HR Escapes Firefighting Mode By Building Frameworks That Scale With Hiring
You need to equip managers and leaders so that they can solve issues on their own by giving them the case, the toolkit, and the resources so they can handle it.
Divya Lohiya
Senior Business Partner
Human Resources
Startups hire fast, promote early, and outgrow their internal systems practically overnight. When companies scale that aggressively, HR often gets trapped playing catch-up, putting out daily fires instead of building long-term architecture. That constant operational friction pushes many people teams to rethink their approach, moving toward a more proactive HR strategy built on simple frameworks that won’t snap at the next hiring wave.
A Senior HR Business Partner with over a decade of global tech experience, Divya Lohiya has navigated these exact growing pains across EMEA, the US, and APAC. At companies including Plivo, Innovaccer, and Sprinklr, she has engineered people strategy during hyper-growth phases, boosting internal promotions by 15%, lifting manager-effectiveness scores, and dropping attrition by 12%. Much of her work centers on building practical, zero-budget systems that decentralize problem-solving, freeing up HR to focus on the business.
“You need to equip managers and leaders so that they can solve issues on their own by giving them the case, the toolkit, and the resources so they can handle it,” says Lohiya. That philosophy grew out of a pattern she kept seeing: newly promoted managers redirecting employees to HR the moment someone asked about career growth or a promotion. The deflection seems harmless on the surface, but it quietly signals to employees that their manager has no ownership over their development. When that happens enough times, trust erodes and people start looking elsewhere.
Building frameworks that survive the next doubling
Early in her career, Lohiya walked into a 250-person company running its entire performance management process on spreadsheets. It is a common scale-up bug: manual processes inevitably break, often leaving employees unsure how they are evaluated or how to climb the career ladder.
Instead of tackling those concerns case by case, she built a structure designed to hold even if the company doubled or tripled in size. “When you’re looking at how HR systems will work as the company grows, you need a framework that still works as the company scales,” she says. “You’re not just solving for today, but for the next two years as well. If we scale up to 700 or 800 people, this should still work.”
That mindset extends to how she defines HR’s role. Rather than positioning the people team as the department that handles every personnel issue, Lohiya pushes ownership outward.
“HR doesn’t need to be coming into the picture all the time,” she says. “Equip the managers, coach them, and make them capable of solving those problems so that HR can be there to make people strategies that really work for the overall organization.”
The manager readiness gap
That decentralization strategy led her to focus on the biggest bottleneck in any growing company: middle managers. In hyper-growth environments, high-performing individual contributors are typically promoted fast. While they often bring strong technical skills, many lack experience navigating difficult conversations about performance or growth.
When employees ask about advancement, some new managers freeze up and redirect them to HR. It is a quiet retention risk that can stall talent development entirely.
“What do crucial conversations look like if an employee comes to you and wants a promotion?” Lohiya says. “Sometimes managers do not know how to react, and they just redirect them, saying, ‘Go to HR, this is not something I can answer.'”
The downstream consequence is predictable. “So they say, ‘Okay, my manager doesn’t have an answer to this. This is the person you’ll be growing under,'” Lohiya says. “If you don’t have that kind of authority or management skill, employees don’t trust you as much, and then they feel they might not grow in the organization. Then they find some other way, probably look for a different role or move out of the company.”
Bootstrapping a training program on zero budget
Instead of dropping cash on an expensive external leadership course, Lohiya and a small team of HR business partners built an internal training program from scratch. They pulled together free resources, using AI to gather examples, podcasts, and articles, and partnered with L&D to design focused training programs.
The curriculum prioritized practical role-play and one-on-one meetings so managers could handle feedback discussions directly, armed with conversation playbooks rather than rigid scripts.
“We added a lot of situational-based scenarios using data that we had from real situations,” she says. “We would give them a situation and ask them to talk to an employee. How would you deal with that? What kind of language do you have to use? You need to be really empathetic. You cannot just redirect people and leave them confused.”
Managing the invisible workload
Behind the scenes, HR teams juggle long-term enablement with a heavy volume of invisible operational tasks. In Lohiya’s experience, the operational load often spikes during organizational changes. During one quarter, she found herself supporting reductions in force while still producing recurring organizational health dashboards and routine deliverables.
