The HR Paradox: Who Does HR Turn to When They Need Help?

What happens when one of the most influential organizations in human resources becomes an HR case study itself?

In December 2025, a federal jury found the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) liable for race discrimination and retaliation, awarding former employee Rehab Mohamed $11.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. SHRM disputes the verdict, unsuccessfully sought a new trial at the district court level, and is now pursuing an appeal. Meanwhile, SHRM’s employment-practices insurer has filed a separate lawsuit involving coverage of the $10 million punitive-damages award.

But this episode of Please Mute Your Trauma isn’t simply about a lawsuit.

It’s about credibility, power, professional standards, employee voice, workplace dignity, and what happens when there is a gap between what an organization teaches and what people experience inside it.

SHRM helps shape the HR profession. Its certifications appear in job descriptions, its resources influence workplace practices, and organizations look to it for guidance on everything from employee relations and investigations to discrimination and retaliation.

So Tiffany asks the uncomfortable question:

If we treat an institution as a standard for the profession, what does that institution have to do to keep deserving our trust?

In this episode, Tiffany breaks down what happened in Mohamed v. Society for Human Resource Management, why the timing and handling of the employee’s complaints became so important, what the jury actually decided, what SHRM argues went wrong at trial, and where the case stands now.

Then the conversation gets bigger.

What does an HR certification actually certify? Why do employers require SHRM credentials in the first place? Should professional authority ever be accepted without scrutiny? Can an organization be technically compliant and still leave people feeling fundamentally undignified? And is employee voice really meaningful if speaking up makes the employee less safe?

Because knowing the policy is not the same as living it.

Having the certification is not the same as having the courage to challenge power.

And certification can demonstrate knowledge. It cannot certify humanity.

This episode explores:

• The SHRM discrimination and retaliation verdict
• The $11.5 million jury award and SHRM’s ongoing appeal
• Workplace retaliation and employee voice
• Internal investigations and organizational trust
• SHRM certification and professional credibility
• The difference between compliance and dignity
• Institutional accountability and organizational legitimacy
• Why workplace culture is measured by what happens when someone actually uses the policy
• What HR leaders and employers can learn from the case regardless of its ultimate appellate outcome

This isn’t an argument to abandon SHRM, burn your certification, or assume one lawsuit defines an entire organization.

It’s an invitation to question something much bigger:

Who HRs HR? Who certifies the certifier? And who holds the standard accountable?

Because work becomes meaningful when dignity is protected—and dignity requires more from us than knowing the right answer on the test. It requires us to live the answer, especially when nobody is grading us.

Please Mute Your Trauma: Emotionally Unavailable During Working Hours

Workplace trauma. Workplace dignity. Meaningful work. Organizational culture. Leadership. And the very human mess underneath all of it.

