The HR You Deserve

Article by Octavius Black, Co-founder and Exec Chair MindGym. This article originally appeared in People Management, February 2026.

‘How to get HR a seat in the Boardroom’ was the packed-out session at a conference I was speaking at. This was 25 years ago. If you promoted an event with this title now, the room would be empty because the Chief HR Office (CHRO) already has one.

Today almost every company has put HR firmly at the Exec table with the ear of the CEO and previously unimagined influence and status.

Over this period, the proportion of the workforce that sits in HR has increased significantly in every Western country, almost doubling in the UK¹. Meantime, CHRO total compensation has gone up from 40% of the average senior executive, including CEO, to 70%².

Putting people at the centre of business makes enormous sense. The leaders of Netflix, Nike, Disney and many other triumphant companies put their success down to culture and talent. It’s the people, stupid.

And yet, over the same period, productivity is lacklustre, absenteeism up, economic inactivity worsening and it’s hard to discern among Gens X, Y or Z a love of work, for many of whom quiet quitting and side hustles are a badge of honour?

The difficult truth for HR professionals is that good intentions aren’t enough to deliver great outcomes.

Over the last 25 years, MindGym has worked with most FTSE-100 and S&P-100 companies bringing science and rigour to ensure that HR investments deliver business impact.

In every case, we have discovered that the root of the problem lies with one, or more, of four fallacies.

Confusing popularity with performance

The first and most pervasive of these is that popularity equates to performance.

We all like to be liked but that is different from improving a company’s performance.

In two separate studies, students’ ratings of their teachers were compared with their performance in exams³. While short term test results were good, students’ assessment of their faculty proved to be a very poor predictor of exam performance later on. There wasn't just no correlation, but an inverse correlation. The students of the higher rated professors got worse results.

The increasing dependency of upward feedback and employee attitude surveys to measure leaders’ performance has ported this problem into the corporate world. If what matters for my bonus is what my team think of me, or a claim however unsubstantiated of bullying or harassment could destroy my career prospects, I’ll be as lovely as I know how, whatever the consequences on the bottom line.

A CHRO of one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies came to me for advice. “Some of the leaders in our top performing divisions aren’t signing up to our new competency model which define what we expect our leaders to do. Can you help me persuade them?”.

It transpired that the problem wasn’t with the leaders but with the standards, which had been based on a ‘Sound of music’ idealised view of the world rather than a down and dirty understanding of what it really takes to succeed, more like ‘The big short’.

No statistical validation had been done. As a result, the weighting was almost entirely to likeable, technically called ‘open’, leadership behaviours such as coaching, delegation and collaboration but without the corollary of the more assertive, or ‘closed’ behaviours such as holding people to account and sending back work that is other than excellent.

When popularity becomes a proxy for performance, rational leaders will optimise for likability, not results.

Process vs progress

The second fallacy is almost as pervasive: mistaking process for progress.

This isn’t restricted to business. Nations can suffer from the same affliction. In his recent book Breakneck, Dan Wang, a sociology Professor at Columbia, compares China “building big at breakneck speed” with America’s lawyerly system which is over-burdened by process, “blocking everything it can, good and bad”.

He goes on, “Every problem in the lawyerly society is worse in the UK... the Leeds tram network [was] first legislated in 1993, [but] mass transit might not come to West Yorkshire until the late 2030s.” During this time China has built over a thousand power stations and hundreds of thousands of bridges.

It’s not the case that all process is bad. Some of it is very necessary to prevent risk: remember the collapsed Chinese bridges.

However, often led by regulators, legislators and anxious General Counsel, HR has tended to plan for every conceivable mishap or outlier, without recognising the clogging effect of adding process on process.

In common with other global businesses, a UK bank identified that the time taken in their annual performance review process cost more than the total bonus and salary increase awarded as a result⁴.

The new employment rights legislation due in the UK is likely to make this greater, which is why the swift simplification and automation of what currently exists is even more urgent.

Performative over profit

The third misalignment is confusing performative action with generating profit.

