Deciding to go no contact with someone is never an easy decision. For someone like me, someone who tends to be, if anything, deliriously kindhearted, who always wants to see the best in people, cutting off my older brother a few years ago for my own mental health was genuinely one of the harder choices I’ve made.

And also, at the exact same time, it was one of the easiest.

Because the moment I actually realized I had the power to do it, that I could simply control my own exposure to him, stop engaging, stop absorbing, stop waiting for something to change, the decision made itself.

I no longer had to sit through relentless bullying texts. I no longer had to waste my mental acumen or energy trying to get someone to understand something he would never want to understand.

I no longer had to survive never-ending email cycles that went nowhere, because there was never a real point of communication to begin with. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to cause harm.

Once I saw that clearly, once I understood that a person of his intelligence, his capability, someone who was supposed to be my older brother, had nothing to offer me but cruelty dressed up as concern, there was no such thing left to protect and no difference of ideas to work through.

As I looked at the 45 year old scar on my hand, from when he set my hand on fire when we were kids, I realized this would always be him. The one who causes harm, will never own it and gaslight you when you have the nerve to be upset about it. That was all he would be, and seeing and accepting people where they are is the best gift to ever give others, and most importantly, yourself.

There was only the question of how vicious he could manage to be, and whether I was going to keep handing him the opportunity.

Once I saw it that plainly, I simply didn’t want it in my life anymore, and once I realized that not only I could do this, that I didn’t have to defend my decision, that I didn’t have to explain it, life just got much easier.

What made it harder

The complicating factor was his children. He was the first of us to have kids, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just an uncle, I became a godfather. That mattered to me. And because of the conflict between us, I’ve never been able to build any real relationship with those kids at all. That’s a real loss, and I don’t pretend otherwise.

I’m also honest that the years around this decision weren’t easy ones for me generally. I went through a stretch where I was wrestling with my own demons, genuinely not in a fit state to be reaching out to anyone, let alone repairing a relationship this fraught. Distance wasn’t just a boundary against him. It was also space I needed for myself, especially after the death of our Mother.

Eventually, enough time passed that we managed something civil, briefly, at my father’s birthday a few years back, and at my other brothers request. It was what my Father wanted, and I was able to bear through it.

Since then, I’ve mostly kept things at arm’s length without drama. When he’s tried to pull me into group chats, I’ve answered with a one-line meme, a single photo, just enough to signal I wasn’t trying to fight, but I also wasn’t trying to engage.

On Veterans Day, when the family group chat filled with “thank you for your service,” he asked me directly if I had anything to say to him. I sent this to him.

That was the whole answer, and it was enough.

A few months ago, purely for my own wellness, I quietly left the family group chat for a while. No blow-up. No announcement. I just needed the space, and I took it. I’ve since reconnected with most of my family, explained why, heard their thoughts, and moved forward from there. The way I believe, contrary to how my family manages it, that good communication works from, conflict, empathy, listening and resolution.

The mistake I made this weekend

If you decide someone needs to be no contact, the general rule is: stay no contact. I broke that rule this weekend, and I want to be honest about why, and what happened.

I got married, somewhat quickly, and I’m genuinely happy. It felt like a big enough milestone that I wanted at least my immediate family to know it had happened, and decided, the day after, to notify my brother, and his wife, who I’ve always been fond of. I’d also heard he and his wife were buying a new house. So I unblocked him, sent a warm, simple message, a couple of wedding photos, a line congratulating them on the house, and nothing more.

I was not prepared for what came back. Though I should’ve been.

He responded by attacking me, telling me he no longer wanted to hear from me, which is a genuinely strange thing to say to the person who was the one who’d actually done the blocking. He’s the one who reaches out, maybe once every six months, always with an insult attached.

And then he did the thing that used to actually hurt me, the thing that, now, mostly just tells me everything I need to know about him. He brought up our mother, who’s been gone for five years now, and used her death as a weapon, again, the same way he always did. He did not know I already wrestled those demons and even published an essay on it a few months ago.

Why would he? The only reason our Mother will be a topic for him is so that he can weaponize her. And while that no longer hurts or bothers me, its also something I get to be completely free from.

When he said it. I found myself watching it happen from a strange, calm distance, like I was watching a nine-year-old throw a tantrum rather than an adult trying to engage. I kept the high ground. I thanked him for his well wishes and told him I’d be blocking him again. I’ll admit, I allowed myself one small moment of pettiness. When he said our mother would be ashamed of my behavior, I told him he was probably talking about himself, but that it was his battle to fight, not mine. Then I reblocked him.

Apparently we had the same idea about where to take it next, because we both immediately texted our younger brother, who’s become something of an unwilling referee in all of this. He offered to forward the seven or eight furious follow-up messages my older brother sent after I stopped responding. I said no. There was no point. I’m genuinely glad he got to vent it all into a wall that couldn’t respond, and I never have to read a word of it.

Where I’ve landed

It’s sad, honestly. I do want a relationship with my nephews eventually, and I’ve told my brother as much, quietly, in whatever rare sincere moments we’ve had. I plan on being there for them once they’re old enough to see this part of him clearly on their own. I expect that’s still a year or two out. For now, reaching out directly and marking their birthdays from a distance is where I’ve landed, and I think that’s the right pace for me.

But the actual lesson of this weekend isn’t really about him.

It’s this: protecting your peace has to come before almost everything else, including the instinct to share good news with people who’ve shown you, repeatedly, that they can’t receive it without turning it into another opportunity to vent their rage. No contact is hard to choose and, it turns out, still hard to hold even after you’ve already proven to yourself it was the right call. I broke it for one weekend, for one piece of genuinely happy news, and got exactly the reminder I apparently still needed.

You don’t owe anyone access to your joy just because they share your blood. Protect it anyway. They’ll protect themselves, including their right to be cruel to you, every single time.

It’s on you to protect the rest.

The first time I ever heard someone seriously argue for getting rid of performance ratings, I was an HR manager at WebMD and had just turned 30.

An HR column writer (and I genuinely wish I could remember her name) referred to people who defended performance ratings as “weenies.”

I remember thinking she was being provocative for the sake of it. I’d been conditioned by ratings my entire career. They were just how the work world worked. It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized she had a point. Wherever she is, I hope she’s still out there moving the needle.

Then, about twelve years ago at Electronic Arts (EA), we actually did it. We moved away from performance ratings. At the time, it still felt strange to me. Then I watched it work, and I finally understood what that writer was getting at.

We Spend Two Decades Learning the Opposite Lesson

Think about the arc of a person’s life before they ever enter the workforce. From kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree, maybe a master’s or a PhD, we are graded constantly. And in nearly all of those systems, everyone can get the A. There’s rarely a forced curve. If the teacher can justify the grade, the entire class can earn it. A 95 means you did excellent work: full stop, regardless of how your classmates did.

Then we hand that same person a job, and we flip the rules entirely. Now there’s a fixed, limited number of top ratings, usually tied directly to the biggest pay increases. We take people who spent twenty-plus years internalizing that a B is disappointing and a C is alarming, and we tell them that “meets expectations” (the corporate equivalent of a 75) should feel “just fine”.

It doesn’t feel fine.

It feels like failure. The employee didn’t do anything wrong and isn’t a poor performer, but how do you expect to remove 20+ years of conditioning in performance?

The Parts That Break Trust

If the psychology were the only problem, maybe we could train our way out of it. But the mechanics of forced ratings are just as flawed, and employees can see it.

Politics beats performance. Even with genuine calibration, the system isn’t clean. A manager who’s skilled at internal politics, who’s built the right relationships with the right leaders, can get a solid-but-unremarkable performer rated higher than someone on another team who moved the needle on something that actually mattered. All because one manager knew how to play the room and the other didn’t.

Quiet managers penalize their people. The flip side is just as damaging. An employee can do exceptional work and still lose out simply because their manager doesn’t know how to champion them in a calibration session. The employee never sees that conversation. They just see the ratings and are left to draw conclusions about their own worth.

The compensation math doesn’t even pay off. The entire justification for forced ratings is usually that we need them to differentiate pay. But look at how merit budgets are actually funded. When the merit pool is 3% and change, the difference between your top rating and your middle rating is often a rounding error on a paycheck. We put employees through an emotionally loaded, politically distorted grading exercise so we can pay our very best performers 18 cents more than everyone else. That’s a lot of trust destroyed for very little differentiation delivered.

It’s high risk, low value, and (ironically) low effort. For all the process weight, an annual forced rating is one of the laziest forms of performance management there is. It compresses a year of human effort into a single label, once a year, built more for compensation math than for actually developing anyone.

None of This Means Performance Management Is the Problem

Here’s where I want to be very clear, because this is where the conversation usually goes off the rails: the failure of ratings is not the failure of performance management.

Coaching. Feedback. Motivation. Real relationship-building between a manager and their people. That work isn’t just worth keeping — it’s essential to a business running well. What’s broken is the annual, forced-rating system we bolted on top of it. The grading system none of us asked to be re-enrolled in as adults.

This Is Where HR Business Partners Earn Their Impact

And this, to me, is the real opportunity - because the most meaningful work an HR business partner can do lives exactly in this space. Not administering the rating cycle. Coaching managers into behaving like leaders.

That looks like:

• Teaching managers how to give feedback and why it matters. Not once a year in a form, but on the spot, in the moment, when it can actually change something and at least once a month if not quarter on how things are going.

• Role-playing the hard conversations. Sitting with a manager before a difficult discussion and practicing it, so they walk in prepared instead of avoidant.

• Coaching managers to motivate and innovate. Helping them understand what actually drives each person on their team, and how to create room for people to grow and ensuring they have the tools to do this essential part of their job.

• Building platforms for two-way dialogue. The best managers don’t just deliver feedback, they create an environment where employees can bring tough conversations back to them.

• Working through the manager’s leader when needed. Sometimes the most effective coaching an HRBP does is indirect - by equipping leaders to develop the managers underneath them.

If you’re an HR business partner, ask yourself honestly how your time splits between running the performance process and coaching your leaders to be coaches. Because one of those activities is administration. The other one changes how the business actually performs.

Good performance management is a critical component of a business running well.

We don’t need to abandon it. We need to finally separate it from a grading system that was built for compensation math — and give our energy back to the work that develops people.

What do all of you think?

Has your organization moved away from ratings - and if so, what changed?

Why “putting the human back in HR” is an insult to our profession

Hello HRBPs!

I saw an interview this week on Instagram from

The title on screen was “Putting the human back in HR.”

I like HR Brew, genuinely, they’ve featured me in 2023 and I think highly of both people in the interview and their work. No disrespect intended here at all, I’m sure the interview was lovely.

But I never got past the opening. I didn’t need to. That title alone hit me the wrong way, and it was pure timing. Something else was happening in parallel that made it impossible to just scroll past.

Not 2 hours earlier, I posted a TikTok asking one question: what trauma do you still carry as an HR professional?

I listed a few of mine.

• Someone pulled a knife on me.

• I held a man while he sobbed through his own layoff.

• I called 911 when an employee had a heart attack in the office, then had to call his wife myself.

• I sat across from a man lying to my face about assaulting an intern younger than his own daughter, already having seen the tape that proved it.

• I’ve sat with a parent whose child had terminal cancer, watching our own benefits plan deny the treatment that might have bought them time.

Within hours, that video had hundreds of likes, saves and reposts and dozens of comments, HR people from every industry trading their worst days like it was the first time anyone had ever asked.

• A wife told over the phone that her husband, father of five, had just died, and someone stayed on the line with her for half an hour because there was nothing else to do.

• Welfare checks that ended in the worst possible news.

• Sexual assault.

• A resignation letter from someone who’d just learned they had three months left to live.

• Someone who spent an hour in grief counseling with an employee who’d lost her daughter, then walked straight into a hostile client meeting, then straight into celebrating someone’s promotion, all before lunch, and had to fully show up for all three.

Here’s the part almost nobody says out loud: none of us were trained for this.

HR people are not trauma specialists.

We are not grief counselors. We are not social workers or psychologists. And yet, somehow, we’re expected to be all four at once, or at minimum, to manage through it and show up composed for the next meeting.

Reading through those comments, one thing showed up again and again: no one ever asked if we were okay. No one offered resources. No one, at any point, along the entire way, ever said out loud that maybe the people managing everyone else’s worst days might need some support of their own.

So let me say it here, because apparently someone has to.

HR needs resources too. Not because we’re fragile. Because we’re human, and we’ve been treating that fact as an inconvenience for the entire length of this profession.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. If you’ve been ghosted by an ATS, if a recruiter never called you back, if you asked for a raise and got a form response, that’s real, and you’re allowed to be angry about it. I’m not defending that experience away. But that’s a scale problem, not a humanity problem. Somewhere behind that cold process is usually a person who wishes it worked differently and doesn’t have the authority to fix it alone.

Here’s what most HR people are actually doing while that phrase gets repeated at them:

• Running performance cycles that determine whether someone can pay their rent.

• Building compensation models trying to close pay gaps nobody above them wants to fully fund.

• Designing workforce plans meant to prevent the very layoffs everyone blames HR for executing.

• Partnering with recruiters to build hiring processes that are more human, with less budget and less headcount every year to do it.

• And in between all of that, taking the call when someone’s kid is in the hospital, when someone’s marriage falls apart at their desk, when someone needs to be walked out of a building with dignity instead of security escorting them like a threat.

Every HR person I know wants the same basic thing: employees who feel safe, paid fairly, seen, and treated like people. Not because it’s on a values slide. Because we’re the ones who sit with what it costs when a company fails at that, and none of us want to sit there twice.

Here’s the thing that gets lost in that phrase: no HR person I know would ever say we need to put the human back in HR. Because for us, the human was never the part that left.

What actually happened is simpler than that, and honestly a little more damning.

HR never lost the narrative on being human. We just never had it in the first place.

Other people, people who’ve never sat in the room for any of what I just described, got to decide what HR means, and they decided it meant cold, bureaucratic, distant.

Meanwhile we were the ones staying on the phone with a grieving wife for half an hour because there was nothing else to do.

So “put the human back in HR” isn’t really about us forgetting something. It’s a slogan, on the same shelf as “HR isn’t your friend, they only care about the company,” another line that every HR person knows is absurd, because we live the opposite of it every day, and neither one leaves room for what actually happens in this job.

We didn’t leave. The human part never left. It’s been here the whole time, doing the job and quietly paying for it, because that’s what the job has always asked of us.

So to everyone who keeps showing up carrying that weight because there’s no other choice:

I see you, and I’m proud of you.

Dan

This week I planned a 5-day content spread for HRBPs, and though each day landed at the right time, I was informed by a few followers that if they viewed the content on mobile, the content loaded poorly. So this is the other 4 stories a few of you reached out to me for and I have simplified the HRBP Template going forward.

Most of what actually makes or breaks an HR Business Partner isn’t in any onboarding doc. It’s the political cleanup, the executive fluency, the judgment calls nobody prepares you for. Here are four lessons from the field, the kind of thing we go deep on in the HRBP cohort and the new Field Guide.

This is the missing link that tells each of the 4 big stories that I hope are useful to HRBPs!

Subscribe now

1. ¿Se Habla Ejecutivo?

If you know me, you know I love South America. I spend months down there whenever I can, and I’m genuinely thrilled to be heading back soon, it’s one of my favorite places on earth.

And it’s actually what got me thinking about this lesson, which is about how you build real relationships with executives. Because it starts with a confession about language.

I speak Spanish….sorta.

For years, what I was really doing was speaking English with Spanish words. I’d think the sentence in English, translate it in my head, and produce something stiff, slow, and obviously not native. People understood me. Many very kind South Americans complimented how “good my Spanish was” - but nobody mistook me for fluent. (Don’t get me started on the “moods” or “ser” vs “estar”, nevermind “por” vs “para”)

Most HRBPs talk to executives exactly the same way.

They’ve learned the vocabulary, EBITDA, pipeline, churn, runway, and they sprinkle it into conversations.

But underneath, they’re still thinking in HR.

They speak executive-speak in HR words.

And just like my Spanish, it’s good enough to be understood but not good enough to be trusted.

Executives can feel the translation happening. They can tell you’re a tourist in their world.

Here’s what changed my Spanish, and what changes this: immersion.

I speak Spanish best when I’m in Colombia, Argentina, or Peru, a country where English isn’t an option. Surrounded by it, forced into it, with nothing to translate back to, I stop translating and start thinking in it. The fluency I could never study my way into just... arrives, because immersion gives you no other choice.

The business works the exact same way.

You will never become fluent in an executive’s world by sprinkling their words into your HR conversations. You become fluent by immersing yourself in how they actually think.

When I moved from EA to Spotify, I went from supporting marketing and data to product engineering, and I brought my old marketing-shaped instincts right along with me.

They did not fit.

It wasn’t until I stopped translating engineering into terms I already understood, and actually started seeing the world the way an engineer sees it, systems, tradeoffs, scale, that I realized how wrong my whole perspective had been. It wasn’t that I needed a new vocabulary.

I needed a shift in mindset. A new way of thinking.

It was the same with Finance. I didn’t learn to repeat the words. I spent real hours inside P&L statements, forecasts, the differences between tax, audit, treasury, and FP&A, until that world stopped being foreign and started being a place I could think clearly inside of.

And here’s what immersion gave me that translation never could: it showed me why my own perspective could be bridged. I could finally understand why the FP&A team was stressed, why treasury was smug, why AP/AR was overwrought. Once I was inside their world, I could bring people strategy that spoke to their outcomes, in their logic, from inside their thinking.