Transcript

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Who is HR's? HR. No, really, I'm being serious. Because imagine being one of the most influential organizations in human resource management. You certify HR professionals, employers use your credentials on job descriptions. Your organization publishes guidance on discrimination and retaliation, investigations, employee relations. Basically, if something weird happens at work, there's a decent chance SHERM has a toolkit for it. And then a federal jury finds your organizational liable for race discrimination and retaliation for the sum of $11.5 million. You then ask for a new trial, the judge says no, so you move forward to it with an appeal. And then your employment practices insurance company enters the group chat and says, 10 million punitive damages bill? I don't think we're going to pay that. And at some point, this stuff becoming an employment law case study, and it now becomes an organizational case study. So today we're talking about SHERM. And the most important question we're asking is what happens when the organization helping define the professional standard becomes the example. Hi, I'm really glad you're here. And if you're back for another episode, welcome back. You know what to do. Pull up a chair. If this is your first episode, I'm so glad you found us, and I'm so glad you're here. We've been saving you a C. Welcome to Please Meet Your Trump, the podcast for anyone who has ever read the policy, who watched the policy, get completely ignored, and then been confidently told, well, we followed our processes. I'm Timmy Collins. I'm a recovering overthinker. I'm often too curious for normal humans and corporate comfort. And I'm the kind of person that hears that isn't what happened, and immediately starts organizing an email chain like it's exhibited. And around here we talk about workplace trauma and dignity, meaningful work, leadership, organizational behavior, and the absolute absurdity of systems created by humans. That's all become so sacred that the humans inside them are no longer allowed to question them. Today's episode has receipts, court filings, performance reviews, an internal discrimination complaint, a retaliation complaint, a jury verdict across free to trial, a judge say no and appeal, and now an insurance coverage lawsuit. There is simply not enough room in just to confirm my understanding folder for this entire situation. But before we get into it, I need to make something very clear. I am highly intelligent, but I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. I'm not your lawyer, I'm not even my lawyer. I'm not Schirm's lawyer, I'm not Rehab Muhammad's lawyer, and most importantly, I'm certainly not sitting in the 10th circuit pretending that my boo yeti microphone has suddenly conferred federal appellate jurisdiction upon me. This story of the legal process isn't finished. Um, Schirm strongly disputes the jury's verdict and is pursuing an appellate review. So throughout this episode, I'm going to distinguish very carefully between what Mohammed alleged, what Schirm argued, what evidence a trial court considered, what the jury ultimately found, what the judge later ruled, and what's still being litigated. Because let's be honest, I don't want to get sued and those distinctions matter. I also don't want to do a 45-minute episode titled, Ha, Schirm got sued, because that's easy. That's also not particularly interesting. So what I want to know is what happens to institutional credibility when an organization built around telling everybody else how work should work has its own workplace practices challenged this seriously. And there's another layer because Sherm isn't simply an employer. If you don't know, SHERM is an institution within HR and organizations. It certifies professionals with tests and credentialing. It defines competencies. Employers then use those credentials as signals of professional capability. Sherm currently describes itself as the trusted authority on all things work. And its certification marketing goes even further, calling SHRM certification, the HR certification, organization's trust, as the standard for HR capability. So when an institution positions itself as the standard, I think we're allowed to ask, what does a standard have to do to continue deserving that status? And that is the conversation I want to have today. Okay, before we get into the real spicy, let's just talk about what happened. I'll lay it out for you. So this started in April 2016 when Rehab Mohammed was hired to share. In 2020, she was promoted to senior instructional designer. And this matters because one of the major disputes in this case eventually became her performance. According to the federal court's 2024 summary judgment order, Mohammed's prior performance reviews rated her either a solid performer or a role model across the criteria. And those reviews did not identify timeliness or miss deadlines as a problem at all. So keep that in the back of your mind because we're coming to deadlines. Mohammed began reporting to a supervisor named Carolyn Barley. The court says that in June 2020, Mohammed went to Barley's supervisor and complained that she believed that Barley was treating white colleagues differently than her. She specifically raised concerns about micromanagement. The following day, she raised the same concerns in a meeting that included Barley. And later that month, she raised them again. Now, HR people, this is where I want you with me. Because employees really walk into your office speaking fluent employment law. That would be really awesome if they did. So nobody comes in and says, Good afternoon, Tiffany. At precisely 2.17 p.m., I would like to formally notify you that I'm now engaging in the statutory protected activity. That'd be awesome. No, they say, I don't think I'm being treated the same. You know, I feel like something's different. I think race may be a part of this. And once an employee says something like that, the next moves matter a lot. So after Mohammed's complaint, an HR employee named Mike Jackson advised Barley to document her interactions with Muhammad. That itself isn't necessarily strange. I am the queen of telling people