Riina Hellström
Founder & Agile Enterprise Coach, Agile HR Community
Most leadership content is about who you are. Your values, your behaviour, how you include people. This is about something else.
I wanted to write about the conditions that let a team deliver, rather than the person leading them.
As sponsors of the Leadership category at the Personio People & Culture IMPACT Awards, I’ve been thinking a lot about what great P&C leadership looks like – particularly as this year’s finalists share their own perspectives on what sets great people leaders apart.
So, alongside their insights below, I’m looking at leadership through a slightly different lens: what would I actually put in place around a P&C team to help it deliver?
At the centre of it is one thing I wouldn’t compromise on: delivering real, long-term results, and being crystal clear on what those are.
Here’s what I’d build around that centre – co-created with the team and fit for purpose.
A P&C leader that doesn't know the business is useless
Before I’d set a single goal for my team, I’d want to understand two things properly: the business we’re actually in, and the market we’re competing for talent in.
That means knowing the value chains, the biggest customers, the product lines, how the organization makes money and delivers to its customers. It means sitting with business leaders regularly enough that their reality, the pressure they’re under, the trade-offs they’re making — becomes something I understand firsthand, not something I’ve read in a slide deck.
I’d also sit with a senior business controller to do a deep dive in all people related costs and investments, including AI and agent budgets. Bluntly: If you don’t know the business, you are a useless HR leader. Each P&C leader must also track what’s shifting externally: the talent market, technology, where the organization and your deep expertise needs to move next.
Once that understanding is real, the next problem shows up immediately: prioritization. A huge number of HR teams say yes to everything. They jump on every request, every initiative, every “urgent” ask, without ever checking that against their actual capacity to deliver.
Great People leadership is about staying close enough to the business to understand what really matters, while being brave enough to challenge it when needed. My success has come from listening to people, turning what I hear into action, and showing that a strong people strategy should make a measurable difference to both employees and business performance.
The result is a team that’s busy constantly and finishes nothing. Prioritization based on real capacity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between delivering something and working on everything forever.
How I'd equip a team to deliver, not just manage them
Once the goals are set, the job becomes making sure the team can actually do the work. That starts with enablement: the tools, the access, the AI capabilities, the collaboration systems that let people work well both together and apart.
The team and each member of the team, must be skilled at setting goals, KPIs and knowing what “done” looks like for their own piece of the work. Whether they lead other HR members or are specialists themselves, clarity needs to be adopted.
Continuous improvement and adaptive planning is an imperative part of today’s leadership system. Things and are changing so quickly, we need to pivot and reprioritise more frequently. Learning a systematic approach for doing this at scale (with the whole team tweaking their approach when and if needed) will be key to performing in tomorrow’s AI-first environment.
Great People leaders are architects of organisational capability. Never has this been more important as the world of work evolves at pace and organisations adapt to an AI-enabled future. The best leaders build the skills, culture and environments that help people thrive while ensuring their organisations remain resilient, relevant and competitive.
None of that matters without the right skills sitting behind it. I’d want a continuous view, 12-18 months out, of where my team’s capability needs to be, and a proactive plan to get there: training people, reskilling them, moving them into roles that fit better, or bringing in outside help when that’s the faster route.
Proactive skill planning also means being honest, early, when someone isn’t going to be right for what the team needs to deliver over the next few years. That conversation is uncomfortable. Having it late is worse for everyone, including the person.
Then there’s what I’d call empowerment. Most people think this is a fluffy, nice concept of letting people work without oversight. For me, it means practical actions. It means connecting people to the networks they need, inside and outside the organization, to actually get things done. It means giving people real autonomy over how they work, while having transparency to see things are moving in the right direction and in the timeline that is necessary. And it means boundaries stated out loud: this is yours to decide, this is what I want visibility on, and here’s why. Vague boundaries create either micromanagement or chaos. Clear ones create trust. Clear is kind.
What keeps a team delivering when things get hard
Every team runs into impediments, and I’d sort them the way you’d sort anything you’re trying to influence: things fully within our control, things we can only influence by working with another team or partner, and things too big for us to move at all.
