When Everyone Can Become a Chief, the Role Stops Meaning Anything.

For most of my career, I stayed where serious work usually happens: away from the spotlight. I lived in the back rooms of organisations, in the places where the air is stale, yet the consequences are fresh. I built frameworks, patched leaking systems, dismantled quiet dysfunctions, and watched entire cultures rise or collapse depending on whether leadership was willing to tolerate reality. I didn’t do it for visibility; I did it because businesses rarely die from one big scandal. They die from a thousand small decisions made by people who should never have been in the room to begin with. For a long time, I convinced myself that competence has a way of surfacing on its own. That if you keep building, the truth will eventually win. It’s a comforting belief. It is also, as it turns out, a professionally dangerous one.

Over the past five to ten years, something shifted in our profession — not loudly, not dramatically, but with that soft, administrative inevitability that makes decay feel like “progress.” I ma talking about by sector: HR. And HR didn’t evolve; it diluted! The doors opened wider, not to welcome better minds(!), interdisciplinary talent, or ethical seriousness, but to reward a kind of professional improvisation that would be unthinkable in almost any other leadership function. Titles inflated. Authority expanded. The word “strategic” got sprayed on everything like air freshener. And the minimum requirements — intellectual, ethical, procedural — quietly yet very distigtly disappeared. Oh yes, that they did!

What I now see in HR, up close, is not a talent shortage. It’s a standards shortage.

In fact, I can name at many “HR Chiefs” — real titles, real power — with few years in HR, no formal grounding, and zero fluency in the very basics they should have mastered before they were ever allowed near decisions that shape careers, salaries, and legal exposure.

And no, this isn’t me being dramatic; this is me being observant. There’s a difference.

Here is where the irony becomes embarrassing. We keep asking why executives don’t take HR seriously, why we’re treated as a support (or even worse) as a mere admin function, why we’re tolerated rather than trusted. But the truth is simpler and far less flattering: we did this to ourselves. We allowed a professional culture where performance sometimes matters more than substance, where optics can substitute for operating competence, and where “connections” can quietly outrank qualifications. If you want a technical term for it, research already has one. In late 2024, researchers associated with the University of Birmingham published work on “false performers” and “organisational charlatans” — people who know all the right things to say, who can sound competent in meetings and interviews, but who operate out of depth and compensate with tactics: claiming credit, over-talking as a smokescreen, shifting blame, and curating an image that management finds reassuring. The point isn’t that these people exist. The point is that systems often reward them. When a field relaxes its standards, it doesn’t simply become “more inclusive.” It becomes more vulnerable to people who can sell competence without possessing it. And once they’re in, the clean-up is never elegant. It’s expensive, demoralising, and slow.

Now, the clap-bait sentence that should never have to be said — but apparently does — because we’ve reached a stage where the obvious needs to be reintroduced like it’s a new innovation.

No one would appoint a CFO without deep financial literacy. No one would appoint a CTO without engineering grounding. Yet we routinely appoint HR leaders with no formal understanding of psychology, labour law, or business fundamentals.That’s not “alternative pathways.” That’s not “learning on the job.” That’s governance malpractice wrapped in a nice title.

Psychology is not a TED Talk about motivation. Labour law is not a checkbox policy template. Business fundamentals are not a vague feeling that “people matter.” These are the disciplines that prevent an organisation from harming its workforce, breaching its obligations, mismanaging risk, and pretending culture can be fixed with emojis and an internal newsletter.

If you think I’m exaggerating, look outside HR for one minute — the world has already run this experiment, repeatedly, in sectors where competence isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s the difference between safety and damage. In a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing on “Protecting Taxpayers from Incompetent and Unethical Return Preparers,” the testimony laid it out bluntly: the lack of regulation and minimum competency standards created an environment that breeds incompetence and fraud; when there are no educational standards, no testing, no continuing education, you don’t get “innovation,” you get a market that quietly attracts the wrong kind of provider. And in healthcare-adjacent spaces, a systematic review on the regulation of traditional and complementary medicine professions noted that lack of regulation was repeatedly cited as exposing patients to direct and indirect risks, with harm linked to practitioner competence and training quality — and that appropriate regulatory mechanisms can mitigate risk by promoting standards and accountability. Different sectors, same lesson: when you remove the floor, you don’t liberate the field; you degrade it.

So why am I saying this now — publicly — when for years I preferred to work quietly from the inside? Because at some point, silence stops being professionalism and starts becoming complicity. When you’re asked to speak on stages, to moderate panels, to be presented as or present a “voice of HR,” your job is no longer just to deliver elegant commentary and keep the atmosphere pleasant. Your job is to protect the integrity of the field — especially when the field is actively undermining itself. And yes, I feel the tension.

I feel the internal debate every time I’m on a panel: do I be diplomatically agreeable, nod at the slogans, let the room keep smiling? Or do I say what needs to be said, even if the room goes a little quiet, even if someone later calls me “intense,” “too direct,” or my favourite euphemism of all: “not collaborative.”As if collaborating with mediocrity is a virtue.

Let me be explicit: this is not a call for elitism. It’s a call for professional honesty. I am not arguing that every HR leader must have the same academic path or the same credentials. I’m arguing that if you hold authority over people’s livelihoods and psychological safety, you must meet a minimum competence threshold — a threshold that includes behavioural science literacy, legal literacy, and business literacy. That’s not arrogance. That’s ethics. And it’s also, inconveniently, what separates HR as a strategic function from HR as a decorative one. Because when your decisions can trigger claims, reputational risk, turnover cascades, culture collapse, or compliance failures, “learning as you go” stops being charming. It becomes reckless. The organisation pays. The employees pay first.

And here’s the part nobody wants to admit out loud because it exposes the theatre: if we want HR to regain credibility, we have to stop rewarding the wrong incentives. We have to stop confusing social proof with competence, proximity with legitimacy, and PR with capability. Connections may open doors. They do not keep organisations safe once you’re inside. A polished narrative does not replace a risk assessment. A confident voice does not replace evidence-based practice. And if HR keeps tolerating leaders who can’t read the room, the law, or the numbers, then we should stop acting surprised when CEOs treat us like an administrative department that is occasionally useful for paperwork and occasionally annoying during “difficult conversations.”

So yes — I’m stepping into the foreground. Not because I suddenly discovered the joy of visibility, but because the profession I’ve served for decades is being turned into a stage where performance is starting to replace competence. I’m not here to entertain panels. I’m here to raise the bar — painfully, publicly, and unapologetically — because if HR will not define its own standards, someone else will define them for us. And they will not be generous. They’ll be transactional. They’ll be dismissive. And, frankly, they’ll be right to be.

Dr. Vasileios Ioannidis is the founder of HackHR.org and inventor of the Tectonic HR™ methodology. With more than 25 years of experience leading global HR transformations and a doctorate in industrial‑organisational psychiatry, he helps organisations predict, prevent, and perform. He writes here as your trusted advisor, strategis,t and friend.

Tectonic HR™ | Human-Centric Futures | Predict. Prevent. Perform.