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Leadership

Mikaela Cohen

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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

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

As Tesla shareholders prepare to vote on whether to grant CEO Elon Musk a pay package valued at nearly $1 trillion, the billionaire argued that this proposal isn’t actually about the money at all—but rather about maintaining control over the electric vehicle maker.

In an Oct. 22 earnings call, Musk and Tesla’s CFO, Vaibhav Taneja, said they didn’t want to refer to the proposed pay package as “compensation” at all. Instead, Musk said he was concerned with “how much voting control I have in Tesla,” particularly given the company’s goal of building an “enormous robot army.”

The package Musk referenced would award him additional shares if he meets certain Tesla benchmarks over the span of a decade, including delivering 1 million robots, and having 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation. Should he meet the milestones Tesla’s board has set, Musk could gain a 25% stake in the company, and in turn increase his voting power.

In recent years, Musk has sought to pivot Tesla away from selling electric vehicles in favor of self-driving cars and a humanoid robot the company calls Optimus. On the call, the CEO claimed he wouldn’t spend the money if he received the proposed award, but said he wanted “a strong influence over that robot army” if he built it. “That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. Like I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence,” he added.

(It should be noted that Musk has had a strong influence in both the public and private sector, with mixed results. After he bought the social media app Twitter, changed its name to X, and discarded the site’s content moderation rules, the platform’s value dropped by an estimated 80%).

Tesla board urges shareholders to approve Musk’s unusual pay package. 

If granted, this compensation plan would be the 

 in history—but its sheer size isn’t the only thing that makes it unusual.

The committee that put together this proposal also bucked traditional executive compensation norms when designing it, HR Brew 

. They decided against proposing Musk’s pay based on what CEOs earn at similar peer group companies, arguing such benchmarking would be “irrelevant” given the types of goals that Tesla’s CEO has been given.

This isn’t the first time Tesla’s board has tried to award Musk an unusually large compensation package. When shareholders decide whether or not to grant Musk this super-sized payday on Nov. 5, they’ll also be asked to vote on partially restoring Musk’s previous pay package, valued at 

While shareholders initially approved that previous pay package, Judge Kathaleen McCormick 

 on grounds that investors weren’t given adequate information about the proposal, and certain Tesla board members involved in the negotiations weren’t independent. Tesla is currently appealing that decision.

The debate over Musk’s pay comes at a time when the gap between what CEOs earn compared to rank-and-file workers continues to invite scrutiny; Starbucks and United Healthcare are among the companies that have recently been criticized for awarding their CEOs pay packages that are much larger than what their median workers earn.

But beyond setting a new standard for CEO pay, the Nov. 5 shareholder vote could also have broader implications for corporate governance practices, a professor and student from Case Western Reserve School of Law recently argued in a 

 published in Bloomberg Law. The Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in the case involving Musk’s previous 2018 package, they added, “will further determine whether Tesla’s governance approach becomes a framework for other founder-led companies or a cautionary tale about the limits of executive control and the importance of board independence.”

Facing off-camera, Elon Musk smiles widely in a suit.

Elon Musk argues $1T Tesla package is about control, not cash

The Tesla CEO recently suggested the proposal is more about maintaining influence than earning additional compensation. 

Elon Musk and Tesla’s board once again make the case for largest corporate payday in history

The band is breaking up. Oh, wait, apologies for the typo. The 

 it’s splitting up nearly 10 years after it was created by a merger. Comcast’s NBCUniversal is going through a 

, spinning off brands including CNBC and MSNBC to form a new company named Versant.

Companies call it splits for a variety of reasons, said Karan Ferrell-Rhodes, CEO and founder of consulting firm Shockingly Different Leadership. “It can be because things are going well, and it can be because things aren’t going so well,” she told HR Brew. “The driving factor, especially for publicly-traded companies, is that they want to make sure they maintain or increase their total shareholder returns.”

Ferrell-Rhodes added she’s never seen a “totally smooth divestiture or carve out where no major issues happen,” and HR teams are oftentimes not brought into the planning early enough.

A spin-off can take a long time to execute, said Frank Breitling, senior partner and managing director in the people and organization practice at Boston Consulting Group.

“Companies, and boards, and executive teams are mulling over it, sometimes even for years,” Breitling told HR Brew. “But what you want to have on the other side of the deal is a fully functioning standalone company, so it needs a [new] board. It needs an executive team. It needs talent decisions. It needs full functional support for HR, finance, IT, etc.”

Spin-offs can present CHROs with an opportunity “to gain a seat at the table, or reinforce the seat at the table,” Breitling said. “They need to approach a deal like this with the mindset of, ‘My role is to make the CEO of the new entity, and their leadership team successful and, in turn, the overall spun-out company successful.’”

Whether a company’s internal HR team or an external HR consultant leads the spin-off, Ferrell-Rhodes said they will have to do their due diligence, strategize, and develop an implementation plan, because “the devil is in the details.”

She said this could include “assessing all talent, deciding who would stay with the parent company” as well as asking if or who would go “with the carve out” or if retention bonuses would need to be implemented. “An executive communications plan needs to be created. If there are going to be jobs impacted, [are there] outplacement services?”

