Can HR Stop Being Culture's Gatekeeper and Own Its Own Failures?

That's what happens when HR stops pretending it has all the answers.

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A CHRO admitted, no filter, how mixing up friendship with leadership forced him to fire a friend.

We filled a room in Mexico City with fifty HR leaders. They didn't come for an engagement panel, or a leadership workshop. They came to hear three people admit, out loud, what went wrong.

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HR gets asked to do a lot: stay composed, always have the right answer, be the one who sets the example. It's almost never given permission to fail in front of others. This private session, hosted by Clan HR Coach with Fuckup Nights, existed to change exactly that.

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The Time Profuturo's CHRO Had to Fire a Friend

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José Antonio Márquez, CHRO at Profuturo, took the stage with a story that wasn't really about a firing. It was about everything he ignored before that conversation ever happened.

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After coming up under a demanding boss, José Antonio built his own leadership style around one belief: closeness and friendship were the foundation of a strong team. So when a strategic project came up, he handed the lead to a close friend of many years (even though something in him already had doubts).

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Those doubts confirmed themselves slowly. He started picking up tasks that weren't his anymore. The team noticed the favoritism. He kept avoiding the difficult conversation, again and again, until one night he found himself staring at a spreadsheet, doing work he'd delegated months earlier.

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"The best thing that can happen to you professionally is having a boss who isn't your friend."‍

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That's what he told his friend the day he let her go. The real fuckup, he told the room that night, wasn't the firing. It was taking months to have a conversation he'd known he needed to have all along.

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José Antonio left everyone with one line that stuck: "Messing up doesn't automatically make you better. What you do after it does."

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Why Fuckup Nights Instead of Another HR Talk?

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Jimena Osio, founder of Clan HR Coach, already knew the territory. Her community of senior HR leaders had sat through enough motivational talks and strategy offsites to know they rarely move anything long-term.

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That's why this event had no panel and no outside speaker with inspirational one-liners. It had three people — Jimena, José Antonio, and Gonzalo Hernández, CHRO at 99minutos — talking to each other about what usually stays off the panels, the podcasts, and LinkedIn

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Why This Matters for HR

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If HR leaders can't be vulnerable with each other,it's hard to ask a team o be vulnerable with its leader. This kind of space trains exactly that muscle: treating mistakes as part of leadership, not as its failure.

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Spaces like this are what actually sustain retention, employer branding, and real trust; an experience built to spark real growth mindset through transparency, not the concept-slide kind.

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The question isn't whether it's worth talking about failure in your organization. It's whether your leadership team already knows how to do that with each other, or is still pretending it never happens to them.‍

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Clan HR Coach and Fuckup Nights pulled it off by building a room where being a CHRO didn't mean being perfect. It was the first time many people in that room watched another CHRO admit, by name, that he'd taken months too long to do the right thing.

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Does your leadership team already have a space like that, or is it still waiting for the "right" moment to build one?‍

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Find out how to bring this format to your organization at fuckupnights.com/at-work, or reach out directly. Sometimes a culture shift doesn't start with another talk — it starts with the first person willing to tell it differently, at fuckupnights.com/at-work.

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