That’s the moment an executive stops tolerating you and starts consulting you.

So the lesson isn’t “learn to speak the business.” It’s deeper than that. Stop translating and immerse yourself. Sit in the meetings you don’t understand yet. Learn the scary tools they use. Read their decks. Ask the question that exposes how much you don’t know.

The discomfort is the immersion working.

2. Are You Solving a Problem or Creating a Competency?

Most HR Business Partners spend the first part of their careers being rewarded for responsiveness. Someone escalates a conflict, a leader needs a hire approved, a reorg is messy, a team is spiraling, and the HRBP arrives with solutions in hand like a corporate paramedic carrying a clipboard instead of a crash kit. And in our eager desire to be liked and appreciated, we take it all on.

And to be fair, that work matters.

But over time, I started noticing that the strongest HRBPs weren’t just solving problems. They were quietly building organizational competencies that made certain problems happen less often in the first place.

If you described your work along two axes, Tactical ↔ Strategic and the scope of impact, Minimal ↔ Maximum (single person all the way up to the whole company), many HRBPs would realize we aren’t acting as the “strategic advisors” we’re supposed to be.

A tactical HRBP reacts quickly and gets the job done. A strategic HRBP changes the system that created the issue, uses the issue to build a competency, or leverages the opportunity to move things at scale.

An example:

One manager struggles with performance conversations. A tactical partner helps them write the corrective action or feedback script. A strategic partner notices that none of the company’s managers know how to deliver feedback consistently, then builds calibration processes, manager training, and accountability rhythms that scale beyond one conversation.

One employee resigns unexpectedly? A tactical HRBP approves the backfill, conducts the exit interview, and ensures the termination process is completed. A strategic HRBP has already worked with the leadership team to identify how to pivot in unexpected resignations, and is in ongoing talks with them about org design risks.

The quadrant most HRBPs live in is somewhere between medium strategy and low impact. Busy, responsive, involved in everything, but generally not moving the organization forward in a durable way.

The best HRBPs eventually learn to ask different questions:

• Is this a one-time fix or a repeatable capability?

• Am I reducing dependency or creating more of it?

• Am I solving for the person in front of me, or the organization we operate it in?

• If I disappeared tomorrow, would this problem immediately come back?

• I can solve this problem, but can I use it as an opportunity to reinforce systemic best practice instead?

That shift changes the entire job. It changes how you approach org design, succession planning, leadership coaching, workforce planning, even conflict. Because at the highest level, HR Business Partnering stops being about reacting to business problems and starts becoming organizational architecture work.

You stop asking: “How do I fix this?”

And start asking: “What would need to exist so this scales correctly without me?”

3. The Worst Week-Five of My Career (or: What to Do When You Inherit a Mess)

This one is about one of the least glamorous, most defining parts of the job: what you do when a leader makes a decision you then have to clean up.

I started a new HRBP role, and on the first day of my 5th month, I had a weird day.

I suddenly had a surge of employees, managers and directors lining up outside my office, genuinely upset:

• “When is my new title going into the system?”

• “We were told we were being promoted.”

• “We were told to start using ‘Senior’ in our titles, when does it become official?”

Here’s what had happened,

A month before I started, the VP of this department had told his whole team of 53 to add “Senior” (and in some cases “Lead”) to their titles.

These were media buyers, programmatic specialists, ad campaign analysts, many with just ~2 years of experience.

For people at that stage, a “Senior” title isn’t cosmetic. It’s meaningful. It signals growth, market value, a real step up. So naturally, they believed they’d been promoted.

The VP had done zero due diligence. No conversation with HR. No check on whether the titles mapped to real job levels, compensation bands, or budget. He just announced it. And the moment the practical questions started, “when does this hit the system, when does the pay change”, his answer was 4 little words:

“Go talk to Daniel.”

A promise I didn’t make, to people who had every right to believe it, with no structure behind it and no budget to honor it. And then, to complete the picture, that VP chose that same window to announce he was leaving for another job.

I was furious.

And I want to be honest about that, because this is where most of us start: with the very fair feeling that we’re being asked to absorb someone else’s mistake.

But here’s what I had to learn.

First, give the bad decision its fair hearing.

When I cooled down, I could actually see what the VP was reaching for. He wanted his people to feel ownership. He wanted them to operate like senior, accountable professionals. That instinct wasn’t wrong, the execution was a disaster, but the intention was human. And seeing that mattered, because it changed how I handled it. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions, and an HRBP who can spot the good intention inside the bad decision manages the cleanup far better than one who just sees an idiot.

Second, and this is the real lesson: you can’t fix this alone, and you shouldn’t try. The instinct of a newer HRBP is to absorb it, to be the good soldier, to quietly take the heat and break the bad news yourself.

Don’t.

That’s how you become the face of a mistake you didn’t make, and it teaches the organization that HR exists to clean up after executives without consequence.

The right move is transparency, honesty, a little professional distance, and, crucially, making sure the accountability lands where it belongs.

I did not stand in front of those teams and personally retract their promotions as if I were the decision maker.

I worked it so the organization owned the correction, the SVP and CMO, his own bosses, were brought into the resolution and shared ownership of fixing it.

The message to those employees could not be “Daniel says no.” It had to be “the company made an error in process, here is what’s actually true, and here is how leadership is making it right.”

That distinction protects three things at once: the employees (who get honesty instead of a scapegoat), the organization (which has to actually own its process failure instead of outsourcing it to HR), and you (who does not become the permanent absorber of every executive’s mess).

Because that’s the trap.

If you let the onus fall on you every time a leader makes a well-intentioned bad call, you will spend your entire career as the cleanup crew, and you will never be seen as the partner who could have prevented the mess in the first place.

The HRBP who manages this well, with honesty, with distance, with accountability pushed to the right place, is the one leaders eventually start consulting before they make the decision.

Which is the whole point.

4. The CEO Finally Noticed Me. In the Worst Possible Place.

Every HR Business Partner secretly wants the same thing: for the CEO to notice them. To see the work, value it, and say so.

We don’t always admit it, but we want that attention, that validation from the very top.

Let me tell you about the day I got it…in the worst place possible.

We had just rolled out a new performance management system, we’d removed ratings entirely, which made the executive suite nervous. Change always does. For a few months I braced for it to get reversed.

But the feedback started coming in, and it was good. Managers were adapting. People were responding.

Now, I had never actually talked to the CEO. We’d nodded at each other in meetings. I’d been introduced once during a presentation. That was the whole relationship. I really liked him, he was energetic, passionate and transparent with no discernable ego.

Until at the end of a very long busy day, I’m on my way out and it’s an empty office at around 7:30 pm and I head to the men’s room next to the main entrance.

As I’m standing at the urinal, the CEO walks in, stands in the spot next to me and decides this is the moment to give me detailed, glowing feedback on the performance management overhaul.

He shared how much it had shifted his thinking. How his management team was coming around. How impressed he was.

A genuine, heartfelt, professional congratulations.

While we were both, shall we say, otherwise occupied.

And I remember thinking: I have wanted this exact conversation for months. And I would give anything to be having it… literally anywhere else.

Here’s the real lesson under the comedy, because there is one.

The CEO’s attention is something you earn through work that changes how the business operates, not through proximity, politics, or being in the right room.

I didn’t get noticed because I networked my way to him. I got noticed because the work reached him, the results traveled up the chain on their own, and eventually the person at the very top felt them.

That’s the goal: build things so valuable that your reputation arrives in the executive suite before you do.

Just, ideally, not while you’re both washing your hands.

These four lessons are a taste of how I think about this work.

The strategy, the executive fluency, the political craft, the organizational architecture, the stuff nobody trains you on, is exactly what we go deep on in the HRBP Weekend Intensive (I keep cohorts to 8–12 seats for the best conversations) and in the brand-new HRBP Field Guide, 231 pages, a year-plus in the making, everything I know about becoming a true business partner.

If becoming a stronger, more strategic HRBP is something you care about, you’re in exactly the right place.

— Dan

Hello HRBPs!

Today’s lesson is about one of the least glamorous, most defining parts of this job: what you do when a leader makes a decision you then have to clean up.

Let me tell you about the worst week-five of my career for a new job I otherwise loved.

I started a new Lead HRBP role, and within a month - I suddenly had a surge of managers, individual contributors and even directors lining up outside my office, genuinely upset.

• “When is my new title going into the system?”

• “We were told we were being promoted.”

• “We were told to start using ‘Senior’ in our titles, when does it become official?”

Here’s what had happened: about a month before I started, the VP of this department had told his whole team of ~50 to add “Senior” (and in some cases “Lead”) to their titles.

These were media buyers, programmatic specialists, ad campaign analysts, many of them with just ~2 years of experience.

For people at that stage, a “Senior” title isn’t cosmetic. It’s meaningful. It signals growth, market value, a real step up. So naturally, they believed they’d been promoted.

The VP had done zero due diligence. No conversation with HR. No check on whether the titles mapped to real job levels, compensation bands, or budget. He just announced it. And the moment the practical questions started, “when does this hit the system, when does the pay change”, his answer was: “Go talk to Daniel.”

A promise I didn’t make, to people who had every right to believe it, with no structure behind it and no budget to honor it. And then, to complete the picture, that VP chose that same window to announce he was leaving for another job.

I was furious. And I want to be honest about that, because this is where most of us start: with the (very fair) feeling that we’re being asked to absorb someone else’s mistake.

But here’s what I had to learn, and what I want you to take from this.

First, give the bad decision its fair hearing.

When I cooled down, I could actually see what the VP was reaching for.

He wanted his people to feel ownership.

He wanted them to operate like senior, accountable professionals.

That instinct wasn’t wrong. The execution was a disaster, but the intention was human, and seeing that mattered, because it changed how I handled it.

The road to hell really is paved with good intentions, and an HRBP who can spot the good intention inside the bad decision manages the cleanup far better than one who just sees an idiot.

Second, and this is the real lesson: you cannot fix this alone, and you should not try to.

The instinct of a newer HRBP is to absorb it, to be the good soldier, to quietly take the heat and break the bad news yourself.

Don’t.

That’s how you become the face of a mistake you didn’t make, and it teaches the organization that HR exists to clean up after executives without consequence.

The right move is transparency, honesty, a little professional distance, and, crucially, making sure the accountability lands where it belongs.

I did not stand in front of those teams and personally retract their promotions as if I were the decision maker. I worked it so the organization owned the correction, the SVP and CMO’s leadership, his own bosses were brought into the resolution and shared the ownership of fixing it.

The message to those employees could not be “Daniel says no.” It had to be “the company made an error in process, here is what’s actually true, and here is how leadership is making it right.”

That distinction protects three things at once: the employees (who get honesty instead of a scapegoat), the organization (which has to actually own its process failure instead of outsourcing it to HR), and you (who does not become the permanent absorber of every executive’s mess).

Because that’s the trap.

If you let the onus fall on you every time a leader makes a well-intentioned bad call, you will spend your entire career as the cleanup crew, and you will never be seen as the partner who could have prevented the mess in the first place. The HRBP who manages this well, with honesty, with distance, with accountability pushed to the right place, is the one leaders eventually start consulting before they make the decision.

Which is the whole point.

This is exactly the kind of situation we work through in the HRBP Weekend Intensive, the real, messy, political moments nobody trains you for. We just confirmed our fifth attendee and the cohort’s coming together nicely; there are still a few spots left, and I’d love for you to be one of them.

👉 Grab your seat in the HRBP Weekend Intensive

Interested but your company won’t cover the cost? Reach out to me directly, there are discounts and scholarships that can be applied. See you there!

Dan

What do you do when you learn that an employee has OnlyFans for adult content?

The move from the traditional career to the gig economy has handed us in HR some genuinely fascinating, genuinely complicated new problems.

I came up through this economy myself, I built DanFromHR on TikTok starting in 2021, so I get the appeal firsthand. Make something people want to watch, learn from, or laugh at. Monetize your own value. Scale on your own terms. And it turns out that the thing people will pay for most reliably isn't education or edutainment. It's the oldest content in the world: adult content.

Before all this, my one and only brush with "an employee has a public-facing side life" was a staffer who was going to be on a game show.

So when the first OnlyFans case landed on my desk, I was spectacularly unprepared to advise on it. Since then I've handled around 50 of these cases and coached close to 100 HR professionals through their own. And a pattern has emerged that I can't unsee.

Let me start with the case everyone brings up.

Brianna Coppage is essentially the face of "Do OnlyFans at your own risk".

She taught high school in Missouri. In 2023 her OnlyFans was reported to the district, she was put on leave, resigned, then was fired from her next job within days over a social media policy. Her teaching salary was about $42,000. Her OnlyFans, she said, eventually cleared close to a million.

Here's the thing: I actually think the teacher case is reasonably clear-cut because of proximity to minors. A high school teacher operates in a position of trust and authority over children, and that proximity creates a legitimate, defensible safety-and-judgment line that has nothing to do with morality policing. If your reasoning is "kids, trust, safety," that's a real line. I'll defend it with you.

But that's the easy case. And the easy case is hiding the hard one.

What about the people whose jobs never come near a child? Who don't teach, don't coach, don't supervise, don't operate in any position of trust over a minor? The adults doing lawful, off-duty things on their own time, in roles where "proximity to minors" can't do any of the moral lifting for you?

That's where it stops being clear-cut, and starts being about something else. Let me run a quick experiment on you. No judgment. Just notice your gut.

Below are seven people.

Each has a standard, adult-context job. Each also has an OnlyFans with primarily adult content that someone at work discovered.

For each, your instinct says something, fireable, need more information or not my business.

Don't overthink it. Just feel where it lands.

• A marketing coordinator at a mid-size insurance firm

• An accountant at a third-party supply chain company

• A real estate attorney at a tech company

• An insurance broker at a real estate company

• A fitness instructor at a national gym chain

• A financial analyst at a logistics company

• A corporate recruiter at a SaaS company

Got your gut reactions? Hold them.

Now here's what's real

None of those were hypotheticals. They were my actual cases and cases of fellow HR professionals.

The accountant. The real estate attorney. The marketing coordinator. The fitness instructor. The insurance broke, financial analyst and the corporate recruiter were all found with OnlyFans account for exclusively adult content - discovered and reported by a coworker.

Same conduct in all seven: lawful, off-duty, adult content, on their own time, in roles with zero proximity to minors and no measurable impact on the job. No mention whatsoever of their public names, day jobs or placed they they worked.

6 of them kept their job after a full investigation. One did not.

The financial analyst was fired.

What was the difference? Did they not hide their face? Did they do content with others? Did they somehow leave a trace that could be linked to their company?

No- but she was the only woman.

And interestingly enough 3 of the men were far less discreet about hiding their face and two of them did content with others. She was the most discreet but was still the only one terminated.

Same act. Same no-minors context. No job-performance impact in any of them. The only variable that moved between "we handled it quietly" and "she's gone" was gender.

I'm not telling you that story to indict anyone.

I'm telling you because I sat in those rooms, or downloaded cases, the conversation was some version of "it's his private life, it doesn't affect his work, let's move on."

And in the woman's case, the same facts produced "this isn't who we are."

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Nobody in that room thought they were being biased.

That's exactly the problem. Even more curious the women that were the decision makers in that room almost always defended the male performers and were also the biggest majority to determine the one woman needed to be fired.

Naturally this is not a comprehensive data collection - there are hundreds of factors that would be present such as location, industry norms, specific policy, relationship to clients, etc - but I do think even in this generalized data set, there are some pretty clear patterns.

The reflex is to treat this as a women's phenomenon, and therefore a women's problem. It isn't. Depending on the source, men make up roughly 20 to 30 percent of all OnlyFans creators, and around 30 percent of the platform's top 1 percent of earners are men, generating somewhere between 10 and 18 percent of total revenue in adult content.

But you don't see them included in the political social movements of OnlyFans being destructive to the nuclear family the way women are targeted.

So the people doing this are a genuinely mixed group. The people losing their jobs and getting shamed for it skew heavily toward women. The conduct is shared. The consequences are not.

That gap isn't a policy. It's a bias. And bias is HR's job to see, because if we don't see it, we're the ones enforcing it.

So what is HR's responsibility here?

I won't pretend there's a clean answer, because there isn't. But here are the questions that actually matter, and they're different from the one we usually jump to ("can we fire them?").

First: did the conduct actually affect the job? Not "did it embarrass us," not "did it offend someone's sense of decorum."

Did it demonstrably impair their performance, their team, or a real business interest? Lawful, off-duty, off-premises activity with no measurable effect on the work is a fundamentally different thing from conduct that does.

In most US states, at-will employment means you can fire someone for lawful off-duty conduct, a handful of states have off-duty-conduct protections, most don't. But "can" and "should" are not the same question, and collapsing them is exactly how bias gets laundered into policy.

Second: is the policy applied neutrally, or only when someone's uncomfortable? A morality clause, a brand-reputation clause, a "conduct unbecoming" standard, these sound neutral. But if you only ever reach for them when it's a woman, and never when it's a man in the same situation, the policy isn't what's operating. Your culture's gendered judgment is. The policy is just the instrument it picked up.

Third: are we calling bias "values"? Sit with this one. "It doesn't reflect our values" and "it's not a good culture fit" are two of the most dangerous phrases in HR, because they can mean something real, or they can be a respectable container for "this makes me uncomfortable in a way I'd rather not examine."

When the discomfort tracks gender, or who we think should get to be sexual in public, that's not a values judgment. It's a bias judgment wearing values as a costume.

The takeaway for HRBPs

You will get this call. Maybe you already have. Someone discovered a colleague's OnlyFans, the temperature in the room is climbing, and someone is using the word "obviously."