HR is also responsible for the “mundane” or “transactional” tasks that can get overlooked, Breitling said, like figuring out how employees will continue getting paid, what internal platforms will continue to be used, how job titles or responsibilities will change, and how company policies will be altered.

“[It’s an] opportunity for CHROs and their teams to be really like the co-pilot and thought partner at every step of the journey for the CEO and the forming leadership team,” he said. “The need for flawless execution of lots of more tactical, but really, really important stuff that creates lots of hiccups.”

Employees will likely feel “angst and anxiety,” Ferrell-Rhodes said. HR could help mitigate these sentiments by encouraging employees to share anonymous feedback.

“You need to know where the angst is in the organization to be able to be proactive and address it,” she said. “A lot of carve outs don’t do that. They’re so bent on getting it done, and you can still do it fairly quickly, but you need to build in interventions to help make sure the process is as smooth as possible.”

HR should also share with employees the reasoning behind and value of the spin-off, Breitling said.

“This is another really important element where the CHROs and HR have a role to [be] in very close conjunction with the CEO,” he said. “Ultimately, purpose, and culture, and change should be a CEO message…It should come down from the overall strategic direction.”

What HR needs to know when overseeing a corporate spin-off

CHROs have an opportunity to “gain or reinforce” their seat at the table when going through a spin-off.

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

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

 on AI technology, many companies aren’t having much luck getting their workforce to 

After discovering that its own employees were timid about using AI in the workplace, enterprise software giant Workday spearheaded a program to encourage adoption. Ashley Goldsmith, Workday’s chief people officer, recently spoke with HR Brew about that initiative, and how her own team is using AI.

Internal research revealed that Workday employees weren’t 

 because they weren’t clear on the appropriate use cases. So Workday launched a program called “Everyday AI,” through which it encouraged employees to use and experiment with AI, and learn how it’s already being used within the organization.

To start, Workday held a company-wide meeting in April that CEO Carl Eschenbach opened by discussing his own AI use. Then, Goldsmith said he gave the floor to employees, who shared how they use different AI tools. Workday intentionally focused the event on employee experiences, as they thought these would do more to engage and inspire than a more general training.

“With that, we saw this huge adoption and real enthusiasm,” Goldsmith told HR Brew. The company has also encouraged adoption in other ways, including leveraging a peer recognition tool for AI use, and providing managers with resources (such as prompt cards) to help them gamify AI use within their teams.

As of June, 79% of Workday employees were using the technology, 

exceeding the goal the company set for itself

 earlier this year. It aims to further increase adoption rates and mandated that every employee set a goal for AI use, whether that be doubling their usage or leveraging it to reduce hours spent on mundane tasks. Goldsmith hopes Workday’s recently announced AI tools and acquisitions will encourage more use as well.

“We want to take full advantage of and maximize all the efficiency and productivity and assistance that we can gain from within those tools,” she said.

Goldsmith’s team has adopted AI more quickly than the rest of the company, and has seen several successful use cases.

Workday’s recruiting agent, for example, has helped streamline the process of sourcing and selecting candidates. Recruiters saw a 12% decrease in their workloads after the agent was introduced, allowing them more time for critical tasks that were otherwise neglected, including post-interview debriefs.

“That 12% was really quickly redeployed into making sure we had these thoughtful, well-facilitated conversations,” Goldsmith said. “We’re hiring faster, we’re getting really good quality candidates. Everybody feels like it was a great use of their time to interview, because they were really heard and their thoughts were heard.”

The team has also used AI to analyze employee feedback gathered through Workday’s employee sentiment tool, Peakon. The technology analyzes thousands of comments and provides insights and trends, giving Goldsmith’s team actionable insights without having to read every individual piece of feedback. The result: initiatives like Workday’s 

“It’s truly game-changing in terms of how you constantly listen to employees,” Goldsmith said. “I think, in the world today, where we know trust is critical and changes at breakneck speed, it’s harder to continue to stay in touch with your employees. To build [and] keep trust at that speed, listening is so incredibly important.”

When spearheading workforce-wide initiatives related to L&D or AI transformation, HR leaders tend to neglect their own employees’ needs, according to Goldsmith. To ensure her team engages with AI, Goldsmith incorporated the technology into a 

style competition, during which HR staff present how they’re using AI for a chance to win $1,000. While the competition is unique to her team, it mirrors the broader push her team has spearheaded to encourage more AI use throughout the company.

“I think if we follow the advice we give others, it really does work,” she said.

A portrait of chief people officer at Workday, Ashley Goldsmith.

Workday’s chief people officer discusses the tech giant’s AI adoption push

After learning that employees were hesitant to use AI at work, Workday spearheaded an adoption campaign.

Workday’s chief people officer shares how the tech giant got 79% of its employees to use AI

, all manner of uncertainty is affecting the workplace.

HR pros preparing to navigate today’s myriad uncertainties may want to consider exercising their core (metaphorically). That’s according to Brené Brown, the bestselling author and researcher.

