When strategic leaders become project managers

'HR Executive' experts

Strategic insights

By:

Mark Stelzner

Date:

June 5, 2026

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Mark Stelzner

Mark Stelzner is the founder and managing principal of IA, an advisory firm that helps organizations achieve their HR transformation goals. With over 30 years of experience in the HR industry, Mark is a trusted advisor to C-level leaders, offering unbiased and candid guidance on complex and strategic initiatives. As a recognized thought leader and influencer in the HR technology and transformation space, Mark has been featured by leading media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR. Mark is passionate about fostering relationships, sharing insights and creating value for his clients, partners and peers. Mark holds a degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Late last year, I was catching up with a CHRO who was six months into an enterprise-wide transformation. She was sharp, committed and clearly exhausted in the way that comes from caring too much rather than too little. When I asked how things were going, she said something I’ve thought about many times since: “I feel like I’m really in it.”

She meant it as a good thing.

She had reorganized her calendar to attend working sessions, was personally reviewing workstream statuses every week and had made herself available for escalations at nearly any hour. She told me the team felt supported, and I believed her. But as she described her days, I found myself listening for what she wasn’t mentioning.

I didn’t hear about the strategic conversations she was having with the CEO around the broader business pivot unfolding in parallel. She never mentioned the stakeholder relationships in parts of the organization that had gone suspiciously quiet. And she didn’t seem to question whether the original scope still made sense, given everything that had shifted since the program launched.

None of it came up, so I asked.

Being “in it,” it turned out, meant being deeply in the work to the exclusion of other critical areas of focus. “It” had also exposed skill shortages within her first line, uncertainty around decision authority across the transformation team, and a lingering culture of perfection over progress. The work of “it,” in fact, had slowly consumed the work of leadership itself.

See also: As pressure on HR mounts, it’s time to redefine the function

The pull is real for the CHRO

I am not sharing her story to be critical. What she was doing was entirely understandable and, honestly, it’s what most organizational cultures reward.

Transformation programs generate a constant supply of real, urgent, solvable problems. When you walk into a working session and help your team push through a thorny integration decision, someone thanks you. The room exhales. You leave feeling useful.

Strategic leadership rarely offers that same immediate reinforcement.

The vision of a transformation typically produces more questions than answers. Maintaining alignment between the “why” and the daily “what” can feel intangible compared to the visible urgency of delivering work. You can spend a month doing the most important work in the program and have almost nothing concrete to point to afterward. Yet maintaining that red thread, sometimes fraying, through judgment, tension and continual recalibration remains critical and often overlooked.

That said, most organizations unintentionally reward visible responsiveness over strategic stewardship. Leaders receive immediate validation for solving operational problems, while the quieter work of sensing environmental shifts, maintaining enterprise alignment and challenging outdated assumptions often goes unnoticed until something breaks.

I’ve seen this dynamic play out in transformations of every shape and size, and the leaders who get pulled in are rarely the ones who stopped caring. Usually, it’s the opposite. They gravitate toward the tactical because that’s where the need is visible, where the contribution is legible and where carrying begins to masquerade as leading.

The problem is that leaders operating at a strategic level have a harder responsibility. They carry the burden of staying attentive to risks that are not yet urgent, but may become expensive precisely because nobody was watching them.

The drift happens quietly

What makes this dynamic dangerous is how gradually it develops. Executive sponsors rarely wake up one morning and decide to become operational managers. The drift happens incrementally through calendars, meeting invitations, escalations and seemingly reasonable requests for involvement.

And there are usually early signals.

Your calendar becomes dominated by operating reviews rather than strategic alignment conversations. Teams increasingly bring you decisions instead of dilemmas. Escalations become more frequent, while strategic dissent becomes less visible. You know more about workstream blockers than changing business assumptions.

At some point, the transformation quietly shifts from optimizing for enterprise relevance to optimizing for execution against the plan.

Research on large-scale transformations consistently reinforces the importance of sustained executive alignment and clear decision ownership. Programs with active, strategically engaged sponsorship materially outperform those where sponsors become episodic, overly tactical, or consumed by operational execution. Yet many senior leaders unintentionally create precisely those conditions through over-participation in the machinery of delivery.

The team adapts accordingly.

When leaders demonstrate through their calendars and attention that they want to be in the problem-solving room, smart teams start filtering what they surface upward. The ambiguous concerns get managed internally rather than escalated. No