Who Owns HR When the Business Scales?

Somebody's doing the work. Try finding whoever agreed to own the decision behind it.

OPINION PIECE

Mayank S. Sharma, Managing Partner, ELEMENT MEA.

8/18/20267 min read

Picture the Tuesday it happens. You wave a new role through between two meetings — “yes, let’s get someone in” — already thinking about the next thing before you’ve finished the sentence. HR hears about it Thursday, from the hiring manager, who assumed you’d already cleared the budget with Finance. Finance finds out when the offer letter lands on their desk for sign-off, and by then it feels too awkward to ask why nobody looped them in.

Three months later the hire isn’t landing. You’re on a call, video, half the faces frozen mid-blink, and someone finally asks the obvious question: whose decision was this? HR says you wanted this person, specifically. The hiring manager says nobody asked for their read after week one. You say you assumed HR was running the process properly. Everyone’s telling the truth. Nobody actually owns it.

That’s not a hiring mistake. It’s what happens to decisions once a business outgrows your ability to make all of them yourself, and nobody ever actually agreed who picks up the rest.

THE OWNERSHIP GAP APPEARS BEFORE THE WORKLOAD GAP

Here’s how it actually happens. You used to sign off on every hire yourself, sit in on the interviews, send the offer emails personally. Somewhere around hire thirty, that stopped being possible, so you handed it off. A deputy took the early rounds. Line managers started deciding outright. HR came in to catch whatever was left. Each handoff made sense in the moment. None of it got written down. Nobody sat you down and said, “You have this now, officially.” It just drifted that way, the way most delegation does.

For a while, nothing seems wrong. Then the backlog starts. Early attrition creeps up, and nobody can say exactly why. Someone in Riyadh is quietly following a policy that’s subtly different from the one in Dubai, and neither office knows it. By the time you notice, the gap’s been sitting there for a year, and it’s already shown up, as a resignation you didn’t see coming, a hire that never should have happened, long before it ever shows up as its own line on a spreadsheet.

The expensive part was never the job itself. It was the handoff, the exact moment a decision moved from you to someone else, and neither of you actually agreed who was catching it.

Scale doesn't expose a shortage of effort It exposes how many decisions never had an owner in the first place.

TWELVE DECISIONS THAT QUIETLY DECIDE WHAT THE COMPANY BECOMES

Play it forward at pretty much any scaling business and the same twelve decisions come up, again and again, usually with nobody’s name clearly on any of them. Here’s what each one actually looks like, up close:

1. What “good performance” actually means here. Someone gets promoted for hitting the number alone. Someone else gets passed over for hitting the same number quietly, without the drama. Nobody’s ever written down which one the business actually wants more of.

2. Build it or buy it. A capability gap opens up, and the answer is almost always “hire someone senior from outside,” not because that’s right, but because nobody owns the slower decision to grow it from within.

3. What culture protects, and what it costs to protect it. Every leadership team says culture matters. Ask which specific behaviour they’d actually let a top performer go for, and watch the room go quiet.

4. Who’s quietly being grown, and who’s quietly stuck. Real internal mobility rarely happens by policy. It happens because someone senior personally decided to bet on a person, which means the people without a sponsor don’t move, however good they are.

5. What the organisation is actually built to do well. Speed, consistency, quality, control: structure always trades one off against another. Most businesses never chose. The org chart just accreted, one urgent hire at a time.

6. Which manager habits get copied. A new manager learns how to manage by watching the manager above them, not from any training programme. Nobody ever decided whose habits were actually worth copying.

7. How much change people can absorb before they start leaving anyway. Every reorg, new system, and process change draws on the same reserve of goodwill. Nobody’s watching the balance until it’s already overdrawn.

8. What gets deliberately taught, and what gets quietly assumed. New capability either gets built on purpose or gets left to chance, and “we hired smart people, they’ll figure it out” isn’t a decision. It’s the absence of one.

9. What “ready for the next role” actually means. Without a real answer, readiness becomes a feeling, usually whoever the last promotion happened to resemble.

10. What kind of person gets hired when nobody’s deciding on purpose. Left alone, hiring drifts toward people who feel familiar. Range of experience and thinking doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to keep resisting the drift.