document, document, document, and documentation is always appropriate. But Jackson was also involved in investigating Mohammed's complaint. And according to the court record, while he was investigating Mohammed's complaint about Barley, he was also helping Barley draft emails concerning Mohammed's project deadlines. Okay, HR people, I know the face you just made, because I made that face too. Because even before we decide whether discrimination occurred, you already see where we're going to have to process questions. The person I'm supposed to trust to examine whether my manager is treating me fairly is also helping the manager formulate communications about my performance. Maybe in a mythical world, there's a perfectly defensible explanation. Fine. But I'm writing conflict in very large letters in my notebook. And that's where things get more complicated. On August 12th, Mohammed's supervisor told her that she had two projects that needed to be completed by August 31st. Mohammed responded that there were vendor-related issues affecting those projects and asked for help meeting those deadlines. Good for her, she spoke up. And according to the court record, a senior executive then asked HR to help draft the response. And in that internal email, the executive said this was an opportunity to use the right language either to correct Mohammed quickly or potentially support an eventual termination. The resulting message told Mohammed that the deadlines were non-negotiable and that no insistence would be provided. Okay, this is where I need a corkboard and a red stray, a lot of snacks. Because we're no longer in the employment deadline zone. We're now asking a series of questions. Who established the deadline? Was that deadline considered reasonable? What was happening before the deadline was established? Who was already discussing termination? Who was involved in those discussions? Who knew about the discrimination complaint? Who was supposed to investigate it? And most importantly, how independent was that investigation? Ooh. Then comes August 19th. Mohammed made an additional complaint. This time she said she believed that she was being retaliated against because she had complained about racial discrimination. And according to the court's order, sure began preparing termination documentation that same day, or roughly the next two days. The HR employee responsible for examining her retaliation concerns never spoke to her about the retaliation complaint. Make that make sense, Ruimi. The employee responsible for examining the retaliation complaints never spoke with the complaint. Okay. Mohammed was informed on August 31st that Sherm had concluded her complaints were unfounded. She was then terminated September 1st. Again, timing alone does not prove retaliation. That's important. Because if an employee says, I think I'm being retaliated against, and at approximately the same time somebody's preparing documents to terminate them, you need pristine, very clear documentation. I mean immaculate, museum quality. I want timestamps, I want emails, I want decision makers, I want contemporary notes. We want to know exactly when the decision was made and why. Because the chronology is going to matter. And it mattered here. But there was another piece. One of Mohammed's white teammates submitted the declaration stating that she herself had routinely missed target completion deadlines on major projects and had not been disciplined or coached for doing so. She also said she found the intense focus on Muhammad's deadlines unusual because she and other white teammates had not been held to that same state. Now, you can begin to understand why this case didn't just disappear at summary judgment. Schirm argued that Mohammed was terminated for legitimate performance reasons. Mohammed then argued that those reasons were pretextual and that discrimination and retaliation were actually the causes. In October 2024, Schirm asked the federal court to resolve the case without sending those issues to jury. According to Judge Gordon Gallagher, he said no. And he opened the factual discussion with one of my favorite pieces of federal judicial understatement. He said, in no uncertain terms, this is a messy employment discrimination case. Sir, respectfully, when the federal judge opens with, hey, this is messy, I know I'm about to need another cup of coffee, but I want to read precise about something. The judge did not, at that stage, rule that Sherm had discriminated. He did not rule that the investigation was definitively a sham. He said there was enough evidence for a reasonable jury to reach those conclusions, so the case needed to go to trial. That distinction matters. And eventually, a jury got the question. So before we get to the verdict, my employment law people are about to have a question. Because when I tell you the damage is number, some of you are going to say, wait a minute, aren't damages under Title VII capped? Look at you. Gold Star, stay with me. Mohammed's lawsuit involved claims under both Title VII and 42 USC Section 1981 during the litigation. The jury verdict we're talking about was on her section 1981, race discrimination and rally retaliation complaints. Okay, why does this matter? Because Title VII has a statutory framework that caps certain compensatory and punitive damage depending on employer size. Section 1981 is different, and the Title VII statutory cap does not simply limit recovery under Section 1981. So let's be honest, we're done with law school for today. You may put your highlighter away. The important thing is this wasn't a typo. When I tell you the jury awarded $11.5 million. Now let's talk about why this case hits a little differently. Because if this were a random company, it would still matter. Discrimination matters, retaliation matters, a failed investigation matters, but this isn't a random company. This is SHERM, the Society for Human Resource Management. This is an institution that helps define professional HR legitimacy, SHERM certification, SHERM conferences, SHEM chapters, SHERM Continuum Education, SHERM Research, SHERM Toolkits, SHERM competencies, and SHERM recertification. And those credentials have real labor market value. Look at current