Ask most people why they distrust human resources, and you will hear a story about a decision that felt cold or unexplained.
Rosemarie “Rosie” Allan has a sharper diagnosis. In most of those stories, HR did not decide at all. “A lot of managers and leaders usurp their agency and say that instead they’re doing it because HR made them,” she said. A hire, a firing, a rating, a raise that never came: it is easier to hand the blame to a department than to own the call, and a lot of leaders take that exit because they are not good at taking ownership. Her account of what has gone wrong inside HR is unusually candid, and so is her account of what fixes it.
HR Has Also Done This to Itself
Rosie does not put the whole problem on bad managers. “We overprocess things,” she explained, describing systems and implementations that end up standing between HR and the people it exists to serve. Someone wants to know when their next paid day off falls, and the answer arrives as the full holiday schedule and the surrounding policy nobody asked for. Every layer makes HR slightly harder to reach, which quietly trains people to stop reaching.
The same instinct followed HR into the boardroom. Legal, finance, and IT never had to lobby for a seat, and her explanation is practical rather than political: everyone has had a laptop problem, and everyone watches a budget. HR does an enormous amount of work nobody sees. Then it arrived at the table and, in her words, “we got to the table, and we didn’t speak business. We spoke people.” HR raises concern about hiring pace or the rising cost of benefits, and the room does not connect, because colleagues believe they only hire when they need someone and know benefits only as a number to call. The issue was real, and the framing did not land, so the contribution never registered as strategic. Rosie is watching the consequence now, with CHRO roles giving way to “head of” titles and the work sliding back toward tactical. The fix is not to talk less about people. It is to know the business well enough that what HR says carries weight when the big questions come up.
The Employees Who Stay and Stop Trying
The most useful reframe in the conversation concerns attrition, and it runs against instinct. When people leave a bad manager, Rosie says, the HR job is comparatively easy. The numbers move, the pattern is visible, and the exit interviews all say the same thing.
What worries her is the opposite. “Those ten people stayed and just disengaged in the job. So they retired in place.” The market is tough, so people calculate that if they comply and keep their heads down, they can hold the seat and stop caring. That is true productivity loss, and it is invisible on every dashboard a leadership team reviews. Some do not merely disengage. They adopt the behavior because they have watched someone succeed with it.
She describes what that does to a culture with real specificity. People come into her office pointing at the gap between the collaboration the company claims to value and the leader who tells no one anything and invites only the people he considers useful. Others arrive with a simpler complaint: that leader can do this and I cannot. Once that comparison takes hold, the values on the wall stop describing the company. The practical takeaway is to stop reading flat attrition as good news. If exits are low and complaints are rising, the damage has moved somewhere your reporting cannot see it.
What to Say When A Top Earner Breaks the Values
Rosie has been in the room for the hardest version of this. A leader had clearly violated the values and the facts were not in dispute. The complication was revenue, because this person brought a great deal of it into the business. The CEO, who had helped write the values that appeared on the website and the walls, was visibly tormented, and she was surprised by that.
When the CEO asked another executive what to do, the answer wavered toward letting it go given the revenue. Then the question came to her. “It’s there’s not even a question, you know, whether the person is bringing in zero revenue or millions of dollars. We said this matters,” Rosie told them, adding plainly that she was shocked they were debating it. She believes the certainty itself moved the room. She then laid out the consequences of inaction, including the one that concentrates the mind: if this happens again and someone asks under oath whether there was a prior incident and what the company did about it, the honest answer becomes a liability.
The CEO acted. Within a week, the feedback came back that people had been watching to see how it would be handled, and because it was handled correctly, it strengthened the culture rather than eroding it. The organization was not waiting to hear the values restated. It was waiting to see them cost someone something.
Rosie draws an equally sharp line on the word aspirational. She has no objection to a CEO using it to mean the company is striving and has not arrived. Her objection is the other usage, the one that functions as a wish list. “The aspirational isn’t, ‘ We’ll just let it slide for a while. Maybe we’ll get there,” she said. Aspirational should describe the distance still to travel, never the accountability being postponed. And ownership of that distance is not hers. Of course the chef is the best cook in the room, she says, and everybody still has to eat.
“If your leaders aren’t leading it and only HR is, you may as well not have done the work.”
~ Rosie Allan
Rely on Me Rather Than Trust Me
Asked how a CHRO builds a team employees will trust, Rosie offers something more demanding than trust, and she knows it sounds controversial. “I don’t know if it’s that I need you to trust me, but I need you to rely on me,” she said.
The difference matters in practice. Trusting HR, in the way most employees mean it, implies HR will take your side and produce the outcome you wanted. Relying on HR means something firmer: that whatever you bring will be heard, investigated fully, and resolved correctly, whether the result goes up, down, or sideways. She tells people directly when a conversation crosses a line she cannot simply absorb, which sometimes ends the conversation on the spot. The goal, she says, is to dig out the truth and do the right thing, even when that turns back toward the person who raised it.
Reliability of that kind gets built by being seen. Rosie is blunt about the failure mode: HR occupying its own section of the building, its own desk in the corner, invisible to everyone else. She coaches her team the other way, telling them to walk over, make the call, catch someone in the eating area, ask how things are going. Visibility plus follow-through plus discretion is the whole formula, and when people start telling each other that what they said never traveled, the reputation changes without a campaign.
Change the Conversation From What to How
Rosie Allan’s advice for aspiring and current CHROs is a single relationship and a single meeting. Build a relationship with the CEO unlike any professional relationship you have had, and insist on a standing hour, roughly monthly, entirely separate from the operational check-in. Not the weekly status update. A conversation about how the company is doing, how the culture is doing, and where the concerns sit.
She keeps a running log of those concerns and brings it into the room, which is the small habit that makes the meeting real. What happens next is the point of the exercise. The CEO starts adding items. The CEO starts owning it. The frame shifts from what the company is doing to how it is doing it, which she believes would make the biggest impact of anything HR could change.
She is honest that the pressure runs the other way. Between transformations, system upgrades, and the endless queue of projects, the core mission gets set aside precisely because it can be set aside, the way exercise can be skipped without immediate consequence. Put the hour in the calendar, start the log this week, and ask how rather than what. As Rosie’s career across regulated industries and global markets demonstrates, the leaders who protect that conversation are the ones whose cultures hold together when a decision finally tests them.
