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When you start something new, whether it's a business, a project, or a podcast, there's always that moment of doubt. Is this the right move? Is it actually going to work? Look, I've been there. And while the uncertainty never fully goes away, having the right systems in place makes a big difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and it powers 10% of all E commerce in the US from established brands to people just getting started. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com leadership go to shopify.com leadership that's shopify.com leadership leaders love blaming HR for bureaucracy, red tape, and generally slowing things down. But these same leaders have no idea how to use HR properly. If you get this wrong in the age of AI, you'll risk destroying one of the most valuable sources of insight in the whole company.

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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

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Hey there and welcome to episode 393 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode Stop Blaming HR and start Using It. HR is the easiest function in the company to blame, but most of the time the real problem isn't actually hr. They're just executing the orders they get from above. In the last five years in particular, the direction that HR has been asked to take has resulted in some particularly illogical and unhelpful policies which leaders have been forced to follow. In many cases, this has materially damaged company performance, and at the same time, of course, it's done little to enhance HR's reputation. As we sit here in early 2026, AI is poised to to wipe out around half of what HR does. The leaders who figure out how to do this surgically while still benefiting from the core value proposition of HR are going to have a massive advantage. I'm going to start the episode by briefly examining what the point of HR is. I'll then look at a recent article from the Economist about the state of hr, and I'll finish with four ways to optimise your relationship with hr. So let's get into it. HR professionals don't get much love, but a good HR advisor is worth his weight in rocking horse droppings. They see the business from a vantage point that many people simply don't have. And this is because they usually have broad visibility across the whole organisation. Just as the CFO has visibility of the whole financial picture, the head of HR has visibility over the whole people landscape. This has become increasingly important in recent years. But different companies place different levels of importance on hr. Sometimes that's simply a function of size. In a small company, for example, you don't really need an HR function, just the odd piece of expert advice to keep you out of jail if one of your employees lodges a claim against the company. But larger companies can potentially benefit from a range of expert advice in the HR space. Like any other functional support team, the purpose of HR is to bring specialist domain expertise and the tools and processes the business needs to optimize its performance. In my experience, whether by design or by default, companies tend to deploy three potential HR models, each with ascending levels of potential business value. The first stage model is super transactional. It's about the mechanics of hr. Payroll procedures, inductions, recruitment, headcount reporting and so on. It's the low value commodity services and pretty much all of it could be outsourced. The only reason for you not to outsource it would be the potential benefits you could drive from internal economies of scale. The second stage of the HR model is all the stuff in stage one, plus business advisory. Now you've probably heard the term HR business partners. HR business partners work with line management to advise them on people issues. This moves their coverage into a more sophisticated space. Industrial relations advice, leadership, performance management systems, key person risk, capability building, incentive schemes. The third stage of the HR model is everything in stage two, plus workforce planning, talent management, succession, leadership and culture. This is where the most value can be leveraged. HR assists the organization to plan its future workforce based on its strategy, the predicted economic trends and the future competitive landscape. It necessarily has strong links to corporate strategy and it attacks the big ticket items like attracting, retaining and nurturing talent. But even in the most rudimentary HR model, there's a whole world of value to be found. There's value simply in knowing that everyone's being paid according to your legal and contractual obligations. Not only does it put your mind at ease, but it reduces a key source of reputational risk. I'm a true believer in the value of and the need for hr. But HR can only be as effective as the CEO and the executive will allow it to be. It also requires a strong HR leader to drive value into the company. But hr, as is the case with any corporate support function like it, Risk or legal can suffer from the syndrome of I'm from corporate and I'm here to help. These eight words strike fear and terror into the heart of any line leader. Like any other functional team, this can only be changed when HR works out what truly creates value for the business and then delivers it. A lot of angst also arises in some companies because of unclear demarcation between HR and the internal customers it serves. HR has been known to suffer from passive aggressive abuse and even gaslighting from their internal customers because they don't know how to push back. For example, many line leaders are really happy to create a problem with poor leadership and then when it all turns to shit, they handball it to hr, saying that's a people problem, so HR needs to fix it. This demonstrates an incredibly poor understanding of where the accountability should