At their best, DEI programmes advance the commercially sensible aim of widening talent pools (eg, we need more engineers who over-represent as neuro-diverse) and understanding customers. But often these initiatives morphed into pursuing a social justice agenda, enforcing ever more unachievable demographic targets with perverse outcomes. Of the non-white people who work in advertising in UK, 69% are privately educated⁵.

Activist employees and ESG driven investors have successfully pressurised nervous leaders to take a stance on political issues from the defence industry to BLM.

Employees lost their jobs for expressing lawfully held beliefs in the reality of biological sex because trans ideology, often promoted by LGBTQIA+ networks, defined language and behaviour even though a significant number of employees quietly disagreed. Even after the UK Supreme Court ruling which clarified the definition of ‘sex’, many organisations have held back from providing single sex facilities for fear of a backlash. It’s hard to imagine any other situation where public companies would choose to breach the law.

Once CEOs were more likely to be fired for mis-speaking, or misbehaving, than missing their numbers, as happened for the first time in 2018⁶, they understandably redirected their attention from minding their P&L to minding their Ps & Qs.

Passion over proven

The fourth, and final, unhelpful HR tendency is for passion over proven.

$50bn pa is spent on wellbeing programmes despite three large scale, longitudinal studies revealing that these corporate initiatives have no significant impact on employees’ health or wellbeing⁷.

Authenticity and ‘bringing your whole self to work’ were, much like servant leadership, once hugely popular but led some of the most vulnerable, who took the advice at face value, to make decisions they would later regret.

While the ‘skills-based organisation’ has had a few successes, usually in IT and Ops, other HR teams have given up after being bogged down in defining taxonomies and acquiring new human capital platforms that employees don’t use¹¹. This might be the latest HR enthusiasm destined for a quiet retirement but it’s unlikely to be the last.

Wake-up call

A clear sign that CEOs are waking up to the lack of commercial focus is that they are increasingly replacing CHROs with business leaders who do not have a background in HR. The brief is to make sure that HR avoids the fads and focuses on the fundamentals that will drive performance. It doesn’t always work out so well in practice and some, like Unilever, have reversed their position, but you can feel the itch that CEOs are so keen to scratch.

Moderna has taken things even further by combining its HR and IT functions. As AI accelerates, many of us may find that our “boss” is a bot and success will hinge on how effectively people and technology work in harmony. It’s not yet clear whether the solution is uniting these two disciplines, but it does signal that CEOs are ready to reconsider HR exceptionalism.

While it’s conceivable that HR will lose its seat on the Executive and revert to its more passive role, this would be a mistake.

CEO’s cite leadership bench strength as one of their most critical needs, with 74% also experiencing a more widespread shortage of skilled labour, up from 38% a decade ago¹².

To realise the benefits of AI, it’s 30% tech stack and 70% talent stack according to Boston Consulting Group. Agility, meaning the speed with which companies learn, adapt and act, will be the defining characteristic for those who seize the AI opportunity.

What to do (and stop)

As pioneering CHROs have already realised, the answer is to reinvent HR from the ground up.

The starting point is agreeing what success looks like. To keep it simple and commercial you could do worse than variants on these two:

• Positive trend in Profit/EBITDA as % payroll

• HR headcount <1% of workforce

Of course these won’t be perfect for every business. The first doesn’t lend itself to companies with heavy capital investment. The second could be worked around with outsourcing or use of consultants, which doesn’t address the issue. But at least these, or others like them, signal that HR is resolutely focused on business impact.

Following the spirit rather than the specifics of these two measures, here is what the most farsighted HR leaders are already up to.

First, HR headcount as %ge of total workforce means fewer people and those who are there will need to have greater skill and will be better paid. It needs to be populated by data analysts, AI ninjas, behavioural scientists and system integrators.

Secondly, new HR does far less and what it does do will be driven by data for what works. 50% of CHROs admit they could stop doing some things without it affecting business performance¹³, so get culling.

This is easy to say but as business leaders in all functions have discovered, you get little credit and a fair amount of opprobrium when you cut something which someone, somewhere, thought was a good thing. Praise goes to those who add something far more lavishly than those who are taking away¹⁴.

