A CEO Bragged That Firing HR Made the Problems Disappear. Give It Eighteen Months.
📌 Riffing on a real one: r/humanresources — CEO says problems disappeared after firing HR
There's a story going around about a CEO of a $300 million company who proudly announced that after he fired the HR team, all the problems disappeared. I read it over my third cold coffee and laughed the specific laugh of someone who has watched this exact experiment run before. Let me tell you how the sequel goes.
The problems didn't disappear, the reporting did
When you remove the function whose entire job is to surface problems — complaints, harassment reports, policy violations, the simmering stuff — the problems do not stop existing. They stop being reported to anyone whose job is to write them down. The CEO isn't experiencing fewer problems. He's experiencing fewer reports, in the blissful quiet right before everything compounds somewhere he can no longer see.
What HR was quietly preventing
Nobody notices the lawsuits that didn't happen, the terminations handled correctly, the accommodation that retained a great employee, the manager who got stopped before doing the very illegal thing he really wanted to do. HR's best work is invisible by nature — it's the absence of disasters. Cut it, and you don't watch the value walk out. You watch it arrive later, with a case number, all at once.
The lawsuit is on layaway
Here's the timeline I'd put money on. Months one through six: glorious silence, the CEO feels like a genius, maybe does a podcast about it. Months six through twelve: the small things he stopped tracking start growing teeth — a botched firing, a wage-and-hour mess, a harassment complaint that now has no paper trail and no process. Somewhere around month eighteen, the first real lawsuit lands, and it's the expensive kind. The kind HR existed specifically to prevent.
So congratulations to the CEO on his quieter quarter. Quiet isn't the same as healthy — sometimes quiet is just the sound of nobody being allowed to tell you what's wrong. Give it eighteen months, then let's lay the legal bill next to my old salary and compare. I'll be here. Probably still understaffed. Almost certainly still right.