The "HR island" problem: busy work that doesn't move the business
Andrew Bartlow has a vivid way of describing one of the most common failure modes in HR leadership. He references the old Claymation holiday movie, Herbie the dentist, the Island of Misfit Toys, and maps it directly onto HR teams that retreat into their own world. "Don't strand yourself out on HR Island," he says, "working on HR things that aren't really important to anybody other than HR people."
The trap is easy to fall into. Engagement surveys, ENPS scores, perks programs, performance review cycles — these feel like real work because they are real work. But if none of it connects to how the business actually makes money or hits its goals, it's invisible to the people who control your budget and your seat at the table. Andrew is direct about this: if you're a cash-burning startup racing toward product-market fit, employee satisfaction is a tertiary metric at best. What matters is whether you helped ship the product, close the customers, or raise the next round.
The risk of staying on HR Island isn't just irrelevance — it's how others come to define the function. Most CEOs and founders, Andrew points out, have no firsthand experience with strong strategic HR. Their frame of reference defaults to compliance and employee relations: keep us out of trouble, make sure payroll runs. That's the ceiling they'll set for you if you don't raise it yourself.
Two roles Andrew explicitly warns against: the cruise director (keeping everyone entertained and engaged, but not driving outcomes) and the union steward (so focused on employee advocacy that you become adversarial with the leadership you're supposed to partner with). Neither earns respect. Neither earns budget. Neither moves the business forward.
Reframing HR as an internal management consultant
The trap most HR leaders fall into isn't laziness, it's identity. Andrew Bartlow puts it plainly: "Don't strand yourself out on HR Island working on HR things that aren't really important to anybody other than HR people." The cruise director planning the holiday party. The union steward going adversarial with leadership. These are real roles HR gets pulled into, and neither one earns you influence. The alternative Bartlow proposes is the internal management consultant, someone whose job is to make the organization operate better and hit its goals faster.
What that actually looks like in practice is more specific than it sounds. Bartlow spends a significant chunk of his consulting work with private equity-backed companies doing CEO and leadership team assessments, asking whether the right people are in place to hit a growth target or execute a transaction in the next two years. He described a 6 AM call from Las Vegas with a CEO and his full leadership team, working through an assessment of their org structure. The conclusion? Remove a C-suite layer so the CEO had direct interface with marketing, because the real lever for that business was top-of-funnel growth. That's HR work. It just doesn't look like an engagement survey.
This is where talent strategy at the top of the org becomes the highest-leverage thing an HR leader can touch. When you frame the role as internal management consultant, the question shifts from "what HR programs should we run?" to "do we have the right team in place to get where we need to go?" That question — asked with the right analytical rigour and stakeholder awareness, is what gets HR leaders pulled into the room rather than left waiting outside it.
Work on the right things by starting with goals, money, and milestones
Andrew's core argument is deceptively simple: before you design a single HR initiative, you need to understand what your organisation is actually trying to accomplish and how it makes money. Not in a vague, mission-statement way. In a specific, follow-the-dollars way.
For a venture-backed startup, that means understanding where the company sits on its journey. Are you pre-product-market fit, burning cash against a product roadmap? Then your job isn't to run engagement surveys — it's to accelerate the work that gets you to your next fundraise. Andrew is direct about this: "Attraction and retention is fine, but that's a secondary or even tertiary metric. What you're after are the dollars." Can your HR work help the team hit product milestones? Land first customers? Reach profitability and unlock the next round? Those are the outcomes that matter.
The practical method Andrew uses is a cascading one-pager: start with the organisation's top three goals, map the handful of initiatives that support each one, then identify where HR can clearly enable those initiatives. Not as a separate workstream, but as a direct input. His example is precise — if the goal is more revenue, don't roll out manager training company-wide. Start with the sales team, measure quota attainment before and after, and show the difference. That's how you connect HR work to business outcomes in a way leadership actually cares about.