HR job postings and you'll find professional HR credentials such as SHERM CP, SHERM SCP, PHR, explicitly preferred and in some roles required. Current postings include director and HRBP positions requiring one of those professional credentials. So when an employer writes SHERM SCP preferred or SHERM SCP, SPHR, or equivalent required, what is that employer really saying? They're saying we believe this credential tells us something meaningful about whether you understand this profession and all the duties that come along with it. And that's institutional trust. And SHRM itself is not shy about that positioning. Its current certification page literally describes its certification as the one organizations trust as the standard for HR capability. Okay, that's not me calling them the gold standard. That's their marketing calling them the gold standard. So when I say SHRM functions like a gold standard and HR, I don't mean there's no alternatives. There absolutely are. HRCI offers the PHR and SPHR and other professional credentials, for example. But what I'm seeing is that SHERM has accumulated enough professional authority that the letters it issues can influence who gets considered for which jobs. And once an institution has that kind of authority, I think we get to ask questions about the institution. Actually, let me rephrase that. I think we have an obligation to. Because here's where I get stuck. Suppose I apply for an HR job tomorrow, and the organization said, we need those letters behind your name because those letters tell us if you understand HR. Not my degrees, not my professional experience. Okay. Then I think I'm allowed to care about how the organization issuing those letters does HR in turn. I mean, don't I? We can't have this weird one-way relationship where Sherm's institutional credibility matters when it validates the professional. But suddenly institutional credibility is irrelevant when we're examining SHRM. I mean, we all have to pick a lane. Either credibility matters or it doesn't. And I'm not suggesting that one lawsuit automatically invalidates an entire certification system, because it doesn't. But if we're going to treat an institution like a professional standard, then I think we have to be willing to ask what obligations come with being the standard. Because authority without accountability is not professionalization, it's branding. And here's where the irony gets a little louder. Before trial, SHURM attempted to limit arguments and evidence for training the organization as the kind of model employer in emphasizing its experience at HR. Legally? I kind of understand why counsel makes that argument. The basic point is SHERM should not be judged according to the applicable law, not subjected to some imaginary superlaw because it happens to TJR. That's reasonable legal advocacy, but organizationally, your name is the Society for Human Resource Management. We cannot show up like human resources? Nope. Different Sherm. You must be thinking of somebody else. You certify HR professionals, you publish guidance about investigations, retaliation, discrimination, employee relations, documentation, compliance. There's probably a PDF, maybe a toolkit, and most certainly a webinar. And if irony earned professional development credits, this entire episode would recertify all of us through 2047. The trial judge rejected SHERM's attempt to make its expertise essentially disappear from the case. And the court had previously noted that SHERM is an HR membership organization that trains people to perform HR. And that alone raises another fascinating question. Does expertise create additional responsibility? I'm not asking whether it creates a different statute because it doesn't. I'm asking about professional legitimacy. Imagine an organization that certifies restaurants and food safety. They train everybody, they write sanitation guidance, they give people credentials proving they understand food safety. And then an inspector walks into their kitchen and suddenly everybody says, really think our expertise in food safety is relevant here. Ma'am, I'm looking at that chicken, and of course I'm interested. Not because experts aren't allowed to fail. Experts fail all the time. I mean, look at doctors, they get sick, accountants make accounting errors, researchers design bad studies, HR professionals can make terrible HR decisions. Expertise does not equal infallibility. The question isn't, did an expert ever fail? The question here is, what does an expert do when confronted with evidence that they may have failed? And that's different. And I think that distinction becomes really important in what happens next. In December 2025, the case went to trial. On December 5th, the jury found Sherb liable for race discrimination and retaliation under section 1981. Then came the damages. They awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million for punitive damages, totaling that $11.5 million. Now, punitive damages are conceptually different from compensatory damages. Compensatory damages are about compensate someone for harm, whereas punitive damages are intended to punish and deter wrongful conduct. So when a jury puts 10 million in the punitive column, I might be gonna live here, but I think it's fair to confirm that the jury was not sitting there thinking, communication breakdown. The jury viewed what Hitchhard seriously. I mean, very seriously. Schirm responded immediately. And Schirm did not hedge. Its official statement said, This claim has no merit. None. Schirm said the verdict didn't reflect the facts, the law, or the truth of how Schirm operates, and announced it would appeal. Okay, now again, Schirm has every legal right to do that. And I need to keep saying this because I don't want us to confuse defending yourself legally with doing something unethical simply because you're defending yourself. I mean, that's not my argument. Appellate rights exist for a reason. Judges make mistakes all the time, trials can contain evidentiary errors, jury instructions can be challenges, damage can be reviewed, that's all fine. But here's my organizational research brain wakes up. So what happens when legal defense and organizational learning require