Your job in that moment is not to enforce the room's discomfort. It's to slow it down and ask the real questions: Did this affect the work? Would we apply this standard to everyone, or only to this person? Are we about to make an employment decision based on a measurable business impact, or on a feeling we haven't examined?

Because here's what stayed with me from my four cases. The work was identical. The conduct was identical. The proximity to minors was zero in all four. The market would have paid all four of them the same. It was the workplace that treated them differently, and the workplace is us.

We don't need a perfect policy on this. But we do need to be honest about whether the one we have is protecting the business, or just enforcing an old double standard with a cleaner-sounding name.

What would you do if this landed on your desk tomorrow? Hit reply, I read every one, and I'm genuinely curious where HRBPs come down on it.

Daniel "DanFromHR" Space

———————

It’s situations like this that I created the HRBP Bootcamp, Guides, Webinars and Classes.

I don’t train people to file paperwork or police policies. I train HR professionals to command C-suite authority, lead complex talent transitions, and build strategies that founders wouldn’t dare dissolve.

My upcoming Strategic HRBP Weekend Intensive is specifically built to bridge this execution gap. We are diving deep into:

• Building the “B” competency in HRBPs

• Fostering valuable executive relationships

• Converting business knowledge into people strategy

• Advanced HR skills like organizational design and workforce planning

• Creating talent strategy maps

• Advanced Talent Acquisition

• HR Data, Metrics and Insights

The cohort roster locks down shortly, and seats are strictly limited to protect our case-study mechanics.

👉 Review the Curriculum & Lock in Your Strategic Seat Here

See you inside,

Dan

Daniel “DanFromHR” Space

PS - Interested in having me work with your team and hosting a private cohort? Contact me for details and rates!

It’s been two weeks since Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, publicly announced that he eliminated his entire HR department, and the discourse has been... a lot. HR professionals weighing in, which makes sense. And then a parade of people who have absolutely no business offering an opinion on this, but who saw the engagement numbers and couldn’t help themselves (namely people demonstrating they have zero concept of what HR does and is)

Here’s the honest part: I’ve read a lot of takes over these two weeks. Some genuinely interesting theories. A few that changed how I saw pieces of this. I’m not above having my mind moved.

But there is one thing I am holding onto with both hands:

The layoffs didn’t eliminate HR. The rename did.

Functionally, Ryan kept a skeletal crew to perform basic HR duties and retitled it “People Operations.” So many people, including HR leaders insist that the department isn’t gone - but I disagree. The moment “Human Resources” became “People Operations,” something real was eliminated: the strategic identity of the function itself. Something many CEOs struggle with and many CHROS struggle to prove.

That rebrand is exactly what I want to talk about, because I think it matters far more than the layoff headline.

Branding is everything. Identity is everything.

I’m someone who knows that what you call a thing shapes how people treat it. Words have power. There is a reason we call it “spell”. And the same reason “Human Capital” and “Personnel” never worked is the same reason “People Operations” doesn’t work.

“Human Capital” turns people into cattle. “Personnel” is just a way to administer them. And “People Operations”? We’ll get there.

Here’s why I believe Human Resources is actually the perfect name for what we do, and I know that’s not the fashionable take:

We are the resource for the human beings. And at the same time, we own the processes and strategies that, yes, treat people as resources, because that’s what they are to a business. Both sides are resources for each other. Both sides are made up of humans. You can’t have employees without an employer just like you cannot have an employer without employees -they are completely dependent on each other.

The name holds both truths at once. That’s not an accident. That’s the job.

“HR is not your friend”

This brings me to the take that drives me up a wall: “HR isn’t on the employee’s side. They only protect the company.”

No department lives in a binary. None. Including and especially us.

You would never say a salesperson doesn’t care about the company or the product, that they only care about their commission. Sure, they care about commission. But to earn it they have to care about the product, the relationships, the targets, the market. All of it drives the outcome. The commission is downstream of doing the whole job well.

Same with us. Good HR people and good HR departments know it’s both. It was always both. And the mindset of most HR people is never: “how do I always put the business needs ahead of the needs of the individual” but it is “what does the most amount of good for the most amount of people” which can sometimes feel penalizing or non-caring about the individual.

And look — this is not me pretending bad HR experiences don’t exist. Or that in many cases we propose and urge one resolution, just to be overruled by Legal and the CEO. These circumstances happen and can be genuinely awful. But HR is not a universal negative, and part of the problem is that the great stories rarely get told. Nobody posts “my HRBP quietly fixed my comp inequity before I even knew about it” or “heres how HR turned me into a leader” on LinkedIn. The wins are invisible by design, but we know them and it’s why this constant never ending backlash that we’ve become avatars for feels so unfair.

Why “Operations” is the wrong word

So why do I deliberately, vigilantly push back when departments default to “People Operations” or “People & Culture”?

Because neither name describes what we actually do - and neither captures that our role isnt to be responsible to define both the people strategy and the culture, its to articulate and help leadership drive them. Leaders are responsible for this - they are accountable for this the same way they are responsible for the financial performance of the company- the sales team is simply given the platform, tools and motivations to do so. And we all know orgs typically fall flat on giving HR the required runway and voice.

Yes, parts of HR are administrative and tactical, and necessary: onboarding, employee files and data, HRIS and reporting, off-boarding, benefits administration. Real work. Has to happen.

But the parts of HR that are the most valuable - the most genuinely life-changing and culture-changing are facets like organizational design, leadership development, talent planning, succession planning and workforce planning. These are not workflows. These cannot be taken over by AI, because they require a human being working with, for, and about human beings. (which is why I always roll my eyes when an angry IT Manager tells me he cant wait until HR is replaced by AI, not realizing those functions will see the replacement far faster than HR - but I digress)

The moment you put “Operations” in the title, you operationalize the function. And once you operationalize it, it stops being a strategic partner and becomes an administrative necessity built on a series of workflows - and if thats what the company wants, fine, but then it can’t be called Human Resources.

That’s the demotion. It happens in the name before it ever happens in the org chart.

Because the real magic of HR has never been the workflows. It’s human instinct, human intellect, business knowledge, knowledge of the people inside your departments - all of it combined to build a talent strategy that works in conjunction with the business, not for it.

Several people have told me this is all just semantics. That People Ops and HR are the same thing with different letterhead.

They are not. And two weeks of discourse about a CEO who “eliminated” a department that still exists under a softer name is, I’d argue, the proof.

Keep the name. Do the work. The name was never the problem.

— Dan

DanFromHR HRBP Resources - Learn More About DanFromHR and HRBP Performance Lab

If this one hit, forward it to the HRBP in your life who’s tired of explaining what they actually do. And if someone forwarded it to you - subscribe, we’re 6,500 and growing!

This is not an HR post. This is not about compensation or job searches or the HRBP model. This is about grief, and dreams, and what happens when your subconscious finally decides you are ready to see your mother’s face again. If you are here for the HR content, I completely understand - it will be back. But if you have ever lost someone and had a morning where they were suddenly, briefly, heartbreakingly alive again, this one is for you.

For those of you who have followed me since 2021, you may remember that I lost my mother to cancer. It was sudden, and it was cruel. Time has done what time always does, smoothing some of the sharper edges, insisting that life continue forward, but it remains the most painful experience I have ever lived through.

I’m not here to tell the story of cancer, or even the full story of grief. I’m here to tell the story of a dream. Or maybe a memory. Or perhaps just an administrative error in the afterlife. I genuinely haven’t decided yet and maybe you can help me, please weigh in.

The hardest moments of losing her wasn’t the loss itself. It was having to be the one to tell her she was dying. No child should ever have to do that the same way no parent should ever have to bury their child. There are just some jobs in life that feel fundamentally assigned to the wrong person.

In her final hours, my mother knew. Not intellectually, not logically, but some deeper and more primal part of her understood that the engine was stopping. She couldn’t really speak anymore, but I could see the terrifying confusion in her eyes as she tried to fight, and negotiate, and hold on. Desperate to lighten the weight in that room, I looked at her and tried to make a joke.

“Mom,” I said, “you’re so controlling you’re even trying to tell death how to do its job!”

To my surprise, she relaxed. Just a little. Just enough.

That moment has stayed with me for years.

So has the pain that came with it - the cost of being the one to tell someone you love that there isn’t going to be a miracle.

The horror of looking at someone who just 2 months ago was dancing with you while watching The War of The Roses and laughing over a steak dinner was not going to make it the next day because that small cancer in her lung turned out to be a stage 4 attack on her whole person.

The fear in her eyes as she couldn’t speak and tried to get out of bed while her sister and her nieces and her sons looked at each other with confusion and sadness.

For a long time, I thought I had processed it. I moved. I rebuilt. I launched DanFromHR, built out the HRBP content, started consulting. Life moved forward because life insists on doing so. For years I rarely dreamed about her. I missed her, I remembered her birthday, I marked the anniversary of her death, but she wasn’t part of my daily reality anymore.

Then, beginning around January of this year, something changed and about once a month she started showing up in my sleep.

Every time she did, it felt important. Not casual. Not like dreaming about an old coworker. It was visceral — a shift that forced some part of my brain to say: pay attention. Your mom is here.

The problem was that the dreams were awful. My subconscious had apparently hired the writers of Stranger Things to script my sleep. Haunted apartments that we shared with her dead best friend. Supernatural disasters. Abandoned cities. In every single one of these encounters, my mother looked sick. She looked tired and diminished and deeply unhappy. We never hugged. She never seemed glad to see me. Every time I woke up I felt an uneasy mix of gratitude for seeing her face and sadness and despair for how she appeared in it.

Then Friday happened.

Friday started the same way - a nightmare, running through the old neighborhood. But this time I kept waking up and falling immediately back into the same sequence, as if my brain had accidentally hit resume on a bad episode.

And then, through the smoke of it, I saw her.

She didn’t look sick. She looked healthy. Not young, not Mom in the early 20s, but the exact version of her I remembered from the safest parts of my childhood. Her hair was short and stylish. Her face was clear. She had her makeup on and was wearing one of her classic fun t-shirts with her glasses on...but she was happy. She was genuinely, completely happy to see me. We hugged. We talked. We laughed. Every time I drifted toward waking I deliberately pulled myself back under to find her still there waiting. I could feel her electric energy like a tightly gripped hug.

And then my conscious mind did what conscious minds do.

Right in the middle of talking to her, a cold thought broke through, what I guess is the concepts of “lucid dreaming”: Daniel. Your mother is dead.

The real-world lcame flooding in — the hospital, the oncology ward, the final hours, the last four years. In the next fragment of the dream I looked at her and said, “Someone keeps trying to tell me that you died.” I said it as if reality were the ridiculous possibility. As if the dream were the truth and the world had made a mistake.

She just looked at me. Calm. Patient. Almost amused. Like she knew something I hadn’t caught up to yet.

The last time I saw her in that dream, we were walking together and I was consumed by a deep, paralyzing confusion. I could not remember which timeline was true. Had she died, or had I only dreamed her death?

The dream ended in a bizarre supermarket, I was with an ex that I haven’t seen in 15 years and I was annoyed that he kept making me walk when I wanted to take a cab.

Then I woke up. Really woke up. Daylight. Friday at 10am in the morning. My actual life.

For the first five minutes, she was completely alive. Not returned, not resurrected. Just existing, the way she always had. I lay there thinking I should call her, thinking I was overdue for a visit, thinking nothing had ever happened at all.

And then reality arrived. All at once. Like a freight train through a wall.

I had to lose her again. In five minutes of a Friday morning, I lost her all over again. I relived those final moments, those final months as though it were my reality.

That hurt. It ruined most of my day and probably most of my weekend if I’m being honest.

But after sitting with the wreckage of that for a few days, something clarified.

For years, my grief had only been able to give me the sick version of her - tired, scared, diminished. Friday was the first time in nearly four years that she looked like herself. The first time she smiled at me. The first time she was glad I was there. The first time I felt her electric positive energy like a warm embrace.

Maybe the dream wasn’t about losing her again. Maybe it was entirely about finding her. Maybe she was returning the joke 5 years later and telling me through the afterlife that I was so controlling and I needed to remember that Death did it’s job.

Bu for five minutes on a Friday morning, I got to live in a world where she wasn’t gone. Where I could text her, call her, show up at her door and be overdue for a visit. Losing that world a second time was agonizing. But I would take those five minutes: the smile, the hug, the hand on mine - over not having them at all. Even knowing the freight train was coming.

I think she knew I was finally ready to see her that way. Not sick. Not scared. Just herself.

And I like to think that the reminder was not that she had died, but rather that she had lived.

And that’s a much more comforting thought.

Dan

The End of an Era

They say hindsight is 20/20. They say life only makes sense when you look at it backward.

The frustrating part, of course, is that life can only be lived forward.

If I’m being completely honest, I should have taken the hint in October of 2023 - but it took some time for me to realize it. That what I thought was the worst day of my life, being let go from Epic Games on the same day of getting my TikTok account banned at almost 180k followers, was a signal to change.

But before we get there, lets start from where it started....

The Hot Chocolate Revelation

It was a crisp autumn afternoon at the end of October in 2019. I was working at Spotify, madly in love with someone who lived a world away. Somewhere between a corporate meeting I was probably late to and a Starbucks hot chocolate I was practically guaranteed to spill, I stopped in my tracks. A sudden realization hit me like a physical wall.

I had been working in corporate America for nearly seventeen years.

I had gone straight from the classroom into the cubicle.

Aside from routine vacations and one transformative four-month stint in South America, I had always worked. Always for a company. Always inside a system. Always learning the machinery from the inside out. And what I learned was extremely valuable.

I had worked for major companies in very different industries for different business departments. I learned retail from The Children’s Place, Benefits Management through American Express, Consulting at PWC, Internet Advertising at WebMD, EA Games and Epic taught me video games and digital products while Spotify taught me subscriptions and memberships. I worked with Marketing, Sales, Finance, IT, Engineering, Product, Operations - and now all the pieces had fit together in a very compelling puzzle - why would I only deliver this incredible value to a single company?

That afternoon, a second realization followed: The things I knew were highly valuable. Not just to human resources professionals, but to interns, managers, executives, and anyone simply trying to survive corporate life without accidentally stepping on every live rake in the yard.

That was the exact moment the idea was born.

The Opening of TheHRVault

By December of 2019, Spotify and I had agreed to part ways. Armed with a deep runway, the content, the specialized knowledge, and an abundance of confidence, I set out to try something new.

What I did not have, however, was a single clue on how to actually build a business.

The first version of my website was an absolute disaster - a literal crime scene with navigation tabs.

I named the venture The HR Vault and hosted it on a .org domain, completely unaware that .org was primarily reserved for non-profits. I also neglected to run a trademark search, which is how I learned that The HR Vault was already an employee relations system for dentists in Arizona. That specific lesson arrived in the mail as a formal cease-and-desist letter. Within six months, the entire operation collapsed. I had sold exactly one product, and I am fairly certain my mother bought it.

I was devastated. I felt embarrassed, exposed, and entirely defeated.

Assuming I had just learned a painful $28,000 lesson, I figured I should quietly retreat to corporate America, rebuild my capital, and maybe try again down the road. So, I took a contract role covering a Director, HRBP role during a maternity leave.

Then, in October of 2020, someone sent me a TikTok.

DanFromHR is Born

I started scrolling the app and almost immediately encountered a creator dispensing absolutely catastrophic job-search advice. I was so profoundly annoyed that I created an account right there on the spot and that is how DanFromHR was born.

I launched at the perfect time, in the right place, with the exact content the market was starving for. The account exploded. Within months, I hit 50,000 followers. Within a year, I was booking panels and podcast circuits. Once the needle crossed 100,000, major publications began writing profiles on me.

And I loved it.

I loved building the community. I loved debunking corporate myths. I loved lifting the heavy curtain to explain how corporate America actually operates behind closed doors. Most of all, I loved giving people access to the institutional information they were traditionally expected to somehow magically know.

But behind the screen, I wasn’t nearly as happy as I looked.

As the platform expanded, the content parameters naturally narrowed. By the time I crossed 150,000 followers, I realized I was trapped in a very specific loop: resumes, LinkedIn optimization, interview scripts, salary negotiations, and layoffs. Important work, undoubtedly—but it wasn’t the work that actually fueled my curiosity.

If I am being even more transparent, TikTok had also become a psychological refuge.

In 2021, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I became one of her primary caretakers until she passed. After her death, my world went entirely dark. I spent months physically locked inside a basement apartment, and that phone screen and TikTok app became my only remaining bridge to the living world. I forged real, deep friendships there - people I still value immensely, who made a brutally isolated chapter feel slightly less lonely.

Eventually, I relocated to Charlotte to be closer to family. Soon after, the universe handed me what looked like the perfect golden runway back into the corporate matrix: a position as a Senior HR Business Partner at Epic Games. That was when I began to realize that my world had dwindled to that tiny screen. I remember the company closing for 2 weeks and I didnt leave my apartment once, spending whole days on crafting, posting, responding to content and then finding some drama to absorb instead - I remember even thinking as i went to bed that night “this has become too much of a coping mechanism” and I found myself relieved when we re-opened and I would focus on other things again

It wasn’t a mistake. But it did teach me a non-negotiable truth: I could no longer be a company man.

I had become far too independent, far too transparent, and entirely too comfortable with creative conflict. I was no longer willing to be the person in the boardroom who quietly nods along while watching a broken system run off the rails. Luckily, Epic came to the exact same conclusion.

