Wrong Hat, Wrong Moment

A CEO stood on a Fortune stage in May 2026 and said he fired his HR team for creating problems that didn't exist. The loudest cheers came not from the usual HR critics — but from operating executives and senior leaders. That reaction isn't outrage. It's recognition, and it's worth understanding.

This episode unpacks what actually drove the Bolt friction — and what it reveals about CHRO strategy, the three-hats framework, and why the HR function becomes the story when the mandate vacuum is never filled. Jackson O. Lynch and Scott Morris have both been on the wrong side of this. They're naming it plainly.

What You'll Learn

• Why the Bolt reaction spread to senior leaders and operators — and what that signal says about HR credibility under pressure
• How the three-hat framework (compliance, advocacy, talent) breaks down in distress — and which hat must lead in a turnaround
• Why the CHRO seat requires a categorically different identity than every other job in the HR function
• The mandate vacuum loop: how unclear CEO direction produces compliance defaults that create friction and erode trust
• Three plays to run this week — one for CEOs, one for CHROs, one for both — before crisis arrives

Key Quotes

"Peacetime business leadership and wartime business leadership are not the same thing."

"The head of HR is not an HR person. Period. Full stop."

"The mandate is the contract that makes everything else possible."

Sources for Statistics Cited

• Bolt valuation dropped from $11B to ~$300M — Fortune, May 2026
• Average CHRO tenure declined from 6 years to 4.8 years (25,000+ profiles) — Josh Bersin Company / Findem, Dec 2024

SEO Summary

Bolt fired HR and the C-suite cheered. Jackson Lynch and Scott Morris unpack CHRO strategy, the three-hats framework, and the mandate vacuum behind the friction. 

Transcript

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Ryan Breslow, the CEO at Bolt, who fired his HR team, didn't eliminate the HR function. He just renamed it. What he was actually doing was eliminating an operating mode. The question nobody asked before that decision — and the question most CEOs and HR leaders have never asked each other — is which operating mode the business actually needed.

This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I am joined by my co-host. His name is Scott Morris. He's a friend of mine, he's a former CHRO with playbooks and the scar tissue to prove it. He's officially on the record as the only CHRO who's ever told a compliance officer that the most significant risk in the room was, in fact, the compliance officer. He's also the founder — I love this bit — he's also the founder of Propulsion AI.

So, Scott, a few weeks ago, a CEO stood on stage at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit and said that he had fired his entire HR team for creating problems that did not exist. Those problems, he said, disappeared when he let them go. Magically. Poof. And that sentence, of course, spread really fast. And the reaction was not what most people expected. Today, we're going to unpack that reaction because I think it's telling us something very important about the relationship between the people function and the business that it serves. And this is going to be a counseling session, and we have things to say to both sides of the table.

I'm excited for this episode, Jackson, because I think this is a really important topic. And I think you and I are going to pull it apart pretty well. I want to say from the beginning that I've been on both sides of this. I've been the highly successful CHRO operating at altitude, and I have also been in the room watching the function get in the way of something that the business needed to do. And I've been the one responsible for it too. All of those experiences are in this conversation.

And I think, most importantly, Jackson, I watched you manage through a company in peril — which was early in our friendship, I think it was like the very beginning of when you and I had just started to become friends and talk to each other. And what you went through in that situation might be similar to the feeling inside of Bolt, where it rapidly shrank from $11 billion to $300 million and made several senior leadership changes, including bringing back the CEO, and was likely acting in survival mode.

That's what I saw when I read the news. And having been in the middle of that, it is awful in literally every sense of the word. I was dialing a friend earlier today. My last two tasks inside the organization were to shut down the benefit plan and to take away people's PTO payout. Not because they were my ideas, but that's what the advisors are telling you to do in the moment, and you lose decision rights. It's awful.

But I think there is something you can learn from the experience, and it's this: peacetime business leadership and wartime business leadership are not the same thing. The risk-reward hierarchy is different. And as a CHRO, you have to rapidly adapt in those crisis moments, or you're going to be left out of decisions — at least for as long as the management team can actually make those decisions.

And when we say peacetime/wartime, wartime doesn't always have to mean the business is totally collapsing and heading down the drain. There are other things that turn it into that. And I've shown up in a peacetime situation with a wartime attitude, and it's been just as wrong as when you're operating with a peacetime mentality in a wartime environment.

