Mountaintop Beverage

Beth Pratt

I once had a Chairman of the Board for a Fortune 500 company tell me, point-blank, that no one cared about the global performance management process I had just spent six months helping to design. Instead, he said, my only real job was to bring people together.

At the time, in my first Head of HR role, I thought: that should be simple enough. Like hosting Thanksgiving dinner simple, right? Everyone shows up, no one argues, and the dishes do themselves! But I quickly learned that bringing people together isn’t about team-building exercises, dual reporting structures, or polished process documents. Those are surface-level HR tools, useful in their place but rarely enough to get at the human undercurrent. The real challenge lies in navigating the invisible web of personal values, belief systems, and decision-making styles that can sometimes lead people to show up in destructive ways. Harassment, hostile work environments, inequitable acts, even employees who simply can’t get along all come from that clash. Most of these behaviors are not born of malice but of differences colliding. Our job is to understand what is really driving people’s perspectives and actions without making them feel judged. Understanding people at this level isn’t just empathy, it’s a discipline that is harder and more time consuming than most can imagine.

What makes it even harder is when your values clash with the very people you need to bring together. Shaping behavior can’t mean losing who you are. If you drift too far from your own compass, you lose credibility and authenticity. You also risk becoming that rigid HR professional everyone dreads when they walk into the room: “uh oh, here comes HR, hide the fun.”

Over the years, I’ve learned to stay close to my values while also being willing to evolve. Leadership isn’t about showing up fully formed. It’s about growing in each conversation, each hard moment, each decision you might even regret later. Brené Brown writes about regret as one of our greatest teachers. Not something to avoid, but something to learn from. If you let it, regret helps you do better next time. That’s how leaders, including CHROs, grow.

But evolving yourself is only half the work. The other half is navigating the beliefs and values leaders bring with them into every decision. We’ve all heard the advice to avoid politics and religion at work. On the surface, that sounds smart. But just because people don’t talk about their beliefs doesn’t mean those beliefs aren’t shaping their decisions. Leaders bring their whole selves to the table, whether they admit it or not.

Think about the recent cases where employees were disciplined or even fired for political posts related to highly charged events outside the office. These aren’t just side comments in break rooms. They ripple through morale, trust, and perceptions of fairness. Even when politics are kept off the clock, they influence who feels safe speaking up, who feels judged, and who chooses to hold back. That’s the kind of under-the-surface force CHROs need to seek and manage.

So what does bringing people together actually look like? For me, it’s a mix of things:

• Know the go-to play. We all have a default approach to making decisions: numbers, instinct, or risk. If you can call the play, you can connect the players.

• Find the common threads. Even when beliefs differ, shared values like fairness or growth can hold people together. The trick is pulling those threads through.

• Make tension work for you. A CFO focused on cost control and a Chief Commercial Officer chasing market growth will collide. But handled right, that tension sharpens strategy.

• Grow as you go. The best CHROs are students of others and of themselves.

• Humor as a secret weapon. A good laugh won’t erase the conflict, but it can unlock perspective no spreadsheet ever will.

This job isn’t about building perfect alignment. It’s about helping leaders meet in the messy middle. It’s not neat, it’s not always comfortable, but it’s where real progress happens. And if you can laugh a little while standing in that space, you’re already halfway to bringing people together.