In October of 2023, I was the single HR Business Partner let go during a 20% corporate restructuring. Honestly? I was deliriously happy. I had already planned to resign in January anyway; they just accelerated my timeline and tripled the pay expected while covering insurance.

But that exact same afternoon, the other shoe dropped. My DanFromHR account was permanently banned.

After being forced away from content creation due to Epic’s strict internal compliance policies, I had been incredibly eager to return. I had reopened my channels, feeling like I was finally reclaiming a piece of my identity. Then, after a minor disagreement and one entirely benign comment, an aggressive creator’s followers mass-reported me.

The account vanished overnight.

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The 2024 Stasis

I fought the algorithm with everything I had. Peers campaigned, executives sent internal tech contacts, and I appealed relentlessly, begging the digital machinery to develop a soul for thirty seconds. It didn’t.

After fifty days of silence, I was informed the account was permanently dead. So, I started over as TheDanFromHR.

But the spark was gone. The landscape had fundamentally shifted. The Great Resignation was over, mass layoffs were sweeping the tech sector, and the moment corporate professionals lose their jobs, a massive percentage of them instantly reinvent themselves as career coaches.

Good friends posted content about me, encouraging their followers to return to my account - but what I had accomplished in 3 months to get 50k followers in October of 2020 did not repeat, and by the middle of 2024, I had only almost 9k.

Suddenly, everyone was an overnight expert. Everyone had taken a generic $250 course and was regurgitating the exact same job search myths, the same overconfident platitudes, and the same superficial nonsense inside an impossibly crowded, noisy digital pool. The leading job search experts with millions of followers have zero corporate experience, but they are excellent marketers and competing with the truth isn’t what the algorithm wants.

Meanwhile, peers I knew and loved were scaling rapidly. I watched creators I had personally helped boost when they were small build massive, global platforms. I was immensely proud of them, and I still am. Seeing the HR profession represented in a bigger, sharper, and funnier way matters deeply to me.

But that specific game was no longer working.

Throughout the entirety of 2024, I gained maybe an additional 3,000 followers. I still secured steady HR consulting gigs and resume clients, my videos occasionally performed well, and I still booked corporate sponsorships - though far fewer than before. Underneath the surface, an overwhelming reality was staring me in the face: I was no longer happy doing this.

Job-search content is vital. I will always respect it, and I will always remain intensely proud of the tens of thousands of professionals I helped secure better titles, higher salaries, and the vocabulary to command their own worth. But through the lens of a seasoned HR Business Partner, the job search is one of the least intellectually stimulating parts of the profession.

The work I actually care about is much bigger.

How HRBPs strategically influence executive organizations. How C-suite leaders make structural decisions. How corporations break and rebuild trust. How HR can thrive with high-yield commercial acumen without losing its human soul. That is the work that changes the trajectory of business.

That became the new destination: The HRBPs.

At first, I tried to do both. DanFromHR for job seekers, and The HRBPs for strategic HR Business Partners.

I executed that duality incredibly poorly. Months would pass where I only fed one channel. The HRBP content struggled because the market only knew me for job search; the job-search content struggled because I was a tiny fish in a massive, hyper-saturated ocean.

I do not create content to chase viral metrics; I create content to educate. Those are two entirely different games. Furthermore, I refused to build an audience around cheap AI hacks, engineered rage, or the corporate lie that complex organizational survival can be solved in a seven-slide carousel and a downloadable template.

So, I kept splitting myself in half, wandering through the static, and wondering why my creative battery was permanently flat.

At the end of December 2025, I finally launched The HRBPs. In January, I attempted to run DanFromHR, The HRBPs, and my corporate consulting practice simultaneously. I managed none of them well. Then, the universe intervened, and I came down with severe pneumonia for a month.

By March, my intuition had finally forced its way past my denial. By April, I could state the reality clearly: It was time to close the DanFromHR chapter.

I am keeping the name, but I am no longer going to live inside that conversation. I am no longer going to spend my days correcting bad advice, arguing in comment sections with overnight experts, or letting a volatile algorithm drag me back into a version of myself that I have completely outgrown.

I have changed my feeds. I have shifted my focus. I have overhauled my business.

And what surprises me most right now is how deeply sad I feel.

Not uncertain. Not regretful. Just …sad.

Because I am actively grieving the end of an era.

DanFromHR entirely changed the trajectory of my life. It taught me how to architect a community from scratch. It proved to me that audience trust matters infinitely more than a polished website. It taught me that a brand is not a logo, a specific font, or a color palette - a brand is simply the absolute certainty of what people believe they can come to you for.

It taught me marketing, SEO, high-ticket pricing, content strategy, and the unforgettable feeling of having complete strangers email you to say that something you built changed their entire life. It gave me a career outside of corporate walls. It gave me real friends. It gave me proof.

I probably should have surrendered to this realization when the original account was banned back in October 2023. That was the universe grabbing me by the shoulders and whispering, “The chapter is closed.” Unfortunately, I am stubborn to a fault, so it took me two and a half more years to listen.

But I got here. And I am profoundly glad I did.

Going forward, my center of gravity is The HRBPs. My content, my curriculum, and my cohorts are built for HR Business Partners, People Operations executives, and the leaders who believe HR can be more strategic, more commercially vital, and deeply human. I may still take the occasional resume client, HRBP consultancy or support an outplacement project, but the target has permanently changed. I am no longer building for job seekers. I am building for HR.

And If you are reading this, thank you.

Thank you for following the journey. Thank you for trusting my voice.

Thank you for the thousands of notes, emails, and messages you have dropped into my inbox over the years. Thank you for sharing the moments when a piece of advice helped you secure the offer, negotiate the contract, survive the panel, or realize that you were never as powerless as corporate America tried to make you feel.

I still meet professionals who tell me they started following me in the dark days of 2021. People who still call me DanFromHR before they ever call me Dan. That will never stop meaning something to me.

I am incredibly proud that I authored and published four books. I am proud that I built a prominent platform out of absolutely nothing. I am proud that even when the digital space got messy, frustrating, and exhausting, I never stopped trying to deliver absolute, uncompromising value.

This is the end of an era. But it is not the end of me.

It is simply the end of the version of myself who believed he had to keep answering the same job search questions forever, simply because that was what people first loved him for. I am deeply, profoundly grateful for that version of myself.

And I am finally ready to let him rest in in a purifying fire, be reborn as the next evolution of myself

Let’s start with fear.

I love to be scared, I love the thrill of a good psychological, spiritual or mental ghost hunt. Interestingly enough, some of the movies from my childhood and adolescence remain the baselines of my deepest fears today.

I am not a religious person, I don’t believe in a heaven or hell - but an 11 year old me understood true terror during the movie Ghost and notably two scenes that depicted what happened when a “bad guy” died.

I know logically this is just an idea of a director or story writer, but the deep seated horror I felt watching those shadows square up and become phantasmic creatures, making those horrible dark noises as they took away the souls of s screaming Willie or Carl was etched permanently inside my brain.

To counter that deep seated terror, I began to wonder about this movie, I remember learning it was a huge hit, that it took the world by storm, that this romantic, thriller-comedy touched so many people in so many places that it became the phenomenon of 1989-1990. And little did I know as I sat there, open mouthed and terrortained as an 11 year old boy would come back and hit me so hard 35 years later.

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The “Ghost” Experiment

Every human being walking the earth today carries an invisible library of code they never actively downloaded. We like to think of our thoughts, reactions, and memories as strictly personal: the distinct results of our individual, isolated lives. But pop culture occasionally exposes a fascinating glitch in this matrix of individualism.

Consider this experiment: Walk up to a twenty-five-year-old who has never once sat through the 1990 blockbuster film Ghost. Press play on the Righteous Brothers’ iconic 1965 track “Unchained Melody,” and ask them what they see.

A sudden, almost involuntary physiological phenomenon occurs. Without fail, their hands will begin to rise. Their fingers will curve inward. They will begin to rotate their wrists in a slow, rhythmic, invisible circle. they close their eyes and smile in private ecstasy.

They have never seen Patrick Swayze sit behind Demi Moore. They have never analyzed the cinematography of Jerry Zucker. They have never guffawed at Whoopi Goldberg’s hilarious Oda Mae Brown’s antics and yet, their nervous system effortlessly translates an auditory cue into a highly specific, shared physical behavior.

This isn’t just film trivia; it is living, breathing proof of a shared human consciousness.

The Cultural Trigger Mechanism

To understand how a single film clip can command human muscle memory across decades, we have to look at the mechanics of cultural mimetics. In biology, genes pass down physical traits. In culture, memes, ideas, behaviors, or styles pass down behavioral traits from mind to mind.

The “pottery scene” in Ghost did not merely entertain audiences; it successfully hijacked the global subconscious. The opening bassline of “Unchained Melody” acts like a psychological sleeper-agent trigger phrase. It completely bypasses the logical prefrontal cortex and plugs directly into a shared emotional frequency of longing, intimacy, and romance.

Because the scene was so violently parodied, referenced, and repeated across every medium from The Simpsons to The Naked Gun the symbol was completely decoupled from the original movie tape. It became a permanent, standalone file in our shared cultural hard drive. The music and the action became a unified neuro-aesthetic reflex.

Carl Jung and the Archetype of the Clay Wheel

This phenomenon provides a modern, undeniable verification of Carl Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious. Jung argued that beneath our personal memories lies a deeper layer of the human mind shared by all of mankind, populated by universal symbols and inherited “archetypes.”

With Ghost, modern media successfully manufactured a brand-new archetype: the Pottery Wheel as the ultimate symbol of intense, unseen romantic attraction and spiritual entanglement.

The metaphor itself is deeply primal. Shaping wet clay is the ultimate act of raw, physical creation: taking formless, chaotic earth and forcing it into order with your bare hands. Overlaying that heavy, physical labor with a story about a literal ghost (pure, disembodied spirit) is why the scene anchored itself so deeply into our collective psyche. It perfectly captured the intersection of the tangible material world and the intangible human soul. We mime the wheel because our subconscious recognizes the ancient, universal language of creation and connection.

The Living Room Experiment

The true test of any psychological thesis is real-world field data. With 4 different people from 4 different backgrounds aged 18-28, none from the US, I began to notice a phenomenon. When I played “Unchained Melody” for someone from an entirely different era, someone who has never tracked the movie’s history, who operates in a completely separate emotional landscape, and who knows nothing of this essay, they all did the same thing.

Within sixty seconds of those vocals soaring, their hands began to shape the invisible clay. Their faces softened in wonder and ecstasy - could they have seen the movie as children and remember it as a base level? Sure - but I don’t think so - I think it’s something far more magical and scientific - they were tapping into shared collective consciousness.

When each of these 4 people (usually at 38 seconds in) the exact same thing happened. All of them said they had never seen the movie “Ghost”, none of them knew who Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze were - and yet they all did the same thing and it’s because they are tuning into the same invisible, universal radio station that we all occupy. Suggesting that despite our isolation, our separate walls, and our individual struggles, our minds are deeply, permanently wired into a single, magnificent, shared human consciousness.

Try it for yourself!

Play the luring Unchained Melodies song to someone of a different generation, and watch their hands and face - and then ask yourself sincerely: “did this person ever actually see this movie…or…?”

DanFromHR

Hello HR Friend,

This whole week, I’ve woken up a little sad and despondent.

There is no real reason, just a general “bleh” that I can’t quite shake right now.

As I sat down to write today, I realized part of this thundercloud above my head is coming from what is currently happening within our profession. Namely, the critique (deserved or not) of HR.

I’ve been in far too many conversations, arguments, and discussions regarding the viral Fortune Innovation Summit clip of Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow indicating he laid off his entire HR team.

This man proudly stood in front of a room full of people executives and said: “We got rid of our HR team... they were creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

I’ve been disappointed and dismayed by certain reactions to this across social media, including those within our own industry who are indicating support, acknowledgement, and even empathy with his decision.

It makes me wonder: What is happening? What do we actually evolve into?

Ryan indicated he’d be continuing with a small “People Operations” team to do the bare-minimum basics. But People Operations is not strategic Human Resources, and many in our field don’t know the difference yet.

If you are like me, you are tired of fighting the defensive battle on all sides.

We know what we do. We know how valuable we are, we understand talent structures at scale, and we know how to navigate that “am I valuable or not?” imposter syndrome that naturally comes up.

To be told by every corporate outsider that “HR isn’t your friend,” to be reduced to an administrative penalty box by executives, to be minimized by sales teams, and to be condescended to by engineering departments - it’s enough to make us go mad!!

But we can’t play on the defensive anymore. Deep down, we know the truth.

Business teams and corporate structures cannot thrive without us.

We know that if we work with that introverted VP enough, we can get them to blossom into an unstoppable leader.

We know that if a company just gives us the strategic space, we can design a high-performing organization of engaged, regulated employees that protects revenue and scales culture.

So do not despair, my little HR grasshoppers. The battle is not over, and you are seen and heard by your HR counterparts all over the country who are experiencing this exact same frustration.

We are going to absorb this hit, reflect, and ponder. We will come back after Memorial Day with a completely new fire, ready to take on the next weeks’ challenges.

Dan

Most HR Business Partners spend the first part of their careers being rewarded for responsiveness. Someone escalates a conflict, a leader needs a hire approved, a reorg is messy, a team is spiraling, and the HRBP arrives with solutions in hand like a corporate paramedic carrying a clipboard instead of a defibrillator.

And to be fair, that work matters.

But over time, I started noticing that the strongest HRBPs weren’t just solving problems. They were quietly building organizational competencies that made certain problems happen less often in the first place.

There’s a difference.

A tactical HRBP reacts quickly.
A strategic HRBP changes the system that created the issue.

One manager struggles with performance conversations?
A tactical partner helps them write the corrective action.

A strategic partner notices that none of the company’s managers know how to deliver feedback consistently, then builds calibration processes, manager training, and accountability rhythms that scale beyond one conversation.

One employee resigns unexpectedly?
A tactical HRBP backfills the role.

A strategic HRBP asks why retention risk wasn’t visible six months earlier and builds talent review mechanisms that surface disengagement before it becomes expensive.

The quadrant most HRBPs live in is somewhere between high activity and low leverage. Busy, responsive, involved in everything, but not always moving the organization forward in a durable way.

The best HRBPs eventually learn to think differently:

• Is this a one-time fix or a repeatable capability?

• Am I reducing dependency or creating more of it?

• Am I solving for the person in front of me, or the organization they operate inside of?

• If I disappeared tomorrow, would this problem immediately come back?

That shift changes the entire job.

It changes how you approach org design. Succession planning. Leadership coaching. Workforce planning. Even conflict.

Because at the highest level, HR Business Partnering stops being about reacting to business problems and starts becoming organizational architecture work.

You stop asking:
“How do I fix this?”

And start asking:
“What would need to exist so this scales correctly without me?

Dan

Over the last decade I’ve spoken to thousands of HR Professionals and I hear the same story over and over again: one day someone is an HR Generalist, and the next day they’re expected to be strategic as an HRBP.

The title changes, the expectations change, sometimes the compensation changes, but the training, exposure, and support rarely do.

That gap is why the HRBP model, as implemented in most companies, and deemed as critical talent, actually sets us up to fail.

Most HRBPs are not developed into the role; they are placed into it.

One week we are managing onboarding, employee relations, and administrative processes, and the next we are expected to advise senior leaders on organizational design, workforce planning, and long-term strategy.

The assumption is that the title creates capability. It does not. Many HRBPs quietly feel like imposters, not because they lack ability, but because no one has actually taught them what “strategic” work looks like in practice.

We hear phrases like “be a true partner,” “earn a seat at the table,” and “push back on leaders,” but very few HR professionals are trained to do any of those things. Most were trained to:

• Follow process

• De-escalate conflict

• Stay neutral

• Cater to policy

• Reactive methodologies

Not to:

• Challenge leaders

• Create healthy friction

• Drive decisions

• Implement business thinking into consultations

• Proactive methodologies

So what happens? Many HRBPs default to being highly efficient order-takers. Efficiency feels productive, but it is not partnership and many HRBPs suffer from both loneliness and very heavy imposter syndrome.

Real strategic partnership requires three capabilities that most HRBPs are never formally taught:

• Business literacy — how the organization actually operates and makes money

• Company context — how teams are structured and why decisions are made

• Relationship management — how to influence, challenge, and align with leaders

When these are developed, HRBPs stop operating as support functions and start operating as part of the business itself.

Another myth we need to retire is that getting a seat at the table means having influence. It doesn’t.

A seat provides access. A voice requires credibility.

Many HRBPs are invited into meetings where decisions have already been made, or where their role is to validate rather than shape. The real skill is not just being present, but knowing when and how to contribute in a way that changes outcomes.

The HRBP model itself is not flawed in theory. Dave Ulrich’s intent was to elevate HR into a true advisory function.

The failure comes from how it has been implemented. Organizations updated titles and expectations but did not invest in developing the skills required to meet them. HR professionals were not trained in financial thinking, operational strategy, or leadership dynamics.

The HRBPs who grow into the role most effectively make a shift. They stop thinking of themselves solely as HR professionals and start thinking like business people with a focus on people. They ask:

• What is the business actually trying to achieve?

• How does this team drive revenue or reduce loss?

• What decisions will have the greatest impact on performance?

• What is happening behind the metrics, not just within them?

I did not have a roadmap when I stepped into this role. I learned through experience, mistakes, and working alongside strong leaders. Over time, patterns became clearer, and the role itself became more defined. Most HRBPs do not get that level of exposure or support, which is why so many are left trying to figure it out on their own.