lie between line management and hr. When HR is at its best, it's a strategic advisor to the CEO and the executive team. It's the philosophical custodian of culture and talent and leadership. And a good HR group is highly pragmatic. It brings insights from the farthest corners of the business that senior leaders rarely see. If the CEO could extract these insights and use them to plan for the company's future talent and capability, the value of HR would be obvious. If not, I'd go back and do a quick check of which HR model your company has chosen. Is it the mechanical side of HR only? Is it the business advisory model? Or is it a true strategic partner in capability and performance? Just pause for a moment and reflect. How does HR function in your organisation? Is it level one, two or three? Whether you're an HR practitioner or a leader trying to work out what HR is good for, ask yourself a few questions. Does my HR group have strong enough boundaries and clear enough accountabilities with the people it's designed to serve? Is HR supported and valued at the highest levels of the business? Is the head of HR serious about improving the organization's leadership and culture? Or happier just playing politics? Who in the business are the true believers and how can I measure the value that HR delivers more than any other functional support area? I leant on HR heavily during my executive career. My biggest problem was getting HR advisors to overcome their conservative nature. Like any other functional support area, I had to school HR on where the accountabilities actually lay. Their job was to give me expert advice, including scenarios, risk assessment and recommendations. They weren't there to tell me what I could or couldn't do. I had to take their advice and weigh it in with everything else I was considering legal, commercial, customer reputation, etc. And I put it into the broader context and used it to shape my decision. Now, when this was done well, it was incredibly valuable and I couldn't have been successful without it. I came across an article in the Economist a little while ago which was titled How HR Took over the World. It was quite a brief article, but it made some very hard hitting points and the key points are easy to summarise. In short, HR has been on an absolute tear for the last few years. In 2024, American businesses employed 1.3 million HR professionals and this was up by 64% from where it was in 2014. This massive growth compared to only 14% growth in overall employment over that same 10 year period. And this trend has also been observed in countries like Australia and the uk. What has driven this rise? Well, the first thing is the growing value of top talent, which has been offset by the declining availability of said talent. Then there are the emerging social trends that forced more work into the HR team, all for pretty good reason. When the Me Too movement broke, it brought a sharper focus to office harassment and misuse of positional power. Covid gave HR a major role, and I suspect more than the odd headache, in working out how to implement work from home and hybrid work models. Then there was dei, which called for many flavours of HR response across a range of areas. Everything from unconscious bias training to writing new recruitment policies, to recommending how many unisex toilets the company should have. Since the 1980s, when cases of companies taking advantage of workers became, I don't know, almost unheard of, industrial relations has become ever more complex and it would appear now that employees are much better informed about their rights. In American workplaces, the average number of allegations of discrimination or harassment jumped from 0.6% of employees in 2021 to 1.5% last year. That's a 150% increase in complaints in just three years. Now, I know that at least anecdotally, the US experience would be the tip of the iceberg compared to countries like Australia and New Zealand where the IR laws have become incredibly bureaucratic and highly restrictive. But the article goes on to say that this surging trend in HR may be coming to an end. Looking forward, the horizon doesn't look quite as rosy as firms begin to lay off staff. You'd think that it would continue the HR boom, but it appears that HR professionals themselves are A key part of the cuts. All non revenue generating functions are going to come under increasing scrutiny and in the US at least, the backlash to DEI has seen major programs dismantled and the HR people who are delivering them on the job queue. The compliance side of HR is already being quietly eroded by AI. Let's face it, I can get a pretty good summary of the relevant statutory and common law relating to workplace relations claims from ChatGPT, and if I'm reasonably well skilled in these principles, I can make pretty decent decisions without the need for an HRX burn on my shoulder. Same goes for hiring. As potential job candidates are getting smarter at using AI, they're generating a thousand job applications and cover letters while they sleep. Companies are going to have to do the same and work out how to use AI to trawl through this ever increasing volume of applications. Add to these woes a McKinsey study that found 22% of executives surveyed said AI had already led to a decrease in HR professionals. This could well be the canary in the coal mine. AI is going to hit HR hard because many companies simply undervalue the function. So we know AI is coming, and we know that HR is going to be in the crosshairs for a whole range of reasons. As a huge believer in the people side of business, though, I've been thinking about what the path to victory is for extracting value from HR as the nature of the function evolves. Previous frustrations with HR policies and their sometimes unwelcome impact on a business unit might convince you to cut the function more aggressively than is actually necessary. It'd be so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are four things that occur to