Hey, you know that report that you send out on the first of every month? The one that your team spent four days building? Nobody's ever asked you to stop sending it. And you've read that as somebody wanting it. Stay with us, because in this episode you're going to learn how to tell which of the things that you're sending out are alive and which ones have been dead for years without you recognizing it.
Because as you know, the top chair is not an HR job, it is a brand new identity. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and this is episode 162, and it's Thursday. So joining me is my co-host, Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with all the scar tissue to prove it. He has a folder in his inbox called Read Later that has been accepting deposits uninterrupted since 2019. And he's also the founder of Propulsion AI. So if you can name every recurring thing your function sends out, but you cannot name the one thing that any of them actually changed, this is the episode for you.
Jackson, this one looks so easy to solve from the outside. Just stop sending the thing that nobody reads. But from the inside, it's really not that easy. Because four people on your team built that pack that you're sending out, and it's the only place outside of your function that people actually see their work.
So here's what we're going to get into today. We're going to show you why the report that everyone in your function can already name is still going out, and no one in the building is ever going to be the one to stop it. We're going to show you what ten years of that does to your capacity, why the arithmetic only ever runs one way. And we're going to hand you the one instrument that tells you the truth about what you send. And it's probably not the one you're going to reach for.
So let's start first with the state of play. Most of what your function does is administrative. Not you personally, of course, but the function. APQC puts the median at 60%. And somewhere inside that 60% is the monthly people pack. That's the report that goes out on the first that everyone in your function can name. It's probably 22 pages, four people, two full days to put together.
And it's Thursday. And one of those four people that report to you is in your doorway asking whether you need the regional breakout this month, because pulling it means she's going to work over the weekend. So you say yes, and she works the weekend.
And this feels a lot like the TPS report in HR language. But what I really want you to ask yourself is what you bought with her weekend. Not whether the pack was accurate, but whether anyone actually did anything because it was accurate.
You know what I would say if you asked me that question a few years back, Jackson? I would say that everybody on the executive team reads it. Of course they do. That's what I would have told you. You know, four years, and I never checked. And I literally sent that thing that I would have told you the executive team was reading.
Four years. Yeah, nobody checks, Scott. And it's not just you. I never did either. And then I got smarter about this. But no one complains either. And so the pack goes out on the first, and then the month after that on the first, and the month after that on the first. And repeat over and over until you die. And you read the silence as a passing grade. Or nobody's opening it. That's the other alternative. By the way, that would be the same silence.
And it's not just one report, because you have that one monthly report that goes out. And then I know, because you and I have talked about it, you and I were operating in very similar ways. Then you've got the quarterly report. Then you've got the second version of the quarterly report for the operating partner, same content, different template. Somebody asked for that one in 2024, and we never reevaluated that ask. We just kept doing it. Every one of those made sense on the day we started to send out that report. You would win the argument in any room you walk into.
And that's, unfortunately, the state of play. The function is already mostly administrative, and bad news — first step is to admit you have a problem — and you keep adding to it. And the work that would actually move the business instead of that report is ultimately what's getting squeezed. Nothing has come off in years. Nobody has ever asked you to stop sending anything.
And worst of all, which is kind of consistent with what you and I just said about ourselves, nobody has ever checked whether it actually is helping someone. And that's why I think, more than ever, right now we need an oxygen check. Jackson, when you're climbing at altitude, the first thing that goes is your judgment, because you're running out of oxygen and you don't realize it until it's too late. And it's kind of the same thing here.
So I want to ask everybody, just take a moment and think about that report that you send out to that distribution list most often. Now think about one thing that changed because you sent it. One decision that somebody made, one thing that got done differently. If they think about it, most people can't name those things. Nobody asked what the outcome of the report was supposed to produce when it was built. And unfortunately, nobody's asked since you started sending it out.
And so here's how you may be thinking about this, and here's how that thinking is going to cause you a problem. You're thinking that sending is the contribution. Not what it changes, but just sending it. And that's how a service provider works. That's how a service provider thinks. You supply, and whatever happens next belongs to somebody else. Here's the problem with that. If sending is the contribution, then your best work and the work that doesn't matter look exactly the same. Both went out on time, both were accurate. Nobody complained about either one. You've been protecting the wrong thing for years, and you've been doing it really, really well.
