From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Book Club

Mikaela Cohen

hr-brew.com

Loss is one of the most painful human experiences.

But it can also transform people, and their approach to work and leadership, according to Adrienne Shoch, founder of 5 to 1 Consulting. Shoch, who contributed to the anthology 

Lives Lost and Leadership Found: Lessons from Special Somebodies

, shared with HR Brew her personal experience with loss and how it helped her become a better leader.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s representative of a number of stories of personal experiences with the loss of an individual and the impact on the business…I lost both of my parents in a span of two years, one from cancer, one from Alzheimer’s. I also had an experience of a hurricane in Nashville a year ago. I got divorced after 25 years, and what I was really looking at is, “Man, what happens when we experience loss, and when we lose people in our lives, and what can I do differently?”

One thing that I know and that I’ve learned very clearly, both inside an organization and my personal life, is, as a culture, we do not do loss well. We react to it, and we tend to hang on to it. We hang on to what we’re losing, which is exactly what the brain and the nervous system loves to do. It doesn’t like change. It doesn’t like surprises. So, really the question becomes, “How do we really prepare ourselves for this life that’s filled with change and uncertainty and loss?”

How did these experiences help shape your career?

There’s this concept called the appropriate response, and I learned it from the hospice workers…when a group of people are not sure what’s going to happen when someone’s going to pass, people talk about things, and say things, and want things to happen that may or may not serve the situation…This is something that the hospice nurses did so masterfully, which was they held space and they didn’t offer something from their own personal wish or experience, but it was what was in service of this experience.

The other thing…is what happens when we really lean into pain? What happens when we lean into the suffering of other people? What happens when we lean into our own suffering?...When I dropped in, and I suspended my desires and my wishes for something to look a particular way…It was compassion. I had access to compassion that I never dreamed of before.

My personal situation is a microcosm for this larger issue of change and transformation…In order to put ourselves in the space from which someone else is experiencing something, that’s empathy. Empathy has a very important part in any kind of organizational change…A lot of people don’t like it, and that’s how we’re designed. That’s how the nervous system is designed. It’s designed because we don’t like change…In HR, really looking at a reorg or a layoff…it’s the way that we communicate with others and the way that we’re sharing compassion in this change that’s going to change people’s lives in one way or another.

When people are seen and witnessed in their transition, they show up differently, but when they feel like they’re going through it alone and there’s a wall, they react to it differently…What we’re doing is we’re accelerating a learning curve, so people can understand how to manage, and experience loss, and transition differently, more effectively, so that the outcome can be better.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Adrienne Shoch, co-contributor to ‘Lives Lost and Leadership Found’

“We do not do loss well. We react to it, and we tend to hang on to it…So, really the question becomes, ‘How do we really prepare ourselves for this life that’s filled with change and uncertainty and loss?’”

Loss can be painful—it can also be transformative for leaders

Fluency can mean more than speaking a language well.

It can also mean cultural fluency, when business leaders become knowledgeable and immersed in the experiences of their employees and customers, according to Joycelyn David, owner and CEO of Canadian advertising agency AV Communications and author of 

The Multicultural Mindset: Driving Business Growth in a Borderless Era

David sat down with HR Brew to chat about her book and how her experience growing up in Canada led her to teach leaders globally to embrace multiculturalism.

You started writing the book in 2023, and published it earlier this year. Did the direction of the book change over the course of those years?

The more I looked around and the more I realized cultural fluency wasn’t necessarily something that was being talked about in boardrooms and executive circles in the same way that I had seen growing up here in Canada…What we’ve tried to do in the book is give people a practical framework in which to have these conversations, whether you’re an employer who hires people who hail from different parts of the world, or whether you’re a professional looking to grow and thrive in your career…The need hasn’t changed from 2023 to 2025, but the way that we talk about that need and the way that we talk about very sensitive topics today…is the challenging part.

Did any of your personal experiences shape the book?

Working and growing up in Canada, this was my normal, like growing up in a society that values 

 at a federal level. Growing up in a community where hyphenated identity and race-based data was always the norm. It was only when I started looking outside of Canada that I realized how much maybe the world could learn.

Cultural knowledge and information is only the surface level of building cultural fluency. What’s actually needed requires us as humans to slow down and immerse deeper than the surface level…Immersion means you can’t just learn about something by reading and absorbing content…I can learn about Turkey by reading about it and looking at it online, or I can go there and immerse myself in all of the senses…But of course, not everybody has access to travel, not everybody has that luxury. So, what are other ways that people can do that in your own neighborhood, in your own workplace?

