I’ve worked in the world of HR/People for over 30 years. And in that time, I’ve been all four of these. I wrote briefly about this on LinkedIn awhile back, but I wanted to expand on it here, because I think even those of you NOT in HR will resonate with this.

I started as a Maintainer.

Not because I wanted to be. That’s just what HR rewarded back then. Hold onto the policies tightly. File the paperwork. Make sure everyone got paid. Say no a lot because that was the way it was always done.

Maintainers are the steady ones. They run open enrollment without missing a beat. They keep handbooks updated when nobody else is thinking about handbooks. They make sure the audit goes clean, the comp data is right, and the I-9s are where they should be. They’re the reason HR doesn’t fall apart on a random Tuesday.

We don’t talk enough about how much skill that takes. The function genuinely cannot exist without them.

But it’s not enough on its own anymore.

Then I was a Fixer.

I deeply love to fix things. Many of us do! We’re great dealing with the culture crisis nobody saw coming. The leader who quits with no notice. The acquisition that uncovers a hundred problems in week one.

Fixers run toward what’s broken. The investigation. The hard termination. The team that’s coming apart at the seams. The senior leader who’s been quietly making people miserable for years, and somebody finally has to deal with it. They’re calm when everybody else is panicking. They know how to triage.

I lived here for years. Most of us did. HR became the people you called when something was on fire. And we are GREAT at putting out fires.

The work matters. But if you spend your whole career fixing, you never get to the part where you stop the fires from starting.

Then I became a Builder.

This was the hardest stretch of my career. And the best.

Building can look a lot like fixing. I look at redesigning a function (and to some extent, a company) as building. I loved that work. Designing onboarding where there was none. Replacing paper-first processes with people-first ones. Standing up career frameworks. Creating things that didn’t exist, usually with no budget and not a lot of support.

Builders look at what isn’t there and decide to make it. They’re allergic to “we’ve always done it that way.” They sketch on whiteboards. They prototype. They get told no a lot, and they keep going anyway.

That kind of building is still everywhere. But the Builders I’m watching now are doing it differently.

They’re creating AI agents to handle the repetitive questions. Automating the reports that used to eat entire afternoons. Reclaiming hours their teams used to lose to admin work nobody should have been doing in the first place. And so much more than that. There are many leaders experimenting with Claude to create career frameworks, systems and processes that work for their unique businesses.

AI will change the HR function. It already has. These builders are putting the systems and processes and agents in place, AND building these skills in their teams to be ready as change continues.

And now I’m a Strategist.

That’s the mode I live in today. Seeing around corners. Trying to figure out what the world of work is going to look like before it gets here. Helping leaders connect their people decisions to the business in a way that actually makes sense to them.

Strategists sit in the conversations many HR people aren’t invited to. The ones about acquisitions, market expansion, succession, what the next five years actually look like. They translate between people and business. They’re not down in the weeds, but they know which weeds matter.

But the best Strategists I know aren’t only Strategists. They still maintain when the foundation needs holding. They still fix when things go sideways. And right now, they’re learning to build, because if they don’t, they’re going to get left behind.

Why this matters right now

HR is in the most interesting moment of my career.

AI is changing what we can actually do. The workforce is more deskless, more distributed, and frankly more skeptical than ever. The leaders who are going to thrive over the next decade aren’t the ones who picked a mode early and stayed there.

They’re the ones who can move between all four. And who know which one a moment is calling for.

A few questions worth asking yourself this week:

• Which mode are you in most days?
• Which mode is your organization rewarding right now?
• Which mode do you avoid — and what’s it costing you?
• What would it take to become a builder this year?

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For the leaders hiring HR people

The same framework applies to how you build your people team.

You don’t need an HR leader who’s only a Maintainer. You need someone who can hold the foundation, fix what’s broken, build what’s missing, and see around the corner. Sometimes all in the same week.

That’s a different kind of HR leader than most companies have ever had. And it’s the only kind that’s going to keep up with what’s coming.