11. How institutional knowledge survives someone leaving. The person who “just knows how things work here” resigns, and it turns out nothing was ever written down, because writing it down was never actually anyone’s job.

12. Who’s allowed to tell the founder no. Every scaling business needs at least one person whose job includes disagreeing with whoever built it, and being heard when they do. Most don’t have one, by accident more than design.

Most leadership teams can rattle off two or three of these with total confidence. The rest go to whoever spoke first in the meeting, which isn’t the same thing as ownership. It’s just faster.

None of these look dramatic on their own. Add them up across fifty people, or five hundred, and you’re not looking at a list of HR preferences. You’re looking at the actual operating system the business runs on, whether anyone designed it or not.

We watched this happen inside a holding company once. Every entity had quietly built its own answer to two of these: what counted as good performance, and whether talent got grown from inside or bought in from outside. All of them confident. None of them the same. Nobody was wrong, exactly. Nobody had ever asked what anyone else was doing.

WHAT LEADERS MUST KEEP, WHAT HR SHOULD RUN

Not everything belongs at the top, and not everything belongs with HR. The trick is knowing which is which before you have to guess under pressure. You hang onto the calls that are genuinely ambiguous, hard to reverse, or likely to become precedent: what good performance actually looks like here, which behaviours you’d let a top performer go for, who gets the next real bet placed on them.

HR runs everything underneath that, the recurring, rules-based layer: the review calendar and calibration mechanics, the training records, the system that tracks who’s actually ready for what. An embedded HR partner exists to run that machine well. Not to make the calls that are actually yours to make.

We’ve also watched this fail the other way, the one nobody warns you about. One governance programme had a single leader’s name attached to nearly every tracked action within a couple of months. Not because she’d grabbed the work. Because nobody else had put their name on anything until someone finally asked why one person was suddenly running the whole show. Too much ownership in one place is the same failure as none at all. It just wears a nicer suit.

Leadership owns the Judgement calls. Managers own how well those calls get carried out. HR owns how well the whole system stays honest.

THE THIRTY-MINUTE TEST

Print the twelve decisions. One page. Next to each one, write down who actually owns it, what proves it’s working, and what happens if nobody in the room can answer.

You’ll hit the same four walls almost every time. Nobody’s name is actually on the decision, and it takes ten minutes just to find out who could even commit the business to it. Or the only proof anything happened lives in one person’s inbox, and none of it would survive the day they leave. Or a report gets built every month and nothing ever changes because of it, because nobody decided what it was actually for. Or a manager’s been quietly waiting for HR to make a call that was theirs to make the whole time.

We run some version of this at the start of nearly every governance engagement, and we’ve never once needed the full half hour before the first person goes quiet. The businesses that actually close the gap don’t leave the answer as something everyone half-remembers agreeing to. They write it down, one page, get it signed, and look at it again as the business changes. Takes a working session to draft. Takes a quarter to actually stick.

THREE QUESTIONS THAT GIVE YOU AWAY

Could you say, without hedging, exactly what behaviour would get a top performer let go here? Could you name who’s being deliberately grown for the next tier up right now, and who actually made that call? And do you know whether last year’s key hires were built from inside or bought in from outside, or whether anyone ever consciously chose?

Answer all three without flinching and you’re probably fine. Hesitate, reach for your phone to check with someone, and you already know the real answer. The activity’s been happening. The decisions never actually were.

BEFORE YOU HIRE ANOTHER HR PERSON

Once ownership’s clear, adding a person, an internal hire, an embedded partner, whatever mix fits, is just a scoping exercise. Straightforward. When it isn’t clear, adding a person hands a fragmented system one more set of hands and exactly the same number of gaps.

Go back to that Tuesday. The one where you waved the role through between two meetings. The fix was never a better process for approving roles. It was somebody, you, actually saying out loud: this one’s mine. And meaning it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mayank Sharma is Managing Partner of element MEA, an embedded people-infrastructure practice helping growing organisations turn people priorities into clear ownership, operating rhythm and measurable execution. elementmea.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayanksharma-element