As companies don’t appear to be investing in giving HRBPs this training any time soon, and companies like SHRM and HRCI teach extremely problematic and outdated concepts, I and a few others decided to step in.

That gap is exactly why I built this work. Not to add more theory, but to provide a clear way to understand how the role actually functions when it is done well. Because the reality is simple: if HRBPs are expected to be strategic partners, they need to be taught how to think, operate, and communicate like one.

Dan “DanFromHR” Space

Dejavu All Over Again...

~Three years ago, after I got laid off from Epic, I wrote the letter below.

I didn’t post it at the time. Not because I didn’t believe what I was saying, but because I didn’t know how it would land. It was blunt, it was critical and it was way too long.

I ended up posting it a few months later, and it got some traction, especially from people inside Epic, many of whom reached out privately to thank me, but it always felt like I missed the actual moment. The conversation had already moved on, and the window where it could’ve really contributed to what people were processing had kind of closed.

Re-reading it now, after Epic announced another round of layoffs, is a weird experience. Mostly because nothing in it feels off. If anything, it feels a little too on the nose. Everything I predicted happened and is currently happening.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched Epic make some very big, very public bets, and we’ve heard leadership talk pretty openly about losing billions as something the company could afford to do. That kind of confidence hits differently when employees are the ones who keep absorbing the downside of those decisions.

And it wasn’t just the layoffs. There were things happening even then that didn’t sit right. Real ethical questions around how parts of the business operated, including decisions that ended up putting gambling-style mechanics and advertising in front of younger users, which eventually led to fines. That wasn’t some random misstep it was the constant reflection of an incredibly ineffective executive team who claimed they wanted one thing while doing the exact opposite, and then asking employees to believe the lies.

That’s really what this letter was about.

Not just one bad decision, but a series of them. The kind that, when you zoom out, make what happened feel a lot less surprising. And especially because of all the warnings they were given but chose to ignore by their very credible staff.

So I’m reposting this pretty much as I originally wrote it.

I don’t love that it still feels relevant, but at a certain point, pretending it isn’t doesn’t really make sense either.

TL/DR As this is crazy long: Epic had plenty of signals and time to prepare their staff and chose to lie instead

October 2023,

Dear CEO, A Letter From Your Former HR Business Partner

Dear Tim,

I have a bit of a ritual. Every time I leave a company, I write a letter to the CEO. I don’t send it. It’s more of a way to process what I experienced, what I learned, and what I’m walking away with.

Most of those letters are pretty balanced. I usually thank them, reflect on what I gained, and move on.

This one’s a little different.

In other roles, I learned how strong leadership shows up in different ways. From some, I learned how to build around customers, how to take feedback and even hostility and turn it into something useful. From others, I learned how important it is for a CEO to recognize where they are strong and where they are not, and to surround themselves with people who know more than they do in those areas, and actually listen to them.

From my time at Epic, I learned something else.

That the path to failure can be paved with very good intentions, especially when those intentions are paired with a lack of structure, a resistance to expertise, and a belief that conviction alone is enough to carry a company through complexity.

I was at Epic for about a year and was part of the layoff.

Not long enough to fully acclimate, but long enough to observe how things actually worked.

What follows is my most sincere assessment from someone who has spent two decades in HR, who has supported a wide range of functions and leaders, and who knows what healthy organizations look like when they scale.

...And also what they look like when they don’t.

Who I Am

My name is Daniel. I’ve worked in HR for about 20 years across companies like WebMD, Electronic Arts, and Spotify, supporting everything from Sales and Marketing to Product and Engineering.

By the time I joined Epic, I had already spent years in consulting as an HR Director, Content Creator and Fractional CHRO, so I had a pretty clear understanding of how organizations are supposed to scale, and what tends to go wrong when they don’t.

I chose Epic as my full-time return to work knowing (and being quite excited) that the role was well below my level. I wanted to do real HRBP work again instead of directing it, I wanted to learn the business, support a new function, and be part of building something so uniquely complex and in high success mode. I also had the wonderful opportunity to work with a former mentor who had also just started. (Plot twist - she was gone for 3 months before the layoff)

My Onboarding

The first few months were actually great.

The offices were beautiful, it felt good to be back in a full-time role, and people genuinely seemed happy. Everyone I met spoke highly of the company, of you, of the culture. There was a lot of pride there. People talked about how well they were treated, the benefits, the perks, the thoughtfulness during the pandemic. It felt like I had landed somewhere that people really believed in.

At the same time, there was this quiet, underlying understanding that things operated a little differently. It was always framed as innocuous, “oh just our little quirk” but experience proved otherwise: The concept of ownership and scope of responsibility was an illusion. Everything was micromanaged under the strangest forms of control I’ve ever seen.

Decisions came from the top. Not just big ones, but a lot of them, almost all of them. And most people didn’t question it, they just adjusted. They were paid well enough to bypass the cognitive dissonance as the decisions that are made from senior individual contributors at most organizations somehow needed C-level, if not your direct approval at Epic.

As I started getting deeper into the organization I was supporting, I remember having this constant reaction of… this doesn’t make sense.

Not in a dramatic way, just over and over again. Why is this team reporting here? Why does this function sit under that leader? Why are these groups connected when their work doesn’t overlap in any meaningful way? Why is this person who has no experience in this function making recommendations to those who do?

It felt like I was looking at an org chart that had been built through a series of decisions that made sense in isolation, but never really got pulled back together into something intentional. Like an insanely difficult last round of Tetris, the patterns and shapes formed nothing conclusive or sensical - but was I just missing something?

And to be clear, there were some incredibly strong leaders inside that structure. People I genuinely liked and respected, who were doing the best they could with what they had. But they were operating inside something that made their jobs harder than it needed to be.

That’s when the questions started.

Is this chaos… or is this some kind of brilliance I just haven’t seen before? I was very eager to find out

Trouble Brewing

It was probably mid-spring, 6 months after I started - when things started to feel off in a more concrete way.

There were very obvious concerns around money. Not subtle ones. People were talking, teams were asking questions, there were signals everywhere. But there was no real acknowledgment of what was happening or what the plan was. Within months of starting emails went out about large cuts to bonuses and freezes on hiring and staffing - but then came something curious - employees were being asked to brainstorm solutions.

Which, in theory, sounds collaborative. In practice, it felt strange and extremely hypocritical, especially while the company continued spending in ways that didn’t match the level of concern people were being asked to operate under. “Do as I say and not as I do” became the observed climate.

At the same time, basic things started getting harder.

Backfills became a mess. Not just slow, but constantly shifting. One day there was approval, the next there wasn’t. Guidance would come down, then change, then change again. Managers were asking simple questions about whether they could hire, replace, or restructure, and the most consistent answer we had was “we don’t know yet.”

From an HRBP perspective, that’s a terrible place to be. You’re supposed to help leaders plan, guide, and execute, and instead you’re relaying uncertainty over and over again. Anyone who knows the first thing about business understands attrition dominoes and cascades - when the highest performer on the team leaves and doesn’t get replaced, the other team members have a very high chance of also leaving which just compounds all of the problems. There was no business strategy shared, nor insights about why we were doing staffing with an abacus and pencil, it was just one of those fun little quirks again.

And while all of that was happening, there was still this expectation that performance management, accountability, and team output would continue as if nothing had changed.

There’s a reason the phrase “a warm body is better than none” exists. When you slow hiring to a crawl without adjusting expectations, you don’t get efficiency. You get burnout and confusion.

Another thing that stood out was how little information managers actually had about their own teams.

Conversations that should have been straightforward were constantly running into walls because key details were controlled at higher levels. Managers couldn’t fully coach, couldn’t fully explain decisions, and couldn’t fully support their people, because they didn’t have the full picture themselves.

And when employees came to me looking for clarity, I found myself saying some version of the same thing over and over again:

“I know, and in any other company I could share that, or better your manager could - but Epic has chosen a different style, and i’m not quite sure why”

Silliness in Day-to-Day Decisions

There were also moments that, at the time, felt small… but in hindsight explain a lot.

One that always stuck with me was around a role elimination.

A decision had been made, the role was clearly no longer going to exist, and the conversation with the employee was actually handled well. Respectful, direct, generous. No issues there.

Then I processed it using a standard job code: position elimination.

And then I was told not to use it.

Because “we don’t do layoffs or position eliminations.”

That kind of moment tells you everything you need to know. Not because of the action itself, but because of that need to substantiate an illusion.

There was a broader pattern like that.

It was clear how much you cared about the company. That part never felt fake. But it also felt very clear that there were entire areas of the business where you didn’t have experience, and the people who did weren’t really being listened to in a meaningful way but the executive would always cater to you.

As the company scaled, across different nonsensical types of products, different countries, different regulatory environments, it didn’t feel like the structure or leadership approach evolved with it. It felt like the same level of control was being applied to a much more complex system:

“We were successful with Fortnite, so we can be successful with everything else” - but were you really successful with Fortnite? Or did the product sell itself and you got incredibly fortunate because of a world pandemic - which in turn gave you and your leaders a sense of false confidence about your abilities?” Just a thought.

And then there were the exceptions.

I was told more than once that certain employees just had to be… “accommodated”. Not because of performance or business need, but because they had a direct line to you. If they didn’t like something, they could escalate it, and it would get attention.

That might work when a company is small. At this size, it creates confusion, inconsistency, and a quiet understanding that not everyone is operating under the same rules. You are begging to have whole teams lose focus on productivity because of exceptionalism

I also noticed how present you and some of the executive team were in Slack.

And to be clear, presence isn’t the issue. Visibility can be a good thing. But when a company gets to a certain size, that level of involvement starts to have side effects. People read into everything. Priorities shift based on who said what in a thread. Leaders hesitate because they’re trying to interpret signals instead of just leading. Having 4 to 5 of you in several slack channels, literally arguing with indiviual contributors while gaslighting them was not the actual leadership I was hoping to see, especially within my own function,

At some point, scale requires trust. In the structure, in the leaders you hired, and in the idea that not everything needs to be touched at the top.

That line didn’t seem very clear. If anything, the more you grew the more it was clear you had this need to control every single element

The Summer Unfolds

As the summer went on, things got harder to ignore.

The broader market had already shifted. Layoffs were happening everywhere, across industries, across companies that had been just as confident a year prior. It wasn’t a surprise anymore, it was the environment.

Inside Epic, though, the message was consistent.

“We’re not doing layoffs.”

And it wasn’t said once. It was reinforced. Publicly, internally, repeatedly. You even posted it on X, bragging that you would remain fuily staffed as other tech companies cut upwards to 30% of their teams.

As someone new to the company, I gave that the benefit of the doubt. There are ways to navigate downturns without layoffs. Slowing hiring, adjusting spend, tightening priorities, those are all real options. And to your credit, taking a strong stance like that does build trust if you can actually hold it. I was partnered with the Finance team so I was aware of our situation and comfortable standings.

But at the same time, the signals didn’t match.

There were fires in different parts of the business. Teams were stretched thin, especially in infrastructure. Expectations didn’t seem to adjust, even as resources did. Decisions were being made at a pace and in a way that didn’t reflect the level of complexity the company was now operating in.

And still, the message stayed the same. If anything, it got almost...strangely cheery. I was part of 2 exec run meetings in which I expected and was eager to hear how we were handling large scale business challenges that just turned into a “rah rah, yay us!” meeting where promotions and new perks were announced.

But no matter how hard things got - no matter when it was asked, one message was clear from you: “No layoffs.”

That’s the part that matters.

Because when leadership makes a statement like that, especially in that kind of environment, people don’t just hear it, they anchor to it. They make decisions around it. They trust it.

So even as more and more people quietly started to realize something was probably coming, there was still that layer of, “well… they said they weren’t.”

And that changes how everything feels when it finally happens.

Stepford Syndrome

Around this time, I started thinking about something I ended up calling “Stepford Syndrome.”

It’s that thing where everyone knows something isn’t working, but nobody says it out loud in any real way. Publicly, everything looks fine. People are polite, agreeable, even upbeat. Privately, it’s a very different conversation.

I had more than a few moments where someone would vent to me one-on-one, very clearly frustrated, very aware that something wasn’t right, and then you’d see that same person in a larger setting… completely aligned, completely quiet, completely on board. I had more conversations with my manager than I can count in which I pointed out something dangerous, if not critical, and she would agree and then in the larger HR meeting she would remain silent as I brought it up and was usually condescended to - in conversations after, she’s just shrug “that’s just who we are”.

And it wasn’t because people didn’t care. It was the opposite. These were smart people who cared a lot about the company, about their teams, about doing good work.

But there was this underlying understanding that pushing too hard, asking too many direct questions, or challenging decisions too openly didn’t really lead anywhere productive. At best, it stalled. At worst, it put a spotlight on you in a way that didn’t feel great and youre role would be eliminated....I mean you would be encouraged to move on to a place where you would thrive.

So people adapted.

You’d see new hires come in, people specifically brought in to improve things, to add structure, to challenge the way things were being done. And then, not that long after, they were gone. Quietly. No big explanation, just… gone. Eyes glazed over, resigned to the hamster wheel because the carrot of good pay, free benefits, 2 week summer/winters and a quarterly bonus was about the right price for independent thought and personal values, especially in the very volatile job market of 2023.

When that pattern sets in, the culture shifts without anyone formally declaring it. You don’t need a policy that says “don’t push back.” People learn it on their own, and that was your culture - you likely never knew it, most people just kiss your ass and tell you what they think you want to hear.

That’s when you end up with a company that looks functional on the surface, but underneath, people are navigating around the same issues instead of actually fixing them.

And once that takes hold, it becomes really hard to have honest conversations at all.

Performance Reviews (and the Point I Checked Out)

I’ve always believed that performance management, when done well, is one of the most valuable tools a company has and can be some of the best value HR can drive by coaching and inspiring leaders to adopt that mindset.

Clear expectations, honest feedback, thoughtful calibration, managers who actually understand how to reward and develop their people, that’s how you build trust and momentum.

That’s not what this felt like.

Out of nowhere, we shifted into a full performance review cycle, months ahead of what anyone expected, and without anything close to the structure or preparation needed to make it work. The tools were broken, the systems were absurd and nobody could answer the question “why were we doing this now after we said we werent?”

There wasn’t alignment on expectations. There wasn’t real training for managers. There wasn’t a shared understanding of what ratings meant or how they would be applied. It was rushed, it was confusing, and it landed on teams that were already stretched thin.

Then came calibrations.

Those were… rough - in some ways entertainingly absurd and in other ways horrifyingly unproductive.

Leaders were trying to make decisions without a clear framework, without consistency across groups, and without the ability to fully explain or defend outcomes. HR was in the middle of it, trying to support a process that didn’t feel grounded in anything solid and with a nonsense timeline. Everything felt rushed, there were 7 ratings and a punishing forced distribution without definition, cause or explanation. I had to keep saying “I dont have more information to share, but I imagine the top has a good reason for it” because I couldn’t defend a single decision.

And then the payouts hit.

That’s when everything snapped into place, in the worst way.

People who thought they were doing well suddenly weren’t. Managers couldn’t explain why because theyre not entitled to critical information. Employees were blindsided, ratings were given but not actually shared. Questions started coming in immediately, and the answers were either vague, inconsistent, or nonexistent. I had ~30 people contact me that day and all i could say was “I’m so sorry, I had no idea, here are the talking points I’ve been given and it feels insincere to say them because neither of us are stupid, I am asking questions and probing and ill share whatever I can”

What made it worse was the way it was handled afterward.

There wasn’t clarity. There wasn’t ownership. There was just this default back to obscurity, generic responses, limited information, and a lot of “this is just how it works.”

I spent days in conversations with employees and leaders trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense, and trying to support people through a system I couldn’t fully explain myself.

And then came the day where our own executive, in a slack group with very clearly smart and frustrated employees, who were rightfully calling out the hypocrisy, the lack of transparency, the audacious dismissive attitude, threw the entire HRBP team under the bus with a callous “all questions about your pay should be routed to your HRBP”

That’s the point where something shifted for me.

Not in a dramatic way, just a very clear realization that this wasn’t a one-off issue or a process that needed tweaking.

This was how things worked at this company, and it wasnt going to change.

And if this is how something as important as performance and compensation is handled, it starts to color everything else - that was when I decided this was not the company for me and that I’d finish out the year and then start my exit.

The Calm Before the Storm

At a certain point, most of us knew.

The people you hire are not idiots. They understand how businesses work, they can read patterns, they can connect dots. You can feel when something is off, even if no one is saying it directly.

And things were OFF.

There wasn’t some clean, well-communicated plan unfolding. It felt scattered. Reactionary. Like decisions were being made without a clear throughline, and everyone else was just trying to interpret what that meant for them.

At the same time, the message from leadership never changed.

“No layoffs.”

So people started doing what people always do in that situation. They tried to reconcile the two things. Why were all the L7s and above meeting in secret confidential meetings? Why were all backfills frozen now? Why was everything so cagey? Why did our policies shift? Why was every major decision now pushed to “later in the year”?

If not layoffs, then what? Cuts somewhere else? Compensation changes? Benefits? Hiring freezes that turned into something more permanent? An acquisition? A sale?

Everyone had a theory.

And underneath all of it, there was this strange tension created by the way the company operated. The more information was held tightly at the top, the more it leaked sideways through conversations, assumptions, and half-confirmed details.

That’s the irony of running a company this way.

The tighter you try to control information, the less control you actually have over how people understand what’s happening.

If anything, more transparency would have created less speculation, not more.

Instead, people were left piecing things together on their own, trying to decide what to believe, and whether the very clear statement that “we’re not doing layoffs” was something to actually rely on.

