Today’s lesson is about one of the least glamorous, most defining parts of this job: what you do when a leader makes a decision you then have to clean up.

Let me tell you about the worst week-five of my career for a new job I otherwise loved.

I started a new Lead HRBP role, and within a month - I suddenly had a surge of managers, individual contributors and even directors lining up outside my office, genuinely upset.

• “When is my new title going into the system?”
• “We were told we were being promoted.”
• “We were told to start using ‘Senior’ in our titles, when does it become official?”

Here’s what had happened: about a month before I started, the VP of this department had told his whole team of ~50 to add “Senior” (and in some cases “Lead”) to their titles.

These were media buyers, programmatic specialists, ad campaign analysts, many of them with just ~2 years of experience.

For people at that stage, a “Senior” title isn’t cosmetic. It’s meaningful. It signals growth, market value, a real step up. So naturally, they believed they’d been promoted.

The VP had done zero due diligence. No conversation with HR. No check on whether the titles mapped to real job levels, compensation bands, or budget. He just announced it. And the moment the practical questions started, “when does this hit the system, when does the pay change”, his answer was: “Go talk to Daniel.”

A promise I didn’t make, to people who had every right to believe it, with no structure behind it and no budget to honor it. And then, to complete the picture, that VP chose that same window to announce he was leaving for another job.

I was furious. And I want to be honest about that, because this is where most of us start: with the (very fair) feeling that we’re being asked to absorb someone else’s mistake.

But here’s what I had to learn, and what I want you to take from this.

First, give the bad decision its fair hearing.

When I cooled down, I could actually see what the VP was reaching for.

He wanted his people to feel ownership.

He wanted them to operate like senior, accountable professionals.

That instinct wasn’t wrong. The execution was a disaster, but the intention was human, and seeing that mattered, because it changed how I handled it.

The road to hell really is paved with good intentions, and an HRBP who can spot the good intention inside the bad decision manages the cleanup far better than one who just sees an idiot.

Second, and this is the real lesson: you cannot fix this alone, and you should not try to.

The instinct of a newer HRBP is to absorb it, to be the good soldier, to quietly take the heat and break the bad news yourself.

Don’t.

That’s how you become the face of a mistake you didn’t make, and it teaches the organization that HR exists to clean up after executives without consequence.

The right move is transparency, honesty, a little professional distance, and, crucially, making sure the accountability lands where it belongs.

I did not stand in front of those teams and personally retract their promotions as if I were the decision maker. I worked it so the organization owned the correction, the SVP and CMO’s leadership, his own bosses were brought into the resolution and shared the ownership of fixing it.

The message to those employees could not be “Daniel says no.” It had to be “the company made an error in process, here is what’s actually true, and here is how leadership is making it right.”

That distinction protects three things at once: the employees (who get honesty instead of a scapegoat), the organization (which has to actually own its process failure instead of outsourcing it to HR), and you (who does not become the permanent absorber of every executive’s mess).

Because that’s the trap.

If you let the onus fall on you every time a leader makes a well-intentioned bad call, you will spend your entire career as the cleanup crew, and you will never be seen as the partner who could have prevented the mess in the first place. The HRBP who manages this well, with honesty, with distance, with accountability pushed to the right place, is the one leaders eventually start consulting before they make the decision.

Which is the whole point.

This is exactly the kind of situation we work through in the HRBP Weekend Intensive, the real, messy, political moments nobody trains you for. We just confirmed our fifth attendee and the cohort’s coming together nicely; there are still a few spots left, and I’d love for you to be one of them.

👉 Grab your seat in the HRBP Weekend Intensive

Interested but your company won’t cover the cost? Reach out to me directly, there are discounts and scholarships that can be applied. See you there!

Dan