It really starts with adopting a mindset that [is outside] your own cultural sphere…so it’s a conscious effort to seek and understand cultures that are not your own…Let’s say, I need to go seek out and then better understand what is it like to grow up and live in the deep south of the United States…I can read about it through headlines and news…or I can really take time to have a conversation with somebody who lives there, or to debate across the aisle, or to go and immerse myself, travel, visit, work in that community. Cultural fluency requires more than information.

Do you have advice for HR pros navigating the current 

Discussions about drawing lines in the sand and having all the debates that are happening in the world today are given by “us and them,” and my perspective is, “It’s both. There is no ‘us and them.’ It’s just we.” We are all multicultural, and we are all, in many ways, descendants of immigrants from somewhere…In workplaces where a multicultural mindset is front and center, you are reminded that your customers are multicultural, because many of them, especially in the US, may not speak English as a first language. So, you need to make sure that your frontline staff, and your recruiting, and your training is reflective of making sure that people understand how to deal with diverse people at the front line.

I always say that diversity is good for business, and that means all kinds of diversity, not just race-based diversity…If companies don’t pay attention to this, that diversity is good for business, they will lose touch with their customers, and they will lose touch with the communities that want to see themselves represented…If you don’t have that diversity representative of your customers who are the mainstream today, you’re going to quickly become irrelevant or out of touch.

An interview with Joycelyn David, author of ‘The Multicultural Mindset’

“If companies don’t pay attention to this, that diversity is good for business, they will lose touch with their customers, and they will lose touch with the communities that want to see themselves represented.”

Why cultural fluency is important for HR

It’s time for some workplace rules to go—especially the unwritten ones.

That’s according to Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, founder and CEO of consulting firm Business M.O. and author of 

Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention and Satisfaction

. All too often, she said, they can create stress for employees.

Hasl-Kelchner shared with HR Brew insights from her book.

Anyone that’s experienced the workplace realizes you start, you’ve got great expectations in terms of opportunity…and you get in there, and then you start to discover things they didn’t tell you about in the interview, and about how things really work. And, those are what I call the unwritten rules of the workplace, and we kind of accept them, and we obey and conform, as a cost of our paycheck…but they take a toll, and they create a tremendous amount of stress.

There are all these workplace surveys [about], “Why do people change jobs?” And the majority of the time, it’s not about the pay—it’s about the manager. They leave the manager more than they leave the organization. And, so the reason is it’s because of the relationship they have, or really don’t have, with the manager, and that’s what these unwritten rules really erode.

What are examples of those unwritten rules?

Approachability. Some people are just never available…Ignoring employees, not demonstrating any kind of empathy, leaves [leaders] unapproachable, and then employees may be afraid to approach them, because there just doesn’t seem to be a good time. “Oh, he’s in a bad mood. Oh, he’s not here. She’s not here. I have to move on”...Managers and leaders at all levels of the organization really need to be available or let their employees know when they can be available to answer questions in order to keep work moving.

Lack of recognition is another one. Too often people take things for granted, and they’re quick to point out, “Well, you didn’t do this. You didn’t do that.” Yeah, but what about the things that went right? I think sometimes people need to have that feedback to have the recognition that: “Yeah, I appreciate what you did do. We got it done on time. Maybe we could have done a little bit better here. Let’s focus on that the next time.” Focus on also the positive things…That’s one thing Gen Z has a real issue with because some managers take it for granted.

Do you think Gen Z workers are less likely to abide by these unwritten workplace rules?

That’s exactly right…One HR professional told me that one of the most effective things she heard a CEO do during Covid was to personally call employees to ask them how they were doing and what can I do to help? When was the last time a manager or someone anywhere in the hierarchy asked you that question? I was working for more than 30 years, and I never had a manager ask me that. It was all a one-way street. What can you do for me? How high can you jump?

To know that somebody is listening and willing to help, and even if what you ask for, they can’t give you. Just to know that they hear you. They see you, and if the opportunity arises, well maybe now they can help you. They couldn’t before, but it puts it on their radar screen. But, I think that’s something that a lot of managers miss out on, and it creates that distance where now people are afraid to ask unless it’s absolutely necessary.

An interview with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, author of ‘Seeking Fairness at Work’

Unwritten rules can create friction in the workplace, especially for Gen Z employees, author Hanna Hasl-Kelchner tells HR Brew.