To stay effective, she applied the same systems mindset to her own desk. By setting up a shared Smartsheet listing active projects, owners, and status, and pairing it with twice-weekly check-ins, she cut down on ad hoc status requests and created a live record of work.
“There is beauty in delegating a lot of things,” she says. “I have a habit of breaking complex things into simple pieces, and then delegating work that can be done by a better-suited coworker.”
That documentation serves a second purpose. “These tools really help navigate things, like seeing the owner, the impact, and what you’re doing,” Lohiya says. “You have something to showcase in a performance management cycle as a whole project, demonstrating your impact and how it contributes to the overall OKRs of the team.”
AI as the unpaid intern
For HR leaders open to experimenting, Lohiya sees real value in using emerging technology to automate routine tasks and buy back time for higher-impact work. She views AI purely as a utilitarian lever to streamline operations and quickly assemble conversation toolkits for managers.
“Think of it as your paid intern,” she says. “You don’t have to hire someone to help you out, but you are getting a smart brain that can work on certain things, help you organize, and help you be better.”
But the technology only amplifies what the human brings to the table. “If you’re using AI, you are spending your time thinking about things you didn’t have time for before,” Lohiya says. “Ultimately, value is going to come down to judgment, influence, and how well you can navigate complexity. The human side of the role is actually becoming more important, not less.”
The messy middle of HR
That human side remains the core of the job. The frameworks, training modules, and AI tools are simply the infrastructure built around the conversations that matter most. While employees often expect HR to have a documented rule for every scenario, the reality of the role is sitting with ambiguity and helping teams navigate it.
“We are also humans,” Lohiya says. “We are figuring a lot of it out together based on the situation. There might be situations that are new to us, so it’s a learning process for HR as well. We don’t have all the answers all the time.”
For Lohiya, the best HR work happens in the spaces where policy can’t reach. “Good HR is about making tough calls and decisions that people don’t think about, where there is no perfect answer,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a very human, one-on-one conversation where you need that emotional quotient. You don’t know where the person is coming from, so it cannot always be around policy and processes.”
Related articles
TL;DR
The most overlooked retention risk in high-growth companies isn’t compensation or policy, but newly promoted managers who deflect career conversations to HR, signaling to employees that their development is no one’s responsibility.
Divya Lohiya, a Senior HR Business Partner, built a zero-budget, scenario-based training program that equipped managers to handle promotion and growth discussions directly instead of redirecting them.
The broader playbook is about decentralizing HR’s role: building frameworks that survive rapid scaling, using AI to assemble toolkits faster, and accepting that the most valuable HR work happens in the ambiguous spaces where policy can’t reach.
Divya Lohiya
Human Resources
Senior Business Partner
Senior Business Partner
Startups hire fast, promote early, and outgrow their internal systems practically overnight. When companies scale that aggressively, HR often gets trapped playing catch-up, putting out daily fires instead of building long-term architecture. That constant operational friction pushes many people teams to rethink their approach, moving toward a more proactive HR strategy built on simple frameworks that won’t snap at the next hiring wave.
A Senior HR Business Partner with over a decade of global tech experience, Divya Lohiya has navigated these exact growing pains across EMEA, the US, and APAC. At companies including Plivo, Innovaccer, and Sprinklr, she has engineered people strategy during hyper-growth phases, boosting internal promotions by 15%, lifting manager-effectiveness scores, and dropping attrition by 12%. Much of her work centers on building practical, zero-budget systems that decentralize problem-solving, freeing up HR to focus on the business.
“You need to equip managers and leaders so that they can solve issues on their own by giving them the case, the toolkit, and the resources so they can handle it,” says Lohiya. That philosophy grew out of a pattern she kept seeing: newly promoted managers redirecting employees to HR the moment someone asked about career growth or a promotion. The deflection seems harmless on the surface, but it quietly signals to employees that their manager has no ownership over their development. When that happens enough times, trust erodes and people start looking elsewhere.
Building frameworks that survive the next doubling
Early in her career, Lohiya walked into a 250-person company running its entire performance management process on spreadsheets. It is a common scale-up bug: manual processes inevitably break, often leaving employees unsure how they are evaluated or how to climb the career ladder.
Instead of tackling those concerns case by case, she built a structure designed to hold even if the company doubled or tripled in size. “When you’re looking at how HR systems will work as the company grows, you need a framework that still works as the company scales,” she says. “You’re not just solving for today, but for the next two years as well. If we scale up to 700 or 800 people, this should still work.”