Brown said she came to this conclusion following a pickleball injury. During the Workday Rising conference in San Francisco last week (on the eve of her latest book release, 

), she told the crowd her trainer said her body had “no core, no lats, no glutes, no stomach,” leading her to overuse secondary muscles when playing the sport.

As she worked with her trainer to strengthen her core muscles and prevent future injury, she realized: “This is the work I do in organizations. Organizations have no core. They’re using inefficient muscle groups to do stuff, because they’ve got no glutes.”

Organizations, Brown said, are looking for “strong ground” to find stability and build their core. But finding that ground requires a new approach. Leaders will need to practice self-awareness, and embrace vulnerability, accountability, mindfulness, and systems thinking.

Another skill that Brown said leaders should embrace, especially with the advent of AI, is paradoxical thinking.

Humans aren’t “neurobiologically hardwired” for complexity and the tension it can create, Brown said. In the case of AI, multiple paradoxes exist, including a rapidly accelerating pace of technological changes while the need for human connection grows stronger. Many feel like they must choose a side between embracing AI, or disavowing it, according to Brown.

“We have to be able to learn to straddle the fact that, if you can hold on to the conflict long enough, something innovative and new will emerge,” she said. “If you give in and pick a side. I don’t think you’re going to win moving forward. I don’t think your team’s going to win, I don’t think you’re going to win. I don’t think organizations are going to win.”

However, she said, workplaces have seemingly also lost that understanding of what it means to be human.

“I’m going to be really honest and controversial, with the introduction of Welchian leadership, this kind of rank and game, ‘Everything that makes you human makes you a liability at work,’ that has set us back,’” Brown said, referencing Jack Welch, the longtime General Electric CEO whose controversial management practices have received a 

 in recent years. Organizations and leaders must embrace those human traits—connection, deep thinking, collaboration, empathy—as they also embrace AI.

“We have to return to that human wisdom and invest in the rekilling and upskilling of those things that are uniquely asked, in order to partner with AI,” Brown said.

Author and researcher Brené Brown speaks on stage at the Workday Rising conference in San Francisco.

Brené Brown: Organizations need to develop new ‘muscles’ to address uncertainty today

All leaders have weak cores when it comes to management.

Organizations are using the wrong ‘muscles’ to tackle uncertainty today, Brené Brown says

A proposed compensation package that could make Tesla CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire has drawn critics ranging from the electric vehicle maker’s own investors to Pope Leo, who decried wealth disparities in a recent sermon.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because the Tesla board has already tried once to push through a massive pay package, 

 by a Delaware court. Tesla is appealing that decision, but in the meantime, the board plans to put to a vote an even bigger awards package at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in November. This comes amid declining sales at the EV maker, whose US market share dropped to the lowest level in 

The proposed package is not likely to look familiar to HR professionals who have worked on executive compensation, as the board thwarted traditional benchmarking standards in designing it.

 published on Sept. 5, Tesla outlined a “2025 CEO Performance Award” that would grant Musk additional shares provided his company meets certain benchmarks, including:

Growing Tesla’s market capitalization to at least $8.5 trillion, up from $1.1 trillion today

Getting 10 million subscribers to sign up for Tesla’s full self-driving technology

Having 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation

Musk must also participate in CEO succession planning to receive part of the award, which spans over 10 years. The additional shares in the proposed plan would give him a 25% stake in the company, and if Musk meets all the targets, his pay could grow to $1 trillion.

Why Musk’s pay package bucks traditional executive compensation practices. 

Compensation committees typically design CEO pay packages through a process called benchmarking. If Tesla took this approach, it might have looked at what CEOs earn at 

 companies and other public firms with a similar market capitalization, and then set Musk’s pay as a percentile of that.

The committee overseeing Musk’s 2025 compensation plan decided against this approach, though, after determining “that chief executive officers at other comparably large companies are not being presented with performance goals comparable in scope, degree, or complexity to those being asked of Mr. Musk,” according to the proxy filing. Traditional benchmarking would be “irrelevant,” the committee argued, as no other company has similar goals to Musk’s, which include transforming Tesla and bettering “society as a whole.”

Regardless of how Tesla’s board landed on the design of this proposal, it seems likely he’ll continue to out-earn the median worker at his company by a long shot—a quality he’ll share with other CEOs in his peer group.

“His own median worker is making $57,000 while he is awarded a pay package that could add up to $1 trillion by being a part-time CEO,” Natalia Renta, associate director of the progressive group Americans for Financial Reform, told 

, characterizing the proposal as “outrageous.”

Heightened scrutiny around the growing gap between what CEOs earn compared to their employees is just one of the factors HR leaders have to take into account when navigating executive pay, HR Brew 

. CHROs and their colleagues may also need to consider whether the justification for granting their CEO a generous compensation package is strong, as well as whether their board is sufficiently independent, when defending such proposals before shareholders and workers.

Elon Musk jumping as dollar bills fall around him

Why Elon Musk’s $1T pay package is unlike most CEO awards 

 The committee overseeing Musk’s compensation said benchmarking his pay to other CEOs would be “irrelevant” in light of the goals he’s been asked to achieve.