But before we get into it, I want to take a second to say thank you and do a quick shout-out, Jackson. This week it is to Amy from Dallas. Amy, thank you so much for being a part of our community. It means something real that you're here.

And I want to share something else with all of our listeners — and I know you and I are both really excited about this one. The Talent Sherpa Podcast was just named the Top Management Podcast in Norway for the month of May. We're the fifth most popular business podcast and the 33rd most popular podcast in the entire country of Norway.

So to our listeners out there, I have been practicing for this moment, and I just want to say — Tusen takk, Norway. And that's like the best Norwegian that I have. So I apologize to all of our Norwegian listeners for probably butchering that because I'm horrible with languages, but we appreciate you so much, and we're very excited that we are topping the lists of podcasts in Norway.

And I think that means "thank you, Norway." But yeah, it was — you might have to apologize to the entire country, to be honest. So, Amy, thank you. I appreciate the exchanges recently on LinkedIn. It's good to see you're doing so well. And Norway, you have extraordinary taste.

This community has built into something that none of us really fully expected when we started going down this path. And we just want to have a different way of talking and thinking about human capital. And it means more than I can even start describing that you keep showing up across these time zones and languages to be a part of it. So let's dive into this thing.

In May of 2026, the CEO of Bolt — which is a fintech company that fell, as you mentioned Scott, from an $11 billion valuation to somewhere around $300 million. My math is that's not good. It's like a 97% drop. Anyway, this guy stood in front of a room at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit, and he said that he had fired his HR team and they were creating problems that didn't exist. And when they left, all the problems left with them.

And then in the same breath, he said he had replaced them with a smaller people operations team — which of course means he didn't eliminate the function. He took a part of it and renamed it. And by the way, that's something that Scott and I keep talking about regularly. That people ops team maybe doesn't need to be called HR. But anyway, these two facts together, I think, suggest the friction was never necessarily about HR. It was about the operating mode that the business was demanding.

I wrote an article about this very thing, about dividing the HR function. You can find it at our website at getpropulsion.ai. I think it's fair to say, Jackson, that neither you nor I know exactly what is going on inside of Bolt. And we're not going to pretend like we do. But it's pretty obvious that a company that loses 97% of its value has an awful lot of things happening at once. And it's likely that none of them trace to a single team or a single decision.

What we do know is that the CEO experienced friction and he identified what he felt like was the source and he removed it. And that kind of thing happens, and it happens all the time, and it's what smart CEOs do.

Yeah, and I want to talk about the reaction as well, because the cheers didn't come from the corners of the internet that you might expect. They came from operating executives, from PE partners, from people who have no particular grudge against HR as a category. And that reaction looked to me at least like a recognition rather than outrage. A lot of people heard that story and thought, "you know what, I understand what he was responding to, even if I would not have done it."

And that breadth is a signal also worth taking seriously. The Josh Bersin Company published research last December drawing on more than 25,000 CHRO profiles, showing that the average CHRO tenure has dropped from six years to just under five. And that number doesn't move without a reason. We're going to try to unpack that.

We talk to private equity leaders all of the time, and it's amazing when we bring up the concept of HR — you can see the reaction on the faces. Nobody's outwardly critical, but you can just see it. And I think what's underneath that number that you just gave us is a friction under pressure for a moment that's moving faster than any historical model has prepared us for.

When I think about what actually changes inside a company that's under real distress, the word that comes to me is inversion. The risk calculus inverts. Things that mattered last quarter become noise. What rises to the top is something very specific: Can this company survive? What do we need to do to get to the other side? And are the people that are important to the business still going to be here in the next 90 days?

Yeah, look, I've been inside companies in that situation, and it's not the kind of distress that produces re-orgs and off-site strategy sessions. I mean the ones where you're looking at Chapter 11 if the next quarter doesn't turn. And that's a different environment.

What I know from those is the rules change. HR grew up with a compliance lens — whether it's legal or process compliance. When you're in a normal environment, all of that stuff matters too. And then you find yourself in this kind of a situation, and that compliance exposure that we historically have existed to manage becomes a secondary conversation. Bankruptcy protection exists precisely because companies in distress have to make decisions that would be impermissible in a stable environment.

And what I want to talk about is the need for the HR function to pivot. Because if they show up in that moment operating through a compliance lens — they probably got there with the right training, but it's for the wrong context. Because to your point, the risk tolerance and hierarchy is already inverted.