Nonetheless, here are 9 HR sacred cows that bold HR leaders, with the backing of their leadership colleagues, can remove or reduce without harming business performance, and in some cases improving it:

1. Diversity targets

Focus on inclusion and respect for diversity of ideas, whoever they come from.

There are only nine organisational values that make up 95% of all company values. Pick the ones you like and stick with them. Use scientifically validated competence models rather than DIY.

3. Annual employee attitude surveys

Don’t delay with endless analysis and dancing around decimal points. Get on with what you know needs to be done. Use pulse surveys if you’re really not sure, but best of all maintain an open dialogue through managers and internal influencers.

4. Mass eLearning libraries

Unless there is a correlation with adoption and performance, cut them. Learning should be tied to live business priorities.

5. Generic team building workshops

Unless they address a real performance constraint and lead to a shift in KPIs, they’re corporate theatre.

6. Wellness initiatives

Stop offering meditation apps and yoga classes. Fix the conditions that make people unwell and unproductive.

7. Large scale HR led redesigns

Changing taxonomies and role architectures rarely changes performance.

8. “We’re different” bespoke HR

Adopt proven solutions and wrap them in corporate colours if you need to. Customise as little as you can get away with.

9. HR tech without high adoption or measurable ROI within 12 months

If it doesn’t reduce transaction cost, cycle time, or management burden, it’s expensive noise.

There is essential HR such as flawless payroll, regulatory compliance and employee relations, which will increasingly be delivered through standardisation, automation and a small number of high-quality experts. These need to be cost efficient, disciplined, and boringly reliable. While they are all completely necessary, like IT infrastructure, they aren’t sufficient to merit a seat on the Executive.

Strategic HR should focus on generating value through five fundamentals, and nothing else.

1. Performance culture. Only excellent is good enough. Everyone is selected and supported to deliver to high standards and moved on if they consistently miss. Optimise workflow rather than obsessing about organisational structure. Think Netflix and Apple.

2. Leadership and management capability. Leaders have the psychological wherewithal to engage, mobilise, and deliver performance and to use the tensions inherent in business (eg, perform and transform) as a positive force to accelerate impact.

3. Business transformation acceleration. Employees are excited by the strategy and committed to their role in delivering it. The cycle of: learn, adapt, act, happens faster and faster. People embrace change rather than feeling overwhelmed.

4. Top talent attraction, assessment and retention – using validated diagnostics to identify which roles are most critical, who is most likely to succeed, and how to get them to join, perform and stay. Elite sports teams are built like this.

5. Robust data: Where Marketing has transformed into being evidence-driven, HR needs to follow. There are robust diagnostics with competencies that predict leadership performance far more accurately than in-house creations. If regulators want to be helpful, they would create consistent definitions to measure absenteeism and turnover than new, often misleading ESG metrics.

Companies get the HR they deserve. The distraction of HR is as much on the CEO and the rest of the C-suite as the CHROs themselves, but it will be the HR professionals who take the hit.

It doesn’t need to be this way. There is a clear route for HR to deliver exceptional value to business. It is up to CHROs whether they take it.

For more information on how MindGym can help, speak to one of our experts. 

References

[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025); British Labour Force Survey (2025)

[2] Bloom, N. and Akan, M, Stanford University (2025)

[3] Carroll and West (2008)

[4] More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews. Gallup (2019); Reinventing performance management processes, Deloitte (2025); MindGym Financial Services client

[5] Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, Leidy Klotz (2021)

[6] CEO Success study, PWC (2019)

[7] Green, J., & Hand, J. (2023)

[8] Barankay, I., & Cappelli, P. (2022); Reif, J., Chan, D., Jones, D., Payne, L., & Molitor, D. (2020); Flemming, W, Oxford University (2024)

[9] ceoaction.com/pledge

[10] Atewologun, D., Cornish, T., &; Tresh, F. (2018).

[11] Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t, Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev (2022)

[12] Zielinski, D. The Biggest Reason Why New HR Technology Implementations Fail. Forbes (2022)

[13] Manpower Group global survey (2025)

[14] MindGym HR leaders survey 2024