Scaling With People Founders, Stop Treating HR Like a Dusty Filing Cabinet with Terri Wilson
What if your greatest competitive advantage is hiding in plain sight within your HR department? Terri Wilson, CEO of Doing HR Differently, joins me to shatter outdated notions of HR as merely a compliance function and reveals how transforming your people operations can become your rocket fuel for growth.
Terri passionately unpacks how most organizations drastically underutilize their HR teams by relegating them to transactional work when they could be driving strategic business objectives. Through compelling case studies and practical examples, we explore how progressive companies are flipping the script – investing in HR as a business driver rather than an administrative cost center.
We dive deep into leadership development, examining how founders often struggle with challenging personalities on their executive teams. Terri provides a powerful diagnostic question: how much of your management time are you spending on each direct report? If one difficult executive consumes 80% of your attention, what could you accomplish if that time were freed up for strategic initiatives? This conversation offers practical guidance for CEOs drowning in people problems.
The discussion takes a fascinating turn when we explore how organizations signal their true values through what behaviors they tolerate. Companies that allow high performers to behave badly while delivering results are sending unmistakable messages about priorities – regardless of what their stated values might claim. Your employees are watching this disconnect, making it impossible to build authentic culture without addressing these contradictions.
Perhaps most valuable is our exploration of scaling challenges. Terri reveals how systems that work perfectly at 100 employees become critical bottlenecks at 500, emphasizing the need for scalable HR infrastructure planned well in advance. We challenge listeners to examine whether they've "duct-taped" their HR systems together through rapid growth, creating inefficiencies that are costing more than they realize.
Ready to transform how you think about HR? This episode delivers actionable insights that will help you build leadership capacity, design systems for scale, and invest strategically in your greatest asset – your people.