Yeah. And if you don't catch that shift, it's not that you're careless, it's that nobody handed you the updated operating manual. The context changed and the mandate — which you and I talk about all the time — didn't.

That's right. And there are, I think, two faulty assumptions underneath most of the HR friction that ends up playing out in conversations like the Bolt story.

The first is that the three hats that people in the HR function typically wear are always in balance. For those who haven't seen my work on this, there's a compliance hat — that's the company defender. The employee advocacy hat, in the way that Dave Ulrich intended it, not as a shop steward against the company representing the people. And then the talent maven hat. And most HR professionals growing up started with the compliance hat. But as you grow in the organization, you are trained to hold all three simultaneously. And that kind of tension allows you to make really good business decisions.

That's why I teach upcoming professionals to look at it with all three lenses, make sure you know what the answer is for all three lenses, and then that can help you drive toward a good outcome. You have to hold it simultaneously. And in the right context, that balance is in fact what you should be doing. The faulty assumption here is that balance is static. And I don't think it was, and it's probably not in this case.

You know, Jackson, let me tell all of our listeners: if you haven't done it already, Jackson's piece on the three hats is at mytalentsherpa.com on his Substack. It's a really good article.

Context, I think, determines which hat needs to be primary. I've watched this play out in private equity environments where the timeline is super compressed and the stakes are really explicit from day one. And in that context, the talent hat isn't one of three equal considerations. It's the governing one. You're asking: who are the people that this outcome depends on, that the value creation plan depends on, and are they in the right roles? And are they going to be here in the next 90 days?

Compliance and advocacy don't disappear, but they serve that talent priority. They're not equal to it. When an HR team arrives in that context with the balance model intact, friction starts immediately. And it's not because they're wrong in general — it's because the moment requires something different from that hierarchy of the three hats.

Yeah, and the problem is no one ever told them that. So the HR team tends to default to the compliance hat. It's not that they're making a bad choice — they're operating from the only framework they were given. And in the absence of anyone saying "here's what the business needed first," of course you're going to go do that.

The assumption that the balance is always right for the moment runs so deep that we don't even recognize that we're holding that assumption. And that allows us to continue to act in ways that we would in what we're going to call peacetime, when we're in wartime. And that's where all of that just kind of explodes up into something with even higher stakes and increased responsibility to act differently.

Yeah, and lest any of our listeners think that we're throwing stones at them — I know you've had a story or two like this, and I will tell you, I've been that person. There's a situation in my career where the business needed to move fast on a decision involving someone on the team. And I ran the process and I considered the angles and I made sure we were covered. I was doing everything that was right for that situation. But I could see across the table that the person waiting for me was watching the clock. And what they experienced wasn't my careful judgment — it was drag. And they were right. I was right in the process. I was wrong in the hierarchy. In that moment, the talent hat needed to lead and the compliance hat needed to follow, and I didn't read it right.

I'll use a real life example from my experience heading into a Chapter 11. One of the things you end up doing is saying, "okay, we don't know how long this is going to be, we don't know exactly what the twists and turns are going to be, but there are a very small number of jobs that you cannot afford to run over."

In a more balanced environment, HR would run a large calibration process — we would do a risk analysis, we would try to figure out based on prior performance reviews, we'd have all of this compliance and advocacy and fairness lens that would go into it. And then we would want to make sure that we had an angle on how much money needed to go and whether there's any sort of disparate impact. Like you do all of that stuff. But in this world, you have to make that decision in about four hours, and you figure out which ones matter. And if you've done the talent portfolio optimization work, it's easier. But otherwise, you just figure out what needs to be done and you do it, and you assume an increased level of risk because the environment doesn't have time to react to a long compliance-oriented fairness process.

And I think that's a good example back to your earlier point where the employee advocacy and the compliance don't go away, but they are done in support of the talent decision, not in place of it.

So let's maybe move on to the second assumption. I think that's the one that quietly does the most damage. And it's sometimes framed as a compliment. The head of HR is a very senior HR person, the best HR professional in the building, elevated to the top job. And if you look at how most organizations hire for the seat, that logic is exactly what drives the search — track record, functional excellence, expertise, can they run the function?

All of that makes sense if the CHRO role is the pinnacle of the HR function. Here's the problem: it's not. It's a categorically different job.

