We love our HR model, and we’re destroying it

By Todd Lewis, Senior Engineer, Brick Abode

Here at Brick Abode, our HR model is really good, and we are burning it down and throwing it away.

1 Introduction

It’s a beautiful model. We took all of the stages a worker goes through, from getting hired to leaving the company, and in each stage, we listed problems to be solved. We then designed all of HR’s activities to solve these problems.

We start every weekly meeting with reviewing this model of why we do these activities; every activity is justified in this way, and we constantly re-evaluate whether we should continue, enhance, or eliminate it.

We struggled for years with HR teams who would just mindlessly do random activities, without taking any responsibility for whether they were the right activities, or whether the cost was worth the benefit, or how to improve the service over time. Once we got the right people paired with the right model, those problems disappeared.

The HR team has a clear model to execute, and each week they show us their status, suggests improvements, escalates problems, etc. Best of all, everyone, from the HR team to the managers who supervise them, has complete clarity about what problems we’re solving and how we’re solving them. It all makes sense to us, we continually improve it, and it runs like a Swiss watch.

We really love it. (Can you tell how much we love it?) We show it off to clients and friends as an example of how to get a department to run really well.

It took us years to build, and it was a big improvement over the informal, ad-hoc HR we had in our company’s early days.

We are burning it down, not because it’s bad, but because we can make it better.

We just concluded our pilot program in delivering Sports Psychology counseling to our engineers. Sports Psychology is a super-power.

Every technical manager in the world should know about this, and after you read this letter, you will.

2 The Nature of the Problem

Let’s start with the normal case, which doesn’t apply to us.

Many technology teams are overwhelmed in their work, lacking clear understanding of the problems to be solved or clear plans to solve them. Very often, they mistake economic problems for technology problems, because they don’t understand the economic problems; this causes them to sink efforts into tasks which can never succeed, with predictable outcomes.

This doesn’t happen to Brick Abode teams. We’ve gotten really good at this over the years, advising clients how strategic changes in their approach to problems can turn uneconomical work into effective work. We’ve even gotten good at explaining it well enough that clients can understand us. Our teams have clear plans to solve clearly-defined problems, with good expectation setting, and with realistic goals that they can achieve on the necessary timeline.

This alone is typically enough for our teams to outperform our clients’ previous tech teams, but we want more, which brings us to the problems that we do have.

As we have gotten better at execution, a funny thing happened: when the crunchy technology and economic bits stops being your problem, the limiting factor becomes the squishy, imperfect humans in the middle.

Even there, we do well. Our people are exceedingly well-trained, typically having PhD qualifications in computer science or engineering. We bring a lot of discipline and work to communicating effectively with clients, and people unwilling to bring that self-discipline are very quickly exited from our company.

We have motivated, capable people, working on the right things, with good coordination and expectation setting, who work responsibly, receive support and try hard. For many CTOs, this would be a significant upgrade!

Nonetheless, our people still have limitations, and we see a lot of clear patterns:

• New hires struggling to embrace the important but non-technical parts of the job: reporting, expectation setting, escalation, team coordination, etc.
• Fighting against routine to set bigger goals and solve bigger problems
• Engineers wanting to help clients improve, but struggling to communicate their ideas effectively, leading to frustration on both sides
• Anxiety, which manifests as fear of big problems, or clearer communication, etc, but is actually difficulty understanding and managing negative emotions
• Bringing confidence to the work
• Coachability, accepting help, and driving improvement

The better we get at execution, the larger these problems loom.
The better any team gets at execution, the larger these problems loom.

3 The Nature of the Solution

Engineering is an intellectual discipline, and intellectuals often look down on athletes, because we all naturally project value systems into the world which make sense to us. Judged as intellectuals, athletes are, as a group, very normal.

Dually, athletes often look down on intellectuals, and judged athletically, intellectuals are, as a group, very normal. The two domains are simply orthogonal to each other. Ideally, each domain will respect that the other contributes value to humanity in different ways.

Perhaps the central point of this letter is that athletes do create value for intellectuals, if we have the curiosity and humility to appreciate and accept it. As a matter of engineering intuition, we should appreciate that, since the two domains are orthogonal, there’s a good chance that they’re complementary, and in this letter we are explaining how they actually are complementary. Ignoring that complementarity is an intellectually lazy thing to do, so let’s stop doing that.

Once you understand that, in high performing teams, the biggest impediments to higher performance are the emotional barriers to better decisions and behavior, the real beauty of athletics comes to the fore. Athletics is humanity’s laboratory for high performance.

Twice per day, outdoor football practice, in August, in pads, is a hot and sweaty and exhausting and painful and therefore emotionally difficult exercise. Waking up at 5AM every day to do performance drills is an emotionally difficult exercise. Brushing your teeth every day with your non-dominant hand to improve your ambidexterity requires emotional discipline that pervades every aspect of your life to maximize high performance.

This is where Sports Psychology comes in. Sports Psychology is terribly mis-branded. It is actually the Psychology of High Performance, and it is only tangentially and accidentally attached to the specific application in sports. Sports is merely the aspect of human life where they have paid the most attention to these fundamental psychological questions of human performance.