different things? Because your legal strategy might say admit nothing, your institutional development strategy might need you to ask, what can we learn from the fact that nine jurors heard this evidence and reached this conclusion? Those are not necessarily the same conversation, right? And organizations are notoriously bad at holding both. Someone says, You hurt me, and the organization immediately asks, can they prove it? instead of what happened. Listen to how different those are. What can they prove is a liability question. What happened is a learning question. You may need the first, but if you never ask the second, how exactly do you learn? The December verdict wasn't the end. In February 2026, Sherm went back to the trial court and sought a new trial. It challenged jury instructions, evidence, arguments that were made during the case, the treatment of Schirm's status as an HR organization, and the size of the damages awarded. Then in April, the judge denied the request. The $11.5 million verdict remained in place at the district level court. Judge Gallagher concluded Schirm's arguments were unconvincing in light of the evidence presented at Trump. And this is one of the moments in the story that absolutely stops me. Because when the court dealt with Schirm's arguments surrounding punitive damages, Schirm's own expertise came back into the picture. The judge's reasoning essentially said, this is an organization that trains businesses on employment discrimination and retaliation risks. In other words, this is not a floor that could possibly say retaliation? What? I've never heard of it. And that brings us straight back to the difference between knowing and doing. Because organizations love knowledge. Oh, we love knowledge. Training? Absolutely. Make a module? Policy? Write it. Compliance? Let's put it in the handbook. Certification? Hanging on the wall. Annual refresher? Everybody clicks through the slides by Friday. And yet then somebody asks, so what happens when the situation actually occurs? And suddenly we're all very busy. Knowledge without implementation is not competence. A policy saying retaliation is strictly prohibited doesn't prove nobody retaliates. Training about dignity doesn't prove people experience dignity. An ethics code doesn't prove ethical behavior. Leadership compassive doesn't prove leadership. And let's be honest, a certification doesn't automatically prove what. Somebody will do when the right answer becomes personally expensive. That is where the real test comes in. Everybody believes in employee voice until the employee voice says something leadership doesn't want to hear. I mean, we all love psychological safety until somebody actually uses it. Everybody believes and wants dignity in the workplace until respecting someone's dignity interferes with the outcome they already wanted. Everybody loves ethics until ethics becomes inconvenient. The test isn't what you know, it's what do you do when knowing costs you something. And this is the part that makes corporate training so unintentionally funny. Imagine the annual compliance module. Question 17. An employee reports suspected discrimination. What should the manager do? A. Immediately retaliate. B. Begin quietly assembling a termination packet. C. Report the concern appropriately. Participate in fair investigation, and ensure the employee is protected from retaliation. Okay, I know we would all answer C. Look at us. We're all ethical queens, 100%. Certificate generated. Please close the browser. You're now officially a good person. Except culture isn't measured by what we click on a quiz. Culture is measured by what happens when C is inconvenient. And that's where this gets much bigger than sure. Because you can teach ethics, you cannot guarantee ethical courage. You can test employee relations knowledge. You cannot guarantee someone will challenge the CEO. You can teach investigations, but you cannot guarantee an investigator will stay curious after leadership has already decided who the problem is. You can test judgment in hypothetical, you cannot guarantee judgment when someone's bonus, career, relationship, political capital, or reputation is on the line. And that's why I keep coming back to this one line. Certification can demonstrate knowledge. It can't certify humanity. It's not an anti-certification statement. Let's be honest, certifications are useful. I've taken a lot of them. What I'm saying is we have to stop asking credentials to prove things they fundamentally cannot prove. A credential can tell you this person demonstrated a body of knowledge and, depending on the certification, applied judgment on assessment. It cannot tell you this person will have courage at 4.37 on a Thursday afternoon when the executive team wants an employee gone and the facts are kind of muddy and not really clear. There's no multiple question for that. And now we get to the real question. I think some HR professionals may be already asking, okay, Tiffany, if you see the irony, if you think institutional credibility matters, why would anyone continue supporting Sherm? I mean, that's a fair question. This is one I've sat with for months. But I think support is doing too much work here. Because these are not all the same decision. Holding a Sherm certification is one thing. Maintaining a credential because it's valuable in your career, that's another. Using a Sherm research radically, another. Paying membership dues, a different decision. Going to the annual conference, different. Sending her whole HR team to the conference, that's also different. Move for insurance certification on your organization's job descriptions, different. Treating SHERM as the unquestioned authority on all things HR, that is yet another decision. We don't have to bundle all those things that are not mutually exclusive. And I'm not telling somebody who spent months for Sherm certification to go home and ceremonially burn it in the backyard. Please do not. Please do not tag me in the video. My insurance situation is already nervous after researching this episode. Your achievement is still your achievement. The knowledge you gained is yours. The time you invested is yours. The credential may continue to have legitimate