#51 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

😖 HR leaders, if we don’t want to be seen as admin, don’t act like one

🏃🏻‍♀️‍➡️ How I stopped chasing leaders and made them chase me

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HR leaders, if we don’t want to be seen as admin, don’t act like one

I know this title is blunt. But if you’ve read my newsletter long enough, you’ll know it comes from a place of intention — not to insult, but to interrupt our patterns.

Recently, I’ve been coaching HR leaders–many fresh from my STEP UP bootcamp–who are working hard to influence at the leadership table. They’re building commercial acumen, aligning priorities to business goals and challenging themselves to think beyond HR. But there’s one behaviour I keep spotting that is undermining all that progress.

Chasing. Nagging. Reminding.

“How much time do you spend chasing your founder or execs to complete HR tasks such as holiday approvals, performance reviews, engagement surveys?” I asked one leader.

Her answer? “Most of my time.”

And when those leaders didn’t deliver, she’d move deadlines for them.

That’s when I told her straight: 

“That behaviour, subtle as it feels, shouts one thing to the business – you’re here to be admin.”

Unconscious ‘admin behaviour’ undermines our credibility

We don’t mean to fall into this trap. We’re accountable people, we care deeply and we want processes completed. But solving for “process blockers” by nagging or shifting dates pegs us into the admin box. And if we behave like admin, that’s exactly how we’ll be treated.

Here’s the boundaries I gave her—and now I’m giving to you:

• You can chase, remind or nag a maximum of three times.

• You do not move deadlines for senior leaders.

• You find different, smarter ways to get the work done.

What we allow defines culture

When we let leaders dodge responsibility, we teach the organisation 2 things: 

Neither is acceptable if we want to be taken seriously as business leaders.

So what do we do instead? Let’s take the most common culprit 😅 — the founder.

1. Set expectations and hold founders accountable

We’d do this for any other manager. The founder is no different. If anything, they should be held to a higher standard because they set the tone for leadership. That means being crystal clear upfront about what you will and won’t do. You might offer extra guidance, coaching, or 1:1 walk-through if a founder is inexperienced. But you will not move deadlines. You will not send 10 reminders. If they miss a deadline, they explain it to their team — not with you to mop up. You treat them like the leader they should be.

Most of the time, founders step up once they see the impact of their inaction. But if you get the rare one who tells you outright that your role is to behave like an admin and bend to their timetable—then you know what you’re dealing with. And you can decide whether or not that’s the leader you want to work for.

2. Find another way or challenge the status quo

Sometimes the issue isn’t unwillingness, it’s bandwidth. Fine. Then let’s redesign. If a founder can’t approve holidays fast enough, can their EA do it? Or, can their direct reports approve requests themselves within clear boundaries? If a founder can’t complete reviews for 13 reports, then maybe the problem isn’t process — it’s structure. These are opportunities to challenge status quo, not excuses to slip back into admin.

3. Be okay with the work not getting done

As HR leaders, we’re well-intentioned. We hate seeing things fall apart. But if we believe in adult-to-adult relationships, we can’t play the “helicopter parent” chasing homework.

Take performance reviews. We can design the process, provide training and offer support. But we cannot nag founders into holding 1:1s or completing reviews on time. That’s their job. If they don’t step up, that’s their choice (as an adult) — and they are accountable for the outcome: disengaged teams, weaker performance, broken trust.

When that happens, of course we support them to develop. But the endless in-between, reminding, chasing, propping them up, is not the answer. Founders need to meet us halfway. After all, leading their team is literally their job description.

Don’t let admin creep undo your work of becoming strategic

If we want to be recognised as strategic leaders, then our behaviours need to send the right signal. Every time we chase endlessly, bend deadlines or cover for irresponsibility, we reinforce the wrong message.

So, if we don’t want to be treated like an admin, we stop behaving like one.

How I stopped chasing leaders and made them chase me

Like most of us in HR, I started my career focused on executing processes. Then I moved up to managing them. And I thought that was the job: make sure the processes get done. If they’re running, make them faster or more efficient. And if leaders weren’t playing ball — chase them, accommodate them, serve them. That’s how I saw my role.

Back then, I was working in a business unit that had spun out of a larger company, scaling from ~30 people to 400 in just two years. Five locations, hypergrowth and all the chaos you’d expect.

Chasing leaders got me nowhere

One of my responsibilities was onboarding. Locally, we’d onboard people as they joined. But every two months, we ran a one-week Onboarding Bootcamp where all new hires came together in person. We rotated locations so they could meet colleagues across sites and learn how every department contributed to the strategy.

It was intensive. It mattered. But here’s the problem: many leaders treated it like a “chore” and, to be blunt, half-assed it. That’s not my opinion, that’s straight from the participants. The same departments were scored poorly for their sessions, bootcamp after bootcamp. (see Dashboard 1 below)

My CTO spotted the pattern and asked me, “What are you doing about it?”

With a sigh, I said, “I’m chasing. I’ve offered to help them redesign. I’ve offered to coach. They’re not taking it up. I don’t know what else to do.”

That’s when my CTO said something that completely shifted how I saw my role:  “Share the data. Not just with exec — share it with the whole company.”

My first reaction was panic. “Really? Won’t that make people look bad? Isn’t HR supposed to protect them?”

He looked at me and said: “Leaders are adults. Transparency is part of our culture. Let them own it.”

And he was right. We shared engineering velocity, customer NPS scores, sales target —nothing was sacred. Why should onboarding quality be exempt? 

Letting leaders own outcomes achieved what nagging never could

So I shared it. For the first time, onboarding results went company-wide: which sessions scored well, which didn’t and what new hires were saying.

And guess what happened? The 4 department leaders I’d been chasing for months suddenly started chasing me. They wanted help. They wanted feedback. They wanted to fix their sessions — because nobody wanted their team to be the one new hires dreaded. (Dashboard 2 says it all).

From then on, I stopped the cat-and-mouse game. After each bootcamp, I published the data openly: scores, comments, changes we were making. And at the bottom of the dashboard, I added storytelling — shout-outs to teams who’d improved and notes on what we’d learned.

From nagging to enabling

It was a mindset shift: from behaving like an admin to building adult-to-adult relationships with leaders (even when I sat four levels below them on the org chart!).

That was my turning point. HR isn’t about chasing or ‘serving’ leaders to get work done. It’s about creating systems that make accountability unavoidable, so leaders step up because they choose to, not because we nagged them into it.

Or put another way: I stopped being their PA and started being their mirror.

💡Special feature: HR and Finance removing ‘reminders’ off the table

As I was writing this newsletter, Constance Ho, one of our HR leaders in the STEP UP Boardroom community, shared an experience I couldn’t resist highlighting.

Constance was facing a familiar headache. Her HR team ran a joint offsite with Finance to strengthen collaboration and operational efficiency. Both teams had the same pain point: senior stakeholders who constantly miss deadlines — pushing them into “nagging” mode. That drags them away from strategic-level work and makes them look like admin rather than strategic partners.

So instead of inventing ever smarter ways to remind stakeholders, they agreed to take reminders completely off the table and set to brainstorming other ways of holding stakeholders accountable.

Some of the ideas on the table:

• A “shit list” (by far the most popular 😝) or a monthly leaderboard to apply public pressure

• Removing problematic stakeholders out of the flow altogether

• Using software settings to add restrictions and control

• Communicating the cost of delays and risk of non-compliance 

• Having “reset” conversations to mutually agree on expectations

• Escalating to the Chairperson of the board to hold even the CEO accountable

• Stopping the habit of anticipating problems for others — and letting them feel the consequences

I love this mindset shift. What about you — how have you tackled this in your business?

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