Summary:

Ben Madden is a veteran HR exec (nearly 20 years) known for scaling teams, integrating acquisitions, and leading people operations through complex change. He served as SVP of HR at The Ambit Group, helping drive growth, two integrations, and a successful sale in 2022, and he’s an active leader in the NOVA SHRM community.

I brought Ben on because real leadership isn’t about keeping the peace, it’s about rocking the boat when the situation demands it. In this one, we unpack a consulting engagement that went sideways: new leadership, values misalignment, blatant compliance risks, and a “my way or the highway” culture. Ben made the hard call to walk away on principle, and we dig into how to spot red flags early, protect yourself, and exit without burning your team or your reputation.

Chapters:

00:00 — The Ice-Out Begins: From stabilizing HR to a 180° pivot 【】

02:00 — Rock the Boat: Why principled conflict is leadership 【】

05:00 — The Flashpoint: “My way or the highway” and shouting matches 【】

11:00 — 180º Philosophy Shift: From stabilize to “run fast, break things” 【】

13:00 — Team Fallout: Fear, churn risk, and dual bosses 【】

17:00 — Plan the Exit, Protect the Work 【】

22:00 — As a Consultant: When you can’t even raise it at the table 【】

26:00 — Frontline Reality: Boundaries when the boss says “be a team player” 【】

32:00 — Close + CTA: Reviews, shares, and where to find Ben 【

Host Dr. Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Guest Ben Madden: linkedin.com/in/benmadden

Executive Producer Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Music Credit: "Lost in Dreams" by Kulakovka

I got nothing set up. I got any touch points that I had set up with him blown off. So it was really just a. Figure it out on your own. And again, they had me working on an hourly contract, so it wasn't like I had these big, hairy, audacious goals to, to resolve. It was really the exact, the actual day to day of making sure that the wheels weren't falling off the bus.

It was absolutely confusing. It was a, as you said, 180 degree shift from where things were. I was brought in to help stabilize the department. I was brought in originally for a smaller project. The person who was running HR left leaving just a generalist who was getting ready to go out on maternity leave.

And it was my job to make sure she understood everything that she needed to know about HR in this specific industry. And she wouldn't listen to me. And, having it get to a head where she finally asked who's in charge of this department? And I said I guess you are. And her response to me was, that's right.

So we're gonna do it my way. And I said, great, but. You're doing things illegal, you're doing things that are gonna cause these issues for the company, and that's not something that I can sit here and do. So that was really that, that, make it or break a decision that was critical.

What happens when you're in a role and you're brought in to change the direction of the organization and you're brought in to put in policies and procedures to help an organization get to the next level? That's a big role. And just when you get momentum, you find out that the ground underneath you has begun to shift.

New leadership is brought in and you're starting to feel yourself get iced out and excluded from important things that you need to be involved with. And your spidey sense is going off. And when you bring it up, it gets brushed off as no big deal. Then you notice something that is a critical oversight and you bring it up to the attention of the people that need to pay attention, and they tell you that's not something for you to concern yourself with.

Today we have Ben Madden, a highly experienced HR executive with nearly 20 years of experience guiding strategic HR decisions for fast-growing companies.

Under his leadership, ambit Twice earned the best places to work. Recognition from the Washington Post, his expertise spans channel acquisition, employee engagement benefits, and full employee lifecycle management. He's an active leader in the HR community and he serves on the board of Nova shrm, including two terms as President and Disrupt, hr, Washington, dc.

Ben, welcome to the show.

Dr. Jim: in typical transformation unfiltered format, we're gonna we're gonna tear the bandaid off. Take us back to that time where you were in your career and you thought that, oh, this thing that I just did is probably gonna get me fired.

So tell us about that.

Ben Madden: Absolutely. Going back to early in my consulting career, which is hard to believe, I've been in HR for 20 plus years, but early in my consulting career, I was with a client and things just weren't sitting right. There were changes being brought in. The client brought his sister in to the same role that I was working in, so things were starting to feel a little bit off.

And very quickly within the first two weeks we would have headbutting matches. We would have shouting matches over what was the right way to approach something. And it very quickly came to a head. I actually, instead of Getting fired. I quit because I realized that was the time that I needed to really drive for what is important to me and my beliefs. .

Dr. Jim: That's what we call the CliffNotes version of the story. So we'll definitely dig into dig into the details and and get more in the weeds with it.

But one thing that I'm curious about this happened when you were early in your consulting career.