Look, you can't out-execute your way about thinking about this. You have to change the thinking. The fix is more than effort. You've got to get your head right. So stay with us.
So let's frame the challenges that most of us find. Four things that I think hold this in place: the clock, the silence, the numbers, and, unfortunately, your own team. Every one of them would still be there if somebody else walked into your job on Monday. So let's take these things in order. Scott?
Let me take the clock first. Because stopping a report, stopping something that you've been sending out, means asking hard questions about whether it matters. And when I say hard questions, it's not that they're difficult questions. It's that they take time to answer.
You can't answer those quickly. And in most cases, you shouldn't. A careful person doesn't kill something without knowing what runs downstream of it. So you'd have to go figure that out.
And figuring it out, Jackson, costs real effort. And that effort has to come from somewhere. And you are already full up with other things that are demanding your time. And so, you know, continuing to send it out costs you nothing. It's already built. Your team already knows the job that they have to do in order to create it.
Yeah, so it works the same way it does when you're trying to delegate something to someone. You make the rational choice that it's going to take too long to teach someone else, so I'm going to hold on to it. You're making a rational choice that says, you know, I have to go talk to people and figure out what they actually do with this. And I don't have time in this crazy week that we have today. I'll just send it out and I'll get to it later. But the problem is, you never do. So every month, the responsible-looking choice is to keep going. And that's the trap. Because every time you make that choice, it's a careful consideration that a very, very rational person makes every single time.
I want you to know I noticed the Star Wars reference in that. There's a trap. I do. It's a trap. It's a trap. And I think that's a really good analogy, Jackson. But you know what follows on that is the silence. Your team spends two days a month putting whatever it is that you're sending out together. And the people who are receiving it, who might be deleting it without even opening it, they don't have any way of communicating that back to you, not at least a formal way. And you have no way of knowing it independent of that communication.
And Scott, nobody's going to tell you. And why would they? That takes effort on their part. And there's no path for the truth about that report to ultimately reach you without someone interrupting their day because they think it's really important for you to know. They're making the same rational decision back. And reception is free.
So the silence is not an approval and it isn't disapproval. It's not an indicator that you've done anything wrong. Unfortunately, it's not an indicator that you've done anything right. It's nothing. You've been reading a blank page.
So now let's get into the numbers, because they are real. Time to fill was 41 days, like that mattered. Turnover was 11%. Also true. It was. Those are bad measures, but I won't go down that path right now.
Well, we should go down that path, because the fact is that an operations manager can't do a single thing with either one of those numbers, even if they're accurate.
Okay, fair enough. We're down that path. And it's the part I'd ask you to sit with. It's true and useless at the same time. And no one's going to argue with a true number, so it never lands on anyone's list of things to argue about and ultimately to do away with, because it's no harm, no foul.
Here's the fourth of those four things that are holding us in place. It's your own team. And I think that's the one that probably stops a lot of people. It would for me too. The reason is that the pack is one of the very few places that anybody outside of the HR function gets to see into your team's work. Somebody spent a long time building a turnover review. Maybe they spent, like, you know, a year on getting that right on your dashboard. And that person put in the effort and they know it's good. And once a month it goes out to the executive team, and everybody knows who's responsible for getting those numbers and making sure that those numbers are right.
Yeah. And incidentally, if you have a turnover report, you should really use decay rate, but that's also a different podcast. But let me double-click on something you just said, Scott, because it's super important here. That is probably the only visibility that that person has, or at least it's the most regular version of it. So if you end up killing it, it takes something real from people who did exactly what you asked them to do.
And that's why I think, Jackson, that a lot of the things that we're talking about, these four forces in particular, outlive any particular leader. Because I'm sure you've had the same experience that I have. You come into a job, the group is already producing a bunch of things that get sent out, and you change exactly none of them. Because you know that same fourth reason about the team is the one that you just don't want to mess with. It's not politics, it's not laziness. It's that you might be taking away visibility from four people who could really benefit from that visibility. Unless what they build next is something that people actually need in the business.
Well, and that's hard to understand, especially when you come into a brand new organization, at least when I've joined in, because the other thing you don't want to do is come in and just say, okay, everything you've been doing is dumb. Yes, right. That's not a good way to win friends and influence people. Even if in your silent moment you're looking at this and you're wondering, like, I wonder how many cycles this is taking people, because what decision is driving from it — which, incidentally, I think is something we can figure out by ourselves. But coming back to the traps, like, these are four things, and all four of them ultimately, I think, they all come back to the same place. Not one of them needs anyone else to decide the report is worth producing.
