I Hate It Here

not your decision but your problem?

Hebba Youssef · MAY 4

Hiii, 

I’m back home to cooler temps and my fave pillow. Yes, I missed my pillows the most. 

There’s something about hotel pillows, they’re fine but not great. My home pillows are the goldilocks of pillows. I’ve perfected it with my home pillows. 

This is how you know I'm older because sleeping on the wrong pillow can, and will, absolutely ruin my week. 

To counteract my pillow dilemma a few things to bring us joy: 

✨ SAFE SPACE SUMMIT: 200 HR people, 3 days of fun in the sun, and interesting keynote speakers. Did I mention… free of cost?

The deets: Oct 13 - Oct 16 in Huntington Beach. Apply for a spot and if you’re accepted I’ll see you there!! You may wonder, why an application? We’re trying to curate the room with folks experiencing similar challenges so we can actually problem solve and get some inspo from peers. 

📺 HR Therapy in May is focused on feedback across the ages. I’m gathering some folks to talk about how different generations accept feedback and how to best set up your org for continuous feedback. 

🎧 S12 of the pod is back!!! Today’s episode features a fellow HR nerd Stacey Nordwall and we get into the first time she had to step into the role of HRBP and what she learned from that experience. 

Now onto today… decisions, decisions, decisions. With a side of romance tropes. Yeah, I went there. 

Also may the 4th be with you! 

HR'S ROLE

Who is making the decision?Copy anchor linkCopied

Okay I have been thinking about this one for a while and I finally have to get it out of my brain and onto some paper aka this newsletter. 

Who actually owns the decision in your org?

Not the decision about what to order for the team lunch. Although honestly, that one also somehow lands in HR's lap, but that's a different newsletter.

I mean the real decisions, like:

  • The reorg nobody asked for
  • The RIF that "came out of nowhere"
  • The AI rollout HR finds out about in the all-hands
  • Comp decisions
  • The promotion that makes zero sense
  • The policy that legal drafted and HR has to defend

You know, the decisions that affect real people's real lives. 

Is it you? Is it your CEO? Is it the CFO who controls the budget? Is it the manager who came to you with their mind already made up pretending they want your input?

Who is it???

📣 Here's the honest answer: there isn't one right answer. 

And anyone who tells you otherwise is probably the person making all the decisions alone and wondering why nothing sticks. Cough your CEO cough. 

The best version of this and the thing I've seen actually work is a checks and balances approach. Power distributed. Perspectives in the room before the call gets made. HR as a genuine partner in the decision, not just the person who makes it real afterward.

🚪 When it comes to frameworks, I worked with a CEO once who described decisions as two-way doors and one-way doors. 

The idea being: before you make a call, ask yourself: can we walk this back if we're wrong? A two-way door decision is reversible. You can course correct. A one-way door decision? Once you walk through it, you're not coming back. Those ones deserve way more attention, perspectives and time.

I’ve been thinking about the framework a lot more lately. Because so much of what goes wrong in orgs is someone treating a one-way door like it's reversible. The decision maker is probably moving fast, skipping the hard conversations, handing HR the decision and calling it partnership (it's not). 

TBH: The goal isn't for HR to own every decision. 

The goal is for HR to have real influence before the decision gets made, not just accountability after it's done!!! There's a massive difference between being a strategic partner and being the person who enacts everyone else's will. 

One of those is true partnership and the other is just a very stressful messenger job.

I’ll shoot ya straight some days i’m the messenger and it really grates on my nerves, especially when it's a decision I'd never freaking make. But most days, I'm consulted like a true partner. For me it is a 25% messenger / 75% partnership equation. 

✍🏽 What’s your breakdown? 

If it swings the other way and you’re mostly enacting someone else’ decisions, this is the newsletter for you to bookmark! I’m digging into common tropes we face at work and how to make better decisions which sets you up for more partnership and less messenger. 

Decision dynamics but make it romantic: Copy anchor linkCopied

Even in orgs that WANT checks and balances, even when everyone agrees in theory that decisions should be collaborative, the actual dynamics at play make it... complicated.

It’s complicated is more than a facebook status, it’s something most of us are dealing with on a daily basis. 

Corporate America has a lot of feelings. And like any good romance novel, there are some very recognizable tropes playing out in every single org. 

Let me introduce you to a few… 

💰❤️ CFO vs HR: Enemies to Lovers 💰❤️

You fight constantly. They want to cut budgets, you want to enable your employees with the resources they need. They see the budget, you see the humans behind the budget. Every conversation feels like a negotiation and sometimes a standoff. And yet, when it works, IT WORKS. 

The best CFO/HR relationships I've seen are genuinely powerful because you're both bringing something the other doesn't have. They have the numbers. You have the context. Together you could actually make good calls. (You just have to stop arguing at first.)

Protip: Find your shared language early, it's usually the data. Lead with numbers to storytell and then weave in the people angle. 

👑 CEO vs HR: Chosen One 👑

The CEO has all the power. They make the call. And then,  every single time, they turn to HR to make it real. Build the culture they envisioned. Deliver the message they don't want to deliver. Fix the thing that their last decision broke. You didn't audition for this role!! You didn't ask to be the chosen one. Although some days I am Buffy. She alone will fight the forces of darkness, she is the chosen one.  