That mindset extends to how she defines HR’s role. Rather than positioning the people team as the department that handles every personnel issue, Lohiya pushes ownership outward.
“HR doesn’t need to be coming into the picture all the time,” she says. “Equip the managers, coach them, and make them capable of solving those problems so that HR can be there to make people strategies that really work for the overall organization.”
The manager readiness gap
That decentralization strategy led her to focus on the biggest bottleneck in any growing company: middle managers. In hyper-growth environments, high-performing individual contributors are typically promoted fast. While they often bring strong technical skills, many lack experience navigating difficult conversations about performance or growth.
When employees ask about advancement, some new managers freeze up and redirect them to HR. It is a quiet retention risk that can stall talent development entirely.
“What do crucial conversations look like if an employee comes to you and wants a promotion?” Lohiya says. “Sometimes managers do not know how to react, and they just redirect them, saying, ‘Go to HR, this is not something I can answer.'”
The downstream consequence is predictable. “So they say, ‘Okay, my manager doesn’t have an answer to this. This is the person you’ll be growing under,'” Lohiya says. “If you don’t have that kind of authority or management skill, employees don’t trust you as much, and then they feel they might not grow in the organization. Then they find some other way, probably look for a different role or move out of the company.”
Bootstrapping a training program on zero budget
Instead of dropping cash on an expensive external leadership course, Lohiya and a small team of HR business partners built an internal training program from scratch. They pulled together free resources, using AI to gather examples, podcasts, and articles, and partnered with L&D to design focused training programs.
The curriculum prioritized practical role-play and one-on-one meetings so managers could handle feedback discussions directly, armed with conversation playbooks rather than rigid scripts.
“We added a lot of situational-based scenarios using data that we had from real situations,” she says. “We would give them a situation and ask them to talk to an employee. How would you deal with that? What kind of language do you have to use? You need to be really empathetic. You cannot just redirect people and leave them confused.”
Managing the invisible workload
Behind the scenes, HR teams juggle long-term enablement with a heavy volume of invisible operational tasks. In Lohiya’s experience, the operational load often spikes during organizational changes. During one quarter, she found herself supporting reductions in force while still producing recurring organizational health dashboards and routine deliverables.
To stay effective, she applied the same systems mindset to her own desk. By setting up a shared Smartsheet listing active projects, owners, and status, and pairing it with twice-weekly check-ins, she cut down on ad hoc status requests and created a live record of work.
“There is beauty in delegating a lot of things,” she says. “I have a habit of breaking complex things into simple pieces, and then delegating work that can be done by a better-suited coworker.”
That documentation serves a second purpose. “These tools really help navigate things, like seeing the owner, the impact, and what you’re doing,” Lohiya says. “You have something to showcase in a performance management cycle as a whole project, demonstrating your impact and how it contributes to the overall OKRs of the team.”
AI as the unpaid intern
For HR leaders open to experimenting, Lohiya sees real value in using emerging technology to automate routine tasks and buy back time for higher-impact work. She views AI purely as a utilitarian lever to streamline operations and quickly assemble conversation toolkits for managers.
“Think of it as your paid intern,” she says. “You don’t have to hire someone to help you out, but you are getting a smart brain that can work on certain things, help you organize, and help you be better.”
But the technology only amplifies what the human brings to the table. “If you’re using AI, you are spending your time thinking about things you didn’t have time for before,” Lohiya says. “Ultimately, value is going to come down to judgment, influence, and how well you can navigate complexity. The human side of the role is actually becoming more important, not less.”
The messy middle of HR
That human side remains the core of the job. The frameworks, training modules, and AI tools are simply the infrastructure built around the conversations that matter most. While employees often expect HR to have a documented rule for every scenario, the reality of the role is sitting with ambiguity and helping teams navigate it.
“We are also humans,” Lohiya says. “We are figuring a lot of it out together based on the situation. There might be situations that are new to us, so it’s a learning process for HR as well. We don’t have all the answers all the time.”
For Lohiya, the best HR work happens in the spaces where policy can’t reach. “Good HR is about making tough calls and decisions that people don’t think about, where there is no perfect answer,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a very human, one-on-one conversation where you need that emotional quotient. You don’t know where the person is coming from, so it cannot always be around policy and processes.”