And then the day came.

The Layoff - Clowns Running a Circus

And then it happened. In the WORST possible way - A one-way Zoom call.

An email. And in about 4 to 5 minutes, it was over.

I understand the appeal of doing layoffs this way. It’s efficient. It’s controlled. It avoids a lot of uncomfortable conversations all at once.

It’s also one of the most impersonal ways you can possibly handle something like this.

I’ve been part of every role for a lot of layoffs in my career. More than I’d like. I’ve seen them done well, I’ve seen them done poorly, and I’ve seen the difference it makes when leadership actually shows up for the people they’re impacting.

One of the first CEOs I ever worked with had to lay off around 40 people. He insisted on being in every single conversation. He wanted to hear it all, the anger, the disappointment, the frustration. His view was simple: if his decisions were taking away someone’s livelihood, the least he could do was sit there and face it.

That stayed with me.

I’ve worked at companies three or four times the size of Epic, and we still did layoffs in one-on-one conversations. It takes longer. It’s harder. It’s uncomfortable.

It’s also the right way to do it.

What happened here felt like the opposite.

People who had been loyal to the company for years were reduced to a calendar event and a follow-up email. There was no space for questions, no space for reaction, no space for any kind of real acknowledgment of what was happening.

And this was after months of being told layoffs weren’t happening.

That part matters.

The reassurances, the public statements, the confidence that people had been given that their jobs were safe, now callously dismissed while you and one of your executives tried to find the right tones of somber. All I could think of was “Clowns leading a Circus” as I remembered the size of the bonuses you had received just a month or two ago after cutting so many others by more than 50%.

Then, in a matter of minutes, that was gone.

The messaging afterwards made things worse.

We were told this wasn’t about performance. But anyone who had been paying attention to how the performance system had just played out could see the overlap. Certain groups were hit harder than others, and it didn’t take much to connect that back to the very system that had just confused everyone a few months earlier. That stupid forced distribution and nonsensical 7 point rating scale that we had to hurredly stuff everyone into - that was what drove your decisions.

There were also immediate process issues.

People were told one thing about access, and then locked out almost instantly. Timelines didn’t line up. Basic expectations around how this should work weren’t met. It felt rushed, inconsistent, and poorly coordinated.

And beyond the logistics, there was just the tone of it all.

People trying to pack up their things, say goodbye, process what just happened, while being treated like they needed to move quickly and quietly through it. Employees who had defended the company, believed in it, built their careers there, suddenly feeling like they were being managed out of a building instead of supported through a major life event. Security was actually walking people out like these people were criminals.

This was done in October, the worst possible time to try and be a job seeker in an already volatile market and you still tried to make it about how hard this was for you.

I remember sitting there thinking how far off this was from what it should have been.

Not perfect. Not painless. But better than this.

Because at the end of the day, these weren’t just “roles” being eliminated.

These were people.

And they deserved to be treated like it.

You Ruined Your Reputation

People had believed in you.

Not just in the company, but in you. They defended the way things worked. They explained away the quirks. They trusted that even if things were a little different, there was intention behind it, and that when it mattered, you would do right by them. A lot of those impacted were gold-card members of the protected “Tim’s employee” - poor bastards.

You told people they were safe.

You said it more than once. You reinforced it internally and publicly. In a time where layoffs were happening everywhere, you positioned Epic as the exception. Your executive minions all reinforced the message all while being paid a kings ransom to lie to everyones face.

And then you did layoffs.

That alone would have been difficult. But what made it worse was how it was handled after.

There wasn’t real accountability. There wasn’t a moment where you clearly owned the gap between what was said and what actually happened. There wasn’t a direct acknowledgment of the position employees were put in by trusting those statements.

Instead, the messaging shifted into business language. “Right-sizing.” Product decisions. Market positioning. You handled the lack of accountability with perceive generosity. You don’t have to feel bad if you give people half a years salary, right?

That might make sense in a boardroom.

It doesn’t land the same way with the people who just lost their jobs after being told they wouldn’t.

That’s the part that changes how people see you.

Companies do layoffs all the time. It’s not new, and people understand that.

What they don’t forget is being told one thing, organizing their lives around it, and then experiencing something completely different.

You didn’t just run a layoff - You broke trust.

And once that happens, everything else starts to shift. Internally, externally, quietly at first, and then all at once. People stop giving you the benefit of the doubt. They stop explaining things away. They stop believing that what they’re being told now will hold later.

That’s not a small thing.

That’s your reputation - and it may take years, but it will catch up to you.

More and More Lies...

Getting laid off is one thing. Being the only HRBP filled me with a mixture of pride and disgust - what came after made it worse.

There was a lot of talk about how “generous” the severance was. And to be fair, parts of it were better than what many companies offer. I’m not ignoring that.

But even there, things weren’t clean.

There was confusion around what was actually severance versus what was tied to WARN. Questions around benefits, COBRA timing, what was being covered and for how long. People trying to make real financial and medical decisions without clear answers.

That shouldn’t be complicated.

It was.

We were given access to an outplacement service that, provided laughably low-value support. Generic advice, outdated guidance, nothing that really reflected how hiring actually works right now. I ended up helping a large number of impacted employees myself, walking through resumes, job search strategy, just trying to give people something practical to work with. When I asked, neither the CFO or CHRO could “remember” how much you paid (wasted) for that nonsense.

That wasn’t my job anymore, but it felt necessary.

There were also basic process issues that just kept popping up.

Requests for employment records going unanswered. Confusion around equipment returns and how that tied to severance processing even though you guys claimed otherwise. People getting different answers depending on who they spoke to. Delays that didn’t need to happen. And of course that time where benefits were shut off for all of us accidentally.

This wasn’t a well-planned layoff followed by a clean, thoughtful transition as much as your head of HR claimed otherwise in our little fireside chat a month later.

It was rushed, inconsistent, and reactive, all the way through.

And when something this significant is handled that way, it reinforces everything people were already starting to question.

Who the F**k Planned This Layoff?

I’ve been part of enough layoffs at this point that I understand what a well-planned one looks like.

This wasn’t that.

When I looked at who was impacted, a lot of the decisions didn’t make sense. Not in a subjective way, in a structural way.

There were deep cuts into infrastructure teams that were already stretched thin. In some cases, you removed people who were directly tied to keeping core functions running, or who had knowledge that isn’t easy to replace. You created gaps in places where there was no redundancy to begin with.

There were also decisions that didn’t seem aligned with performance, impact, or engagement. Some of the people who were cut were strong performers, highly engaged, and deeply invested in the company. At the same time, there were areas where it felt like decisions were influenced by politics, legacy structures, or just a lack of clear visibility into how teams actually operated. Naturally the diversity of those impacted, and the ones that had active sexual harassment claims, the ones that were talking about unionizing all somehow made it on the list.

A well-run layoff isn’t just about reducing headcount - its spending time in understanding how the organization actually functions, where dependencies exist, where risk lives, and how changes in one area ripple into others.

That requires coordination. It requires input from people who understand the business at multiple levels. It requires HRBPs, finance, and leadership actually working together to map impact before decisions are finalized.

It didn’t feel like that happened here.

It felt disconnected.

Like different parts of the organization were making decisions without a full picture of how those decisions would affect everything else, many of the decisions were obviously personal. And when that happens, you don’t just lose people, you lose continuity, you lose stability, and you create more work for the people who remain.

Which leads to the next problem.

Because layoffs don’t just reduce a company - especially the first one, they reshape it.

And if you don’t understand what you’re reshaping, you’re going to feel it pretty quickly.

What Will Likely Happen - HR predictions

When you run a layoff like this, the impact doesn’t stop with the people who left.

It carries forward.

The first thing you lose is trust. Not just from the people who were impacted, but from the people who stayed. The ones who were told they were safe, watched what happened, and are now recalibrating how much they believe anything they hear going forward.

That changes behavior quickly.

People start looking. Quietly at first, then less quietly. Not always because they want to leave, but because they don’t want to be caught off guard again. The sense of stability is gone, and once that’s gone, everything else feels a little more temporary.

You also create an attrition domino.

Layoffs don’t just remove a percentage of the workforce, they trigger additional exits. Some out of fear, some out of frustration, some because the workload shifts in ways that aren’t sustainable. Teams that were already thin get thinner. High performers who have options start exploring them.

At the same time, the work doesn’t slow down.

So now you have fewer people, in some cases the wrong people, trying to maintain or increase output, while also processing what just happened. That’s where you start to see burnout, shortcuts, missed opportunities, and a general slowdown in anything that actually moves the business forward.

You also lose something less visible but just as important: engagement.

When people feel like decisions are made without clarity, without consistency, and without honesty, they stop investing the same way. They still do their jobs, but the extra effort, the creativity, the ownership, that starts to fade.

And all of this compounds. And unless you get a large infusion or angel investment, you wlll see this over the next 18 months.

Because if the underlying issues that led to the layoff aren’t addressed, the same patterns keep showing up. The same decision-making gaps, the same lack of alignment, the same reliance on control instead of structure.

From the outside, things might look stable for a while.

Inside, it’s a different story.

And eventually, that gap closes.

My Comprehensive HR Assessment and Recommendations

A lot of what happened and will happen, especially in the next 3-5 years is avoidable. Consider this my parting gift to Epic with my hopes that you and your leaders read it and understand the positions you are in.

If I were sitting in your seat, or advising someone who was, a few things would be very clear.:

• 1. You have to start by actually listening to the people you hired.

You brought in experienced leaders across Finance, HR, and other functions, and then didn’t fully use them. At this scale, you don’t get to rely on instinct and proximity to the business. You need structure, you need expertise, and you need to trust the people who have done this before.

• 2. The obsession with keeping everything at the top has to go.

It doesn’t create control, it creates confusion. It slows decisions down, it strips managers of the ability to lead, and it forces people to operate without the context they need to do their jobs well. Transparency isn’t a risk at this point, it’s a requirement.

• 3. What is your product and brand?

There’s also a bigger issue underneath all of this that I don’t think gets talked about enough, and it ties directly into the decisions you’ve been making.

Fortnite is an incredible product. It captured lightning in a bottle, built a massive player base, and created a level of cultural relevance that most companies never get close to, having this happen during a 3 year global pandemic solidified its place in history.

But games like that don’t stay at that level forever without evolving in a very real way.

Yes, you’ve added modes, events, collaborations, new mechanics, all of that matters. But at its core, it’s still anchored in the same experience loop. And over time, that kind of loop starts to lose people. Not all at once, but gradually.

That’s just how these things work.

What sets something apart long term isn’t just iteration, it’s diversification and your running a company like a product that has already proved itself instead of one that always has to, while you purchase other products in domains in which you dont have strength, profit or experience.

There’s a reason companies like Activision and EA don’t rely on a single title or a single experience to carry the business. Call of Duty isn’t just one game. Battlefield isn’t just one version. They build ecosystems, they expand into different types of experiences, they give players multiple ways to stay engaged.

Because eventually, any one format starts to plateau.

And when that happens, if too much of your business is tied to that one format, you feel it everywhere.

That’s what makes some of the decisions here harder to understand.

You’re making very large, very public bets, fighting (by your own definition) needlessly expensive battles, and operating with a level of confidence that suggests the core product can absorb it indefinitely

Maybe it can for a while.

But if the underlying experience doesn’t continue to evolve in a way that keeps pace with how fast gaming is shifting, especially as more games move toward broader, more immersive, more varied experiences, that margin gets thinner.

And when that margin gets thinner, the cost of getting other decisions wrong gets a lot higher.

• 4. Your approach to compensation and performance needs to be rebuilt.

Managers should be able to understand, explain, and stand behind decisions that impact their teams. Right now, too much of that sits behind a wall that no one can see through, and that erodes trust faster than almost anything else. Your HRBPs are symbolic without any ability to make real impact. All of this needs an overhaul. I suggest looking into Netflix’s model of open feedback and communication - Epic was essentially the exact opposite.

• 5. You also need to take a hard look at your executive team.

At this stage, running a company at this size, across this level of complexity, requires a different level of leadership. If there’s a gap, you fix it. Your leadership choices left a lot to be desired and seemed more based on loyalty and personal relationship and not expertise.

• 6. And finally, if layoffs are on the table, you say it.

You don’t position yourself as the exception just to turn around and do it anyway. You don’t protect morale in the short term by creating a much bigger breach of trust later.

You tell people the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, and you handle the outcome in a way that reflects the fact that these are people, not line items.

None of this is easy - but it is what competent business leaders do.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t think you set out to build a company that operates this way.

I think a lot of what happened came from believing that what worked before would keep working, that instinct and conviction could carry more weight than structure and expertise, and that people would continue to trust the direction even when the signals started to shift.

But at this scale, that stops working and the cracks in your infrastructure are even larger while you financially reward low value behavior.

What you build starts to reflect not just your intentions, but your blind spots. And when those go unaddressed for long enough, they don’t stay contained, they show up everywhere. In your product decisions, in your culture, and eventually in moments like this.

The layoffs weren’t the root problem - They were the result of poor leadership, and unless you start correcting that now, you will be in this exact spot within the next few years, if not next year.

There’s still time to fix it. To be more direct, more honest, more willing to listen, and more willing to let people who know what they’re doing actually do it.

But that requires a level of accountability that hasn’t really shown up yet.

And without that, this won’t be the last time something like this happens.

Peace Out!

~Dan

There is a famous saying - “you can never be rich working for someone else” - while the term “rich” may be a bit subjective, the truth is you can actually earn a very good living in Corporate America by understanding how it all works. Easier said than done given how obscure and maddeningly non communicative companies can be about how they think and believe in compensation, so Im here to pull back the curtain, unlock the safe and show you 7 surprising things you likely didn’t know about compensation that you can USE TO YOUR ADVANTAGE.

First, if you don’t know me - I am Daniel “DanFromHR” Space, an HRBP for almost 20 years with the privilege of working for industry leaders such as AMEX, Disney, WebMD, EA Games, Spotify and Epic - in 2020 I retired from corporate america to become a content creator, author and speaker and have since helped hundreds of thousands of people understand how all of this works.

Within my roles I not only partnered with but have helped design compensation models for all types of business and industries and its one of my favorite areas of HR. Im also very confident in the subject since im the one that manages the annual appraisal cycle and all new hires.

So lets get into the list!

1: Embrace Stoicism (Be Emotionless About This)

One of the most frustrating aspects of corporate compensation is how unfair it often feels.

Why is the person who started two years after you making $20,000 more? Why are you rated a five but receive only a 1% salary increase, especially during a period of high inflation? Why didn’t anyone tell you that you could negotiate a sign-on bonus when the new hire next to you received $10,000?

These moments trigger understandable frustration. But the people who earn the most within corporate systems learn to look at these situations differently. Instead of reacting emotionally, they study them.

High earners notice what feels unfair, but they analyze why it happened. They learn the rules, incentives, and timing behind compensation decisions and then apply that knowledge to their own advantage.

In other words, they stop thinking like employees and start thinking like the business.

Removing emotion from compensation decisions allows you to see the system clearly. And once you understand the system, you can begin to use it.

2: There’s a Method to the Madness: Market Surveys

Corporate compensation can feel confusing. Sometimes it feels arbitrary. Other times it can feel frustrating or even insulting.

In reality, most companies rely on a large amount of market data when they make compensation decisions. Many organizations purchase detailed compensation surveys that track salary ranges across industries, company sizes, and geographic regions. These datasets are expensive and typically only available to corporations.

Using this information, companies build a compensation philosophy that guides how they pay people across the organization. Leadership decides which roles they want to invest in more heavily and where they are comfortable paying closer to the market average or even below it.

An important thing to understand is that not all roles are treated the same.

Companies consistently pay more for roles that sit closest to the product, revenue, or core technology. In technology companies, engineering roles are a good example. Many organizations will pay far above the broader market to attract strong engineering talent because those employees directly build the product.

Other functions such as operations, finance, or support roles may not see the same level of investment. The pay for those roles is often closer to market averages and sometimes lower.

Once you understand that companies allocate compensation strategically, many of these decisions start to make more sense. The system becomes easier to navigate when you recognize how organizations prioritize different kinds of work and most importantly how to navigate to situations that are far more lucrative.

3: The Six Pillars/Elements That Impact Compensation

Compensation is never determined by a single factor. In most corporate environments, pay is shaped by several variables that work together. I often think of these as the six pillars of compensation. The more each pillar is optimized, the closer someone gets to what I call the golden circle of earnings.

A good example is software engineering. It’s common to hear stories about engineers only a year or two out of college comparing offers in the $300,000 to $400,000 range at major technology companies. That level of compensation is not accidental. It happens when all of the pillars align.

Some of the pillars are easy to see. Job role and geographic location are two of the most obvious. Certain roles command higher salaries, and certain markets pay more than others.

Other pillars are more subtle. One of them is job family alignment with industry. The same role can be paid very differently depending on the industry where it sits. A finance role inside a low-margin industry will often have a very different pay range than the same role inside a high-growth accounting company.

Industry profit margin is another important factor. Industries that generate larger margins tend to support higher compensation structures across the board. Companies operating in those environments simply have more room to pay - a great example is that B2B companies usually perform at much higher margins than their B2C counterparts.

When several of these pillars line up at the same time, compensation rises quickly. Understanding how those pillars interact helps explain why some roles and industries consistently produce higher earnings than others.

4: Moving Away From Static to Mixed Model Pay

Many people think about compensation as a single number. Their salary becomes the entire conversation.

That mindset can limit earnings potential more than people realize.

