This year’s International HR Day, highlighted the theme: “Empower People to Lead Change.” It seemed like an appropriate time to reflect on what this requires and what is lost when organizations treat speed as a substitute.
Later, I came across a Fortune Workforce Innovation Summit Interview on LinkedIn where Ryan Breslow, CEO of the fintech company Bolt, discussed laying off his entire HR department and replacing it with “People Ops.” His reasoning: “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach,” claiming that “People Ops empowers managers, streamlines decision-making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.” Breslow also noted that in an effort to improve efficiency, the company is restructuring into a leaner organization that relies heavily on AI.
This restructuring occurs against a backdrop of significant organizational turmoil. The company has seen its valuation plummet by 97%, falling from a peak of $11B to approximately $300M, while its Glassdoor rating of 3.1/5 sits below the tech industry average. Since 2022, the company has endured four rounds of layoffs and the dismantling of previously championed culture-first perks, such as unlimited PTO and the four-day work week. These developments suggest the kinds of organizational conditions that make “lightning speed” feel like the only available lever. When trust is already strained, removing structural support does not accelerate recovery. It accelerates exposure.
Bolt offers a highly visible example of what many organizations are grappling with: pressure to move faster, do more with less, and leverage AI to maintain competitiveness. The tension is not unique to Bolt. It reflects broader questions many leaders are wrestling with right now.
These are not questions about one company. They are questions about the future of work itself.
The Speed Imperative is Real.
SHRM’s 2026 State of AI in HR report found a widespread sense of urgency among HR professionals driven by fear of falling behind peers who have already deployed AI. That pressure is legitimate and shared by tech leaders alike. SHRM researchers caution against rushing to implement AI to narrow a perceived gap. Doing so consistently hinders a more strategic approach aligned with larger organizational objectives, and produces the disjointed investments that create the problems leaders were trying to solve in the first place.
The pressure to move faster is real. But when speed becomes the primary operating principle, organizations risk undermining the very conditions that make transformation sustainable.
Human-Centered Leadership
This focus on “lightning speed” stands in stark contrast to the principles of human-centered leadership. Speaking at the Bamboo HR Summit, Brené Brown emphasized that human-centered leadership creates psychological safety, builds trust, and navigates change through “deep humanity.” While AI can provide data, it cannot replace the human side of work: empathy, connection, and meaning.
Those conditions do more than make people feel supported. They make people feel empowered. And empowerment is what enables curiosity, challenge, and innovation to flourish. Brown links a curiosity mindset directly to the presence of trust and psychological safety and argues that HR professionals are uniquely positioned to foster these conditions. In their absence, people do not become more curious. They become more protective. She also notes that AI falls short here. “AI is more sycophantic than productive challenge. Even with the right prompts, AI is still a little bit afraid to challenge. It’s just not built that way.” The independent thought and productive challenge that drive innovation cannot be automated. They require people who feel safe enough to speak up, question assumptions, and say what they actually think. That is not a technology problem. It is a culture and leadership problem. From a trauma-informed perspective, trust, psychological safety, and empowerment are not soft skills. They are three of the foundational pillars of a trauma-informed workplace and the operating conditions that make learning, adaptation, and meaningful contribution possible. Organizations that undermine these conditions in pursuit of speed may achieve short term gains and compliance, but they often sacrifice the very capabilities required for sustainable transformation.
This is why trauma-informed workplaces are not simply about well-being. They are about creating the conditions that enable people to adapt, contribute, thrive and ultimately lead change.
Trust is Strategic Infrastructure
This is the part the speed argument misses: trust is not soft infrastructure. It is the operating condition that determines whether any other initiative, AI adoption, organizational redesign, manager empowerment, produces the results it promises.
Trust is often treated as something organizations build after the strategy is decided. In reality, trust is what makes strategy executable. It influences performance and whether people speak up, challenge assumptions, adapt to change, and remain committed during change and uncertainty. Organizations can mandate compliance, but they cannot mandate trust. And without trust, transformation becomes far more expensive than leaders anticipate.
Regulation Before Strategy: The Sequencing Problem Tech Leaders Need to Know About
The sequencing problem facing organizations goes deeper than AI governance or implementation. It is human.
One of the assumptions in the speed imperative is that organizations can simply deploy an initiative and successful transformation will follow. Unfortunately, human beings do not work that way. From a trauma-informed perspective, the nervous system follows a biological sequence whether organizations acknowledge it or not. Regulation precedes cognition. A person’s nervous system needs to be calm and regulated before they can access higher level logic, problem solving or coping strategies. Individuals who do not feel safe do not produce strategic thinking; they produce protection.
From the outside those protective responses are often misinterpreted. They look like disengagement, resistance, mediocre performance, presenteeism, excessive busyness, change fatigue, perfectionism, silence, cynicism and the cultural drift that Breslow described as entitlement. These are not individual failures. They are predictable responses to environments where speed has been prioritized over the conditions that make sustained contribution possible. A nervous system in protection mode cannot simultaneously produce the sound judgement, creativity and initiative that leaders are asking for. Organizations cannot expect peak performance from a workforce that is operating in a constant state of stress and uncertainty. It is a sequencing error.
