’s a piece I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. Not because it’s about AI (AI isn’t my usual lane😉), but because AI is now crashing straight into the lane I am in: people, leadership and organisations. 

👉 It’s exposing every unclear decision
👉 Surfacing every messy workflow
👉 Shining a light on every “we’ll fix it later” org structure

And that’s the thread running through the whole article: we can’t build AI-ready organisations until we learn to think, design and decide with sharper reasoning.

A few reflections as I wrote it:

• I found myself smiling at how full-circle this journey is; from crashing my PC running AI models in 2000s 😅, when I was modelling power plants, to now modelling organisations.

• I realised how much HR is standing at a crossroads. Stay a support act, or become the architect of the system everyone else relies on.

• And writing this reminded me (again) that AI doesn’t forgive lazy thinking – myself included. If our thinking is vague, it reflects the vagueness right back at you. Very clearly. 👀

Before AI, Fix the Org

A Leadership PhD’s Advice for Going Back to Org Design Fundamentals Before Integrating AI and Scaling HR Teams

The article walks through 3 shifts I’m noticing:

1. AI is exposing weak organisational systems

We can’t just throw AI into a broken system and hope it works miracles. If our org design, decision-making or workflows are messy, AI will only scale the mess. Which is why disciplined organisational design can no longer be “nice to have.”

2. Thinking quality is now the leadership advantage

AI removes information scarcity. What matters now is how leaders frame problems, design decisions and leverage AI as a thinking partner. Vague thinking gets mirrored right back. The strongest leaders will use AI to challenge their logic, improve clarity and scale their decisions.

3. HR role as the system architect

We either step into our role as strategic system architects…or risk becoming irrelevant. Our job has always been to build commercial perspective and connect the dots across the business — and AI now gives us even more leverage to do that well.

If any of this resonates with the way you’re building your team, your thinking, or your organisation, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

💛JooBee

TL;DR

🍚 Exec meeting is like bad fried rice (and why nothing gets done)

⏱️ 3Ws to run effective Exec meetings (that move the company faster)

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Zelt 💛

Exec meeting is like bad fried rice (and why nothing gets done)

“No, you can’t.” That was my immediate answer. And no, it wasn’t the answer the founder wanted.

Because when I dug a little deeper, what he was really asking was this:
“How do I solve the entire company’s problems in 60 minutes?”

That, right there, is the same recipe for bad fried rice. 

🧂 Status update? Toss it in.
📉 Pipeline issue? Sure, that too.
👥 Hiring escalation? Throw it in.
🔥 Customer fire? In you go.
🗨️ Product roadmap debate? Why not.
🧭 Strategy pivot? Let’s squeeze it into the last five minutes.

If you throw everything in at once, you get a soggy, confused, beige mush.

And that’s exactly what a weekly exec meeting becomes when you try to cook every business problem in one pan. It steams, not fries. It gets dense, directionless and nobody leaves feeling satisfied.

Some execs walk out thinking, “Well, at least we solved my thing.” 

Others leave frustrated, “We didn’t even get to the important thing.”

Having worked with enough start-ups post-product-market fit, I can tell you this: Show me a company with just one weekly exec meeting, and I’ll show you a business with:

• unclear priorities,

• misaligned teams, and

• decisions stuck in limbo.

Honestly, don’t get me started on the cost. Put all your exec salaries into a spreadsheet, multiply by meeting hours…😱

Why do bad exec meetings happen in the first place?

Because everyone is in the room.

That’s it. That’s the whole reason 🤦🏻‍♀️.

There’s a psychological pull: “Since we’re all here, let’s fix everything now.” 

But just like frying rice, it doesn’t matter how many ingredients you have — if you add too much, it stops frying and starts steaming into mush (and you’ll start hearing Uncle Roger shouting ‘haiyaaaa!’).

Exec meetings suffer the same fate:

• too many topics → nothing cooks properly

• too many priorities → no clarity 

• too many goals → no momentum

So, have more than one exec meeting perweek

I know, I know…founders hear that and cringe, “We can’t afford to have execs in more meetings.”

