Why Hiring HR Won’t Fix Management Gaps, According to Leanne Bridges

In a recent LinkedIn post, Leanne Bridges addresses a common misconception among business leaders: that hiring an HR professional or service will automatically solve underlying management issues. Bridges argues that this approach often fails because the root cause of the problems lies not in HR processes, but in leadership deficiencies.

Leanne Bridges observes that many managing directors, when faced with difficulties like underperformance, lack of team cohesion, or managers not managing effectively, often default to the idea of bringing in HR expertise. “We need to hire someone for HR,” is a phrase she frequently hears from CEOs in these situations.

“Someone’s underperforming. A manager isn’t managing. There’s a complaint brewing. Or the team just isn’t pulling together.”

However, Bridges contends that this instinct, while understandable, overlooks the fundamental nature of many workplace challenges. She explains that the problems businesses face are frequently not about HR compliance or processes, but about the direct actions and inactions of their leaders.

The Limitations of Traditional HR Hires

According to Leanne Bridges, the typical outcome of hiring an HR person, especially a junior one due to budget constraints, is an individual focused on process – contracts, policies, and handbooks. This individual then often reports to the same leader who was initially unsure how to handle the management issues, effectively creating a situation where the leader is now managing someone to fix a problem they couldn’t solve themselves.

Even when engaging an advisory service, Bridges points out that the support typically centers on legal compliance and procedural updates, such as performance management systems. While valuable, these services often don’t address the behavioral aspects of leadership. As Leanne Bridges states:

“But it won’t tell you why your ops manager keeps avoiding the difficult conversation, or why your senior team agree things in a meeting and then nothing changes.”

Leadership, Not HR, is the Core Issue

Bridges strongly asserts that the crux of the matter lies in leadership. She elaborates that persistent issues like a manager’s inability to drive team performance, a senior employee’s over-reliance on the CEO for decisions, or a team being busy but not focused on strategic priorities, are not problems that HR policies or processes can resolve.

In Leanne Bridges’s view, these are fundamentally leadership challenges that require direct engagement and different types of conversations with the team. She emphasizes that no amount of HR process can substitute for effective leadership.

“No policy fixes that. No process fixes that. HR doesn’t fix it. It takes a different kind of conversation with your team. And it starts with you.”

Ultimately, Leanne Bridges concludes that addressing these persistent people problems requires leaders to look inward and initiate direct, perhaps difficult, conversations with their teams. The responsibility, she argues, rests with the leadership team to foster the right environment and skillsets, rather than expecting an HR hire to be a silver bullet.