Dear HR,

I am sorry to have to do this, but I am breaking up with you. I am especially sorry to have to do this in writing; given our shared love for documentation, I suspect you won't be too offended. I don't understand us anymore. I do know that I owe you a lot and don't want to come across ungrateful. When I left teaching, you took me in. I learned so much about many industries across many countries. I realized a lot of my dreams, thanks to us. But now it is time to say goodbye. I don't blame you. I have changed, and you wish to stay the same. 

I will explain "the why" but bear with me. It will be a long one. I have had since May of this year to think about our relationship. Yes, I have been on a break. Another thing we were too quick to judge and label as a red flag. Since when is a break between jobs if you can afford one or even if you can't afford one a "bad" thing. Life happens, and time off work offers a fantastic opportunity for reflection and growth. Some of our recommended best practices don't make sense anymore.

As an enabling function, I don't feel like we were enabling the organizations we support to face the two challenges that keep them up at night, responsive to the needs of its customers and its staff. We are slowing down the organization's responsiveness while promoting autopilot leadership, disengaging staff, eroding trust, and invariably affecting our customers. 

We have inserted ourselves in the relationship between leaders and their staff. We have mapped out the interactions between them and called it the employee life cycle, and throughout the years, we have policy-ed and processed the "human" out of them, thinking we were enabling consistency, fairness, and autonomy. The opposite was the case. We also built an empire in the process, adding cost to the bottom line. We were supposed to enable leaders and staff to connect; instead, we automated the interaction. 

Then 2008 happened. Everyone talked about trust in leadership, engagement, and a "great place to work culture." We didn't change our approach in managing this new portfolio; we continued to create more policies, processes, and templates to bring "human" back into the workplace. We tried to develop a policy and procedure for trust and culture, not realizing that trust isn't something that can be processed, and learning is the output of the efforts we put in and the strides we make in continuously improving the organization's design, capacity, and capability. 

I have been lucky to work with start-ups, mid-sized, and multinational organizations trying to reimagine the world of work. Given that many systems and structures were designed precisely to reinforce a centralized, command and control flow of work versus an agile and responsive model, I had the opportunity to channel significant resources towards learning about and experimenting with more effective models. Models of architecture, capability, and economics centered on an entirely new set of principles: that human beings want to leave work feeling like they left the world in a better place than they found it. That the term 'experience' isn't about gimmicks in a flagship store but our customers learning from our staff and that the employee life cycle is the only leadership skill. All organizations expand and consolidate, propagate and protect, cooperate and reciprocate all the time; there is embedded agility, a feedback loop. We aren't tapping into this feedback loop enough; the foundation of the learning organization that Peter Drucker and Peter Senge presaged as organizational design's next iteration. 

As for organizational capability, I have had the good fortune of working with some great minds and futurists to help offer the skills that will future proof our staff. As machine learning and systems replace routine and administrative work, new jobs are being created. The new generations entering the workforce are Drucker's knowledge workers, and they crave and thrive in learning organizations, where staff and leaders ever know the broad processes that define their work. They understand the nature of the interacting processes that, in their totality, engender the expansion and consolidation of the organization. 

I remember asking a group of leaders in a meeting to define the word "manager" or "leader" without using any of these words from the employee life cycle: recruitment, rewards, training, development, leaves of absence, underperformance, talent, terminations. They came up blank. The closest they got was "taskmasters." AI can replace a taskmaster, and maybe that's the future, but for now, I know I want a human as my boss at work. 

The most critical decisions affecting organizational responsiveness are how we hire, promote, and cut. The financial performance of an organization can be reimagined if the employee's life cycle is intelligently executed and continuously improved by the leaders closest to it rather than centrally through an HR relationship manager. That HR owns so much of the life cycle isn't half as worrying as to how easily leaders give it up. 

Our role, especially now, is to hand back the employee life cycle to its rightful owners, the leaders, and to focus our energy on understanding how the world of work is changing. The knowledge workers are curious and hungry. Our role is to foster a learning environment, and I am off to reimagining the world of business, word by word, slogan by slogan. I want to un-buzz the world of business and re-learn it considering the future of work, which is here, by the way. 

As I said, I am and will forever be grateful for everything we did together, and I know I wouldn't be true to myself if I continued to stay in this relationship. I hope you will join me on this journey so we too can go home after work and feel we have left the world in a better place than we found it. 

Here's to creating the world of work anew. 

Talk soon. 

Nahal 

PS I have moved to New York to kick-start this journey. They say if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.