What if your struggling managers don’t need more coaching—they simply have too much work?
The podcast that helps HR executives go beyond running the function and become business-first — the consequential leader your CEO builds the business with.
Because the CHRO isn't an HR job. It's a brand new identity.
Here's the part you've probably already suspected. Your best sales leader did not forget how to sell. Their quarter filled with work that started outside of sales: a system rollout, a pricing pilot, a champion role in a process redesign, engagement action plans, talent review prep. Every item had a sponsor, a deadline and a slide in the executive committee deck. None of it was selling. Pipeline reviews got shorter, ride-alongs stopped, and a quarter later the number slipped and the leader above called it a coaching problem.
So HR funds more manager development. Gartner has put leader and manager development at the top of HR's priority list survey after survey, and 75% of HR leaders in its 2024 survey said managers are overwhelmed by how far their responsibilities have grown. Every fix adds a duty. None takes one away, and nobody owns the manager's week.
Jackson O. Lynch, a four-time CHRO, walks through why manager development keeps failing when it goes first, the order a consequential CHRO works instead (clarity, then capacity, then capability), and what he learned at Frito-Lay when fifty initiatives from every function landed on the same frontline sales leader.
In this episode:
Read a slipping number as a capacity question before a skills question, starting with what landed on that manager's week the quarter before
Turn manager load into a business constraint the leadership team can see: every initiative in flight, the managers it lands on, and the hours it asks
Get the sponsors in one room to decide what fits in the glass this quarter and what waits, after you have cut what your own function pours in
If your managers keep missing the number no matter how good the program is, this episode shows you where their hours went and hands you four moves to get them back, beginning with one week spent watching how a handful of managers actually work. Start there.
If this hit, listen next: How HR Can Solve a Business Constraint Without Hiring More People (E170)
Explore the CHRO Ascent Academy: https://mytalentsherpa.com/ascent-academy
This episode covers manager overload, middle managers stretched by delayering and a wider span of control, strategic sequencing of the initiative portfolio, change saturation, and what AI rollouts ask of frontline managers.
Check your mandate here or X-Ray your calendar here. Both are free!
The Ascent Academy details here!
Schedule time with Jackson here, if there's anything we can help you with.
We publish Monday and Thursday mornings at 7AM Eastern. Don't forget to subscribe and we'd appreciate a review.
Each episode builds the HR leadership the top chair demands, and the business-first HR that takes human resources beyond the support function, without losing its functional excellence, and makes it a driver of the business.
It's what CEOs want from HR and how the CHRO and CEO actually work together — the unwritten CHRO mandate, the human capital strategy and people strategy that show up in revenue and margin, the talent strategy and executive talent that outlast a leadership change, and the succession planning that survives a new chief executive.
It's job architecture as AI and work design reshape the org, the emerging chief of work agenda, and the moves a private equity HR clock demands.
And no — this was never about an HR seat at the table. The chair is already yours; the altitude is the question.
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
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