So let's reframe this thing, Jackson. You know, most people who take a run at this, most people like you and me who come in and we're thinking, okay, how do I make this situation better — the first move is always to make the report better. Not to change it, just to make it better, tighter, fewer pages, a story instead of a table. And every one of those is a real improvement, but none of them really change anything, not at the level that you and I are talking about.
Well, because they all start from the same end. What we in the HR function think is important and we want to share with the world.
And very few of us — I was going to say nobody, but that's probably not true, right? There are some people who are thinking like this. We want more people to think about this. Very few people think by starting at the other end. What does the business actually need to make changes with the information that we give them?
Look, if there's a takeaway coming out of everything that we talked about here, I think that's an important theme that we've probably given short shrift over the last, gosh, what, eighteen months that we've been doing this together? And that is, your frame of reference actually matters here, folks. Because when you are doing things from the HR frame of reference forward, you're going to get a certain set of indicators that are primarily how we are doing as a function. If you start on the other end and you say, what does the end user need, you're going to get things that are useful to the folks on the other side.
So the question is, like, if we all know that, why does it keep happening? And I think there's a machine that runs underneath of it. I think you're running a budget that nobody actually set. Every recurring thing your function sends is a standing debit against your capacity. You're funding it with your team's effort. So you've got two days here, you have a week someplace else, and nobody ultimately approved the total, nobody ever reviews it, and it only ever moves in one direction.
Let me tell you a real story from my last inside job. We, on Sunday nights, had a broader business package that had 63 pages in it. And you had tons of cycles that were all done by individuals who gave up their weekends on a regular basis to do it. We didn't change anyone's shift. No one ever stepped back and said, how many of those things are decision inputs that need to be made in the CEO staff meeting on Monday morning? Because the answer was, like, none of them. And people actually read those, but they didn't drive decisions. And one of the things I tried to do when I got there was, like, that's a lot of work over the weekend. How about we have our staff meetings on Tuesday? And, you know, that went over like — I have a few metaphors to use. It didn't go over well. Just say that you shouldn't be doing that. And ultimately, in the three years I was there, I never saw one thing come off the list. It just kept adding on to it. Oh, there was a question in the staff meeting, so yeah, something else that gets added to it. The reality is that same thing holds true with what we're doing. It only moves in one direction.
And I think that's why you and I set up at the very beginning of the episode, this looks so simple to change, but it's really hard to change. And let me tell you why the capacity argument that you're making right now, Jackson, and the debit against your capacity, is even more important. Because you're the only person that sees the whole line as the head of HR, right? Here's what's working against you a little bit. Your CFO knows what the HR function costs, but they can't see what you're spending that capacity on, because that number isn't in any system that they read. So the more you get eaten up into this number that APQC put out, this large amount of administrative work, the less capacity you have for everything else that's going to make a difference with that audience who is looking and saying cost versus value.
Yeah. So here's how I would suggest you hold it. You're an owner of this business, and an owner is accountable for what the business produces, never for what the subfunctions supply. And there's a name for that on this show, and it's called the plainest idea that we have. I think it might have, in fact, been the first 17 of these things we did. Outcome over activity, folks. Outcome over activity.
We do that one a lot. Here, there are two questions that live underneath this thing, and I want to double-click on them, Jackson. You know, the first is: is the function running well? The second is: is the business running better because the function exists? Different questions.
Yeah, everything in that pack is going to answer the first one. And the question is, is it important? Because nobody outside of your function is actually asking the first one. Just you.
Right. They don't care. It's an assumed thing. You are running great over there, HR, and that's why the focus has to be on that second question. Is the business running better because the function exists? Right? You know, of course the function's running well. We've got 22 pages of evidence of that, right? First business day of every single month.
Yeah. And I'm going to be a little caustic here, and I apologize for anyone that's about ready to be insulted here. But we would laugh at our CFO if he put the level of detail about a sub-process in accounts payable into these decks. Because they would look at that broadly — we would all look at that and say, that's ridiculous. Like, we don't need to know that, it doesn't do anything. And instead, we put it in there and we expect that we get polite nods. And you actually are hurting your credibility when you do that.