Why managers need to ditch unwritten rules in the workplace

Time to say “out with the old and in with the new,” not just to last season’s styles, but to your approach to people analytics, too.

People analytics are good for more than just “creating facts”—they can help inform strategies and drive innovation, according to Cole Napper, VP of research at labor market research firm Lightcast and author of 

People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset

“I’d say 80% to 90% of what is people analytics today is just creating facts. ‘How many people do we have? How many people left? How many people did we hire? What are the demographic characteristics?’ and not much beyond that,” Napper said. “We’ve invested in a space as an HR function to be more data-driven for 10, 15, 20 years, and they don’t have much to show for it.”

Napper chatted with HR Brew about how to get the most out of people analytics, especially in the age of AI.

I really tried to focus on, “What are the challenges that I’ve had? What are the ways to do HR and people analytics, specifically in HR, effectively, and cutting through all the BS?” Because there’s a lot of talking points where I’ll hear, “People are your greatest asset,” and then companies don’t operate any differently…What does it really mean to treat people as an asset? What does it really mean to use AI effectively in 2025?...What is HR even going to look like in five or 10 years if AI truly proliferates the way we think?

What are examples of shortcomings with people analytics?

Let’s take the hardest one first, and that’s data-driven decision making. I think very few people are making data-driven decisions at all. Now, I think that there are data-informed decisions that get made…A lot of what has been called people analytics, up until this point, was actually what I call “creating a shared set of facts.” So analytics, in my opinion, is focused on the future, focused on diagnosis, focused on prediction, focus on prescription.

There’s a generational shifting of the guard in HR that’s going on right now…You have more of the folks who are digitally-native, and eventually going to be AI-native professionals, in the HR space that are eventually going to be holding chief people officer/CHRO roles, and that’s not really the case today, and it hasn’t really been the case, historically speaking…I think it’s time for fields like people analytics to step up to be the thing that’s driving the future…Being a thermostat, rather than a thermometer that just goes up and down with the temperature.

What else should HR pros know about people analytics in the future with AI?

There’s a whole section in the book I call, “Is people analytics a luxury? Is it just a phenomenon?” Like I chose some charts that show the relationship between the growth of people analytics and low interest rates…From roughly 2012-ish to roughly 2021-ish, where there was a period of functionally zero interest rates for corporate borrowing…What you see is the second interest rates started to go up, people analytics headcount started to go down, and so the question you have to ask yourself is: “Is this just the new designer purse for HR, that everybody wanted to do it because everybody else was doing it?”...If you only talk about it theoretically, you don’t put it into practice, what does that mean for an organization? What it means is it was a luxury item, and they were treating it as such. When times got tight, they were going to cut back.

People analytics needs to be focused on helping businesses understand their cost structure. If you go to any CEO right now, they’re trying to say, “How do we take costs out of the business? How do we be more efficient? How do we be more productive? How do we be more innovative?” And, people analytics historically has not focused much of their effort in that space, and so one of the ways that AI helps is, you can produce people analytics at a lower cost structure by having AI be that leap frog or be that force multiplier for a people analytics function. So, maybe historically, you needed 50 people and a $15 million budget to do people analytics effectively. Maybe now you could do it with AI technology and five people what 50 people used to do.

An interview with Cole Napper, author of ‘People Analytics: Using Data-Driven HR and Gen AI as a Business Asset’

“I think it’s time for fields like people analytics to step up to be the thing that’s driving the future…Being a thermostat, rather than a thermometer that just goes up and down with the temperature.”

People analytics can be a powerful HR tool in the age of AI

Ingrid Hu Dahl’s journey to becoming a great leader started when she noticed how different she was from her peers.

Sun Shining on Morning Snow: A Memoir of Identity, Loss, and Living Boldly

, the leadership coach and speaker shares how grappling with her identity impacted her career, and why she hopes other leaders and HR pros will approach leadership with empathy.

“This is a leadership book. It’s a book about how I came to become a leader, from the lens of identity, and choice, and choosing to learn every step of the way and to choose to connect with people despite all of the series of projections,” Dahl told HR Brew.

We chatted with Dahl about more insights from her book.

I absolutely wrote this book to lay bare my authentic journey and invite people to step into my shoes as I experienced xenophobia, and how I slowed down as a child being inquisitive about being asked the question, “What are you?” every day by typically white adults. And this search for identity and trying to fit in, but not belonging anywhere. I didn’t belong with the white kids or along with the Asian kids, and it continued throughout my life, and so I got really comfortable being an outsider. But I was very bold, and there’s been also a lot of rejection and loss in my life, which a lot of people can relate to. And, so, I’ve just been seeing a lot of people say, like, “Wow, I really saw myself in her story,” and this is a cis-white Jewish man down the street who’s in his 70s.

