Ask what HR is for and the answers split into two jobs that only sound compatible. One job is parental: guardian of welfare and discipline, deciding what is good for employees, administering both the benefits and the punishments, keeper of the file. The other job is mediation: making the terms between adults explicit, and enforceable in both directions. Most people functions were never asked to choose, so they perform both jobs at once, and the contradiction shows.
The parental pattern
Parental HR has recognizable symptoms. Benefits exist that nobody dares use, because using them signals weakness to the very hierarchy HR reports into. Permission workflows govern things adults handle alone outside the building. Wellness programming runs alongside untouched workloads, treating exhaustion as a mindset. The open door turns out to open toward management: confidences travel up, verdicts travel down. None of this is malice. It is what any function becomes when it owns both care and control over people who have no standing in its decisions; the combination is the definition of custody.
The context makes the drift worse. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends, surveying nearly ten thousand leaders across 93 countries, reports that managers spend almost 40 percent of their time on firefighting and administrative work and only 13 percent developing their people, while 36 percent say they feel unprepared for the people-management part of the job. Faced with managers like that, a parental people function responds by taking over more of the relationship: more programs, more processes, more custody. The mediator response is the opposite, and harder: fix the terms of the manager-employee relationship itself, then get out of it.
Why the relationship, not the program
The research says the direct relationship is where the value sits. Dirks and Ferrin’s meta-analysis of 106 studies on trust in leadership found that trust in one’s immediate leader is a distinct referent from trust in the organization’s top, and the pivotal one for everyday outcomes, performance, citizenship, intentions to stay. No parallel program can compensate for a dishonest Tuesday with one’s manager. The highest-leverage people work is therefore unglamorous: making that specific relationship honest, symmetrical and consequence-bearing, which is mediation, not parenting.
The Semco instrument
What does institutionalized mediation look like? Semco built a version of it, as Ricardo Semler has told it. Everyone rated their boss anonymously, twice a year, Ricardo included. Two low scores in a row and the manager lost the role, though not the livelihood: returning to technical work at the same salary was a legitimate and unhumiliating exit. The rationale was stated plainly: whoever controls other people’s days has to deserve it.
Read as an HR design, the instrument does everything the parental model cannot. It points the accountability upward, at power, rather than downward, at dependents. It is symmetrical: the same system that can remove a manager protects the employee who scored them honestly, because the scoring is anonymous and routine rather than heroic. It requires no case files, no investigations, no custody of anyone’s feelings; the mechanism is the care. And it makes one job of the people function unnecessary in the best way, because a workforce with a working lever against bad management does not need a parent to complain to.
The instrument also clarifies what mediation asks of the people function itself: not neutrality of opinion but neutrality of mechanism. HR did not decide which managers deserved their roles; it built and defended the machine by which the governed decided. That is a harder job than parenting and a smaller one, which is exactly why it is resisted; empires are built from custody, not from working levers.
The choice between the two roles can be tested with a question about any people process on the books: does this process give both sides better terms, or does it give one side better files? Mediators produce terms, published pay logic, real severance, working upward feedback, and then defend them against whichever side breaches. Parents produce files, programs and permissions, and call the custody care.
A people function that chooses mediation ends up smaller, less visible and far more powerful, because it stops being the department that manages employees and becomes the department that manages the deal. Companies talk constantly about treating people like adults. The shortest path is to stop staffing the role of their parent.
Sources
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Survey of ~10,000 leaders in 93 countries: managers spend nearly 40% of time on firefighting and admin and 13% developing people; 36% feel unprepared for people management. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- Dirks & Ferrin / Journal of Applied Psychology 87(4) (2002). Trust in Leadership: Meta-Analytic Findings. Across 106 studies, trust in the direct leader is the pivotal referent for daily outcomes including performance and turnover intentions. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/675/