Issue 013: The Interior Job

234 CEOs left their jobs in 2025, 21% above the eight year average, according to Russell Reynolds' Global CHRO Turnover Index. When a new one arrives, the CHRO is often next out the door within the year, not because they failed at the role, but because the role itself quietly got bigger: organisational design, operating model change, culture, and now the workforce implications of AI, all landing on one desk that didn't used to carry any of it. Whatever a culture change costs an organisation on paper, it costs the person driving it something closer and harder to put a number on.

This week is about five leaders making a version of that same bet right now, in public. One CEO stayed personally hands-on inside a company scaling past $100 billion, because she believes presence protects culture better than absence. One leadership team put its own name on the internal AI usage leaderboard before asking anyone else to touch the tools. One CEO has kept a hundred-year no-layoffs promise standing through the exact AI wave everyone else is using as cover to break theirs. One co-CEO has spent three decades treating leadership as an integration problem, not a balance one. And one company's 21,000 job cuts arrived by email at six in the morning with no warning at all, the clearest possible answer to what happens when you skip every step the other four took. Three Micro-Playbooks on why the people meant to protect a culture are leaving it fastest, what a 2026 workplace survey actually found when it measured belonging against AI use, and why convening always looks like the slower option right up until commanding blows up in your hands.

Jeremy Reeves is living the harder, closer-in version of this same question, from inside a single company rather than a single headline. As Chief Creative and Culture Officer at Creative Consortium, a company running 250 to 300 live creative projects at any given time, he calls his own job convening rather than commanding: getting the right people to a table, then making sure they can actually say what they need to say once they're there. He's also Co-Founder of GHOST Signal. He joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday to talk about what a culture shift actually asks of the leader personally, not just the organisation around them, a question that gets harder, not easier, as workplaces get faster and more technical.

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Torani, the 101-year-old flavoured syrup maker, has never laid off an employee, not through the Great Depression, the 2008 recession, Covid, or, as of this year, the AI-driven automation wave that's given plenty of other companies a ready-made excuse. Melanie Dulbecco has run the company for 35 years and led it through 20% average annual revenue growth over that period, without breaking the streak once. Asked directly by Fortune in September 2026 how AI changes the promise, she didn't hedge: "It is going to dramatically change things, and we're all going to live through this together, but our approach is going to be the same as it has been. How do we create great jobs through this for everyone?"

The insight is in what that promise actually buys the company operationally, not just morally. Dulbecco's own framing: "What we find is our team is more likely to embrace new technologies also because there's confidence and an openness to learning new things because they know we've got their backs and they've got ours." Torani calls its answer to displacement "career mixology": when a role changes shape, the person in it moves to a new one inside the company rather than out the door, the way a longtime procurement staffer named Carlos has moved through several roles as the business evolved. Job security isn't the reward for adopting new technology at Torani. It's the precondition that makes people willing to try it at all.

Airbnb now runs with AI writing roughly 60% of its new code and AI-powered support resolving 45% of customer inquiries without a human, changes that have compressed the company's concept-to-launch timelines by as much as 60% this year. On the company's August 2026 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky called AI "the best thing to ever happen to Airbnb." What's less obvious is what he says winning that shift actually requires of him personally: "The winners of AI are going to be the companies that embrace transformation. You might call it founder mode, not manager mode."

Chesky isn't describing a return to micromanagement. His own account of the company's early days, "I was in the details. I knew everything going on. I was the chief product officer," gave way, as Airbnb scaled to roughly 8,200 employees, to a deliberate sequence rather than a permanent handoff: "We should start in the details, develop trust, develop muscle memory, and then let go." The AI moment pulled him back toward the start of that sequence on purpose, personally reviewing token usage and AI output alongside his teams rather than only setting a target and waiting for a report. His own summary of why: "Great leadership is presence, not absence."

When Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told staff in an April 2025 memo that using AI effectively was now a "baseline expectation" and that teams should show why a task genuinely required a human before asking for more headcount, the memo alone didn't do the cultural work. What actually moved adoption, according to internal accounts of how the mandate spread, was that Shopify's own senior leaders showed up on the company's internal AI usage leaderboard, including CTO Mikhail Parakhin appearing among the top token spenders, and that engineering leadership paired directly with individual engineers to show their own workflow rather than delegate that down. VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar's own description of it: "I have a tab open for ChatGPT and in practice, will show how I'm pairing with AI all the time."

