The best work that you did last year might have a dollar value, and it's written down nowhere. In fact, it does have a dollar value. A few weeks ago, you may have read a post about that and hit the reaction button, and you felt better. That good feeling is unfortunately the most expensive thing in this function right now, and you'll know what it costs you by the time we're done.
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is the podcast for HR executives who realize the top chair isn't an HR job. It's a brand new identity. And we help you move beyond operating as a support function and become the business-first executive and the right hand that your CEO cannot run the company without. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch.
So I'm going to share something here that sounds wrong, or it probably is going to sound wrong. Here it is. The most damaging idea in human resources right now is completely accurate. Every word of it, it checks out. I've lived almost every example of it. And that, my friends, is what makes it dangerous, because true and useful are two different tests. And a lot of really good people are only ever using the first one.
We talk about this a lot, but you're in the chair to move revenue, margin, speed, and risk. And to do it through how the work is built and who's doing it. That's the mandate. Appreciation, please note, is not on that list.
So here's what I want to show you today. Why the work you're proudest of never reaches your CEO, and why invisible is not the right word for it. How keeping the score privately is what makes the scoreboard permanent. And what changing one thing about the order is worth to you.
And look, before we get into today's episode, I just want to say thank you. Shout out this week to Lance in Toronto. I appreciate you being a part of this community. And to everyone that's tuning in, whether you're listening in Auckland or from Des Moines, Iowa, we appreciate that you're here.
Now I'd like you to put yourself back in the last quarterly business review. About 90 minutes deep, probably when the CFO gets to the risk register. And they're going to walk the room through it. The concentration in the second largest account, the currency exposure on the European contracts, the supplier that's running one plant. Like every item has a range next to it, has an owner, has a date. No one in that room debates whether those things are real. They're on the register. That's what makes them real.
And you're sitting there holding three items that belonged on that list, and they're not on it. The regional manager whose team has turned over twice in 18 months. The investigation that closed in March. The commercial leader who is one bad quarter away from leaving and has told exactly one person, which is you.
Now you left that meeting and you fixed one of them by Thursday. And I want to slow down here because that part went well. You saw it early, you moved at the right moment, and the thing you're worried about didn't happen. That's real confidence. I am not saying that it is anything other than noble work. You did it where nobody was looking. And then the year closes. And that save is going to be recorded in one place, which is in your own head.
Here's what the register would have carried if it had been on there. In fiscal 2025, the EEOC recovered $528 million from workers before anyone filed a lawsuit. Not verdicts. Mediation, conciliation, settlement, all of it, all of it resolved before anyone saw a courtroom. Highest figure in the agency's 60-year history. 88,000 new charges in the same 12 months.
So the thing that you prevented actually has a market rate. That win came pre-priced, and the federal government, they were actually helpful this time, and they did the math and they published it for you. And you have the room. For an hour. If they ask.
Now, a few weeks ago, an argument about all of this went around, and it went around hard, because it's very well written and it's honest, even though the person that wrote it has no background in HR until he developed a software package to sell. And in it, he says the failures in your job are events and the successes are not events. Nobody thanks you for the lawsuit that wasn't filed. The executive who didn't leave, the layoff that stayed humane, the investigation that never leaked. If you do your job right, there's nothing to point out. And then it gives you advice. Keep a list, not for your CEO, for you. Write down what didn't happen because you were there.
And I felt the pull of the post. It was really good. And then something underneath of that took me a while to name, and I want to talk to you about it.
The first trap here is the one that feels most like professionalism. You extended confidentiality from the facts through the number. The facts of that investigation are confidential, and they really should be. The name, the allegation, the finding, the remedy, all of that stays right where it belongs. The exposure, though, is a whole different object. The exposure is a range with a date on it, and it belongs in a register the same way a single-plant supplier does.
Underneath that is the order that this function learned to solve problems in. Defensible first, then efficient, then effective. Two decades of containing risk teaches you that quiet handling is the professional standard. So you learned to protect the facts, and the number ended up going with them because they arrived in the exact same envelope.
Second one isn't yours, and that's what makes it a little harder to deal with. The business believes talent contribution can't be quantified. You know that that's wrong, and you've obviously known that for years. What you did about it, though, is the trap. You went where the hooks already were. So we went to time to fill, completion rate, engagement scores, the vanity metrics. Usually you picked them because they were already attached to something the business tracked, maybe even asked for. Attaching to something felt better than attaching to nothing. Whether they mattered most never really entered into it. So you proposed a set of metrics, and now you're evaluated on them, and the room didn't impose that. You offered it, and you had good reasons at the time. And it's now hardened into the standard.