The same logic applies in nonprofits, just with a different definition of success. Whether it's feeding the hungry or hitting a revenue target, the question is the same: does this initiative move the organisation toward what it's genuinely trying to achieve?
A simple cascade model to translate strategy into HR priorities
Andrew Bartlow describes a one-pager that works as a visual waterfall: start with the organization's top three goals, map the handful of initiatives that support each one, then identify where HR can slot in as an enabling function. Not HR initiatives for their own sake, HR initiatives that have a clear, traceable line back to something the business is actually trying to accomplish.
The example he gives is straightforward and worth stealing. If the company's number one priority is revenue growth, the relevant question isn't "should we roll out manager training?" It's "should we roll out manager training for the sales team, specifically because better managers correlate with quota attainment?" That's a different conversation. One gets you a line item in the L&D budget. The other gets you a business case.
And the measurement approach matters just as much as the targeting. Andrew suggests tracking quota attainment before and after the intervention or, better yet, running it with half the sales team first so you have a live control group to compare against. That kind of before/after or test/control structure is how you move from "we ran a training programme" to "we can show what changed because of it."
The broader point is about resisting the pull of the imaginary list, the mental catalogue of good HR programmes that every well-run function should have. As Bartlow puts it, the trap is "working on HR things that aren't really important to anybody other than HR people." The cascade model is the antidote: it forces every initiative to earn its place by connecting upward to something that genuinely moves the business.
Earning a real seat at the table through proactivity, not titles
Andrew's advice here is refreshingly practical. Before you can influence strategy, you need to understand what your organization is actually trying to accomplish. That means reading the board deck, the all-hands deck, the investor materials — whatever gives you visibility into the real priorities. If you're not sure you've read them correctly, test your assumptions with a peer in finance or sales. "Hey, here's what I think matters most right now — am I roughly right?" That one conversation can save you months of working on the wrong things.
From there, the move isn't to ask for more access or a bigger title. It's to show up with proposals tied to real pain points. Andrew is direct about this: leaders get pulled into strategy conversations because they're already working on things that clearly matter to the organization. They don't get there by requesting a seat. If you're waiting to be invited in, you've already handed away your leverage.
On the title question, Andrew doesn't mince words: "Don't let title be your excuse." It's common in HR to hold a VP-level role while every other function has a C-suite lead. That gap is real, but it's not a reason to hold back. Demonstrating value, proposing solutions, connecting your work to measurable outcomes, showing you understand the business, is what earns credibility. Asking "how can I be more strategic?" without evidence of strategic thinking doesn't move the needle. Bringing a well-reasoned proposal that links manager training to quota attainment, for example, does. Proactivity isn't just a nice trait here. It's the mechanism.
Closing the courage gap: finance curiosity, stronger language, and measured risk
The biggest capability gaps Andrew sees in senior HR leaders aren't technical. They're psychological. He calls it the "courage gap", and it shows up in two distinct ways.
The first is a reluctance to engage with basic financial concepts. Things like EBITDA. Andrew is direct about this: HR leaders often know there's distance between themselves and the business, but they hesitate to close it. They'll avoid asking the CFO a "basic" question because it feels exposing. Some even wear their discomfort with numbers as a badge of identity. Andrew's response to that is unambiguous: "Please stop saying 'I'm not a numbers person.' Excise that from your language." It signals disqualification. It hands credibility away before the conversation even starts.
The second form of the courage gap is the fear of being shot down. HR leaders spend three evenings building a proposal, present it, watch it fall flat, and then go quiet for months. The logic feels self-protective. In practice, it's career-limiting. The leaders who earn influence aren't the ones who wait until their ideas are bulletproof, they're the ones who keep proposing, keep connecting their work to real organizational pain points, and keep showing up with solutions rather than waiting to be assigned them.
Andrew's reframe is worth sitting with: you won't fail from making an imperfect first proposal. You'll fail from never making one at all. Once HR leaders understand that proposing is the expectation, not a risk to manage, the courage gap starts to close on its own.