Regulation first. Then strategy.
Trust first. Then transformation.
Psychological safety first. Then innovation.
Empowerment first. Then change.
When the order is reversed and leaders push for output before employees feel grounded enough to deliver it, the result is not speed. Instead, it produces compliance rather than commitment, and short term output rather than sustainable performance.
The lesson is not that speed is wrong. It is that the sequence determines whether speed creates momentum or creates friction. Organizations that build safety, trust and empowerment first move faster over time because they are not spending resources on the recovery work that rushed decisions produce. The human operating conditions have to be in place before the strategy can be executed.
The Misdiagnosis of Protection
Breslow identified, “a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company, and people who felt empowered, felt entitled, but weren’t actually working hard. And this is the number one thing that I had to battle.” This is not an HR failure; it is a cultural and performance issue born from a lack of psychological safety, corroborated by employee critiques of an “extremely metric driven” and “toxic” culture where those who speak up “vanish without much warning.”
This challenge requires a shift in perspective: Breslow’s focus on individual entitlement misdiagnoses the problem as personal failure. From a trauma-informed lens, this behavior is a symptom of a system failure, reflecting a lack of clear boundaries, trust, and consistent leadership.
The research reflects this reality. Accenture’s Work, Workforce, Workers report found that 95% of workers do not trust their organizations to ensure positive AI and organizational outcomes for everyone. This figure reflects what happens when people have watched decisions get made without them, and have learned to protect themselves accordingly.
People produce protection before they produce strategy.
This is why HR is not the function that slows transformation down. HR is the people function that helps create the conditions that make speed and transformation sustainable
What Sustainable Transformation Requires
The shift toward leaner, more operationally focused people functions is also being accelerated by technology. Bolt is not alone in questioning how much of HR needs to remain human-led as AI automates many of the function’s traditional responsibilities. That shift is real and it is accelerating. But removing headcount is not the same as removing the need for the function itself.
As Lauren Winans, CEO of Next Level Benefits HR Consulting, observed in response to the Bolt story: “the name matters far less than whether leadership truly empowers the function to influence business strategy, culture, workforce planning and organizational effectiveness.”
That distinction matters. The question it raises is not whether HR teams should be leaner. It is whether the functions that remain, the ones that require judgment, trust-building, accountability, and helping people navigate change are being resourced and empowered to do that work, or quietly absorbed into a gap no one has named.
Sustainable transformation requires more than efficiency. It requires manager capability, empowerment, trust, psychological safety, and helping humans adapt through periods of change. These are not administrative tasks or cultural initiatives. They are strategic capabilities and operating conditions that enable organizations to scale without fracturing.
Real scalability, the kind that compounds rather than corrects, requires an intentional infrastructure underneath it. AI can accelerate that infrastructure, but it cannot replace it. The organizations that will move fastest over the next five years are the ones that build psychological safety, trust, and accountability into their operating model now, before the pressure to move fast makes it feel like a luxury they cannot afford.
Because organizations do not scale through efficiency alone.
They scale through trust.
The CEO Sets the Conditions
Leaders set the conditions in which culture develops. They establish what is safe, what is valued, and what happens when people raise concerns. HR can design systems, coach managers, and build frameworks, but it cannot manufacture safety, trust, accountability, or healthy culture if leadership is not modeling the consistency those conditions require.
Breslow’s decision may yet produce the outcomes he is after. People Ops, done well, can be a legitimate evolution of the HR function. But the evidence suggests that the underlying conditions, empowerment, trust, psychological safety, and clear governance must exist before structural change can be sustained. Speed without that foundation does not produce momentum. It produces exposure. And exposure has a way of revealing what was already there.
As organizations race to adopt AI, the question is no longer simply how quickly we can move. It is whether we are creating the conditions that allow people to move with us.
Perhaps that is why the International HR Day theme seems so timely. Empowering people to lead change is not a soft aspiration. It is an operating condition that makes everything else work.
References
Accenture. (2024). Work, Workforce, Workers: Reinvention in the age of generative AI. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/consulting/gen-ai-talent
Balakrishnan, B. (2026, May 27). Bolt fires its entire HR team: The harsh truth behind the headlines. HR.com. https://www.hr.com/en/app/blog/2026/05/bolt-fires-its-entire-hr-team-the-harsh-truth-behi_mpnpxe1o.html“
Barth, J. (2026, May) Brené Brown’s big challenge (and advice) for every CHRO. https://hrexecutive.com/brene-browns-big-challenge-and-advice-for-every-chro/
Breslow, R. (2026). Fortune Workforce Innovation Summit Interview. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7462931027758329856/
Glassdoor. (2026). Bolt employee reviews. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Bolt-Reviews-E1181527.htm
SHRM. (2026). State of AI in HR report. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/research/state-of-ai-hr-2026