Here's the third trap. Yeah, it's on top of the first two. And it's the notion of this private list. It's a decent instinct. It's kind, and it does one thing. It moves the record off the system and into your own head. Same as the confidentiality reflex, same as the metrics trade. Those are three different starting points, one ultimate result. The record lives in your head, and the enterprise never gets a copy.
So let's get to what's actually running here. Every item on that register had already cleared a chain before it got printed. Somebody allocated a scarce resource against a constraint. Somebody made an explicit trade-off about what that company would not do. And that trade-off got executed against whatever the business is ultimately competing on. Cost, quality, whatever it is for you. And it landed in one of four currencies: revenue, margin, speed, or risk. I refer to those as the value currencies. Nothing reaches that register without landing in one of those.
Now run your three items through it. The regional manager is risk. The commercial leader is speed, and margin maybe, if you have to replace them. The investigation was a risk before it got closed and probably still is. So here's the point. They all fit. All three of them. They fit very cleanly. So your work belongs on the chain. It always did, and that was never the problem.
Now I spent a long time holding on to the wrong version of this, and the imprecision is what cost me. I thought the problem was translation. I thought if I said it better in the CFO's words with the number on it, it would count. So I got really good at that. I'd walk into a review and talk about "we avoided a claim that would have run $400,000." And I'd watch people nod and move on to the next item, and I couldn't work out why, because the number was always right.
But here's what my friend Scott Morris taught me. It wasn't untranslated, it was unlinked. Translation is a language operation. Linking is a structural one, and they fail very differently.
When the CFO retires an exposure, it counts because the exposure was on the register first, with an owner and a date, and then it wasn't. There's a before and there's an after, and the save is the distance between the two states the company had. And they'd already agreed that both were real. Your save has no before. So the number arrives as an assertion, no matter how accurate it is. And senior people, they discount assertions automatically. Not unkindly. They do it to each other all day long, twice on Sunday.
Which means invisible by design is only a description of sequence. You fixed it before you priced it, nearly every time, for most of your career. And guess what? That sequence belongs to you.
And that's why the advice to keep a private list is the most expensive kindness in this entire function. It is meant well, it resolves the feeling. I personally think we have more agency on it, but it leaves the structure sitting exactly where it was, which is the only thing you actually needed to move to begin with. A support function inherits the scorecard and then works really, really hard against it. The chair that you're climbing towards decides what goes on that scorecard. That's a whole different job, and you can start doing it this very week.
Which brings us to the climb. These are three moves, and the first one is going to probably take you about an hour.
So play one. Pull up your three biggest saves from the last 12 months, and then try to put a currency and a number on each one of them. Was it risk, margin, speed, or revenue? One line apiece. Do this all by yourself. Do it alone. It's not a document for anybody yet. The first number you write down — I've done this before — it's going to be too high, because you're going to price the absolute worst case. And then price the likely one. That's probably the one that you should bring into the room.
Play number two. Take the exposure that you're quietly working right now and book it before you fix it. Next leadership meeting, bring a paragraph. The condition, the currency, a range, and the date it stops being a range and it becomes an event. And then roll up the sleeves and go fix it. That's the move from the executive who absorbs the risk to the executive who prices it in. Same prevention, same competence, by the way. One different order. Nobody has to approve it.
Play three is you've got to get one of your items onto a register that already lives in the real world. Your company has one somewhere. Whether it's the enterprise risk register or the operating review or the CFO's quarterly pack, just ask what it takes to add a line and who owns the format. Now, you're asking to be on the chain that the business already runs on. No new report, no new meeting, no new deck.
And the one thing I want you to carry out of here: prevention only counts when there's a before. And you build the before yourself, on purpose, in advance, before you fix anything.
So let me be plain with you, because I don't want this to land as criticism. Handling those things quietly was the right instinct. The order was the only thing wrong with it. The details need to stay confidential, but the risk, the exposure, does not. The work you're proudest of is never going to reach the CEO today because no one linked it to anything the business actually tracks. Invisibility was not the problem. Sequence was. A private list moves the record to one place that cannot change what the system counts. And changing the order costs you about an hour, maybe even a paragraph, and then turns every save after this into a result that somebody can actually check.
And that's the whole job. Move beyond operating as a support function. Become the person that your CEO cannot run the company without.
And one last thing. If something that we talked about today resonated with you, let's take 30 minutes on the phone. You tell me what's actually happening. I'm going to help you find the architecture underneath of it and share with you what I would do next if I were in your shoes. The calendar link is in the show notes, or you can find it at mytalentsherpa.com.
That's the summit for today. I appreciate you climbing with me. Till next time, keep raising the bar. Keep pricing the risk in before you retire it. And keep on climbing.