It is common to see professionals reach the $200,000 to $300,000 range within ten years of their career and feel that they have reached the top of the ladder. In reality, that number may represent only a portion of what their compensation could be in the right structure.

Many companies operate on what can be described as a mixed model compensation structure. In these environments, salary is only one component. Employees may also receive an annual bonus and equity grants as part of their regular compensation package.

The table above shows how a TC (Total Compensation) arrangement highly favors static salary for individual contributors at $85,000 - but will heavily index towards mixed variables such as bonuses and equities at higher levels that a $240,000 salary is just 40% of what can be earned.

Equity can come in several forms, including restricted stock units or stock options. These grants are often awarded as part of the role itself rather than tied to extraordinary performance. Over time, those equity grants can grow into a meaningful portion of total earnings.

This is why you will often hear about employees at certain companies whose total compensation far exceeds their base salary. The structure of their pay allows multiple components to work together.

Making intentional moves toward companies and roles that use mixed model compensation can dramatically change long-term earning potential. Within corporate environments, this shift from a single salary to a multi-component compensation package is one of the most reliable ways to increase overall earnings.

5: Learn the Language: Comp(a)-Ratio/CR

One of the most important compensation terms inside most companies is something employees almost never hear about: comp ratio.

Comp ratio is one of the main ways organizations measure where someone’s pay sits within the expected range for a role. Without that context, a salary number by itself does not tell you very much. Someone might say they earn $85,000 and feel overpaid or underpaid, but the number has little meaning unless it is compared to the role’s internal pay structure.

Comp ratio provides that reference point.

It works as a measurement against 1.0 or 100%, which represents the expected salary for someone who has reached full mastery of the role. To calculate comp ratio, you divide the employee’s salary by the role’s mastery point.

For example, if someone earns $88,000 in a role where the mastery point is $100,000, their comp ratio would be 0.88. If someone earns $105,000 in the same role, their comp ratio would be 1.05.

Companies pay close attention to where employees fall within this range. Most organizations prefer not to have employees below about 0.8, since that suggests someone may be significantly underpaid relative to the role. Many companies expect employees to sit around 0.9 as they grow into the position. As someone approaches 1.0, they are considered close to full proficiency.

Once comp ratios move too far above the mastery point, compensation teams often start to worry about internal equity across the team. For that reason, companies tend to monitor ratios above 1.2 carefully.

Understanding comp ratio changes how compensation conversations happen. When employees know the terminology and ask where they sit within the range, the discussion becomes more informed and more productive. It also shows management that the employee understands how the system works.

That knowledge alone can lead to much stronger conversations about pay

6: The Two Moments That Matter Most: New Hire Offers and Annual Appraisals

When it comes to compensation, two moments shape your salary more than anything else: the new hire offer and the annual performance appraisal.

These are the points where meaningful adjustments actually happen.

The highest earners inside organizations are rarely the people constantly advocating for themselves in isolation. The strongest compensation outcomes tend to happen when managers are advocating on their behalf. Creating that dynamic starts much earlier than most people think.

It often begins during the new hire process.

Many candidates focus only on the number that appears in the offer. A better approach is to ask questions that help you understand how the company thinks about pay. Asking how the offer compares to the full salary range for the role, how the company defines its compensation philosophy, or whether the organization shares comp ratio internally can reveal valuable information about where the offer sits.

Even simple questions can open productive conversations. Asking a recruiter or hiring manager, “If you were in my position, would you accept this offer or continue negotiating?” can lead to surprisingly candid responses.

The second important moment is the annual performance appraisal. This is when most companies evaluate raises, promotions, and adjustments across the organization.

Employees who manage compensation well tend to keep their managers well informed about their contributions throughout the year. They regularly discuss performance, growth, and future goals. They also remain comfortable discussing compensation as part of those conversations.

By the time the appraisal cycle arrives, their manager already has a clear case prepared. Instead of reacting to a request for a raise, the manager is able to advocate for it.

That distinction can make a meaningful difference in long-term earnings.

7: Relentlessly and Guiltlessly Prioritize Yourself

The highest earners tend to approach their careers with a high degree of honesty about how the corporate system works. They are comfortable putting their own financial interests first.

That mindset shapes many of their decisions.

They do not allow themselves to be pressured by guilt or sentiment about staying longer than makes sense financially. They understand that companies make decisions based on business needs, and they treat their own careers with the same level of clarity.

When the market shifts, they respond to it.

It is common to see professionals move to another company after three or four years for a compensation increase of 15 to 20 percent, even when the role itself is largely similar. Lateral moves can produce meaningful salary growth simply because market demand has changed.

They are also careful not to internalize ideas that blur the professional relationship. Messaging about companies being a “family” may sound positive, but compensation decisions remain business decisions. High earners keep that distinction clear.

They remain focused on protecting their financial trajectory. They pay attention to market demand for their skills, they monitor compensation trends, and they stay open to opportunities that increase their long-term earning potential.

Career movement every three to four years can also expand experience across companies, teams, and industries. Over time that breadth often increases both market value and negotiating power.

In Summary

Approaching a career with this level of clarity removes a lot of frustration from compensation decisions. Instead of reacting emotionally, high earners look at the landscape honestly and make the moves that benefit them the most.

Corporate compensation often feels confusing because most people are never taught how it actually works. Once you understand the mechanics, the patterns become much easier to see. Salary structures, comp ratios, mixed model pay, and market timing all follow systems that companies use every day.

If you’d like to go deeper into these concepts, I regularly teach corporate compensation classes* through a cohort system on Maven that walk through how companies structure pay, how to read compensation ranges, and how to negotiate offers more effectively - those who work with me usually see at least 20-29% increase in TC within a year and a half.

I’ve also put together a free 45 min lightning lesson that breaks down several of the ideas from this article in a short, practical format. You can start there, and if you want to explore the topic further just let me know!

Additionally I have both paid and free guides, explanations, playlists and templates on Compensation that can be located here*

*Anyone who knows me knows I am egalitarian to a fault. If cost is ever an issue, please contact me. I am allowed to offer a limited number of scholarships and discounts to people and always want to ensure cost is not a barrier to accessing me or my information.

Get that bag!

Daniel “DanFromHR” Space

I vanished.

For weeks I disappeared from work, social media, and even normal communication with friends. What follows is what happened, what I learned, and the warning I want to leave you with.

None of us are invincible.

A “Normal” Illness This is Not

I’m not someone who gets sick very often. When I do, it’s usually the typical cold or flu. Miserable for a few days, sure, but also oddly restorative. A low-grade fever forces you to slow down. Your body says “wait, something is wrong”, sets you on fire, hits pause.

You sleep, watch Netflix, drink ginger ale, eat soup, and recover.

That’s what I assumed was happening in the last week of January. Charlotte had just been hit with a rare weekend snowstorm. My roommate and friend, Jorge, and I spent the weekend watching movies and enjoying the kind of quiet winter lockdown that makes you slow down and just enjoy the natural seasonal shifts while our other roommate and friend Christian visited family in Florida.

A few days later I started feeling off. By Sunday night I was weak, coughing, and feverish. I texted work that I’d be offline for a couple of days and went to bed.

Then things got strange.

For days I barely woke up. I would regain consciousness for a few minutes, take medication, drink something, and fall back asleep. Jorge later told me he had come into my room several times to check my temperature. I had no memory of it.

At one point I attended a brief Teams meeting that lasted nine minutes. It felt like running a marathon just to stay awake. When it ended, I took some medicine and fell asleep.

I woke up almost three days later. A week into being sick, I realized something was very wrong. One night I ordered food and medicine. When the delivery arrived, I stood up to answer the door and discovered I couldn’t walk more than a few steps. I collapsed in the hallway, coughing and gasping for air.

Eventually I crawled to the door. Sitting in my desk chair, I wheeled myself over just to hand the driver my passport for the cough medicine. Then I dragged myself back to bed.

That was the moment it stopped feeling like a normal illness.

Intervention

By that point Jorge was genuinely scared. He and our other roommate Christian contacted my family because something clearly wasn’t right.

From the outside it looked like I had locked myself in my room for nearly two weeks. My family assumed I was depressed as this had coincidentally fallen on my Mother’s birthday. I didn’t even clock the date, I was in oblivion.

Eventually I agreed to visit a clinic, where I was given antibiotics for what they thought might be a bronchial infection. But the symptoms didn’t improve. If anything, they were getting worse.

Walking across the house felt like climbing a mountain.

Finally one evening I ordered an Uber and took myself to the emergency room.

The Diagnosis

The staff at the ER immediately took things seriously which scared me. My heart rate was extremely high and my breathing was unstable. Within a few hours they had done scans and tests.

The diagnosis surprised me: Pneumonia.

Somehow what I thought was a stubborn flu had become a serious infection in my lungs. But that wasn’t the only concern. My heart had gone into a dangerous rhythm known as “flutter,” likely triggered by the stress on my body.

Instead of going home after a few hours, I was admitted.

The Indignity of it All

I had not been to an emergency room since 2018, and that was only to be with my Mom. Prior to that, 2013 was the last time in which I had a sudden kidney stone. I was not prepared for ICU containment, my clothes forcibly removed, a rough and 6 handed bath with alcohol wipes, a bed prepared, wires, plugs, needless and thermometers stuck in my arms, mouth and nose at all hours of the day and night.

Anyone who hasn’t spent time in a hospital may not fully understand how quickly you lose control of your life.

The strange thing is that the smallest comforts suddenly felt enormous. A single cold ginger ale after hours of thirst felt like luxury. When your body stops cooperating, you realize how fragile independence actually is.

It was 3:30am and I felt like I wanted to cry. There is something exhausting and in-dignifying when you are just removed of all agency, from your clothes and your freedom and even getting a godamned drink.

From the endless interruptions while you lay in a bed that is not designed for you to rest in and your back and shoulder ache and you cant get comfortable and you are like a zombie watching Friends marathon and silently screaming at the commercials.

That became the first time of many that I used gratitude to get me through it. I was in the ER, I was being given meds, I felt the untapped joy of drinking cold ginger ale when i was parched, I was going to be treated and fixed. I texted Jorge that Id be home over the weekend and while angry I didnt wait for him, he was relieved that I was in the ER.

My Sentencing

My Dad and sister began visiting me daily, which became the highlight of my otherwise monotonous existence. Every day I would ask the doctors the same question: “When can I go home?”

And every day I received the same answer: Not yet.

The problem was administration. I needed an electrocardiogram, a brief shock to the heart the helps reset the rhythm, but between beds, priorities, transfers and new cases, my moving day went from Sunday afternoon to “unknown.”

So I waited. And waited. And waited.

By Wednesday morning I had been in the ICU for days. My arms were swollen from IV lines. My oxygen levels had been set incorrectly more than once. At one point I needed help getting to the bathroom and no one came for nearly an hour.

I was also given diuretics without anyone explaining what they were. If you’ve never taken them before, allow me to explain the experience: imagine suddenly needing to pee every fifteen minutes with the urgency of a fire alarm. Day and night.

Visitors, nurses, doctors, interruptions, wires, alarms. The numbers on the monitors improved slightly but never enough for the magic word: discharge.

By Thursday I had had enough.

I told the doctors I would happily continue treatment as an outpatient. I didn’t have insurance, I was sitting in an ICU waiting for a bed somewhere else, and I had people at home who could help care for me.

I wanted my clothes. My bathroom. My home. I wanted to fucking sleep. I wanted my bed.

In short, I wanted my freedom.

The doctor reluctantly agreed to discharge me Against Medical Advice.

For the first time in days, I felt hopeful. Then the next team came in.

They calmly informed me that if I left, they would not prescribe the medications I needed to survive the next stage of treatment.

The nurse took my hand as she explained it. I pulled it away.

They asked if I could wait one more day while they tried to arrange the cardiac procedure in-house. My father texted and told me to wait as well. I silently nodded while giving them the finger under the hospital blanket.

The Transfer

That evening Jorge arrived expecting to take me home. Instead he found me still trapped in the ICU explaining that my escape attempt had failed. We talked for a while, catching up on life outside the hospital walls. Christian was coming home soon, work messages were piling up, and the outside world suddenly felt very far away.

Then there was a knock. Three staff members rolled in a new stretcher.

A bed had opened up! I was being transferred to the cardiac unit after all.

Leaving the ICU felt like being released from psychological confinement. The cardiac center was technically part of a different hospital building, so they transported me by ambulance.

Twice during that ride I was briefly outside and when the cold air hit my face. Wind moved across the stretcher. After nearly a week indoors, it felt like stepping back onto another planet. The cardiac floor itself felt like a luxury hotel compared to the ICU. There was an actual bathroom. A proper bed. A window. No strange angles or constant alarms.

Most importantly, I was told my procedure would happen the following morning.

Since I hadn’t eaten all day, I was allowed to order food. My sister brought Panera and I devoured a chicken salad sandwich, soup, and an orange scone like a man who had just been rescued from sea. That was when I realized how much weight I had lost and how my appetite had shrunk

Everything about that night felt better. I no longer needed oxygen. My medications were now pills instead of IVs. I finally slept for a few hours like a normal person.

Then they handed me an iPad with my medical chart and it listed my target discharge date. March 3rd. FOUR MORE DAYS??!

Mount Everest

The next morning I made my position very clear.

I had originally been told I would leave Wednesday. I had already been held over on Thursday, and I was not staying past Friday. If they couldn’t do the procedure that day, I would do it outpatient. The only reason I had stayed was because they told me it would happen that morning.

Fortunately the cardiology doctors were far more courteous than the ICU team. They listened carefully, even if they didn’t love what I was saying. They explained again how dangerous the heart flutter was and how the solution, an electrical cardioversion, was actually a very fast procedure with an extremely high success rate.

They respected my wishes, but there was one final obstacle before they could do it.

Before resetting my heart rhythm, they needed to make sure there were no blood clots that could dislodge and cause a stroke when the heart restarted. Normally this is checked by putting a small camera down your throat while you’re under twilight sedation. Instead, they decided to run a CT scan with contrast.

This turned out to be the last boss battle of my hospital stay.

Unlike the earlier CAT machine I had endured in the ER, this one was far tighter and far louder. Because of the images they needed and the contrast timing, I would have to remain completely still for nearly twenty minutes.

They positioned me with my arms above my head.

Naturally, this is when my neck, nose, and scalp decided to become the itchiest parts of my body in human history.

And of course I couldn’t scratch.

The machine roared to life inches from my face. I couldn’t see the ceiling, couldn’t see the room, just the circular mouth of the scanner hovering over me like a mechanical halo.

A calm voice came through the speaker.

• “Breathe.”

• “Take a deep breath.”

• “Hold it.”

• “Don’t breathe.”

Somewhere around minute twelve, I made the tactical error of attempting a quick scratch when the machine slid me briefly out of the tunnel.

The technician immediately scolded me like I had just tried to escape a museum exhibit.

So I laid there, hands above my head, resisting the growing waves of claustrophobic panic while the machine thundered around me.

Finally they injected the contrast dye. Warmth spread through my body almost instantly, like someone had poured a cup of tea directly into my bloodstream.

“Only one more image,” the technician said through the speaker. “You’re doing great.”

Sixty-one seconds later it was over. I was wheeled back to my room around 10:30 that morning, exhausted but relieved.

The Heart Reboot

Around two in the afternoon they came to get me.

Originally the doctors hadn’t been sure they could fit the procedure into the schedule that day, but apparently my determination to escape the hospital had accelerated things. They found an opening and decided to perform the cardioversion after all.

By this point I had also been introduced to a completely new category of medical specialist I had never heard of before: rhythm doctors.

That is not the official title, of course, but it might as well be. Their entire job is to study the electrical rhythm of your heart, listen to the patterns, and decide what the beat should be doing. They monitor it, interpret it, and when necessary, fix it.

Basically, cardiologists with a DJ booth for your heartbeat. Mine had been watching the monitors for days while my heart stubbornly refused to cooperate.

Now it was time for the reset.

For those unfamiliar with the process, the technical term is electrical cardioversion.

The simpler description is: they shock your heart back into rhythm.

When they first explained the procedure earlier in the week, I lightened the mood. Instead of endlessly waiting for a bed, could I just call Jorge and have him come in with his car and jumper cables. We’d pop the hood, grab the paddles, and fix the problem in the parking lot?

The real version was a little more civilized.

They wheeled me into the procedure room where the rhythm team was already preparing the equipment. Pads were placed on my chest, monitors connected, machines humming quietly around the room while the anesthesiologist explained what would happen next. I had only “been under” three times in my life. I was both terrified and beyond excited - the concept of induced sleep was fascinating for me.

It felt oddly ceremonial, like raising your hand in class before being excused from consciousness. There were 8 doctors, medical techs, nurses and professionals. I felt safe and secure. I made jokes, they joked back and then the head doctor called order and read out my stats, information and what we’d be doing. I signed an ipad electronically and the anesthesiologist put someting in my iv and propped my hand up and said “keep it up until you are asleep, it will take about 10 seconds” - I don’t remember counting past 8

The next thing I remember was waking up in recovery. A nurse leaned over and told me everything had gone perfectly. My heart rhythm had reset immediately. I looked at the screen and smiled. It was bleeping at a smooth 81. It had been between 109 and 160 for the last few days. I was glad I stayed. I watched the even rhythm with fascination as I dozed in and out of consciousness. Enjoying the nice easy shape of the 81 over and over again

The rhythm doctors had restored the beat.

Freedom!

When the doctor came to check on me around 4:30 that afternoon, he smiled before he even said anything.

“Normally we’d keep you another day for observation,” he said carefully.

Then he laughed.