But here you are, making someone else's vision happen with half the resources and little authority. The best CEOs know this and actively work against it. But some of the rest may wonder why HR seems ineffective or even take themselves over to Twitter to proclaim how they don’t need HR. BOO.

Pro-tip: If you’re in this situation, start to ask what the decision criteria was before you leave the room. Understanding how the decision got made could help you figure out how to intervene early. With this trope you want to get to the decision before it's even being made and make sure you influence the outcome! 

☀️😤 Manager vs HR: Grumpy x Sunshine ☀️😤

The manager comes in hot. They've already decided what they want and they just need HR to sign off. You come in trying to find the nuance, understand the full picture, and usually save someone's job in the process. They think you're naive. You think they're reactive.

 Somehow, you end up coaching the very person who created the problem in the first place while the manager goes back to their desk completely unbothered. Classic! 

Protip: Your job isn't to make decisions easier for managers. It's to make sure the right decision gets made! Stop letting managers come to you with conclusions. Start requiring them to come to you with context. "Walk me back to the beginning" is where the convo should start. Eventually they will be conditioned to come to you with the context rather than a decision they already made. True partnership! 

⚖️👀 Legal vs HR: Will They Won't They ⚖️👀

Are you partners or not? Nobody knows. It changes depending on the situation, the stakes, and honestly the phase of the moon. Some weeks Legal is your best friend and you're aligned on everything. Other weeks they're cc'ing your CEO on emails without telling you why and you're finding out about a settlement in a calendar invite. 

The tension is real. The collaboration is inconsistent. And there is absolutely unresolved energy that neither of you are addressing directly. 

Protip: If you're seeing this play out try establishing a standing sync. The ambiguity lives in the silence between you two and it's better to have a set time and place to discuss decisions. 

Okay okay, I could’ve gone on forever with this romance trope angle. We didn’t even get to one of my fave tropes: one bed! JUST KIDDING!! I really could not figure out how to make that work related. 

Next up, how do we get better at making decisions?? 

Getting smarter on decisions:Copy anchor linkCopied

Okay so now that I've named some of the dynamics at play…  what do you actually DO with this?

4 things I want you to think about when it comes to decisions: 

1. Know your doors. Go back to the two-way door framework. Before you push hard to influence a decision, ask: is this reversible? If yes, pick your battles. If not, that's where you dig in. Trust me, you do not want to be exhausting yourself and your political capital fighting EVERY DECISION. One-way door decisions are where HR's voice matters most and where you should be fighting hardest for a seat before the call gets made.

2. Get upstream. Influence before the decision, not after it. Find out where decisions are actually being discussed in your org. Is it: the informal conversations, the leadership meetings, the CEO's standing 1:1s? Figure out how to get yourself into those rooms before the call gets made. And no, I don’t always mean physically IN the room, I mean get to the members of those groups and share your opinions and caution. They then carry your influence into those meetings and that’s how you can influence outcomes. If meetings about people things are happening without, absolutely aim to physically be there. As is your right, imo. 

3. Name the dynamic out loud. Literally say it. "I want to make sure I'm influencing this decision before it's finalized, not just delivering it after." That sentence said directly to your CEO, your CFO, your leadership team changes the entire conversation. Most leaders don't realize they're doing it until you name it. And if they’re intentionally leaving you, this at least holds them accountable for their actions! 

4. Track your wins upstream. When you DO shape a decision like when you push back and something changes or when your read on culture prevents a bad call,  write it down. HR's influence is invisible by design. Make it visible, at least to yourself, so you can make the case for more of it. 

What’s next: Copy anchor linkCopied

^^ easily one of my fave 90s rom coms

Next week I’m talking about AI and what it's actually doing to the pace of your job because everyone keeps telling HR to just "use AI" to do more with less, and I have some thoughts. 

Several thoughts. Loud thoughts. REALLY loud thoughts.

I can’t wait to share all of them and potentially some helpful tips for how to handle everyone telling you what to do with AI in HR. 

P.S. Which trope is your org living in right now? Reply and tell me. I'm collecting data for science. And by science I mean my own personal entertainment.

(HUMAN) RESOURCES

*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

  • 📚 What I’m reading:  Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Yes, this was on my list before the Anne Hathaway announcement. The plot sucked me innnn. I can’t wait to hear what y’all think about this!! It was so so so good I finished in about 24 hours. Should we book club it? LMK
  • 📺 What I’m watching: The Boys. I must have missed this show returned and honestly its a somewhat disturbing tv show. It’s starting to get too real… IYKYK
  • 📱 What’s happening in the group text: Who else is obsessed with that trending Tiktok sound about the group text involving Deja? I can’t stop saying help help help help help help help help help help help. I think that was the right amounts of help?? 

SONG OF THE WEEK

🎧 Drop dead, Olivia Rodrigo Copy anchor linkCopied

This came up on my rando playlist on Spotify and I loved it. I wouldn’t describe myself as a huge Olivia Rodrigo fan but I do know most of her hits. 

This song made me laugh when she said I stalked you on the internet and another line where she contemplates have you ever been to Japan?

I love a good crush song!

I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears.

Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. 

By Hebba Youssef

I Hate It Here

A safe space for jaded, overworked and emotionally burned out HR/People Operations professionals who need a little inspiration to tackle the newest dumpster fire of the week.