professional labor market value. But mature professionals should be able to hold two thoughts. A credential can be useful, and the organization issuing the credential can deserve scrutiny. Why would those ideas conflict? In fact, blindly defending an institution because we've personally invested it would create its own problem, right? Well, I paid a lot of money for those letters, so I need everybody to stop asking questions about the organization that issued them. I mean, in my mind, that's not critical thinking, that's protecting your investment. But I think organizations and HR professionals can handle more complexity than that. So no, my question isn't should everyone abandon sure. My question is why should any professional organization receive automatic allegiance? Now that's different. What has it earned? What is it doing? How does it respond to criticism? How does it govern itself? Does its behavior align with its stated professional principles? What alternatives exist? What value am I actually receiving? I mean, those are all healthy questions. And frankly, if a professional institution cannot tolerate members asking them, that's a whole nother problem. Now let's move away from individual credential holders, because I think employers have a different responsibility here. If your HR job description says SHERM CP required, or SHERM SCP required or preferred, I want you to ask this question why? Not rhetorically, like literally sit down and answer it. What are you trying to validate? Employment law knowledge, strategic HR capability, experience in employee relations, business acumen, ethical judgment, investigative skills, leadership? Okay, then I want you to ask yourself whether the credential is the best proxy for that capability. Because there are other credentials, PHR and SPHR, other education experience, equivalent professional experience. And plenty of current employers already list SHREM and HRCI credentials side by side rather than treating one organization's letters as the only acceptable pathway. So maybe the question isn't should employers stop recognizing SHRM? I don't think that's really a useful question. Maybe it's should we stop automatically outsourcing our assessments of competence to a brain? Because I think this happens constantly in organization. We require this degree. Why? Because the job description requires it. Well, who wrote the job description? I don't know. Why did they require it? I have no idea. How does it predict performance? I have no idea. Can somebody demonstrate the competency another way? Well, that's what we've always required. There it is, the four horsemen of organizational nonsense. And that's how we've always done it. So if you're requiring SHERM certification because you have deliberately decided it validates competencies essential to the role, fine, tell me which ones. But if the answer is becomes SHERM is the industry standard, now I want to ask another question. Why is it the standard? And when was the last time we examined whether our standard still serves a purpose we think it serves? Because sometimes the most dangerous phrase in HR isn't that's against policy. Sometimes it's that's the industry standard. Standards can create consistency, but unquestioned standards create inertia. And if I'm hiring an HR leader, great, you now have a certification. Now I want to know who you are when the PowerPoint hits. What do you believe about employees? How do you understand power? What happens when the discrimination complaint is against your best performing executive? What happens when the CEO wants someone terminated tomorrow in the documentation just isn't there? What do you do when legal says, well, technically we could defend it? But everything in your body is saying yes, but we probably shouldn't. What happens when an employee challenges your decision? Can you admit that you're wrong? Can you investigate somebody you personally like? Can you advocate for an employee everybody else has labeled difficult? Can you recognize the difference between legitimate performance management and performance management being weaponized? Can you walk into a room full of executives and say, no, we need to slow this down? Can you preserve someone's dignity while preserving their dignity creates additional work for you? Those questions tell me far more about the HR practitioner you're going to become than the letters after your name. The letters are information. They're not the conclusion. And because apparently the story was not sufficiently complicated enough, we need to add in one more character, the insurance company. On July 28, 2026, Twin City Fire Insurance Company, a Hatford subsidiary that carried employment practices liability insurance for Sherm, filed a separate lawsuit. The dispute primarily is over 10 million punitive damage portions in the HOMAS award. Twin City argues that Virginia law prevents it from identifying SHREM for punitive damages arising for intentional conduct, pointing to the jury's findings. SHERM disagrees. Sherm says the insurer accepted coverage and that it expects the policy to be honored. Now, here's another important distinction. The insurer is not conducting a second discrimination trial and independently deciding whether Sherm discriminated. It's instead asking the court to determine its insurance obligations given the existing verdict and the applicable law. That dispute is separate. But organizationally, come on. We now have an employment practices lawsuit against Society for Human Resource Management, an appeal of the employment practices verdict, and employment law practices insurers suing the Society for Human Research over coverage of the employment practices verdict. And at this point, the Spider-Man meme has too many Spider-Man. I mean, I need a flowchart. Sherm has a brief, Wallman has a verdict, Twin City has a complaint, and I apparently chosen the wrong week to reduce caffeine. But that's actually less interesting to me than the organizational mechanism underneath it. There is a concept in organizational theory called decoupling. And you don't need to remember the academic word, but the idea is really simple. Organizations become very good at building formal structures, policies, codes