I ultimately wanted this to be a couple of different things. One was, how do we help, through my story and my lens, bring us closer to humanity?...There’s also such a huge reconciliation story between a mother/daughter anchored in sexuality. I absolutely struggled with my mother, who did not want me to be gay, and I’m absolutely a lesbian, and she struggled with that…It’s also this painful connective point around coming out, coming of age, losing my mom, because I’ve chosen myself, not what she wants, but what I who I am, and before she ultimately passes from cancer, which is a really beautiful, dramatic part of the book. She has, and we have, this beautiful, transformational experience together of forgiveness and healing, and intergenerational healing.

How did those experiences impact the work you do?

Being somebody who’s been in learning and development for about 20 years, and leadership development for the more recent five years being an executive coach, I have connected with a lot of people and have experimented with a lot of different learning solutions around behavior, and around what does good leadership, or empathetic/high emotional intelligence, high self-awareness, look like in the workplace. How do leaders actually create conditions for people to thrive?

People were like, “Why didn’t you write a leadership book, or a book around inclusive leadership, or something that reflected your expertise?”...All of the vignettes that make us who we are continue to shape how we lead, and how we choose to belong, and how we model to our teams, how to interact with one another.

What are some HR takeaways from the book?

When I work in these corporate settings and run teams, I tend to be known for my empathetic leadership and people want to follow and be in my teams…We choose to believe in one another, and I recognize and value that that is a choice every day that you’re making, and sometimes you’re going to have a day where you’re like, “I feel like shit. I don’t like the company, or I just am cranky.” And, that’s okay. But to be seen and to be able to show up full of your fallibility, or mistakes you might make, not knowing how to do something and need to ask for help—those things are important to feel safe.

For people who are curious about this particular way of leading from somebody’s perspective who grew up as, “the outsider, the other,” is a very telling example of transformational leadership from this point of view, and to lay there and understand all of these things that made me who I am, that shaped my lens. I hope it will be inspiring to people who are leading differently, and have come up, from growing up, multiracial, multicultural, bilingual…I felt like sharing that story from the beginning to present was more important than writing a straight up leadership book.

An interview with Ingrid Hu Dahl, author ‘Sun Shining on Morning Snow’

“All of the vignettes that make us who we are continue to shape how we lead, and how we choose to belong, and how we model to our teams, how to interact with one another.”

Growing up as an outsider made this leadership coach a better leader

 didn’t age well…for many reasons. But, despite the obvious HR violations in the 2011 movie, some might need a refresher on how to 

Mita Mallick, a workplace strategist, highlights the circumstances that can lead any manager to become a bad boss—and how to avoid them—in her book, 

The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses

Mallick shared more with HR Brew about her forthcoming book.

What will HR leaders learn from your book?

One of the number one DMs I get is, “Here’s a horrible situation at work that I’m going through. How do I survive this situation? What do I do?” I, as I was crafting this book, thought to myself, “Well, what if we are the bad boss? What if we’re the person that’s contributing to the environment?” Our behaviors can swing from bad boss to good leader to bad boss.

I hope HR leaders look in the mirror and think [about] how are they acting and behaving, and then also, how can they coach other leaders, versus saying, “Let me coach the team on how to work around this person, try to survive this person, try to manage up to them.” What if we actually said, “No, we actually have to go to the person who’s behaving badly and work with them.”

Why is bad leadership a problem in today’s workplace?

Loyalty is dead in the workplace…There used to be this employee-employer contract, like, I will take care of you. You take care of me. You’re going to get a pension, and so people knew there was job security, and a lot of times, generations before us endured abuse because they were guaranteed a paycheck.

We know in this market that’s no longer guaranteed. I could lose my job tomorrow. You could lose your job tomorrow…What’s happening more and more is that people, especially with social media having changed our world over the last decade, people are voicing and people are saying, “I’m actually not going to stay. You can tell me to put up with this, but I’m going to craft an exit plan, and I’m going to leave.”

Do you share any personal experiences with bad leadership in the book?

, I nicknamed her Medusa, I had never had anyone in my life, not my parents, not my brother, not my husband, not my friends, ever shout and scream at me. And, then I entered the workplace, and this woman would shout and scream at us. She would drop an excessive amount of F-bombs. She would publicly and privately humiliate us.

