Kristin Berkinsky, a veteran Chief Human Resources Officer, makes the case that decades of delegating “people work” to HR has quietly but systematically hollowed out executive leadership capabilities and accelerated three converging crises now afflicting the C-suite.
-- Kristin Berkinsky, a former Chief Human Resources Officer and current Strategic Human Capital Consultant with more than 30 years of experience advising boards, private equity sponsors and executive teams across life sciences, financial services and high-growth environments, today announced the release of her new book, The HR Trap. Available on Amazon and in audiobook format, the book offers a provocative challenge to one of the most entrenched assumptions in modern business: that companies need an HR function at all.
The book opens with a deliberately uncomfortable question. What if eliminating HR is not reckless, but rational? Berkinsky argues that the HR function has slowly absorbed the responsibilities that real leadership requires, including difficult conversations, performance accountability, coaching and culture enforcement. The result is a generation of executives who have outsourced the human work of management, and an HR profession buckling under the weight of leadership gaps that were never theirs to fill.
“HR didn’t aggressively seize these responsibilities,” Berkinsky writes. “They accumulated them as leaders delegated discomfort, boards demanded control and regulators required documentation. Someone had to manage it, so HR did.”
Three Crises Converging on the C-Suite
The HR Trap arrives at a critical moment for business leadership. Berkinsky identifies three connected crises hitting organizations simultaneously:
The CEO Succession Crisis. Boards across industries report a shortage of CEO-ready candidates, with research spanning ten years and seventeen thousand C-suite executives showing that companies have systematically misunderstood what predicts CEO success while HR leaders, who possess many of the very capabilities boards now say they want, remain largely excluded from succession pipelines.
Leadership in an AI World. As artificial intelligence reshapes operational work, the human dimensions of leadership become harder to automate and more valuable, yet many organizations have invested in technology while underinvesting in the judgment and courage that technology cannot replicate.
CHRO Burnout. A striking 95% of HR leaders report feeling burned out, with CHRO turnover consistently outpacing every other C-suite role. The profession is collapsing under the weight of leadership work that arguably should never have been assigned to it.
“These three crises are not separate,” Berkinsky writes. “They are symptoms of the same underlying issue. Leadership has not kept pace with the complexity of modern organizations.”
A Call to Reclaim the Work of Leadership
The HR Trap is not an attack on HR professionals. It is a direct challenge to CEOs, founders, boards and executive teams to take back the human side of leading people. Berkinsky walks readers through a practical framework for redistributing responsibility across the organization, separating the work that should be automated, the work that should be reassigned and the work that genuinely belongs to leaders themselves.
The book closes with four possible futures for HR, including its evolution into an on-demand strategic capability, a talent factory for future CEOs and a redefined business partnership grounded in clarity rather than catch-all responsibility.
About the Author
Kristin Berkinsky has served as Chief Human Resources Officer across multiple sectors, advising leadership teams during mergers and acquisitions, rapid scaling and complex organizational change. She has worked closely with executive teams, boards, private equity sponsors and investors, and has acted formally and informally as Chief of Staff in several organizations. Her work focuses on building human capital strategies that increase enterprise value and aligning talent infrastructure with business strategy.
The HR Trap is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and audiobook formats.
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