I've started to give this piece of advice — and you have to be careful with it because context matters. If you have a strong enough set of second-level HR leaders, I strongly advise that you're not getting an HR person for the top job, that you're thinking differently about it. You can't have zero of the things that drive success in HR. But your point is really well made. It is not an HR job anymore. It's a business leader job.

I experienced that firsthand, and it took me a little bit longer. I'm glad I survived it because I went on to successively more responsible roles. But before I took the top job, I was pretty good at what I did. I knew how to build teams, I knew how to design programs, I knew how to operate the organizational complexity that lives inside of HR. And then I got the top job. And the expertise was real, but it was obvious that that wasn't the job anymore. I didn't need to do those things. I had people working with me who did those things.

The job required me to stop asking "how do I run HR?" and start asking "what does the business need from human capital in order to execute its strategy?" Which means that the first thing you've got to do is be able to truly understand the strategy. Those are different questions. "How do I run HR really well?" and "how do I navigate the business strategy and allocate talent to that strategy?" — those produce different answers. And the identity shift between them, at least in my case, was not automatic and it wasn't natural.

No, and every other C-suite role is a more senior version of the same operating identity. The CFO became a more senior finance leader, the COO became a more senior operations leader. In my view and experience — both personally and in coaching other executives — the head of HR is the only role where the identity that carried you into the seat isn't the identity that you need in the seat.

And unfortunately, most CHROs walk in without anyone having made that explicit. The CEO doesn't do it, the board doesn't do it, the search firm certainly doesn't do it, and the default identity takes over. That's the one that earned all the promotions for the last 20 years. So of course that's what you're going to do. It's the one that knows how to run the function well. It's unfortunately a different job than the one the title describes. And it is, as we've talked about a couple weeks ago — over half your job isn't in the function itself.

So before we get into talking about what we do about this, I want to name what I think is the thing underrunning both of those assumptions.

Because the fix that gets reached for — in Bolt's case, fire the team, rename the function, replace the head of HR — it addresses the output of the loop, but it doesn't actually address the loop itself.

Two things are running at the same time. When the mandate's not defined clearly, the function defaults to the safest historically available behavior. And when the mandate is unclear, compliance tends to be the hat that the function can defend. I had someone early in my career say, "you never have to defend saying no" — which was really bad advice, to be honest, but it is not different from what I've seen people do over the years. Compliance is measurable, it's auditable, it protects against criticism.

And I think the loop ends up working like this: the mandate's vague or absent. The function defaults to compliance. Compliance creates friction in the moments that required a different operating mode. Leadership loses trust — if they ever had it — in the function. The mandate gets reduced further because no one expects anything other than what they're delivering today functionally. And the function doubles down on compliance because that's the only behavior still being rewarded. Over time, that loop tightens until somebody names the function as the problem. In this case, it was the Bolt CEO.

We don't know whether their mandate was ever defined or not, or whether something broke in translation. But we do know there was a disconnect, and that disconnect produced friction, and the CEO removed what he experienced as the source of that. That's the loop. It's completing itself.

You mentioned two loops right there, Jackson. And I think the second loop is the harder one to talk about because it requires looking at yourself honestly. You and I, in a previous episode, I think we called that the identity lag.

The path to the CHRO seat is built over 20 years of being really, really good at all of the transactional elements of HR. And that identity is real and it's earned and it's load-bearing. The problem is that when you arrive, the identity required for the new role is really, really different. Not a more senior version of what you've done before. In fact, if you haven't read it, Marshall Goldsmith's book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, is an excellent read. You need a different identity when you step into that top job.

In a stable environment, there are at least some signals, some time, and some space to begin that shift — even if nobody explains it to you clearly. But when a company goes into genuine distress — and it doesn't have to be a bankruptcy — you know, there are a bunch of different kinds of stress that get put on organizations. When the organization is experiencing that kind of distress, the transition that has to happen needs to be there almost overnight. That first jump from functional expert to business leader goes into hyperdrive. The CHRO who hasn't started that transition is suddenly asked to make two identity shifts at once while the company is fighting to survive.

And if you don't make the jump — either jump — you get left behind. And what's causing that is the moment required a different operating system than the one you were running. That's a different thing from being wrong for the role. I can be great, but not for the moment.