So here's the thing you need to know. You don't produce that report, you are funding that report. And that's why we said it's a standing debit. You're paying for it every month, and you're paying for it with your team's effort and the opportunity cost of what they could be doing with that time that you need to be doing that's more important than that report. Almost cussed there.
But here's the thing, Jackson, it's good news and bad news, right? Because that funding decision that you're making, you're making right now. It's not one that somebody made in 2019.
So money has a controller. Time and days has nobody to pay attention to. So try adding a person without a business case and see how far that gets you. Short answer, not very far. Then try adding a report. Nobody in this profession has ever asked for a business case on a report.
I mean, my example from my four years, right? Like, I always never asked for any of it. People just, like, sure, add it, right? Four years. Worse than that, though, I think, in that situation that I was describing, my own experience — I never asked anybody else. It wasn't that they weren't questioning me, because they weren't, but I wasn't questioning anybody else about it either.
No, but for those who are listening, you're ahead of the function. So here's a really, really good idea, and you come to us for these really deep, well-considered, thoughtful ideas. Ask it yourself. And ask it first. And do it before anything gets built. And if you're thinking about changing something, ask it before you make any sort of changes. Ask what decision this is for and who's making that decision.
You know, and that's the answer to the thing I said was the hardest. Four people on your team, the pack is really the only place that their work shows up or gets showcased, right? It's not that they're not doing good work, it's that's the showcase of the work. Ask anybody up front, and they're not building a page anymore. They're building a thing that the manager really needed, if we take the time to go and figure out what that answer is. That answer is going to get used. And getting used is more valuable to your people than getting seen.
Well, I think we're making a false trade-off here, right? And I've been guilty of making it. Just because you take one thing away that gives them visibility does not mean that you cannot add something back that adds visibility. And that's my point.
Yeah. And, well, in that case, you should have made it more clearly, because I obviously didn't understand. Sorry. I'm glad we agree now. I'm glad there's two of us.
Look, here's the part that matters. Because up to this point, I think it might sound like this is something that's being done to you. And that's not what I'm trying to say at all. It's not. The clock, the silence, the numbers, and your team do not care who is in the chair. They still need somebody to keep feeding them work, right? So every month, that's you. Every one of those debits continues because you renew it by not stopping it. That's your authority, and you have had it the entire time.
And when you finally decide to act on it, you know, most people go and ask, do we need this? Yeah. Is it helping you? How is it helping you?
What decisions are you making? Right? Those are the questions. Like, this isn't rocket science. But what those people do is they take the pack to the distribution list and you ask, like, is it useful? What would make it better? And, you know, everyone's polite, and the pack comes back two pages longer. Like, that's not the way to do it.
Right. Well, you can't — so you've got to be smart about the questions that you ask and how you do the probing. Because I think the reality is, look, you know, very few people are going to kill a colleague's work to their face. But if what you're trying to do is really get to the underlying truth, then you're probably going to have to ask more than one question to get there.
Well, the instrument that tells you the truth is removal. Okay, that's what you're looking for. You stop it and you read what comes back. Silence tells you that it was dead. A complaint tells you that you found maybe the only person who was using it, but at least you found someone that cared that you were doing it.
See, that's why I like doing this, because you make everything very simple. Twenty minutes reduced to one thing: just stop sending the report and see what happens. And I think that's probably the simplest version of the reframe. You need to decide what your function's capacity is for. The report might be where you start, because it might be one of the big things that is on your ledger that nobody's ever really priced out in terms of what it's costing you.
Absolutely, indeed. And that brings us to the climb, which, as you might know, is four moves. And as Scott always says, if nobody reads it, add a cover page. And if no one reads the cover page, add an executive summary of the cover page.
I don't think I've ever said that, but honestly, I think I did sit through a 90-minute meeting once about a cover page.
I unfortunately have too. I love that bit, but that got a little close to home for me. Anyway. Move one. Ask your own team two questions. Of everything we send on a schedule, which one do you think nobody reads? And how many days a month does it take you to make those? And you'll have both answers before you finish asking. They will love that you have asked.