me, and I think the best way to frame these is in the context of the three HR delivery models that I outlined at the start. The ability to automate certain functions depends almost entirely on the requirement for human observation, and in HR there is plenty of human observation. If you can focus on these areas, you'll be able to work out exactly how to get the best out of hr, instead of blaming them for intruding into your space and slowing you down with red tape. Now, the first tip is you have to know what HR can and can't deliver. Start by being really clear on what the company has mandated HR's involvement in. They'll be asked to set certain policies, for example remuneration bans for different roles, and you have to abide by these. Don't fight against it. It's not HR's fault. These decisions come from the very top of the company. Then try to understand the areas in your team that you lack expertise and support. If you don't have certain knowledge or expertise, you need to get it from somewhere. If you don't, your risk will increase. So work out how to articulate your need and engage HR for their help rather than having them tell you which advice and guidance you're going to be given. Having a good working relationship with HR is half the battle, and if you do this the right way, HR will eagerly provide their expertise, you'll get what you need and HR won't feel disrespected and undervalued, which, let's face it, can create a whole host of other problems. The second thing is understand which HR functions AI can replace right now and get good at extracting it. A lot of the data and knowledge and complexity of HR can be accessed through large language models. Today I've already had ChatGPT produce all sorts of things for me and since I know what the fully engineered, high cost, expert driven big business versions look like, I can say with a level of confidence that AI does a good enough job for most requirements. Boilerplate HR policies, employment contracts which are designed for your state's governing law, salary, intelligence. A lot of the legal and regulatory and policy guidance is reliably at your fingertips. You don't need an HR resource to advise advise you as long as you're an astute AI prompter. These things of course are incredibly important, but still they fall into the model of stage 1 hr. The mechanics the third tip is use HR to help you with the most subtle leadership tasks, the ones that require interaction with people. AI can't replace human perception, and I suspect it's going to be a while before it can in any meaningful way. Even zoom meetings dull your ability to read the play. When you sit across the table a few feet away from another human, though, you get to observe things that are almost imperceptible. The slightest changes in facial expression, their nervousness or frustration, little changes in their tone of voice. These observations need to be tested, calibrated and evaluated when you're trying to understand the connections between people's behaviours and habits and their ultimate performance. An HR advisor can be an invaluable partner. Knowing where someone is at, understanding what options you have for leading them forward, and assessing the relative utility and risk of each option requires expert guidance, which often only HR can provide. This very much leans into the stage two HR model, the business advisory function and finally the fourth piece, work out how to Blend the art and the signs now. Talent management is a core deliverable in every executive's remit. You need to get better at attracting, selecting and retaining top talent. This is going to be what makes all the difference in performance. HR can be enormously valuable in this endeavor. Not just with the mechanics of recruiting, but by being a trusted advisor in the talent space. Deciding who might be ready for a move, who needs to be tested at the next level up, who needs to be given an opportunity to acquire new skills, and of course, understanding key person risk and which capabilities the company sees as being core to its future strategy. All of these are enhanced by HR support. Blending the science of performance management data and metrics with the art of predicting who might have potential to be successful at the next level. Well, this is what a high functioning HR team does. The Stage 3 HR model of workforce planning, talent succession, leadership and culture. It's the whole point of having people people. They're the ones who are going to make sure that the company talent pipeline keeps producing the leaders of the future. In recent years, HR has become the whipping boy for all company ills. It's been the focal point through which many poor policies have been enacted. But even taking this into account, it seems to have gone from boom to bust in a really short space of time. In most cases, it's not HR's fault. They're just responding to the direction and demands of their boss. So the challenge for leaders at all levels is to stop blaming HR for problems they're created from on high risk and giving them some love for the critical role that they play. There's an enormous amount of value in the people side of leadership, which AI won't be able to replace in the short to medium term. The sooner you work out where the value is, the more you'll be able to protect the true expertise and insight that HR brings before it disappears for good. All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 393. I really hope you enjoyed it. But as I'm sure you know, listening is easy. Leading is hard. That's why we created Leadership beyond the Theory, our flagship program that turns insight into action and action into results. This is where we unlock the secrets of elite leadership performance and give you all the tools you need to extract maximum value from the expertise of your functional support teams. I'm looking forward to next week's episode. Competitive advantage is built in the middle. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit leader.