Online Reporter
Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
Most organisations treat Human Resources as a middle-management problem.
They invest heavily in training supervisors, running engagement surveys and rolling out wellness programmes for teams three or four levels down.
They assume that if they fix the middle, the culture will hold.
That assumption is expensive and it is wrong.
The most costly HR catastrophes in modern organisations — the toxic cultures, the waves of resignations, the lawsuits and the collapse of trust — are rarely engineered on the shop floor.
They are conceived, approved and normalised in the CEO’s office. Which is why the most urgent HR intervention we need today is not another workshop for managers, it is an induction for the CEO.
Twelve months ago, many CEOs were finance managers arguing about headcount, business development managers pushing back on HR policies or production heads complaining that “people issues” were slowing down output.
Then they got the promotion.
In some cases, that history follows them into the corner office. There is a quiet, unspoken “payback” mindset.
In other cases, there is simply a vacuum.
No one told them that the moment they became CEO, their primary job description changed.
They are no longer just the chief executive.
They are the chief human resources advocate.
A CEO must advocate for best practice when shortcuts are tempting. They must champion signature processes that shape how people experience work every day.
They must invest in human capital with the same aggression and discipline they apply to capital expenditure, markets and technology. They must model, in their language and decisions, the culture they expect to see five levels down.
It sounds obvious, yet they continue to approve strategy documents at board level that read like engineering manuals.
There is a line for fleet, a line for IT, a line for marketing, but the section on people is thin, generic and unfunded.
It is like expecting a bumper harvest while refusing to invest in the soil.
Then they act surprised when the strategy fails to take root.
In my work across sectors, CEO failure on people issues usually shows up in two ways.
The first is what I call The Post Office Mindset. This is the CEO who has mistaken leadership for logistics. Their dominant emotion is fear, specifically, fear of the board.
In many cases they volunteered for it. They put themselves on a leash and now their entire role is to relay instructions, deliver the board’s parcel and report back.
That is not leadership. That is being a messenger. And an organisation led by a messenger quickly becomes an organisation of messengers.
Decision-making stalls and initiative dies.
The CEO’s office, which should be the most enterprising room in the building, becomes an admin desk.
I have come to call this leader “The Spirit Medium of the Invisible Hand” syndrome.
Nothing moves until they consult the god behind the scenes. It is the birthplace of what I call “The Death of Ingenuity”.
The second syndrome is the opposite, but equally dangerous: The “I Have an Answer for Everything” CEO.
This is the leader who comments on every hire, every grievance, every policy draft, every organisation chart — including areas where they have no depth.
They override HR, bypass due process and make people decisions based on instinct, ego or convenience.Both syndromes have the same outcome.
When the CEO gets people wrong, the entire organisation pays. The damage is exponential because it is signed at the top.
Boards are diligent about inducting new CEOs on governance, risk, compliance and financial stewardship. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
There is need for a parallel induction on people stewardship.
A CEO cannot be expected to lead what they have never been taught to see.
A robust CEO HR Induction should not be a two-hour HR briefing. It should be a structured and continuous immersion in the pool of human resources leadership.
If something is important, it must be on the agenda. People issues must have prominence on both the CEO and board scorecard.
This cannot be HR’s responsibility alone. HR directors must be both creative and diplomatic. You cannot fix a culture from the middle if the top is misaligned.
Ask for 90 minutes in the CEO’s first 100 days. Don’t call it “HR training”. Call it “CEO People Leadership Immersion.”
Frame it as enterprise risk management because that is what it is.
To boards: stop hiring CEOs and abandoning them to figure out people leadership through trial and error. Include “people leadership capability” as a KPI in the CEO’s contract.
And ask one question in every board meeting: What are we doing for our people this quarter that will move the business forward?
We do not need more CEOs who act as post offices. We need architects, advocates and investors in human potential.
The organisation does not need a spirit medium, it needs a leader who can walk into the boardroom and say, with confidence:
“Here is the strategy. And here is the human capital plan that will deliver it.”
Until we take CEO induction on HR seriously, we will keep treating symptoms in the middle, while the disease spreads from the top.
HR does not start with HR, it starts with the CEO.
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