Ben Madden: This happened early in my professional running a business career. That was only about two and a half years ago. So it's eyeopening and even now, we learn a whole lot, every day when it comes to the work that all of us do.

To walk away from that money and say, yeah, this is not for me. So how did you navigate that sort of set of circumstances in your head space? Because here you are just starting out and now you're in the middle of something that's not good. But I'm assuming the money was great. It's gonna be tough to walk away from.

So how, tell us about all of this stuff that was going through your head at that time.

Ben Madden: I actually just signed an extension on this agreement with them. We had started off small, had grown doing some more of that work that I was doing with them, and when he brought in his sister. I was gonna give it a chance. I figured, let's see how this goes. Let's see what we can do to hopefully get the right people in the right places.

I figured I would make it up through, frankly, working with clients that really wanted to believe the work that I did, and at the same time. I figured, it's early on if I need to take a pause or if I need to pivot back to going into full-time work. I can do that without too much loss. But I can't, I cannot stress enough that I couldn't give up my values and my belief system.

I.

But one thing that, that I'm wondering is this whole process of bringing the, the CEO's sister or the owner's sister in there, that seems a little abrupt. It seems like it's outta left field. What was the reasoning for that happening in the first place?

Ben Madden: So I was told, and actually I wasn't even told directly I got this through the rest of the HR staff that was there that he, the owner had brought in a new representative to, to help run hr. So I reached out immediately and said, Hey, I understand you've brought somebody in. I wanna make sure we don't have too many cooks in the kitchen.

I wanna make sure that we are, all going in the same direction of how and what we want HR to be. And for two weeks it was get her up to speed and let her understand what, what needs to be done. But it became very apparent that coming from a different industry, a different set of.

Why do I need to be doing X, y, and Z things? And that's really the stuff that started to give me those red flags about is this the right type of environment for me? Both in my experience in HR and frankly for an organization that claims it values people.

Dr. Jim: So it's interesting that you mentioned that things were going off the rails even on what I would think is pretty basic stuff like compliance on I nines that's like a core element of HR functions, don't get the company sued and don't get the company in an investigation.

Ben Madden: The line that I was given multiple times was I have lawyers to get me outta those situations which is never actually something you want to hear. You don't ever want to pay a lawyer to get you out of a situation that you could resolve for. Ostensibly free. And why bother being in compliance when I can just pay somebody to get me out of it and move on.

Dr. Jim: So this is an interesting contrast. You as a startup entrepreneur, you're taking the approach of slow down to speed up. I wanna make sure that our i's are dotted, t's are crossed so that we can operate at a fairly high velocity going forward because we have all of our ducks in a row. And then you have the organization that you're working for, that is pretty much at the opposite end.

How did that strike you?

Ben Madden: It was absolutely confusing. It was a, as you said, 180 degree shift from where things were. I was brought in to help stabilize the department. I was brought in originally for a smaller project. The person who was running HR left leaving just a generalist who was getting ready to go out on maternity leave.

And so I was there really as the only conduit to hr, to the only person who understood. Frankly anything about the industry we were in and slowly built the team behind me. But when they brought in his sister, who he had said he'd been trying to bring in for years, and she finally agreed to do this, that's.

And it was my job to make sure she understood everything that she needed to know about HR in this specific industry. And she wouldn't listen to me. And, having it get to a head where she finally asked who's in charge of this department? And I said I guess you are. And her response to me was, that's right.

Dr. Jim: That's tough and I keep thinking through the circumstances that you're in because you're in a build phase before you got the extension. So you brought people into this too, and now you're dealing with this person that wants to operate a different way and you're the conduit between that person and the rest of the team.

What was the team sensing and feeling as this churn was happening?

So it was a lot of me just trying to. Alleviate concerns immediately trying to say, here, we gotta give them a chance to build what we have already started to build. But even then, things went even further. The HR director I had brought in was fired for one mistake given no notice. And again, leaving a team that was very green when it came to handling a lot of the HR issues.

And then two leaders who did not see eye to eye and were really having a values misalignment to drive forward.

And what you're describing is the opposite end of the spectrum where it's no warning and you're terminated. That creates a whole nother set of issues because you just mentioned that you have a junior team underneath and they see their boss get rolled. They've gotta be completely freaking out.

So you have fires all over the place. A risk of some pretty high churn. How did you filter that up upstream so that people are aware, Hey, this is not how things are supposed to work.

Ben Madden: So a lot of times I would have long conversations with the HR team. We would go have coffees, we would go just talk through their experiences, and I would try and make sure that they all didn't feel like they were on this crazy train of. How did we get here and how did things go so badly? So quickly?