Just take a look at the standard evaluation Sports Psychologists perform when working with a new athlete:

• Coping with adversity: Can the athlete engineer continue to stay focused and make good decisions when facing adversity?
• Peaking under pressure: Can the athlete engineer bring peak performance at the times when peak performance is most important? Can they turn it on when needed and, just as importantly, turn it off when it’s not needed?
• Goal setting and mental preparation: Does the athlete engineer create clear goals and then design the ideal emotions and behaviors they need in order to achieve them?
• Concentration: Can the athlete engineer focus on the problem to be solved, even in the face of distractions?
• Freedom from worry: Can the athlete engineer set aside their negative emotions to focus on the work?
• Confidence and achievement motivation: Is the athlete engineer motivated to become a high performer, and are they bringing confidence to their work to maximize their progress?
• Coachability: Is the athlete engineer willing to detach their ego from their performance and accept help from other people as a positive, not a negative, contribution?¹

Every engineering manager who has run high-performing teams knows these problems like the back of their hand, probably from personal experience, and definitely from seeing these constraints in their engineers’ ability to maximize their performance.

4 What our new HR model will look like

In 2025, we ran an experimental engagement with a Sports Psychologist with selected engineers. The diagnoses from the Psychologist perfectly matched our evaluation as managers, the action plans focused on exactly the right problems, and the engineers reported that the coaching was a big help in their understanding and working through the emotional problems that hold them back from better work.

As we analyzed this experience, we had good news and bad news. The good news is that our Sports Psychologist was able to identify and drive progress on the emotional problems holding back our engineers and creating problems in their life. The bad news is that doing so in isolation from the remainder of our HR activities limited our ability to support and drive these improvements.

What we really need is a whole-lifecycle engagement, from the engineer’s first day with our company until their last. It is not only the engineer who needs to maximize their performance every day and in every way; Brick Abode needs to be doing so as well.

So, again, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that we need to burn down and rebuild our entire HR operating model around these ideas, and that is a lot of work. The good news is that we are Brick Abode, and we love doing work that makes ourselves better, so burning it down is exactly what we are doing.

Here is what we are not changing in the new HR model:

• Managing across the entire worker lifecycle: From the day an engineer arrives until the day they leave, we want to do everything we can to help them maximize their performance and minimize the emotional cost of their work in their overall life.
• Activities clearly mapped to goals: Every activity by the HR team should happen for a good reason, to solve a problem. We will continue to have every activity explained in terms of what problem it solves, so that we can continually reevaluate whether to continue or modify that activity.
• Careful execution and quality control: The HR team will not just “do stuff”. Instead, their activities are well understood and clearly defined, and the HR team is responsible, just like every team at Brick Abode, for explaining their activities to their stakeholders and holding themselves accountable for how well they are doing the job, identifying problems, and asking for help, all on a proactive and continual basis.

Here is what we are changing in the new HR model:

• Holistically designed for personal growth: From the hiring process to the leaving process, we are taking these previously informal efforts at performance improvement, organizing them along the lines of the Sports Psychology checklist (coping with adversity, freedom from worry, coachability, etc.)
• Clear identification of psychological improvement areas: From the project managers to coworkers to the Sports Psychologist to the engineer himself, we are building and maintaining a 360-degree situational awareness of the engineers challenges.
• Structured improvement plans: In each of these areas, the Sports Psychology textbooks are filled with clear action plans for getting the athlete engineer to understand these problems and control their behaviors and emotions to solve (or at least manage) them. When the entire organization (project manager, HR, psychologist, teammates, the engineer himself) is working together to help the engineer, we are confident that we can drive real improvements, because humanity has decades of experience doing the exact same thing with athletes, and our experiments have already shown that those approaches work for our engineers, and work very well.

5 What this means for our clients, our company, and our engineers

Clients: Our clients don’t worry about hiring, or HR, or vacation scheduling, or dealing with a sick spouse or kid, or long-term career management; Brick Abode manages our people and delivers a service. So, at one level, clients don’t really care about these details, because they don’t have to. At another level, our clients do care that our people are well treated, supported, and loved, and they also directly benefit from the increased performance which these efforts give them.

Workers: That immediate benefit falls to the client, but our workers will keep these new skills with them for the rest of their lives. That makes them the big winners here, as they often are. Those improvements are higher performance, but also a lower emotional cost to the work.

That point is important. Capable, motivated engineers often have a high emotional cost to wanting to be more effective, but being frustrated in behaving in ways that lead to higher effectiveness. It damages their work, and it damages their personal lives. Our efforts for many years, which we now understand how to accelerate, is to help them turn the emotional engine on at work (which can be hard) and then turn it off when they go home (which can be very hard.) The benefit for our people of developing this skill is immense.

Brick Abode: For Brick Abode, we are able to create value here both for our workers and for our clients, and that is our job as a company. Not only is this support much cheaper to provide in Brazil than it is in our clients’ home countries, but we have better scale and depth of experience from which to do it; very few of our clients have been managing tech teams for over a decade, or have teams bigger than our team.

Clear communication, written weekly reports, structured client meetings, strategic team reviews, making HR work very well: none of this is exotic or complicated or fancy. That is why many engineering companies don’t do it, or don’t do it as well as they should. It’s just work.

Our business model centers on simple, unglamorous, difficult things that actually help our workers and clients. It is attention to these things that allows the impactful engineering work to flow and actually solve problems.

That doesn’t make for fancy marketing, but it does make for happy and satisfied workers and customers. That’s enough for us.

Nick Saban famously said “When a coach tells a player they’re doing something wrong, the player can choose respond in one of two ways: ‘Thank you’, or ‘Fuck you’.” That choice is coachability.↩︎