A company in distress — which is almost any sort of turnaround, and it doesn't have to be the one that's right on the precipice of bankruptcy, but you know, oftentimes you don't see it until it gets there — that person doesn't have the time or the structure to separate those two truths gracefully. So that's the hard thing to name about someone who's excellent at their craft. Excellence in the function and readiness for the top seat are, in my view, two completely different things. And then you throw in wartime/peacetime — and it gets really hard, really fast.

Really fast. So that's the mechanics that sort of contribute.

Let's reframe the situation. Here's the frame that changes everything: The head of HR is not an HR person. Period. Full stop. The head of HR is not an HR person. That's the thing that we've been building toward, and it's worth saying plainly.

And I want to say — sit with that for a moment — because every other C-suite role is a more senior version of the same operating identity. The CHRO is the one role where the seat requires you to become something categorically different from what you were.

The successful people are there. They're the ones acting as a business leader who happens to steward the human capital system. That is not a head of HR function. It is a fundamentally different orientation. And honestly, I think it's always been true. What's different now is the speed at which business contexts change — whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's the PE financial engineering model that isn't working as cleanly, whether it is just the general economy. And all of that just kind of fills into the pot. And it means that we have to be able to make that change faster than ever before. Which is one of the reasons why I started the CHRO Ascent Academy — because that is the model that allows you to go faster.

But to the listeners who are not in the top job: you don't have to wait until you get into the top job to start getting ready for this shift. In fact, you're probably going to be a lot more successful if you can make that shift now and then take the top job. And let me describe for a second what that shift felt like from the inside, because I don't think it gets named concretely enough.

When I started operating as a business leader rather than an HR leader, the first thing that changed was the question I brought into the room. I stopped asking, "how do we handle this from an HR standpoint?" And I started asking, "what is the business need right now, in this context, in this situation, from its people, and what's standing in the way of that?" I started looking for constraints.

Those questions look similar on the surface, but they produce really different conversations. And they signal completely different operating identities to the person sitting across the table from you — who, if your reporting relationship is right, is the CEO.

Yeah. The second thing that changes, I think, is the risk calculus. And let me unpack that for a minute. A business leader does not try to eliminate all risk. That's impossible. A business leader identifies the risks that are worth taking and the ones that are not. So compliance is one of the resources in that calculus. It is not the lens.

I'm going to put myself into this directly because I think the honest version of the story is more useful than what you'll see on Instagram. I've created friction before. There was a situation in my career where a manager wanted to move on someone on their team. The documentation was thin, the manager hadn't followed the whole process. And of course, because I'm compliance and employee advocate, I intervened. I protected the employee. I was technically correct. And I was dead wrong. Because I didn't see clearly enough that the employee was in fact not working. The manager hadn't earned the right to terminate by our process standards, but the underlying business judgment — that they weren't going to be a fit for the future — was sound.

And like many of us, I used the process to override a call that was right. I substituted my judgment for theirs. And that's treating the employee advocacy hat and maybe even the compliance hat as overriding the talent hat in a moment that, for a role that mattered, required the talent hat to lead.

And you know what I think is really funny about that? I have an almost identical version of that story in my past. And I'm willing to bet that every single listener who is in the top job, if they're honest with themselves, probably has the same story.

And that's why the HR business partners who tend to be in this friction zone — the ones who have worked for me in the last 15 years — will hear things like: "It is not our job to superimpose our judgment and replace theirs. They have the risk calculus." Now, if we're going to do something incredibly stupid, okay. But in that case, we have an elevation discussion, not an override.

And if I can be really blunt about it, 75% of the HR people I've worked with do really well in that environment. And 25% cannot get past the "I have the answer and it's my decision." It could be that the folks inside Bolt had that approach, to be fair. I could totally see that.

Well, what you and I are talking about right now is what happens when the mandate has not made the hierarchy explicit.

Yeah, so now take that into a crisis context. A company that's fighting for survival — $11 billion to $300 million. In that environment, the talent hat is not one of three considerations. It becomes almost everything. You are asking one set of questions: Who are the people this company can't survive without? Are they locked in? What happens to their equity comp if we restructure? What happens if we go down a different path?

And you're asking those questions before the advisors arrive, hopefully. Because once the turnaround professionals walk in — and they never actually turn around anything, they just extract fees — those decision rights migrate. You lose any operational control. And so the operating logic shifts from an organizational one to a legal and financial one. The window for HR to shape people outcomes narrows to almost nothing almost immediately. And it's awful.