Dr. Jim: one thing that I keep thinking about is when you have a new cook in the kitchen and you're the incumbent who's been there for a while. Probably the first thing that I would do in that sort of scenario is probably have a sculping session or a level setting session.

Did I'm assuming you tried that. How did that go over when you're trying to reset the table?

Ben Madden: So I tried multiple times to sit with the owner and say, Hey, let's just clear the air. Let's make sure we understand what you need. If you weren't getting what you needed out of my leadership, let me know if that is the direction you want to go. We can resolve this now. And I got nothing. I got no meetings.

I.

Dr. Jim: So what you're describing. Whenever I have these conversations with other team members or other people that that are in my circle, one of the red flags that you might be on the way out is if you have your one-on-one start getting canceled if you get left out of important meetings. So you're describing all of these things that are red flags that, hey you are not gonna be in the room where things happen anymore.

So I see that happening in your circumstances. So when you see that happening. How do you strategize or how did you strategize what your exit plan was while still making sure that the existing team that you brought on isn't in full freak out mode?

I thought things were going well. I got that contract extension. I figured, great, we'll survive this. And then it, it just truly got to a point where it didn't make sense. It didn't have that. Connection that you know you wanna have with clients, you wanna feel connected to the work that they're doing to be able to be supportive of the work that they're doing and drive forward.

Dr. Jim: So you tore the bandaid off and and you ended up leaving. You made the decision that, hey, I'm not gonna, put myself at risk and, put myself in a scenario where I'm operating against my values and my philosophy. So there's probably a lot more that we can dig into in terms of.

Ben Madden: So absolutely first and foremost is A, understand your values. Understand what it is that makes it so you wanna get up in the morning every day and do the work that you do, whether it's hr, whether it's anything else, because if your values and your beliefs about what it is that you do are attacked.

That's gonna make it so you can't be an effective leader. You can't be effective in the work that you're doing. So that was absolute number one. Number two is.

And also pretty much just to be able to hear that. You made the right choice. Nobody wants to walk away from money. Nobody wants to walk away from a guaranteed contract, but I had to do what I needed to do in order to feel that I could wake up in the morning and do the work that I needed to do.

Dr. Jim: So when I think about this, I'm in sort of two minds. On the one hand, I think, Hey, it's probably a little bit easier to pull this off if you're a consultant. But on the other hand, if you're, an early stage startup founder and you're doing this that's a pretty tough decision. I want you to think about this scenario, but apply it to, let's say, an earlier career employee who's leading, dealing with the same stuff. So how would you advise them to manage that situation?

If there's a mismatch. It's time to start looking for new ways to go about working. I was fortunate that I didn't have to do things like give a two week notice period. I could literally say that I was done and as long as I gave it in writing, my contract was up For employees that are going through that it's really understanding where it is and how long of a runway they need to build in order to be able to get that new opportunity.

Dr. Jim: We've spent a fair amount of time talking about aligning with values, but I think that creates an interesting opportunity as a full-time employee within an organization where, if. You're feeling uncomfortable theoretically if you're at a level of maturity, you can basically say, Hey, I'm not gonna do this because this is misaligned with the company values and it's misaligned with my values.

How would you have that conversation in a way that it doesn't end up blowing yourself up in the process?

That's the first critical step is that self-awareness. Beyond that, it's really being able to have folks in the organization that you know and trust that you can have these types of conversations with. When I was internal, I was fortunate to have a leader who respected me and would hear what I had to say.

And so when there were things that didn't make sense for us as a company and for me as a leader, I was able to have those discussions and we were able to see change here when I was consulting. I didn't have that same level of comfort, so I couldn't even bring the issues to the table to try and resolve them.

Ben Madden: A absolutely. Playing the role of a subject matter expert now.

Gig in my entrepreneurial in journey, I am much more comfortable now saying, Hey, there are things here that don't make sense. You guys espouse X, Y, and Z, but really you're doing A, B, and C. We need to look at what is critical for you as an organization. And I've walked away from potential clients based on things that don't match my values now.

So I also have gotten clear.

On what I need to drive that.

Dr. Jim: you went through this experience pretty early, how has that impacted how you select your clients or how you decide to partner with clients going forward?

There was a gun manufacturing company that was looking for HR support and for me, that was not something that I felt comfortable. Being supportive of. So I did what was critical for me, which was, I can't do this work because of my own personal beliefs, but here's another group of folks who would be happy to support that.

And you're able to square the round peg of, I can't do this work, but I'm also not gonna leave you all on a lurch.

