The Kraft Heinz company was revamping its learning and development (L&D) programs when its global chief people officer, Melissa Werneck, learned something she found alarming.

“I heard from Gallup,” she told HR Brew, that only “one out of 10 people are naturally wired to be a manager.”

Werneck said the revelation affected her greatly. “I could not sleep for a week,” she said. “Oh my god, we have a gigantic job to do with the other nine!”

This, coupled with the results of an internal survey that showed that 80% of employees wanted their leaders to be better coaches, and 92% of leaders wanted to be better coaches for their employees, led to what Werneck called “the year of the manager” at Kraft Heinz, during which she and her team were “obsessive” about pursuing a holistic manager development strategy.

“We were much more intentional [about] putting a big amount of resources on making managers better, because there is a halo effect on that,” Werneck explained, referring to managers’ ability to impact many people in the organization.

Philosophy. The “year of the manager” initiative came as part of a broader effort “to build a state-of-the-art learning and development department and our corporate university,” which started in 2016, Werneck said.

In the spirit of ownership—one of the company’s core values—she moved to make development opportunities more available, expanding Kraft Heinz’s content library to include different formats such as podcasts, in addition to traditional training materials.

Always-on coaching. Werneck acknowledged that the events of the last few years have made manager development tougher than ever.

These challenges led to the creation of Project WIN (work as a team, inspire excellence, and navigate our future) in 2022, inspired by research from Google’s Project Oxygen—an internal study on leadership excellence—and a similar effort at Microsoft. Some 600 company leaders voluntarily participated in the first available training. Keep reading here.—AK

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @AmanfromCT on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Aman for his number on Signal.

Three years ago, Jennie Blumenthal was hard to pin down.

Then a partner at PwC, where she managed 300 employees and a $20 million business unit, her days often started before 6am and stretched late into the evening as she jumped from early morning workouts to wining and dining clients to catching cross-country flights to tuck in her kids at night.

From the outside looking in, the self-described “extreme adrenaline junkie” seemed to have everything under control. But she was exhausted. When the pandemic forced her to slow down, she realized her lifestyle was unsustainable.

This might sound familiar to the growing number of female HR leaders, some of whom, a McKinsey survey found, often do “invisible work” outside business hours to advance their organizations’ DE&I goals, and feel they bear the brunt of employees’ emotional well-being.

In her book, Corporate Rehab: Ditch the Hustle Culture and Thrive Again, she explores why some female leaders get addicted to hustle culture and how they can break free.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

How do women become burned out?

There are very real additional caregiving responsibilities [placed on women]. In a heterosexual couple, [women] will give 20 hours of additional childcare and housework in addition to whatever the man is doing.

The second piece is women tend to be highly influenced by this limiting belief of not being enough…Many women that I interviewed said, “I have to work 120% to be seen as good enough to the guy next to me who’s working 100%.”

The third piece…is that structural changes within the workplace are needed but [offices] haven’t really changed since 1950. So, without a national caregiving policy, without multiple different career tracks beyond the rocket to the top…the workplace is not designed for women.

Does it differ between women with or without children? Keep reading here.

What book should HR pros read next? Click here to let us know.

You’re typing away in a Google doc when all of a sudden, an “anonymous wombat” appears. Did your coworker forget to log into their work credentials (again), or is a former employee haunting the drive? Chances are you’ve been there, and if your company recently conducted layoffs, you may be there again soon. IT Brew’s Billy Hurley recently reported on how employers can better track who has access to their organization’s tech.

A Q3 report from the risk-advisory consulting firm Kroll saw insider threat peak to its highest quarterly level yet, accounting for “nearly 35% of all unauthorized-access threat incidents” seen by the company. One incident cited by Kroll revealed a terminated employee kept gigabytes of company data on multiple cloud networks.

And employees don’t have to take data to ruin a company’s reputation. As imposter accounts proved during Twitter’s tumultuous transition, rogue tweets can damage stock value. A secure offboarding process that blocks an exiting employee from company services, including social media, becomes an important risk-management strategy.

[Brian Haugli, CEO of cybersecurity services company SideChannel] recommends the “easy” shutdown method: Put the person in a room with HR, away from devices, while others dismantle access, lessening the chance of data leaks caused by insider ire. “With a remote-heavy world now, this is proving a little bit more difficult to navigate, but not undoable,” said Haugli.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—BH

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Union petitions were up 53% year-over-year for the 12-month period ending September 30. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “I don’t think you’ll just see half of the workforce disappear, but you’ll see a good percentage, and we can’t afford for anybody to leave because we’re so undermanned as it is.”—Hugh Sawyer, a railroad engineer, on worries that rail workers will quit following President Biden’s forced deal to avert a strike (The Hill)

Read: Thousands of laid-off tech workers hired on H1-B visas have 60 days to find new work or face uprooting their lives and leaving the country. (Buzzfeed News)