At GLS, we’re genuinely confused by the trend of rebranding Human Resources to “People & Culture.” 

We get the ‘People’ part, that’s been the heart of HR since forever. But ‘Culture’? That’s a stretch.

Let’s be honest: most HR teams aren’t out here crafting vibrant workplace cultures. They’re barely holding the line. Between policy policing, headcount tracking, performance management admin, and being the unfortunate bearers of every “this isn’t working out” conversation, HR has become the organisational scapegoat. To many employees, they’re the ones you see right before your security badge stops working.

And from the inside? It’s chaos. HR professionals are often fighting uphill battles, trying to convince leadership that investing in people isn’t just a “nice to have,” it’s a strategic imperative. But what’s the usual response? “What’s the ROI?” or “Let’s park that for now.” 

Translation: we don’t care, but you know what we care about? Money.

So sure, “People & Culture” looks good on an org chart. It sounds progressive on LinkedIn. But let’s be real: if your workplace culture is broken, it’s not because HR forgot to schedule a pizza Friday.

It’s because leadership didn’t lead.

Most people don’t know this, but the first org chart was created in 1854 by a railway manager trying to keep track of train operations across England.

It made sense at the time: trains ran on tracks, people followed orders, and hierarchy meant control.

But here’s the real question: Why are so many companies still running like 19th-century railroads?

Because when you strip it back, most org charts today still reflect the same top-down logic: command at the top, execution at the bottom, and very little space for flexibility, collaboration, or adaptive thinking.

We’ve changed how we communicate, how we buy, how we live. But how we organise people at work? Not so much.

Let’s get one thing straight: if you’re working with people, you’re going to have conflict.

It’s not a sign something’s broken. It’s a sign people care, people are different, and people are human. The problem isn’t conflict itself. It’s how we handle it.

And that’s where emotional intelligence makes all the difference.

Imagine telling a professional athlete:

“You’re great. So we’ll bring in a coach once every three years, give you a seminar with slides, and then expect you to win championships.”

Sounds absurd, right?

But that’s exactly how most corporate environments treat learning and development.

We expect high performance (under pressure, in constant motion) with almost no real training time.

In sports, training is 90% of the job. Practice. Coaching. Skill refinement. Performance is just the visible tip of the iceberg.

In the corporate world, it’s the opposite. We spend 99% of our time in performance mode. Back-to-back meetings, project deadlines, constant delivery and then hope that people will somehow grow on their own.

When we talk about “training,” we usually mean one-off events. Expensive. Occasional. Often disconnected from the day-to-day reality.

And when people struggle?

We assume it’s a performance issue. Not a preparation issue.

In 2020, remote work became the default overnight.

What began as a crisis response soon revealed unexpected upsides: no commutes, flexible schedules, and surprising bursts of productivity.

Many leaders were pleasantly surprised. It worked.

But as the dust settled, some companies began pulling people back into offices.

Why? Because fully remote setups started showing cracks.

Studies from Stanford and others found that fully remote workers can be 10–20% less productive than their in-office peers, largely due to communication hurdles and reduced mentoring opportunities.

The complaints that don’t make it to the boardroom.
The problems flagged again and again, only to be patched with a smile and a sticky note.
The meetings that end with, “Let’s just get through the week,” as if surviving is a measure of success.

It’s not bad luck. It’s not a rough quarter.
It’s not a one-off.

It’s a culture.
A culture of looking away. Of pretending it’s not that bad. Of duct-taping dysfunction instead of facing the real cost of doing nothing.

And we wonder why our teams are burning out. Why high performers quit quietly. Why leadership feels reactive, fragile, stuck. 

We turn to HR to ‘do something about it’ and somehow end up with a 10% gym discount, like that’s going to solve systemic burnout. Hi? We said stop the quick fixes.

What to hear something no one likes to say out loud?

Most of our workplaces aren’t broken. They were built this way.

The words that aren’t said out loud but hang in the air like a silent judgment when I walk in a boardroom: “She’s a woman.”

As if that, in itself, somehow disqualifies us. As if our gender alone makes us less credible. Less capable. 

It’s 2025, and somehow we’re still telling ourselves this tired narrative. Women aren’t “born” to lead. We’re better suited to supporting roles, while the big, bold decisions are best left to others (read: men).

But what if the opposite is true?
What if everything we’ve been taught about leadership is outdated?

Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s just work, nobody loves it”? It’s one of those beliefs we often accept without questioning. But what if we did? What if we stopped seeing work as a necessary burden and started seeing it as a space where people can thrive?

A study published in The Economic Journal offers a striking reminder: in a happiness ranking of 40 daily activities, “working” landed at position 39 just above “being sick in bed.” Yes, you read that right. Most people feel happier doing housework or commuting than they do working. And yet, we spend nearly a third of our lives at work.

That statistic alone should be enough to pause and ask: what are we doing wrong? And more importantly, what can we do better?

Let’s face it. Feedback is one of those things we all know we should give and receive more often, but rarely feel equipped to do well. It can feel awkward, triggering, or just unclear. But what if feedback became a normal part of the day, as natural as grabbing coffee with a colleague? That’s exactly the culture Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, has built.

In his book No Rules Rules, co-written with Erin Meyer, Hastings shares the backbone of Netflix’s feedback culture: the 4A Feedback Framework. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and more importantly, it works. Even (and especially) in high-performance environments.

We’ve all heard it: “You can do anything you want in life.” And yes, it’s true. But there’s a crucial nuance we often forget — you just can’t do it all at the same time.

This truth hits especially hard when you’re in a leadership role. Because the more responsibility you carry, the easier it is to fall into the trap of believing you have to be everywhere, know everything, and solve every problem. But when you hold on to everything, you don’t create momentum. You create a bottleneck. And unintentionally, your team gets stuck too.

So let’s talk about the cost of trying to do it all and what it takes to step into real leadership.