Why HR MUST Go Kaput

She Didn’t Cry in the Meeting. But She Looked Like She’d Been Hit.

The executive team had just wrapped up a quarterly review. Revenue was up. Retention was down. Trust scores had cratered. The COO turned to the CHRO and said, “Could you pull something together—maybe an engagement initiative?”

She nodded.

It was the fifth request of its kind in two years. Five different campaigns. Five full-scale internal launches. None of them had changed how decisions were made, who got promoted, or how toxic leadership was sanctioned. Culture had become theater—and HR had been cast as supporting actress.

This wasn’t burnout. This was futility: the silent, systemic kind that comes when a function is expected to deliver outcomes without any operational levers.

HR Didn’t Lose Power. It Surrendered It.

The popular narrative holds that HR was sidelined by executives who didn’t value people. That story is wrong.

HR wasn’t marginalized. It chose marginality. It accepted advisory roles over governance. It embraced performance coaching over performance control. And it built its entire operating philosophy around the idea that “influence” was enough.

The Ulrich Model (1997), once heralded as visionary, fragmented HR into business partners, shared services, and centers of excellence. It removed system ownership in favor of customer satisfaction. HR became a helpdesk for human behavior.

But Ulrich’s model didn’t spread on its own. SHRM scaled it. Gallup validated it with engagement data divorced from structural enforcement. And HR academia reinforced it by building certification pipelines that emphasized communication over control. The entire profession aligned itself around symbolic inclusion—while quietly abdicating the levers of real organizational power.

This was not done to HR. It was done by HR.

Culture Drag™: When Story Fights System

In 2021, a North American financial institution approached us after experiencing escalating attrition. They had high engagement scores. They had DEI initiatives. They had recognition systems. But they were hemorrhaging high-performers.

Our Culture Execution Audit™ revealed a systemic truth:

• Behavioral violators were regularly promoted if they hit revenue targets.

• Performance reviews didn’t assess conduct.

• HR had no formal authority over leadership selection or removal.

The firm’s story and its system were in open conflict. Employees listened to the system.

We call this Culture Drag™—a state where aspirational language is outpaced by structural contradiction. It’s not a people problem. It’s a systems problem. And HR was nowhere near the power switches.

The Psychology of Structural Irrelevance

The illusion that HR could lead without control is not just a design flaw—it’s a psychologically dangerous one.

Ellen Langer (1975) introduced the concept of the illusion of control to describe the human tendency to overestimate influence over outcomes. HR leaders often believe that proximity to executives and polished presentations will drive culture. But if they don’t control the systems of consequence, reward, and elevation, the outcomes will always revert to structural defaults.

And when professionals are held accountable for outcomes they can’t influence, a second phenomenon takes over: learned helplessness. Martin Seligman and Steven Maier (1967) demonstrated that when individuals are repeatedly exposed to uncontrollable failure, they begin to disengage—even when conditions change. In HR, this manifests as shrinking scope, lowered ambition, and tactical busywork.

In our 2024 survey of 350 HR professionals:

• 71% reported feeling accountable for results they could not control

• 58% said they had lowered their ambitions in the past 12 months

• Only 12% believed their performance systems enforced the culture they claimed to promote

This isn’t burnout. It’s rational resignation to a powerless role.

Gallup and SHRM: Metrics Without Mandates

Gallup reports that just 21% of global employees are actively engaged at work (Gallup, 2023). But its own data collection methods prioritize sentiment over system design. Engagement is treated as a mood, not a measurement of alignment between behavior and consequence.

Meanwhile, SHRM’s professional standards emphasize risk avoidance, emotional intelligence, and influence—not ownership of execution systems (SHRM, 2023). Certification in HR today is more about soft-skills diplomacy than operational governance. The result is a function that can describe culture, but not defend it.

No one in finance earns credibility by “influencing” the numbers. But HR has spent 25 years trying to influence outcomes while explicitly avoiding structural control.

Education: Manufacturing Irrelevance at Scale

Most HR graduate programs continue to churn out professionals who are experts in emotional support, facilitation, and mediation—but are ill-equipped to redesign authority systems, install consequence frameworks, or enforce enterprise alignment.

This is not accidental. It is the inevitable result of a curriculum architecture that sees HR as a support function, not an enforcement one. The intellectual poverty of HR education is now matched by its structural irrelevance.

What the HR Power Model™ Reinstalls

The HR Power Model™ is not a rebrand. It is a governance realignment. It replaces influence with operational ownership.

It installs HR at the center of:

• Promotion gatekeeping based on codified behavior

• Consequence design linked to strategic standards

• Behavioral enforcement embedded into platform architecture

• Leadership eligibility grounded in systems—not sentiment

This is not theoretical. It’s field-tested infrastructure.

In organizations where we’ve installed the model, high-performer retention increased by 28%, culture violations dropped by over 70%, and strategy execution rates doubled (Woods, 2024; Huang, Gino, & Bazerman, 2022).

Because when HR owns the system, behavior aligns. When it doesn’t, culture drifts.

Why HR Must Go Kaput

HR should not be gently reformed. It must be structurally replaced.

The polite version of HR—the one that calls influence “strategy,” that accepts advisory status as success, that smiles through irrelevance—is the enemy of execution.

This is not a call for better communication. It is a call for power transfer.

Let the current model die. Let HR go kaput. And in its place, build the only thing that can protect culture, drive performance, and ensure execution holds: a function with system authority and the will to use it.

Ready to Replace the Model?

Join the seminar:
Why You Must Move HR from Cost Center to Business Driver

Learn how to:

• Identify Culture Drag™

• Reclaim authority over behavior, performance, and privilege

• Install The HR Power Model™ and end symbolic HR for good

References

Gallup. (2023). State of the Global Workplace Report. Retrieved from https://www.gallup.com
Huang, K., Gino, F., & Bazerman, M. (2022). Organizational Accountability and Strategy Execution. MIT Sloan Management Review, 63(4), 24–31.
Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(2), 311–328.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1–9.
SHRM. (2023). SHRM Body of Applied Skills and Knowledge™ (BASK). Society for Human Resource Management. Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org
Ulrich, D. (1997). Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results. Harvard Business School Press.
Woods, J. (2024). Internal Culture Execution Audit Data – Seattle Consulting Group. Unpublished report.