The insight is the order of operations. A mandate that starts with "prove you can't do this with AI before you ask for headcount" reads as a threat if the only visible AI users are the people it applies to. It reads as a genuine expectation once the people issuing it are visibly, personally near the top of the same leaderboard everyone else is being measured against. Thawar's coaching to a product lead captures the standard leadership held itself to alongside everyone else: "There are an infinite number of bad solutions and probably 10,000 good ones. Your job is to find the best one."

Susan Griffin-Black has co-run EO Products, the organic bath and body care company she co-founded, for over 30 years. Her explicit rejection of one of the most common frameworks in leadership, work-life balance, isn't a branding line, it's how she describes actually running the company: "There's an ongoing conversation about work life balance which I believe is a set up for women to be unsuccessful. It's not as much about balance, it's presence." Her stated model for leadership borrows directly from parenting rather than management theory: "the job is to lead from an integrated place, to bring your whole self to work," pointing to consistency, mindfulness, and bringing people together as the traits the two roles share.

The insight is what "integrated" rules out as much as what it allows. Griffin-Black is explicit that bringing your whole self to work isn't a licence for boundarylessness: "That doesn't mean it's boundaryless, or you're leaking too much information all over the place, but it's a much more curious, open and collaborative process." She's also candid that three decades in, the work isn't finished: "Even though we've been a B Corp, and even though I've been aspiring to do this for 30 years, there's still such a long way to go." That combination, a firm personal model plus an explicit admission it's still incomplete, is a harder thing for a leader to say out loud than either a confident framework or a vague aspiration on its own.

Oracle eliminated roughly 21,000 roles, 13% of its workforce, over the year to June 2026, funding a $156 billion infrastructure commitment that is, in the reporting's own phrase, "replacing approximately 30,000 human workers with servers, networking equipment, and AI accelerators." The company booked a $2.1 billion restructuring charge and raised $50 billion in new debt to fund it. None of that is unusual for a company repositioning around AI infrastructure at scale. What made it a story about culture rather than just balance sheets was how it landed: termination notices went out by email at approximately 6:00am Eastern on 31 March 2026, simultaneously across the US, India, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay, with no advance warning, reading in part "today is your last working day."

The insight is the gap between the decision and the delivery. A workforce reduction tied to a real, defensible infrastructure strategy is a business decision leadership is entitled to make. A 6am email with zero notice, landing the same way across five countries at once, is a communication decision, and it's the one employees actually experience. LinkedIn filled with posts from affected staff "expressing shock at the lack of advance notice," and the reporting describes remaining employees living in "a climate of fear and uncertainty, with remaining staff unsure whether additional rounds of layoffs are coming." Every leader in this issue's other four Plays chose presence, visible personal involvement, or an explicit promise, before asking their people to absorb a hard change. This is what it looks like when a company skips straight to the outcome instead.

In 2025, 155 CHROs were appointed at public companies globally, up from 124 the year before, and still below the five-year average, according to Russell Reynolds' Global CHRO Turnover Index. Separately, HR Dive's H1 2026 data puts CHRO turnover above the eight-year average, with 95 appointments in the first half of the year alone. Around 60% of new CHROs are first-timers in the seat. The average tenure of a departing CHRO is now 5.2 years, and a meaningful share of that turnover tracks directly behind CEO transitions: 234 CEOs left their roles in 2025, 21% above the eight-year average, and a new CEO very often wants a different CHRO within the year.

The reason given for why isn't performance, it's scope. Analysts increasingly describe the CHRO's job as now covering "organisational design, operating model change, culture, and the workforce implications of AI," a remit that barely resembles the role a decade ago. That's the exact same expansion Jeremy Reeves is describing from inside his own job this week, a role that used to be about protecting culture and is now also about holding that culture together while everything else moves faster underneath it.

If you're a CPO or CHRO reading this, the data isn't abstract, it's describing your own actual risk of burnout and exit, not a trend happening to someone else. If you're the CEO or board member this person reports to, the honest question isn't why CHRO tenure keeps shortening, it's whether you've actually resourced the job for the scope you've quietly expanded it to.

Jeremy Reeves' own question going into this week's conversation, whether AI-accelerated pace puts workplace belonging at risk, has a real answer as of this year, and it isn't the one most people assume. Gensler's 2026 Global Workplace Survey, built from over 16,400 office workers across 16 countries, found that employees it classifies as "AI Power Users," the 30% who use AI tools regularly in both professional and personal contexts, report stronger team connection than late adopters, not weaker. AI Power Users spend 37% of their workweek working alone, against 42% for late adopters, meaning they're actually alone less, not more. They also report 12% of their time on learning against 8% for late adopters, and 11% socialising against 9%.