And the CHRO who shows up in that moment with a defined mandate, with an identity shift already made, and the talent hat already primary — that person is invaluable in the room. Because if we do that well, we can avoid the advisors walking out the door with the wheel.

And the experience that kind of launched our friendship was a company where there was a bankruptcy involved. But it doesn't have to be a bankruptcy. Bolt's not in bankruptcy, but $11 billion to $300 million — they're operating with an $11 billion cost structure and $300 million in value. Something is going to have to drastically change in that business.

And this episode — I worry a little that people are going to interpret it as a warning. I think we are giving a warning. But there's also an opportunity here, Jackson. The HR leader who can read the moment, name the hat the business needs, and operate from there is pretty rare. And in an environment where companies are moving faster and demanding more from their people function than they ever have, that rarity has real value. Being able to make that shift as an HR leader — as a human capital leader — is hard. It's not abstract. But the leaders who make that shift are operating at a level that most of their peers haven't reached. And that's a really, really good thing.

Yeah, so let's move forward to the playbook. Here's how both sides of the table can move on this starting this week. Three plays. Each one belongs to a specific person.

I'll take the first one. It's for the CEO. I need you to define the mandate before the friction starts. Not in a job description, not in a conversation. Sit down with your head of HR and name explicitly: given where this business is now, what operating mode are we in? Because growth and stability and transformation and survival all lead to different answers. And what hat — in my language — does the people function need to lead with in this context?

That conversation is going to tell your CHRO which hierarchy of risk is relevant right now. Because without it, the function is going to default to what it normally defaults to — the safest option. Compliance is almost always the safest hat. The vacuum that you leave fills with caution. And the friction that you later name as the problem might have been the absence of your direction and clarity around the mandate.

What I like about the moves we've built into this playbook is they're the ones we're telling people: don't wait for Monday. If you're CEO and you're listening to this, on Monday go do play one — the Jackson Justified.

Play two is for the CHRO. And I'd say the same thing — don't even wait for Monday. Start now. Make the identity shift visible in every single conversation you're having, not just the internal ones.

The business leader who owns the human capital agenda asks different questions than the head of HR. If you're a CHRO and you're not asking these questions, you need to start. Form the hypothesis and test it with your CEO. At minimum, go to your CEO, have a conversation, and ask about the constraint the business is hitting that has a people dimension. Make sure you understand how your CEO is thinking about that.

And you should have an independent point of view. You should have an independent point of view about the five people your business can't afford to lose in the next 12 months. And if you don't have a plan for keeping them in place, you better be thinking about what your plan is so that you can say to the CEO: "Here is my plan for keeping these people in place. Where is the talent risk building that the leadership team hasn't seen yet because they're too close to the operations to look up?"

Those questions signal which identity is operating. Are you the head of HR or are you a business leader? The CEO who hears them consistently is going to start to experience the CHRO differently. And the permission for a different kind of conversation follows the evidence of different kind of thinking. That's what play two is.

Play three belongs to both of you, and it has a deadline. Build the talent lock before the moment of crisis. Don't wait for a restructuring to ask who you cannot afford to lose. Once the turnaround professionals arrive in their hearses, the decision rights migrate. And the window for HR to shape people outcomes closes way faster than anyone expects. And by the way, the CEO loses their decision rights as well. It's a whole different world than what you're normally operating in.

So it's important — before you get to that state — to have the conversation about who is essential, what keeps them, what's the plan. If you are heading toward a turnaround, how do you lock in equity and compensation in a distress scenario? You will have the ability to do those things well in advance. So you need to do it. That's why talent portfolio optimization matters. What are the jobs that matter most? If I have an A player in those roles and I'm going to be going through some stuff, now is the time to go after that. I'm less interested in the process than in knowing: do I know who those people are and have I done something to lock them in?

Every company has a different version of that list. Most of them have never written it down. It's time to write it down. That's the key point.

So, all right, senior leaders, here is your Talent Sherpa summary. And this week it was interesting in our pre-prep call. Scott always says, "We have a fully documented process for managing workforce risk in a downturn. We wrote it during our last profitable quarter, and we haven't looked at it since." Go ahead, Scott.

I've literally never said that, but I've probably operated in one of those contexts. All right, here's the summary — four points.