I think people do like that, and they usually know the truth on the ground and on the front line, right? Move two. Decide what those days that get saved by cutting out the effort that Jackson just talked about — decide what you're going to buy with those days. Name one piece of work that's going to make the business better at something that it's bad at now, that you're going to dedicate the capacity to, and say it out loud to the people who are going to get the time, your team, right? Because capacity with nothing attached to it is going to get absorbed by something else administrative, probably inside a month.
Yeah, we've talked about that on all of our AI shows, where you actually have to be planful up front. So that's exactly right. Move three. Stop it for a quarter and see who asks. Now, I would also tell you, tell your CEO before it happens in one sentence. Don't ask for permission. This is not a permission statement. "I'm not sure how much value this monthly pack is delivering, so we're going to pause it for a quarter, find out who actually uses it and how. And I'm going to tell you in November what we learned and what we did with the time." And then tell your team the same thing. And tell them it's a secret, because you don't want to poison the well, if you will. Yeah. But tell them what they're going to be building instead. And ultimately that is going to be the best diagnostic that you have. And most people, in my view, really want to do things and work on things that matter. And you're giving them a permission structure to say the thing that right now they don't feel comfortable saying.
Move four. Trigger, right? In November, from following on from move three, say the word, make the decision. Nobody's asked, it's dead, it goes permanently at that point, if in fact that's the result that you found was the right thing to do, right? Somebody asked, it's live, you found the person who was using it, so go ask them what decision they were making with it and rebuild for those decisions. And it's probably not one person, it's probably multiples, right? Kill the old stuff, build the new stuff. That's move four.
Yeah. And so I've actually done this both when I've come into brand new roles, and as I've helped, you know, coaching clients who are sitting in the chair and they're like, I don't have time to do anything. Like, we spend time on the calendar and we spend time on their team's calendar. And what we find in these is they are almost always just a highlight reel of HR that is read by HR. And they'll notice that you didn't do it, but they won't be making a decision on it. And if they do, like, that's awesome. Find out what they're doing, because maybe you can make their decision quality better. And we move on. We get so excited about adding data. But here's the thing. Data in and of itself isn't helpful. It's actionable data, data-driven insights, things that people do stuff with the data. That's what matters.
So, Scott, we made three promises at the top, and I think we hit them, but why don't you take it?
Okay. Number one, the reports are going out because stopping them means asking a question about whether they really matter. Continuing them costs you nothing. Asking those questions costs you real effort. So every month, the careful choice is to keep going. Ten years of doing that is a function permanently at capacity without any room to do anything else. Nothing new can start because nothing old has ever ended over that period. And the last one, the instrument is removal. You stop it and read what comes back. Because very few people are going to tell you to your face that it's not worth anything. But they will react if it's gone and it was valuable to them.
Yeah. So here's what I want you to take away from it. No one ever approved that report. No one ever cancelled it either. And one of those is a decision that you can make this quarter. Make it.
I think that's it, Jackson. But you know what? Before we let everybody go, let's say thanks. Shout out this week to Tom from McKinney, Texas, and to everybody who listens to us, whether you are joining from Maysville, Kentucky, or from — I'm going to try this one — Vorderstoder in Upper Austria. I've got to learn to speak German. Attention is the scarcest thing that you own, and Jackson and I sincerely appreciate you spending a little bit of your attention with us today. New episodes of the Talent Sherpa Podcast drop every Monday and every Thursday at 7 a.m. Eastern. On Monday, it's Jackson solo.
On Thursday, you get both of us. And there's no truth to the rumor that if it's an easy-to-say word like Helsinki or Berlin, it's what I get to say. You're going to get it. And then if it's someplace that has a little challenge to it, that Scott does it. That's just random and coincidental.
I wish we knew where that came from.
And I don't always give those to Scott. One last thing here. Most CHROs, if you're listening to us, like, you're probably operating without a written mandate, and you don't find out until it's too late to fix it quietly. So most of you are going to find out when you realize that no one can name what their work changed. And we talked about that here, right? So take 10 minutes, you can check yours. I built an assessment, and it'll tell you which of the three conditions you're missing and which one is costing you the most. And the best news is it's absolutely free. You can find it at mytalentsherpa.com/clarity. And that's the summit for today. Thank you all for climbing with us. Until next time, keep raising the bar. Keep cancelling what nobody uses. It's kind of fun. And keep on climbing.