of ethics, training committees, mission statements, investigative procedures, anonymous reporting systems, leadership principles, values, and all of those things communicate. We know what good looks like. But the formal structure and the lived experience can become, at some points, disconnected. And organizations are incredibly good at using the existence of the formal structure as evidence that the lived experience can't possibly be happening. I would like to call that gaslighting. How could retaliation happen here? We have an anti-retaliation policy. I know you all have policies, and some of you have policies about your policies. There's probably a SharePoint folder containing the policy, the procedure explaining the policy, the archive policy from 20 years ago, five years ago, two years ago, the track changes versions of the policy, and a PDF from 2019 that nobody is quite brave enough to delete. I mean, that's not the question. The question is, is what happens when somebody actually needs the policy? You say retaliation is prohibited. Fantastic! Show me what happens after somebody reports discrimination. You say employee voice matters. Great. Now, show me what happened to the last employee who told an executive something they absolutely do not want to hear. You say dignity is one of your values. Fantastic! Show me the inconvenient employee. Show me the poor performer. Show me the whistleblower. Show me the person everyone finds exhausting. Show me somebody who has challenged power and how they were treated. That's culture, not a PDF. This is why I keep coming back to dignity. Because dignity doesn't actually live in your employee handbook. Dignity is experienced. Do I have standing here? Does my perspective count? Can I say something is happening to me? And have you become curious before you become defensive? Can I disagree with someone who has more organizational power than I do and still belong in this organization tomorrow? Do the rules apply consistently? Can I question a decision without becoming the problem? If I tell you I'm being harmed, do you investigate the harm? Or do you begin investigating me? Does my humanity remain intact when I become inconvenient? That's where dignity lives. And that's where employee voice becomes important. Because organizations love employee voice. Speak up. We want feedback. Bring your wholesale. We have an open door policy. Okay. Can I survive walking through the door? Because employees watch what happens to people who speak, and those people become isolated and labeled difficult, excluded, performance managed, or suddenly discovered to have 17 performance deficiencies. Nobody could locate six months earlier. The organization has communicated something much more powerful than your voice matters. It has communicated, calculate the cost first. Employees are brilliant students of organizational behavior. We all watch, we learn, we adapt. We don't need the CEO to announce, please stop telling us things. We all watch what happens to the person who tells leadership something uncomfortable. And then they decide what is safe. I mean, that's culture. Culture isn't what leadership announces. Culture is what employees learn will happen. Compliance is not the same thing as humanity. And maybe that's one of HR's deepest identity problems. HR is frequently expected to do two things, protect the organization and support the people. Sometimes those goals align beautifully, and sometimes they absolutely do not. And when they don't, HR often reaches instinctively toward compliance. What does the law require? What does policy say? What can we document? Can we defend the decision? What does council recommend? All legitimate questions, really. You need those questions. But there's another set of questions I think that like we all aren't great at asking. Was it fair? Was the process trustworthy? Did the employee have a meaningful voice? Was this person treated with dignity? Did organizational power distort what actually happened? What did the rest of the workforce learn from watching this? What harm are we creating? Even if our lawyers believe the decision can survive litigation, because compliance asks, can we defend what we did? And yet humanity asks, what did what we did do to another human being? I mean, those questions overlap and they're not synonymous. You can win a lawsuit, but leave an enormous wake. Trust can disappear, employees can stop referring to problems, high performers can leave, and managers can learn that power protects them. HR can become the last place anyone goes when they actually need HR. And six months later, leadership is sitting in a strategy meeting asking, why aren't people more engaged? I don't know, Brad. Maybe check the SharePoint folder. Now I want to address something really quick before we close. What if Sherm ultimately wins its appeal? Seriously. What if the judgment is reversed? What if damages are dramatically reduced? Then we talk about it. That's how intellectual honesty works. We don't take new information that threatens our preferred argument and shove it under the organizational rug next to the employee engagement survey results. If the legal outcome changes, we say change. At the latest status reflected in the sources I'm using for this episode, SHERM has continued to dispute the verdict and pursue the appellate process. Because this is an act of litigation, I'm checking that status again immediately before I record it. Even if SHRM ultimately prevails, would that make every organizational question disappear? You know, I don't really think so. Because organizational learning shouldn't require liability. If the only time your company asks, could we have handled this differently, is after a judge telling you that you've legally screwed up, I mean you don't really have a learning system. You have a liability system. You can win a lawsuit and still have a culture problem. You can lose a lawsuit without every allegation made about your culture becoming universally true. Courts answer legal questions. Culture asks something else. What is it like to be human here? Okay, all right. If you stayed with me through discrimination law, professional certification, insurance litigation, organizational