I cried in a termination meeting once. Not the employee. Me.
I was the HR person in the room, which means I was supposed to be the steady one. The decision was right. The process was clean. We had done the coaching, we had documented the conversations, and the person across the table had every chance to turn it around. None of that mattered to my face. I felt terrible for them, and it showed. I held it together enough to get through the meeting, but there was no hiding it from anyone in that room, including the person we were letting go.
I spent a long time afterward deciding what that meant about me. What I landed on, for years, was that I was bad at the hardest part of this job. Everyone else seemed to be able to do these meetings with a level voice and dry eyes. I could not. So I did what a lot of us do with the parts of ourselves we think are flaws: I got very good at hiding it, and I kept quietly believing that the real HR people were built differently.
Years later I was sitting in an arbitration. If you have never been through one, picture hours of questions, many of them pointed, some of them designed to get you to hedge or contradict yourself. I answered every single one the only way I know how, which is plainly. What happened, what I did, what I knew and when. No spin, because I do not have the skill for spin and never bothered to build it.
When it was over, the mediator pulled me aside. She told me how impressive it was that I had stayed so direct under that kind of pressure. I remember being confused. I was not being direct. I was being honest. I did not know there was a difference.
It took me a long time to put those two days together. The termination where I cried and the arbitration where I would not bend. I kept them in separate boxes, one labeled weakness and one labeled strength. Here is what I finally understood. They are the same thing.
The reason I could be that clear in the arbitration is the same reason I cried in the termination. I have never been able to pretend a person is not a person. So I do not soften the truth, because softening it is a kind of lie, and the person on the other side always knows. And I do not pretend the truth costs nothing, because it does, and pretending otherwise is a different kind of lie.
That is the entire philosophy behind everything I have built since. Say the true thing, say it plainly, and stay human while you do it. The managers I work with almost all believe they have to choose between direct and kind. They think kindness means cushioning, so they cushion until the message disappears. Or they think directness means armor, so they armor up and come across cold. They are not choosing between two good options. They are choosing between two ways of failing the person in front of them.
You have to be both, at the same time, or you are not really doing either. Direct without kind is just blunt. Kind without direct is just avoidance with better manners. The employee who gets a clear message from someone who obviously cares about them can actually do something with it. That is the whole game.
It is why every script I teach starts with the fact, names the impact, and makes a plain ask, and it is why the AI agents I built refuse to hand a manager softened language, because softened language is the shortcut that costs people the most.
Nineteen years in, I still feel it every single time. I have stopped thinking that is a flaw. It is the reason I can do this job at all.
The hardest parts of HR, handled.