Janet Pogue McLaurin, Gensler's Global Director of Workplace Research, put the finding plainly: "The employees most embedded in AI workflows are also the ones most engaged in learning and have better team relationships." The mechanism isn't mysterious once you sit with it: AI is freeing up time inside the workweek, and the people using it well appear to be reinvesting a meaningful share of that freed time into exactly the human parts of work, learning together and connecting with colleagues, rather than only into more output.

That doesn't make Jeremy's question naive, it makes it the right question asked one step too early. The real risk isn't AI's pace itself, it's what a leader does with the time it frees up. AI adoption alone doesn't erode belonging. A leader who takes the hours AI frees up and fills every one of them with more output, rather than any of them with more connection, is the actual mechanism to watch.

Every leader in this issue's five Plays made a choice about which was cheaper: convening people into a decision, or commanding it down to them. Torani, Airbnb, Shopify and EO Products all chose some version of convening, staying personally present, modelling the behaviour themselves, holding a promise steady under pressure, and every one of those choices cost more time and personal exposure up front than simply issuing an instruction would have. Oracle chose the fastest available version of commanding, a decision and a departure delivered in the same six-word email, and it was faster to execute by every measure except the one that actually matters afterward: whether anyone left still trusts what happens next.

This is the trap in judging convening against commanding on speed alone. Commanding wins every short-term productivity comparison, right up until the moment trust becomes the constraint instead of task completion, and by then the cost has already compounded past the point a single town hall or apology memo can undo it. Convening looks slower on a Tuesday and looks like the only option that was ever actually available in retrospect, once the alternative has visibly failed somewhere else.

Jeremy Reeves' own description of his job, convening rather than commanding, getting the right people to a table and then making sure they can actually say what they need to say, isn't a soft alternative to real leadership. Based on what this issue's five Plays actually show, it's the expensive, slower-looking option that's also the only one that was ever going to hold.

Jeremy Reeves is Chief Creative and Culture Officer at Creative Consortium, a role he's held since January 2026 after previously serving as the company's Creative Strategist. He's also Co-Founder of GHOST Signal, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Since taking on the Chief Creative and Culture Officer seat, Jeremy has held two roles inside one job that don't usually sit in the same person, pushing the creative work forward across 250 to 300 live projects at any given time, and protecting the human culture underneath that same team. He's built his own working definition of leadership as convening rather than commanding, getting the right people to the table and then making sure they can actually say what they need to say once they're there, developed a real two-question diagnostic he uses before assuming someone can't deliver on a request, and run the twice-weekly project reviews that keep Creative Consortium's work moving, using them as his own real-time read on where culture is actually made or lost. He's also raised his own unprompted question about whether AI-accelerated pace puts workplace belonging at risk, the same question this issue's second Micro-Playbook takes on directly.

In this week's Leader Spotlight, we look ahead to sitting down with Jeremy to unpack what leadership as convening actually looks like day to day, what a stalled answer in a room really tells you, and what changing a culture has cost him personally that never makes it into a culture deck. A note on what follows: Tuesday's conversation hasn't happened yet as this issue goes out, so instead of five direct quotes, here are five threads from his own guest brief worth bookmarking ahead of it.

Jeremy's own definition of the job: get the right voices to the table, then make people feel safe enough to actually use them. Worth watching for what he says happens in the room when that safety isn't there yet.

A stalled answer usually means one of two things, and only one of them is actually a performance problem. Worth watching for what the other one is, and how he tells the difference in the moment.

The part Jeremy says never makes it into a culture deck: the personal shift a leader has to make before anyone else does. Worth watching for what he names as his own cost, specifically.

Two standing review meetings a week, across 250 to 300 live projects, are Jeremy's real-time window into where culture is actually made or lost. Worth watching for what those meetings have taught him that a survey never could.

Jeremy's own question going in: whether faster tools and AI-driven pace put belonging at risk, and what a creative leader can actually do about it. Worth watching for his answer against this issue's own Micro-Playbook on the same question.

Thank you in advance, Jeremy, see you Tuesday!

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And that's a wrap for Issue 013. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

Follow The Work Life Reporter on LinkedIn for what we share between issues, and join us live on Tuesday for Jeremy Reeves' first appearance. Visit theworklifereporter.com for more.

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