theory, first of all, I'm proud of us. Second, here are the five things I want you to take away. Number one, expertise should create humility, not immunity. Knowing more doesn't mean you stop failing. It means you should become better at recognizing how serious your failures can be. Sometimes expertise actually makes blind spots worse because everyone thinks we know this. And once everybody in the room knows, nobody starts asking whether they're actually doing it. The goal of expertise shouldn't be certainty. It should be the ability to ask better questions. Number two, the existence of a process does not prove the integrity of the process. We investigated. Were they independent? What did they review? Who did they talk to? What had already been decided before? Were they simultaneously participated in the employment decision they were supposed to evaluate? The process doesn't become trustworthy merely because somebody can produce the policy describing it. Number three, employee voice isn't real unless employees can survive using it. Do not tell employees their voice matters if telling you the truth makes their organizational life more dangerous. Don't measure employee voice by the number of listening sessions you schedule. Measure it by what happens to the dissenter. The person who says, I disagree, this isn't fair, my managers treat me differently. What happens next? That's the test. Number four, compliance is the floor. Dignity asks for more. Please continue following employment law. Please do not leave this podcast saying, Timothy told me compliance doesn't matter. Tiffany told you no such thing. But dignity asks something beyond what is legally required. It asks, what does this human being deserve? Voice, recognition, consistency, respect, the ability to challenge power without being dehumanized. Those are not decorative HR concepts and really cool posters you can put on your wall. They shape whether work remains a place where people can function. Ask people. Number five, stop outsourcing professional judgment to letters. Certifications can be valuable, education can be valuable, degrees can be invaluable. But if your job description says SHERM SCP required, ask why. What competency are you trying to validate? Could another respected credential demonstrate it? Could there be equivalent experience? Could education, are you evaluating the candidate or are you allowing a professional brand to do the thinking for you? Because professional institutions should absolutely have to continually earn their legitimacy, just like the professionals they certify. And maybe that's the story that stayed with me. Because it isn't simply about Sure and losing a lawsuit. It's about what happens when an institution becomes so embedded in a profession that eventually we stop remembering we're allowing to question. The institution says this is a standard. Employees say, job description says preferred, required, professional studies. They test, they pay, they earn continuing education. And eventually, the institution feels like a synonymous with professional legitimacy until something happens that forces us to ask, wait, who decided this was the standard? And maybe more importantly, what does the standard have to do to keep deserving our trust? Because credibility isn't permanent. It isn't self-issued. You don't get to declare, we're trustworthy, and build an ecosystem around that declaration and become immune from examination. Trust has to be retained, legitimacy has to be maintained, professional credibility has to be retained. That applies to SURM, it applies to HCRR, it applies to universities, licensing boards, professional associations, consultants, your organization, your orator department, and uncomfortably applies to people like me too. If I'm going to sit behind this microphone talking every week about dignity, then my behavior better be open to examination when I fail to protect somebody's dignity. Otherwise, dignity is just part of the branding. And maybe that's what I want most from this episode. Again, I'm not telling you to burn your Sherm certification. I'm not telling you to cancel your membership. I'm not telling employers to blocklist SHRM. I'm definitely not telling you what the 10th circuit is going to do. I'm asking you to do something much less dramatic and maybe much more important. Think, read the case, watch what happens in the peel, ask questions, examine the institution, examine your organization and your profession, examine the things that you've accepted as the standard, and simply because everyone around you accepted them first, because sometimes the most dangerous phrase in HRC isn't that's against policy. It's sometimes that's the industry standard. Standards need to be questioned, especially by the people responsible for enforcing them. New information may change parts of the story, and when it does, we should change our understanding with it. Because this podcast isn't about proving I'm right, it's about willing to keep looking, especially when the answer becomes uncomfortable and the question I started remains. Who is HR's HR? And maybe there's another one, who certifies the certifier? Because certification can demonstrate knowledge, but it can't certify humanity. And work becomes meaningful when dignity is protected. And dignity requires more from us than knowing the correct answer to the test. It requires us to live it. It requires us to live the answer, especially when nobody is grading it. I'm Tidney Collins and this is Please Meet Your Trauma. If this episode made you question something, you always treated as a professional gospel.

unknown 43:37

Good.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

That's kind of what we do around here. You can find the show at pleasemeetyourtrauma.com. And if you've ever looked at something your organization called Best Practice and Quietly Thought. Okay, but why? I definitely want to hear from you. Call or text the show at 138-629-5081. And until next time, protect your dignity, protect other people's dignity. Question the standard. Pay attention to the wake you're leaving behind. And remember, work becomes meaningful when dignity is protected. And that includes protecting your own.