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 What's up surf dudes with attitudes?? Clearly i'm California Dreaming. IYKYK. ☀️ This week I’m in sunny Huntington Beach, CA for Safe Space Summit! If you’re sad you missed out… don’t worry I’m cooking up something special. I can’t tell you anything yet which you know I haaate keeping secrets from you but just trust me!!!! Until then, a few goodies to hold you over: 🎧 The cackle queens are back to discuss all the work b.s we have lived through this year. Jess Winder and I get into stories from this year and we even play a game! Enjoyyyy 🎃 HR Horror Stories (Vol. 4!!!!) is back. It’s my FAVE thing of the year!!! Click that link and submit your most frightening to absolutely outrageous HR stories. I’ll be reading them on the pod & featuring the most horrific stories in the newsletter. Moving on to todayyy - when no one’s accountable what happens? Chaos she whispers.. Sponsored by HiBob Most of us have been told that using AI will save HR time (allegedly). There's a small catch, though: HiBob’s free virtual event on Oct 6th introduces the Bob MCP Server, connecting Bob data to AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude through secure logins and existing permissions. See how it supports things like people analytics, performance review prep, recognition summaries, and time-off planning. Register to see it all in action, and give your copy-and-paste fingers a rest! ACCOUNTABILITY The meeting we’ve all been in: Let me paint a picture for you and you tell me how real it sounds. Yes, I’m going to paint HR like one of the French girls… 30 minutes, 8 people on the call, someone is sharing their screen. There's a really good discussion, like, genuinely good! Some people push back, others nod, and a coworker even utters the beautiful words "love that." Then someone says: "Great, so we're all aligned." Everyone agrees, the meeting ends and everyone goes on with their day. Two weeks later… "Wait... I thought you were doing that?" Come again????? Was a decision made in that meeting? Technically, yes… Did anyone walk out of that room owning it? Uh, no. I AM NOT THE OWNER! DUN DUN DUN. [End scene] How realistic was that?? It’s almost like… that's happened to me before. (It has, I did not respond well). And before you think it's just your company: 🚨 In Microsoft's Work Trend Index, 55% of people said next steps at the end of a virtual meeting were unclear. More than half???! To note: this study was done in 2023 so maybe with the improvements with all the AI notetakers this stat doesn’t hold up in 2026. Couldn’t find good data on that so stay tuned. 🤯 And then Atlassian surveyed 12,000 knowledge workers. Only 20% feel confident their team has a real process for telling other teams about decisions that affect them. And 1 in 2 say teams at their company unknowingly end up working on the same things. Here’s the thing we have to remember: agreement does not equal ownership. Consensus feels like progress. Everyone nodded! We're aligned!! YAYY!! But "everyone agreed" and "someone owns it" are two completely different situations and TBH most meetings only produce the first one. Soo, why does this happen? Why nobody raises their hand: Ever wonder why nobody raises their hand? The easiest excuse is “they’re lazy.” TBH I think it’s the opposite. I think employees are incredibly smart about what raising their hand means. Three things I’ve observed: 1. Agreeing is free but owning is expensive. Remember last week? In a lot of companies, "accountability" is code for someone is about to get blamed. So if your name is on the thing and the thing fails, guess whose name comes up when failure is discussed. Nodding along costs very little but raising your hand for a task puts you on the hook. 2. Everyone is already at max capacity. Real talk: everyone is doing a lot with a little right now. Lean teams, fewer free hours and the same people stretched across five projects that were ALL labeled "top priority." So when the room goes quiet after "ok, who wants to take this?" It's not people being apathetic. PEOPLE ARE BOOKED AND BUSY. A lot of people don’t have time to wrangle the chaos. 3. You get the responsibility, but not the power. Sometimes ownership shows up without authority. Like, you "own" the rollout, buttttt you can't make the other team prioritize it. You "own" the fix, but the one exec who can unblock it is OOO. So you're on the hook for the outcome with none of the levers. People have been burned by this before so they tend to remember and then they keep their hand down. Soooo where do you think the the floating decision sometimes land? Cough HR cough. Ever heard the following: "Can HR just send something out?" "Can HR own the rollout?" "Can HR figure out the policy part?" It feels like sometimes we’re the function that’s become the lost-and-found for every unassigned decision in the building. And then we get asked why our team is underwater. 🙃 So what do we actually do about it? I'm not going to tell you to "build a culture of ownership” because what does that even mean in this day and age?? Also… that takes time. Here are three things you can do this week: 🏢 At the org level: make owning something safe (and visible). If ownership = blame, nobody's going to raise their hand. I need you to take hard look at your org and understand if this is the case! When something goes sideways, have leaders have to post-mortem the decision that was made, not the person who got stuck executing it. AND bonus points when you make decisions visible! I love a decision log with four columns:
Adopting this as an org practice will def help the accountability piece. 👥 At the manager level: protect your team's bandwidth and close the loop. Managers should be the buffer. Before they say yes in a meeting, they need to know IF their team can actually take it on. This is where a bad manager can make a situation even worse… because they don’t know or care to understand their team’s bandwidth AND they aren’t checking in on things. So tell your manager to make “who owns what” a common thing that is discussed at team meetings. REGULARLY. Then they need to actually follow up on it. Not in a micromanage-y way. In a "hey, how's that going, what's blocking you?" way. Ownership sticks when someone checks back on where things are. 🧡 At the HR level: stop adopting orphans. When an unowned decision lands on your desk, please don't just say yes. Ask: "Who made this decision, and who's accountable for it working correctly?" Sometimes the right answer is to hand it right back, do not pass go, do not collect 200. And then other times HR really should own the thing. But then at least it's on the record that you own it, with the authority, time, and resources that come with it. YES you need all 3 to accomplish certain tasks!! Taking things on quietly is how HR ends up with 47 priorities and no time to work on the important things. TBH: None of this is fancy or requires a new framework. The meeting where everyone agreed isn't broken because people don't care. It's broken because we keep asking people to own things without the safety, the bandwidth, or the power to actually pull them off. When you fix those three maybe people will start raising their hands again. So this week, when someone says "great, so we're all aligned" PLEASE be the one who asks, "Who owns next steps and action items?” Next week: the top of the org... What accountability looks like when you're usually the one doing the holding. See some of y'all in Huntington Beach this week!! 🌊 Sponsored by WEX How many benefits emails does it take to get someone to use their HSA??? Apparently, we’re still trying to figure that out! 😭 Employees have healthcare savings available, but confusion keeps getting in the way. And somehow, explaining it again has become a part of your weekly to-do list. WEX’s free HSA Engagement Guide digs into the barriers behind low adoption and tech-driven strategies that help employees become confident, active savers! Download the guide before you send another friendly reminder with deeply unfriendly feelings! 😬 (HUMAN) RESOURCES
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners WORK-LIFE BALANCE
SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 Last Train Home, John Mayer THE WAY I LOVE THIS SONG. It's giving 80s in all my favorite ways. I think this would have been incredible in the background in an John Hughes movie!!! I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears. Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. | |||||||
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