She had 12 people leave, and then she goes to manage another team, which I’m forced to join, and guess what happened? A year and a half later, those entire 12 people were gone. And, so the question is, employers and people who are in leadership power, aren’t actually thinking about the cost of replacing the employee, and they’ll do everything they can to protect this one person when it’s actually costing the company quite a lot.

How do you think AI will affect employee-manager relationships?

I hope that AI doesn’t breed a generation of lazy bosses…There are going to be things that are problematic with AI, and there are. But if AI is actually being implemented correctly in organizations, it’s the opportunity to do more work at scale. Take it off managers’ plates. So, then managers actually have time to do what they’re supposed to do, which is coach, and teach, and train, and lead.

The way I’m going to compete against AI agents is to be human, and to lean into a lot of the things, like dealing with conflict, teaching people how to go through mistakes, how to bounce back, resilience, a lot of these things we need. Some of the best leaders I worked for, they taught me these things on the job…People will argue, “Well, there’s no time during the day, and then I have meetings back to back, and that’s why I have to send emails at night”...Okay, if you actually scaled AI appropriately, and a lot of the things that can be automated are taken off your plate, you actually now have time to be with your teams.

An interview with Mita Mallick, author of ‘The Devil Emails at Midnight’

Employees may have tolerated bad behavior from bosses before, but those days are over, Mita Mallick, author and workplace strategist, tells HR Brew.

Are you a bad boss? Ask yourself these questions

The very thing that helps some leaders earn a seat in the C-suite could eventually hold them back, according to Muriel M. Wilkins, CEO of executive coaching firm Paravis Partners and author of 

Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential

“I’ve been working as an executive coach for over 20 years…and while they are wildly successful in terms of what they are able to do with their organizations,” Wilkins said, “I have often found that they run into roadblocks, not necessarily realizing that the roadblocks include themselves.”

HR Brew chatted with Wilkins about what possibly prevents some executives from being effective.

What will people leaders learn from your book?

A lot of times when leaders have to develop themselves, they often look at things outside of themselves…But very often, they don’t look at the internal game, which is their mindset. And, when you think about a leader being able to scale, be able to operate differently than they have in the past…Change in skills is one thing, but changing mindset is actually what leads to sustainability in terms of their effectiveness.

From an HR perspective, the ability to understand what the mindset is that’s required to be able to lead more optimally is paramount. And, from this book, they would be able to identify the areas where mindset might be able to get in the way, as well as a roadmap for how those leaders could actually expand our mindset.

What tips do you have for leaders who need to change their mindset?

They have these beliefs that they have formed that, frankly, has led to high performance, but that might not necessarily be working in the position, or role, or context that they’re in…[You need to] have an understanding of what the beliefs are that you hold, and question whether they are the ones that most serve you in the capacity that you’re in. Because if they don’t, then it is critical that you shift to a different mindset, or thought, or belief that actually supports the outcomes that you’re looking to drive to rather than working against you.

Have the mindsets or priorities of CHROs and CPOs shifted since you started working with them 20 years ago?

One of the big shifts that CHROs and CPOs have had to make, and quite frankly, that they wanted to make, is really from being seen as tactical leaders, who are there to sort of execute on HR policy and HR administration, to really being a strategic leader within the organization…[They’re also] able to be in a place where they are a valued, trusted, and a strategic advisor to the rest of the C-suite, and that is a complex role to play.

Because you’re sitting at the C-suite level, while at the same time being an advisor and thought partner around not only people issues, but really people issues as it relates to the business being successful. So, that’s a big shift that I’ve seen over the past two decades, and being able to not only build the skill to do that, but again, see yourself in that role. And, going back to the mindset piece, having the mindset that enables you to operate at that level is a critical shift that folks who are in that career and advising in that career need to make.

What’s your biggest piece of advice for CHROs navigating this precarious time?

It’s a time of a lot of change and a lot of complexity, but we’ve been here before. So, getting them to understand that they have to operate from a place of confidence, that they may not have seen this particular environment before, but they are actually experts in being able to deal with change and being able to navigate change, not only at an individual level, but also how do you move an organization or a team through change. They’re the crux of being able to do that. They bring that value to an organization.

An interview with Muriel M. Wilkins, author of ‘Leadership Unblocked’

“While they are wildly successful in terms of what they are able to do with their organizations, I have often found that they run into roadblocks, not necessarily realizing that the roadblocks include themselves.”