One: the Bolt story, and who cheered and how broadly — that's not noise. It's a real signal about how widely the feeling that HR is in the way has spread. It's worth sitting with rather than reflexively defending or pushing back. CHRO tenure is 4.8 years and falling — down from six, down from something even higher before that. The function is under pressure from multiple directions at once. And the momentum is demanding something different from what carried the function through the last decade.

Point two: the three hats Jackson talks about — they're not always in balance. Context determines which hat is primary. In growth and stability, the balance model works. In distress or turnaround, the talent hat has to lead. Compliance is a resource. It's not a default. The function that can make that shift meets the moment. The function that cannot make that shift becomes the problem by running the wrong hierarchy at the wrong moment. That's a diagnostic. It's not an indictment.

Number three: the head of HR is not the most senior HR person. The head of HR is not an HR person. It's a categorically different job from every other job in the HR function. The identity that carries you to that seat is not the identity the seat requires. It's completely different. It's business leadership. In a stable environment, you have some time to begin the shift. In a crisis, it happens fast. Leaders who have already made the shift are in a fundamentally different position if and when that moment arrives. Start getting ready today.

Fourth and final: the mandate is the contract that makes everything else possible. If you haven't listened to our episodes on mandates, you need to go find those episodes. When a CEO doesn't define which operating mode the business needs and which hat is primary, the function defaults to the safest possible behavior available — and that's compliance. That's what any rational system does in the absence of direction. It's not a criticism. When the friction eventually appears, the real diagnosis is usually the absence of a contract.

And if you want help building that contract with your CEO, great news. I have just launched something called the Five-Day Mandate. You can find it at mytalentsherpa.com — go where it says Courses, and it'll say Mandate Protocol. It's $297, and it's a work-at-your-own-pace course with all of the artifacts and downloads. I will walk you through how to build it. I build it in the context of CEO-CHRO, but it works for literally anyone with a business-facing role who is wanting to make the jump from service provider to strategic influencer of business outcomes. Check it out there. It's available now.

I also want to return to something I named earlier. I stepped in to protect the employee when the business judgment said I needed to do something different. I thought I was doing the right thing. The process supported me. What I was actually doing was deciding that the advocacy hat outweighed the talent hat in a moment that the talent hat needed to lead. And the manager was right, and I invoked the process incorrectly. And that version of this still plays out in organizations every day — in small ways and in large ones. It rarely gets named clearly, and it might have been happening in the Bolt situation.

The shift this episode is asking for is being very thoughtful about the priority the business needs from you in this moment, and being willing to operate from that location. That clarity is what separates the function that meets the moment from the one that becomes the story.

Thank you so much for tuning into the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is, as you know, where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. It is so much fun to do with all y'all.

If you like today's episode, do us a favor right now and hit that like button. Better yet — subscribe to the podcast so you get the latest episodes. And if you would, leave us a review on your favorite platform, whether that's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. We're on all of those. It benefits the community if you take a second and write us a quick review. It's free. It helps us reach other senior leaders.

And I want to talk a minute about Scott's company. Propulsion AI is amazing. It is about workforce intelligence for private equity. Their AI teammates are surfacing workforce risk before close. And importantly, they're helping leadership teams drive execution afterwards. They are translating strategy into individual accountability. They're coaching managers to define roles by outcomes, and they give every employee a clear line of sight into what actually matters. It's really good stuff. It is all done through artificial intelligence.

I was having a conversation with a CEO about a week and a half ago, and he was explaining that one of the big challenges they're having with their existing team is they can't get job specs right and they're all activity-based. As a result, there are like two people, including the CEO, writing everything. This is exactly where Scott's company started. And they can help you go faster and farther. If you have a challenge around clarity, you should look at the cleverly named getpropulsion.ai, and Scott's team can help you.

I appreciate you, Jackson. Thanks for doing that. And if you're a CHRO that's new to the role, or if you are preparing to become a new CHRO, Jackson has built all of the tools that are going to help you operate at the altitude that role demands. Personal coaching, the CHRO Ascent Academy that we mentioned earlier, his best-selling Substack — everything that you need, you're going to find at mytalentsherpa.com.

Yeah, thanks Scott, and thanks to everyone who is listening. So until next time — keep raising the bar. Define the mandate before the friction finds you. And keep on climbing.