Dr. Jim: I like that extra step of of building a referral network that if there's companies. Or products that don't line up with your values, you can always refer them to somebody else that that might be better aligned. I think that's good practice. When you think about that experience that you went through, what are some of the ways that it actually improved your ability to find the right clients and partner with the right organizations?

Like what did this, how did this help you hit fast forward in your consulting career?

So even in those sessions where I'm just doing discovery, I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I don't know that. Either I need to continue asking those questions or it's a client that doesn't understand what they want and so either it is helping them define what it to have human capital, or it's a client that I'm not gonna work with.

Dr. Jim: that makes sense. But let me run you through a scenario. You can have all the best discovery in the world. You can check your reviews and all that sort of stuff. And then you get into an environment and you're plugging along just fine after a period of time.

How would you, they probably wouldn't say that. Maybe they would, I don't know. But if that situation comes up, how would you deal with that scenario?

Ben Madden: So I, I've dealt tangentially around that and a lot of it is document the risk that I'm seeing. If you're asking me to do something that is. Wrong, illegal, et cetera, document the risk. I have notified you that this is something that we cannot do, something that has to be done in order to be in compliance.

I notified you on X date. You've asked to either not do it, brush it aside, all of those things. Then from there, allow the company to have that risk on them. I've done everything that I can in my powers to say, this is what we need to do. And if you decide not to take that advice, I am just a paid consultant, but this is how we're gonna put a, to put a block on, on going forward with whatever activity that is.

And as an FTE, you're probably a frontline leader and you have deliverables and all this sort of stuff that that there's a lot of pressure to deliver. And somebody in that same circumstances leveraging their relationship and say, Hey, ben, come on be a team player. Let's make this happen.

How would you advise that FTE beyond documentation to protect themselves and navigate this sort of scenario? Because it's something that happens because frontline managers are on a need to know basis, and there's stuff above them that is probably hidden from their reviews. So how do you build a protection engine there?

Nobody wants to be held accountable for things that they can't deliver on because it's wrong, et cetera. But the more that you're able to elevate that, these are the concerns that I'm seeing. These are the reasons and the rationale as to why I am unable to do something, the better off you are to protect yourself and also raise that to the company.

Presuming it's something that they deeply wanna make sure it gets either done or not done. Again, depending on the side of that fence.

Dr. Jim: one of the big things that we're talking through is how do you navigate situations where there's a misalignment between your values and what the company or the direction that the company chooses at any given moment. So when you look at that sort of.

Ben Madden: So absolutely it is critical for somebody to know their own values. A lot of times people don't know what they are until they're pushed beyond that limit. Certainly understanding what it is that is important to you as an individual, for you as somebody in an organization. And making sure that first and foremost, the organization's mission still aligns with your beliefs.

If they don't. That's step one of, I need to get out of here. If building that safe net behind you is having folks that are your own personal board of advisors. I, there's a, an author named Pete Schram, who's written about this idea of having folks that can be your personal guidance when it comes to making decisions.

Dr. Jim: If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Ben Madden: Best way. I'm on LinkedIn. Email ben@hractionllc.com. The website, hr action llc.com. And just happy to talk.

Dr. Jim: We'll make sure to include all of that in the in the show notes. So I appreciate you hanging out with us Ben, and sharing with us your thoughts and how you'd navigate this, these situations when I think through this conversation.

There. There's something that I was told very early in my career in terms of how you make decisions and what that decision matrix should look like, and this entire conversation reminded me of that. And there were four basic pillars that we needed to consider when you're making decisions. And I think this can broadly apply to anybody.

Is this decision that you're making good for you as an individual and good for you from a career perspective. The second piece is you have to be able to answer, is this good for the company? Third piece, is this good for the customer? And the fourth piece, and this is the trickiest one, is it ethical?

Because depending on where you work. That definition of ethics can vary. So what I gathered from your conversation is that when you're checking off the answers to those questions, you need to make sure that you're staying consistent with your values and your interest in terms of advancing and progressing your career in a way that you can sleep well at night.

Just make sure you're documenting and making sure that you are articulating why you're recommending one particular course of action, and if the leadership or the company decides to go a different direction, that's on them. So I think this is an important lesson in terms of managing ambiguity, managing conflict, managing.

Misalignment of values, and I appreciate you sharing that with me. It reminded me of something that I came across very early in my career and it's been an operating principle going forward. So I appreciate you hanging out and sharing that with us. For those of you who've been listening to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out and checking it out if you liked it.