- Things fully within our control → we decide and fix ourselves.
- Things we can only influence by working with another team or partner → we negotiate.
- Things too big for us to move at all → we figure out how to mitigate the impact or live with it.
Delivery also depends on trust, and trust only holds up alongside accountability. The team wants to see results and everyone needs transparency about how work is progressing, while P&C teams deliverables all have dependencies. I want to build a culture where immediate and honest feedback is moving in both directions, and continuous improvement built into how we operate.
Great People & Culture leadership is about balancing humanity with accountability: creating a culture where people feel valued and empowered to succeed, while having the courage to challenge, make difficult decisions and raise the standard.
In my mind autonomy, accountability, quality and transparency are all part of the systemic trust I’d deliberately build in a HR team.
Well-being sits close to all of this, and I think leaders need a clear line here. People have full lives outside work, and a good leader notices when someone is struggling and helps them find the right support, for example a counselor, a break, an adjusted target.
I am worried, though, about a current trend where it seems like the organisation (and its leaders) are expected to solve most people’s mental and social problems. We should build the work environment where people feel included and supported, and are able to work according to the goals of their role or team.
But it is still a job.
What I’m saying is that it isn’t the leader’s job to carry too much weight from everyone’s private problems, because you’ll break yourself. Beyond enabling people with wellbeing at work, and offering stretch for situations where it is temporarily needed, there’s a limit, and HR policies exist for a reason.
Lastly, AI and technology. I’d be quite harsh here, setting a solid expectation that using AI doesn’t remove your responsibility for the result. You’re accountable for the quality, the ethics, the accuracy of the source data, and for checking that AI hasn’t hallucinated its way into something wrong.
I’d ask everyone to use AI every day. Ask them to spent 5% of their time learning with and about AI. Do morning coffees to share results, learnigns, failures and wins with AI. I’d relentlessly look for work that can be automated with high quality, and move the team to higher value work.
Where I'd start, in practice
Those are the conditions I’d build around a P&C team. But they only matter if they show up in how the team actually works day to day. So, if I were checking whether we’d really put them in place – rather than just talked about them – I’d look for a few concrete things:
Check the following…
- Can the team members describe our business value streams, logic, and main customer segment’s needs? (yes, in HR!)
- Can everyone on the team name the team’s top priorities, and what they’ve deliberately said no to, and why?
- Do we have metrics in place to inform us of the quality and value of our work?
- Does everyone know their stakeholders and how to best work with them? Does everyone speak with business representatives or end users of our deliverables each week?
- Does every person have a current view of the skills the team will need in twelve to eighteen months? (and what are they doing about it?)
- When someone raises a blocker, do we know within a day or two whether it’s ours to fix, ours to influence, or one we need to live with?
- Do we have transparency into each team’s or individual’s work pipeline, so that the team can autonomously work on dependencies and synchronizing capacity to what matters most?
- Do we have a culture of discussing feedback, any feedback, candidly and immediately, and are we improving based on that? How? When do we discuss feedback?
- What are we going to automate next? How? What do we need for succeeding with that?
- How can we spend everyone’s time only in high value meetings, maximising capacity for delivery, and speed up learning?
- What are the next things we can do to improve wellbeing, communication, collaboration and inclusion in the team? Have we done what we agreed to do about this the last month?
None of these require a transformation program. They’re checks you can run this week.
My closing thoughts
None of this is about being liked, or having the right values on a slide. Nothing of this is about making people love their jobs and feel good every day. What a utopia to think you should be liked by everyone as a leader. It’s also perfectly ok and normal to have some bad days or periods. The job still has to be done.
I need to build a working system that delivers. It’s about whether the team can actually deliver reliably, over time, in a way the business finds it valuable. Build this environment properly, fair and good leadership behavior has somewhere to land. Skip it, and even the best values won’t move the needle on delivery.
HR folks tend to want to decorate their leadership frameworks with fancy wordsmithing.
I just call this common sense. Let’s just get great things delivered together in a functioning team, with working tools, and for the majority of the time feel good doing it together.
