The Questions Your CEO Won't Ask You

We asked a room of HR directors one question: what should a CEO ask HR but almost never does? They worked it through and produced a short, sharp list.

• Give me feedback on how I manage my team.

• What's your honest take on my strategy?

• How do employees actually feel?

• Where's our weakest link in people?

• Does HR have the budget it really needs?

We posted the list on LinkedIn asking for more. The responses sorted into three different relationships a leader can have with HR. Most leaders have none of them.

The original question named the CEO specifically, but the dynamic isn't CEO-specific: a divisional VP and their HR business partner, a country manager and their regional HR lead, a function head and their talent partner face the same three questions at a smaller radius. From here, "CEO" stands in for whichever leader you report to or support. The org chart changes size. The blind spot doesn't.

The mirror

Several of the added questions ask HR to be a feedback source about the leader, not the workforce.

The original two point the leader at themselves: "give me feedback on how I manage my team" and "what's your honest take on my strategy?" The expanded list sharpens that lens: what leadership behavior are we unintentionally rewarding right now? What truth has the organization quietly learned is unsafe to say out loud?

These questions put the leader inside the system that needs diagnosing. Few operate that way. Most hire HR to fix other people's problems.

Look at Boeing. After the 737 MAX 9 door plug blew out in January 2024, the Senate ran two hearings on the company's safety culture. More than a dozen whistleblowers testified. Engineers and technicians described being afraid to speak up. CEO Dave Calhoun admitted under questioning that retaliation against whistleblowers happens at the company, and said he had never spoken directly to any of them. An FAA-mandated expert panel found a disconnect between senior management and the factory floor.

Nobody lied to Calhoun. Either he hadn't asked, or someone had raised it and it never reached him. Either way, people stayed quiet long enough for parts to start falling off planes.

The same dynamic shows up two levels down. A plant manager who never asks the HRBP what truth nobody will say out loud. A function head who never asks what the reward system is actually teaching the team. The scale is smaller. The blind spot is identical.

The forecaster

Other questions ask HR to think like a strategic investor in the workforce.

The original asked where the weakest link in people sits. The expanded version pushes further: where should we invest, or stop investing, to grow the business? What capabilities will differentiate us in three to five years, and which critical skills are missing today? How should we redesign jobs to maximize value delivery instead of just headcount? How likely are AI-driven layoffs to still look smart in two or three years? What's the bench strength behind our most critical roles?

This is HR as forecaster. A leader who asks these questions wants to know where capability is being built and where it's being eroded. Most leaders ask HR about cost per hire and attrition. Few ask whether the team can build what they promised in next quarter's business review.

Sebastian Siemiatkowski paid that cost in public. In February 2024, Klarna announced that its OpenAI-powered chatbot was handling the workload of roughly 700 customer service agents, most of them employed through outsourcing partners rather than by Klarna directly, and projected the shift would add $40 million to 2024 profit. Hiring slowed to a near-freeze. By December 2024, Siemiatkowski was telling Bloomberg that AI can already do all of the jobs that we as humans do.

By May 2025 he was reversing course. His own account: "We focused too much on efficiency and cost. The result was lower quality." Klarna started hiring human agents again, including flexible contractors, so customers could always reach a person.

The forecast question, whether the AI-driven cuts would still hold up in two or three years, was available to ask in early 2024. Klarna had the numbers. Nobody ran them past the launch quarter. A year later, Siemiatkowski was paying for the gap in reputation and rehiring costs, months ahead of the company's IPO.

A leader at any level who never asks the forecast questions keeps backfilling yesterday's decisions.

The truth check

The remaining questions ask HR to be the source of organizational reality.

"How do employees actually feel?" was on the original list. So was "does HR have the budget it really needs?" It's a quieter version of the same question: budget reflects whether leadership treats the people side as real. The expanded list pushed harder: are we tracking the real inputs that drive outcomes, or staging performance theatre? Are we incentivizing outcomes that move the business, or rewarding visible effort and long hours?

The formal reporting system shows most leaders a sanitized team. Engagement scores rise. The dashboard turns green. Underneath, the place is brittle. Performance theatre is the pathology I see most often in client work, and the one HR has the hardest time naming to the leader it serves, because the theatre usually includes HR's own metrics.

Why leaders don't ask

Wells Fargo shows the mechanism.

Between 2011 and 2016, Wells Fargo fired roughly 5,300 employees for opening bank and credit card accounts that customers never asked for, chasing an internal quota the company called "eight is great": eight products per customer. One employee, a branch worker in San Francisco, told NPR she called the bank's ethics hotline more than once to report the pressure to falsify accounts. She was fired in 2011. Wells Fargo ran an ethics workshop on the problem in 2014. The fake accounts kept coming.

That's five years of the same pattern: catch the employee, fire the employee, hold the quota. When the scandal became public in 2016 and cost the bank $185 million in fines, CEO John Stumpf told Congress that no executive above branch-manager level appeared to be aware of the misconduct. A board investigation the following year found leadership failure, a sales culture built on an unrealistic target, and performance systems that rewarded the exact behavior that blew up the company.

All three reasons leaders don't ask show up in that one case. The credibility problem: an ethics hotline existed and got used, and the response was to fire the messenger rather than escalate the message, so the channel never built the trust it needed to work as a warning system. The cost problem: fixing it meant dismantling the growth story Wells Fargo was telling investors, since eight accounts per customer was the pitch, not a side effect. The volunteering problem: nobody pushed the aggregate count upward on their own. Regulators forced it into daylight. Five thousand three hundred firings over five years is not a rogue-employee story. It's a number sitting in the company's own files that a curious CEO could have pulled in year two.

Two moves

If you sit in HR at any level, pick one question from each cluster and bring those three to your next 1:1 with the leader you support. Don't introduce them as "I think we should discuss X." Ask the question. Notice which ones the leader engages with and which ones they deflect. That tells you which kind of leader you have. Scale the questions to your radius: down to a function if you're a business partner, up to the enterprise if you're a CHRO. The questions translate.

If you sit in the leadership chair at any level, pick three questions from the combined list and put them to your HR partner at the next business review. A dashboard answer means you have a capability problem. Silence means you have a culture problem. A precise, named, uncomfortable answer means you have an HR partner worth listening to.

HR has three possible relationships with the leaders it serves: mirror, forecaster, truth-teller. Which one are you delivering, or asking for, today?

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of any institutions with which they are affiliated.