“But I’ve heard about you.”

Apparently my reputation had traveled across departments.

He explained that medically it would be ideal if I stayed. at least another night, just to be safe. But he also knew he probably wasn’t going to win that argument. One last step remained before they could release me: an internal medicine doctor had to come review everything and sign the discharge paperwork.

She arrived not long after, and she made one final attempt.

She was calm, professional, and clearly very used to patients trying to leave early. She walked through every reason they preferred I stay longer: the pneumonia recovery, the heart rhythm stabilization, the risks of complications.

I listened patiently.

Then I responded with the same simple truth I had been repeating for days.

• My pneumonia had been treated.

• My heart had been reset.

• And I could do the rest of this outpatient.

• I was going home.

She pushed back a little more, but eventually even she seemed to recognize that the decision had already been made.

Before signing the paperwork she made me promise to follow up with both a pulmonologist and a cardiologist. I would need continued monitoring, medications, and checkups to make sure the pneumonia and the heart rhythm stayed under control.

I agreed immediately. Then she handed me the prescriptions. The cost of those six medications, without insurance, felt like another small medical event all by itself. But at that point I didn’t care. I would have paid twice that just to walk out of the building.

The nurses began removing the IV lines. For days my arms had been covered in tubes, needles, and tape. Being disconnected from everything felt incredible. No more machines, no more wires, no more feeling like a medical experiment pinned to a bed.

I was finally free of the pincushion. There was just one final challenge.

Actually leaving.

After nearly nine days of barely moving, walking through the hospital felt like navigating Mount Everest all over again. I moved slowly, stopping several times to sit and recover along the way. As I was leaving AMA, I was not entitled to help or a wheelchair.

Eventually I reached the exit and found a bench outside.

For the first time in over a week, I was just… outside. No monitors. No machines. No nurses waking me up. Just fresh air.

I sat there quietly, waiting for my Uber, feeling the wind and the cold air and realizing how extraordinary something as simple as being outside could feel. I felt waves of gratitude and a new found promise to not spend so much time inside.

When the Uber arrived, the driver immediately noticed I wasn’t exactly in peak condition. She was incredibly kind, helped me get settled, and let me roll the window down. The cold air rushing into the car felt like medicine.

When I got home, I walked inside and collapsed onto the couch in joy. Jorge rushed in and threw his arms around me and for the first time in weeks I finally felt safe. I wasn’t okay, not yet, but I was home.

Over the next few days he and Christian, who came home early to make sure I was okay helped me clean the room that had become ground zero for my illness. I had even ordered new sheets while I was in the hospital, and making the bed again felt strangely symbolic.

The room that had once felt like a sickroom suddenly felt like a sanctuary. After weeks of illness and a hospital stay that felt like it lasted a lifetime, sleeping in that bed for the first time felt like the final step back toward normal life.

For the last few days I’ve been recovering, slowly getting my strength back, taking my medications, and following up with the doctors who are now responsible for keeping my lungs and heart behaving properly.

Pneumonia is no joke. Even after treatment it can take weeks before your body feels like itself again.

Final Thoughts

I turn 47 in two months. Until this winter, I have been incredibly fortunate. No major health scares, no serious hospitalizations, nothing that forced me to confront the reality that my body could suddenly stop cooperating.

That illusion ended very quickly. What started as what I thought was a normal flu quietly turned into pneumonia, a dangerous heart rhythm, and a 9 day stay in the hospital. It happened gradually enough that I kept convincing myself it wasn’t serious.

I was wrong. One of the strangest realizations during all of this was how easily we ignore warning signs. We push through exhaustion. We assume things will pass. We tell ourselves we’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Sometimes tomorrow is fine but sometimes it isn’t.

Your health is the one thing in your life that you cannot negotiate with, outwork, or simply power through forever. When your body decides it needs your attention, it tends to make that point very clearly.

I was lucky. Lucky that my roommate paid attention when something was wrong. Lucky that my family pushed for help. Lucky that the doctors caught the problem when they did.

And lucky that I get to write this now.

So if there’s one thing I’d leave you with after this experience, it’s simple:

Pay attention to your body. Take symptoms seriously. Ask for help sooner than you think you need it. Because none of us are invincible.

And sometimes what feels like a “normal illness” is anything but.

Read more

For the last six years, I’ve had a strange relationship with January.

After leaving my last corporate role in 2019, I was never full-time employed or fully contracted at the end of the year. No company waiting for me. No inbox lighting up on January 2nd. No internal pressure to switch my status from “out” to “back.”

I was usually working on my own business, building products, writing, planning launches. There was effort involved, but it was self-directed. No one was counting on me in the traditional sense, and that made the end of the year feel essentially the same as the rest of the year, it was just colder.

I’d still take time off. Christmas, New Year’s Eve, time with family and friends. But there was no looming return date, no psychological whiplash. I didn’t realize how rare that had become.

This year was different.

For the first time in a long time, I was working full-time with one consulting opportunity, part-time with another, while also preparing for an updated business launch.

Both consulting engagements wrapped between December 15th and December 20th, which meant I suddenly had nearly three weeks with very little expectation, very little checking in, and no one waiting on me. I even made the decision to remove a very aggressive product goal I had set for myself during the end of 2025.

And only then did I realize how much I’d missed having something to step away from.

No emails to monitor. No new clients onboarded. No job seeker intake. No sense that someone, somewhere, needed me to move faster. I reconnected with my home, my family, my friends in a way that felt unfamiliar, almost indulgent. Not because I hadn’t wanted that before, but because I hadn’t given it to myself, I was floating on cloud 9, blissfully losing track of time between December 27 and January 3 and simply enjoying life.

Then Sunday came.

That deep, familiar dread I hadn’t felt in years showed up right on time. The kind that doesn’t scream, just hums under your skin. I had to gone to bed in casual relaxation at about 4am, and woke up with a very unfamiliar sensation at 2pm.

Dread.

Deep sustaining dread. Even after showering, running a few quick errands and eating, the dread only got worse. God I had forgotten this terrible feeling and anxiety. I eventually began opening my email. I looked at project plans. And instead of motivation, all I felt was the weight of “I didn’t do anything over the break.”

I felt that deep rooted sadness that I think marks the end of every year. The pure freedom from responsibility, the routines and rituals and generally festive joy from Thanksgiving onward, and all you start with is the essential sad dourness of January. The lights and decorations pulled down, presents long opened and forgotten for the first time in more than 6 years.

By Monday morning, I was anxious, restless, and fully aware that the holiday buffer was gone. Like so many people, I felt miserable returning to work.

But instead of forcing myself back into motion, I did something I haven’t done in January for a very long time. I chose myself deliberately.

I still did the work. Over the last 2 days, deadlines were met. Progress was made. But I refused to immediately collapse back into the cycle of reacting, scheduling, pushing, and pretending momentum equals clarity. I carved out four hours one night and three hours the next day with no agenda except reflection.

I asked myself questions that anxiety usually drowns out.

Am I actually happy in this consulting role? What about the other one? What mistakes did I make in my last launch, and what did I avoid admitting? What worked better than I expected? How much am I earning right now? How much do I want to earn? What resources could I invest in that have a real return, not just emotional reassurance?

What surprised me most was how energizing it felt.

The anxiety didn’t disappear, but it stopped running the show. Instead of turning into panic or avoidance, it became focus. Instead of rushing to “get back on track,” I used that unsettled feeling as fuel to design the track intentionally.

January doesn’t have to be about snapping back into productivity or proving you’re “on” again. It can be about orientation. About asking whether the direction you’re moving in still makes sense now that the noise has quieted.

If you’re feeling that familiar post-holiday dread right now, here’s what I’d encourage you to try: before you sprint, pause long enough to choose yourself on purpose. Even a few hours of honest reflection can change the entire trajectory of your year.

If you are having trouble, start with these questions!

• If you took one evening this week to prioritize clarity over urgency, what would you ask yourself first?

• January is loud about goals. What’s one question you’ve been avoiding that deserves space right now?

• Before the year fully accelerates, what would choosing you actually look like?

~Dan (Now on Substack!)

The HRBPs will launch in early 2026!!

To celebrate the launch, there is an exclusive pre-sale to access the official “HRBPS: The Official HRBP Field Guide” with 7 chapters ready for immediate download

If you want to work with me in a team, individual or cohort environment to focus on fast-tracking and changing your mindset to be a successful HRBP, check out the HRBP Performance Lab

If you want to join the HRBP’s community, please sign up here!

Daniel Space is an HRBP Senior Consultant, Speaker, Author and Evangelist for the HR function. He has worked for more than 20 years for companies like WebMD, PwC, EA Games, Spotify, Epic and AMEX before becoming a consultant. In 2020 he created his “DanFromHR” persona on social media to dispel common myths and misunderstandings about corporate america and is currently focused on empowering the untapped potential HRBPs can have

Andre entered my life around nine o’clock on a Friday night in June.

I had just moved into a rural house 4 months ago, almost 20 minutes outside of the central city. I hadn’t ordered food or deliveries. No routine visitors. No real sense of community yet. I barely knew my neighbors. So a knock at that hour wasn’t alarming, exactly, but it was enough to register. Unexpected. Curious.

When I opened the door, it was my next-door neighbor, Darien. We’d spoken before, but never for more than a minute at a time. He gave me a triple A battery the day I moved in and provided numbers for local landscapers.

He explained that there was a young man nearby who needed help. There was something wrong with his car. Darian didn’t speak Spanish, but he remembered that I did, or at least that the first person I lived with when I moved in had. He was hoping I might be able to talk to him.

(The person he was talking about was Maiker, who had lived with me for the first month in that home before heading to Miami, but that was a story for another day.)

That’s how Andre entered my life.

Once Darian left, Andre’s personality was immediately obvious. A big, open smile. Genuine relief. He was visibly thrilled that I could speak Spanish at all. Within a minute, he told me he was trying to learn English, that he wasn’t very good at it yet, but that he was working on it.

He talked quickly, cheerfully, generously. Details about his life poured out in a tone that was upbeat, friendly, almost celebratory. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t understand everything. While I do speak intermediate Spanish, the fast and upbeat way he spoke and the nuanced topic like car trouble are far beyond my vocabulary. Still, I could grasp the essentials.

There was a problem with his car, and it seemed like a flat tire.

What he was asking, eventually, was simple. Could he leave it in my driveway for a bit? He had a friend who was a good mechanic. The friend was about an hour and a half away. He just needed a safe place to wait. He would be fine just leaving it on the street as well, he didn’t want to weird me out or cause any discomfort.

He was careful. Almost overly so. He didn’t want to impose. He kept repeating that he didn’t want to cause any trouble. I said yes. He was relieved. He said he’d just wait outside and I heard him a few moments later talking to a friend in rapid Spanish and saying he wouldn’t be able to attend that nights festivities.

About fifteen minutes later, it started pouring.

I could see him through the window, dashing to the car, but already soaked and throwing a jacket on, trying not to look like he needed anything more. He waved when he saw me. I waved back. I opened the door and invited him in.

He hesitated. “Seguro? Seguro?”

Andre’s Trust

Yes. I was sure.

I live alone. I hadn’t had anyone in the house since Maiker had left in the third week of March. The company, unexpectedly, felt nice. My house was huge, 3 large bedrooms and one converted office, most of the house was still relatively barren and he looked around both impressed and confused at how little stuff there was. There was a strange delight I got that the guest bathroom had gotten it’s first use since Maiker left.

I put out some snacks and he came back, grinning and showing an almost childish optimism and sat down and began to eat voraciously. I had my laptop at the next table so used that to help us translate - that’s how I learned of his story

I learned his whole story. That he had two children. Twins. They lived in Colombia with their Mother. He came to the US to provide better for them. He had arrived 3 years ago in Texas, spent some time in West Virginia and was now in a small suburb about 40 min north of me. He worked 3 jobs, a warehouse worker, running errands and packages on Uber and taking care of elderly people. He loved it all and gleefully showed me pictures of the first time he drove the warehouse machinery.

His friend arrived an hour later and tried to change the tire. It didn’t work. The two of them stayed outside for over an hour. Eventually, Andre came back inside and said something that caught me off guard.

“I know we just met,” he said, “but I feel like I can trust you.”

He was leaving for a small family vacation the next day.

Would it be okay if he left his car in my driveway for a few days? He even offered to pay me.

I remember pausing. I know myself to be a kind person, but that’s not a small thing to ask of a stranger. I think he saw the hesitation on my face.

He immediately backtracked. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll figure something else out. This isn’t your problem, I shouldn’t have asked.”

I told him it might be better to call a tow truck, to make arrangements and he agreed.

He took my number and then texted to thank me and said he would call me as soon as they were heading back over to not wake me up or inconvenience me.

And then I thought about my driveway. Large. Empty. Completely unused.

If I could offer something that mattered to someone else, why not? What was the actual risk? If it allowed this person who clearly had 1051515 stresses in his life to relieve one burden by using something I have but don’t use, why not?

15 minutes later, I texted him to say it was fine, to not worry about picking it up immediately and to enjoy his vacation - I naturally fell into my normal humor joking about selling his car on the black market. He responded back with a joke that if I decided to sell it, at least give him 40%

The next morning, he left for Seattle. While he was there, he sent me photos. I connected him with someone who spoke Spanish who lived there who could help him get around, see the city, do tourist things.

It became an easy acquaintanceship. Light. Friendly. Effortless. I felt strangely compelled to make sure he was okay, I wanted him to love Seattle and to get to know it and experience the joys of it

He came back a few days later, and when he arrived he threw his arms around me in a huge hug. I couldn’t help but smile at the enthusiasm as he yelled “Daniel! My Friend!”. 10 minutes after we greeted each other, his mechanic friends arrived and they fixed the car. and within 20 minutes, they left. The next day, to thank me, Andre brought me a plate of home-cooked food, courtesy of his cousins and aunts that he lived with and a small drawing from his young cousin. I was touched.

That could have been the end of the story.

Instead, it became a new type of relationship.

Once or twice a week, he’d text me out of nowhere. Ask what I was doing. Send a funny picture. Ask for advice. A few times, he stopped by just to say hello. He introduced me to people and jokingly called me a guardian angel.

It was said with a laugh, but there was something earnest underneath it. I started to reciprocate. I sent him updates on ICE and DHS within our cities. I sent him connections to resources and several times I was his English advocate for when he called his mechanic. I got to know him more and started to meet his family as well. All hard-working cheerful people and felt touched to have our lives intersect.

Maldito Ladrones…

In early November while on a 2 hour meeting, Alexa kept informing me that Andre was calling and texting me. Call after call - my heart sank thinking it was the worst news and that he was in custody. When I finally connected with him, I could barely understand him - he was angry and scared and speaking miles per minute. He was close to my house and I told him to come over. He showed up on my door his face plainly showing betrayal that he didnt deserve.

He explained that someone he thought he could trust had connected him to a job. It was very hard work, endless manual labor. Yard work. Logs. Cutting. Filth. Nine to ten hours a day, every day, for 3 weeks. The hours were a little vague but it totaled up to almost $3900. The guy rounded-up to $4500 as an extra thank you for his vigilance and dedication.

He enthusiastically deposited it, eager to send money home to his kids, buy himself a few new shirts, replace a broken window his cousin accidentally caused, he had even said he wanted to buy food to cook a big dinner for me as a Thank You.

It bounced.

Positive it was just an error, he waited two days and texted the man who at first apologized and said it would clear within the next day, but sure enough the money never cleared. After that, his calls were ignored (likely blocked).

Andre called and texted several days with no response and decided to go to the mans house to ask him what had happened. When he knocked on the door, the guy showed him through the window that he had called ICE and that was when he had called me.

We first called the police who couldn’t help and he asked if we could go to a station together. I researched around and understood that this guy knew he was doing, the amount was RIGHT below the threshold for civil action. There was essentially nothing we could do that wasn’t without huge risk to him.

He had been in the U.S. for three years, legally on an asylum request. He had never had a problem. The idea that someone could exploit him so thoroughly, then put him at risk like that, shattered something and though I couldn’t understand all of his words, the look on his face told me everything.

We ended up talking about him, about his life and his journey. About walking 11 countries from Colombia through Central America in 4 months. About jungles and borders and fear and endurance. About the Darién Gap. He showed me photos and videos. He talked late and I could see he was exhausted. He asked if I minded if he napped briefly - he needed to rest, and within minutes he was passed out on my sofa.

(The route that Andres and 9 of his family had walked to apply for US residency - it had taken 4 months)

The Next Morning

A few hours later - his cousin called to say that ICE had come to the house - luckily the large majority of the house are legal residents, with only Andre and one cousin in asylum status. It had been a tense hour, but they were prepared and had all of their paperwork ready with a community attorney on speakerphone.

Andre realized he could no longer stay there - while he was of course worried about himself, he also could not stand that he had put his family in risk. They had gone to both of his other jobs and he knew he could no longer work at any of those locations either. He ended up with a friend of a family member about 2 hours away in a more remote city.

While he is trying to be productive, the experience rattled him. He watches the news, he’s seen what happens and while he tries to find work, he gets terrified. He’s also angry because that paycheck, the one that bounced, was supposed to go to his children. He has twins. A son and a daughter. They live in Colombia. He had taken care of them. Provided for them. And when he left, he did so knowing that saying goodbye meant years apart. He made that choice willingly, because he believed it was the only way to give them a better life.

That money was for them. We’ve been able to get him work here and there. Enough to keep going. Enough to survive. But survival isn’t the same as stability and we are trying to ensure he can not only become stable, but thrive.

Thank you!
Dan “DanFromHR” Space