So here’s the question I push back with:

What could possibly be more important for executives than:

• setting clear priorities,

• creating alignment,

• unblocking the business, or

• enabling the organisation to move faster?

This is their job.

The real goal is not more meetings

The goal is to have the right meetings — each with a clear purpose, clear decisions and clear boundaries on what belongs in that wok (ahem, meeting).

And that’s the difference between bad fried rice…and a start-up that actually scales with clarity and momentum.

Sponsored: Not just another HR Software

You’ve probably been burned by HR tools before. They often feel heavy, rigid, or stitched together.

Zelt was built differently - as a unified people platform that’s simple to use, flexible to configure, and powerful enough to run all things people in one place.

Yes, that includes HR, payroll, attendance, and performance (& more!)

Discover a smoother way to run people ops →

3Ws to run effective Exec meetings (that move the company faster)

There are far too many playbooks on how to run meetings – agendas, templates, timeboxes, facilitation models…all useful, but they send leaders straight into the weeds.

At exec level, the job is simple: make sure the company can move forward with momentum.

And momentum really boils down to just 3 questions:

Question 1️⃣: Who can make the decision?

I use “can” intentionally. Not who wants to, not who has opinions – but who actually has the authority, context and accountability to make the call?

Simple, but in my experience, you’d be surprised how often exec teams don’t know this. As a result, discussions drag on, more meetings get added and decisions stall.

Question 2️⃣: Whose input is needed to make a good decision?

Not every meeting requires everyone. You only need people who can add valuable insight, detect risks early and help shape informed decisions.

I need to emphasise this: input is not the same as authority. It’s not a consensus. And it definitely doesn’t mean including everyone just in case someone’s feelings might get hurt (that’s a different problem to solve).

Question 3️⃣: Who needs to know so they can execute decisions made with clarity?

The best decision still fails if the people doing the work don’t know what was decided, why it was decided and what it means for them.

So back to the weekly exec meeting — what problem are you actually trying to solve?

❓ If only the FOUNDER can make the decision:

Your weekly exec meeting should focus on decision readiness, not brainstorming. The exec team’s job is to bring data, risks and implications (not to debate endlessly 😫) but to give the founder the clarity to make a fast, confident decision that unlocks momentum for the company.

Examples: Entering a new market, pausing hiring to extend runway, changing pricing.

The exec team’s role is to bring the data, the risks and the options and trade-offs. So the founder can make a fast, confident call that unlocks momentum.

❓ If a SUBSET OF EXECS can make the decision:

Your weekly exec meeting should focus on alignment, not solving. Let the right group tackle the issue in a smaller, faster room. The exec meeting is simply the place where you connect the dots: “Here’s what we’re solving, why it matters, and what the organisation needs to know.”

Example: 

• CRO and CMO: deciding on shifting GTM focus from SMB to mid-market or redefining how leads are qualified. 

• CTO and CPO: choosing which technical debt to tackle this quarter or how engineering capacity will be allocated across product requests.

This doesn’t need the full exec table to solve it. A smaller group works it through quickly.

❓ If an INDIVIDUAL EXEC can make the decision:

Your weekly exec meeting should focus on visibility, not approval. Share the decision, the rationale and the implications. No fishing for validation. No committee thinking. This is how you keep velocity.

Example: 

• CPeO deciding to redesign performance, refresh onboarding or run a leadership workshop.

• CMO adjusting content strategy, reallocating budget to a new performance channel, changing messaging tone.

• CFO updating financial reporting cadence, revising forecast assumptions, tightening spend controls.

The weekly exec meeting is about visibility, not permission. CxO shares the decision, the rationale and the business implications.

Answer the 3 questions honestly to move faster

If you can’t, no meeting playbook can fix your meetings. But when you can, the right meetings (and the right cadence) become obvious: leaner, clearer and built for momentum.

Step up from HR Leader to Business Leader

Ready to influence strategically, drive business impact and make HR indispensable?
Here are 3 ways I can help: