Why SMEs Misdiagnose People Problems: Leanne Bridges on Leadership vs. HR

In a recent LinkedIn post, Leanne Bridges discusses a common pitfall for growing Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs): misidentifying the root cause of people-related issues. Bridges argues that many MDs, when faced with team dysfunction or underperformance, instinctively reach for a dedicated HR solution, often overlooking that the core problems are typically leadership failures, not HR process gaps.

The post opens by highlighting a frequent scenario:

“We need to hire an HR person.” I hear this from MDs all the time. Usually when things are going wrong with people and they don’t know where to start.

Bridges points out that this reactive hiring often leads to disappointment, with the same issues persisting months later. She explains that SMEs, constrained by budget, often hire junior HR professionals. These individuals are typically process-focused, dealing with contracts, policies, and handbooks. However, without senior HR mentorship readily available within the SME, the MD ends up managing an HR person to fix problems the MD themselves doesn’t know how to address.

The Limits of Traditional HR in SMEs

The analysis extends to external HR advisory services. While acknowledging their utility in providing legal compliance advice, Bridges contends they fall short in addressing the nuanced dynamics of team performance.

But it won’t tell you why your ops manager avoids difficult conversations, or why your senior team agree things in meetings and then nothing changes.

According to Leanne Bridges, the fundamental issue is a misunderstanding of the problem’s nature. She argues that HR is designed to solve HR problems, but the persistent challenges in growing SMEs are rarely purely HR-related. Instead, they often stem from a lack of effective leadership.

Leadership Deficits Masquerading as HR Issues

Bridges elaborates on these leadership failures, providing examples such as a manager unable to drive team performance, a senior employee who defers all decisions to the MD, or a team that appears busy but isn’t achieving impactful results. These are not issues that can be resolved with new policies or streamlined processes.

The Need for Leadership Intervention

As Bridges emphasizes, fixing these deeper issues requires a different approach, one that begins with the top leadership. The insights shared by Bridges suggest a need for MDs to cultivate their own leadership capabilities rather than delegating the resolution of people problems to an HR function that may not be equipped to handle the underlying causes.

No policy fixes that. No process fixes that. Fixing that takes a different kind of conversation. And it starts with the MD leading the way.

In essence, Leanne Bridges’s post serves as a call for business leaders to look inward and address the core leadership competencies required to foster a high-performing team, rather than seeking an external HR fix for what are fundamentally leadership challenges.