When people tell me they want to get into HR, the reasons sound familiar. They want to help people. They want to develop the organization. They want to drive engagement and build culture. Some of them are coming out of operations, some out of recruiting, some out of a leadership role, where they realized they cared more about the people side of the business than anything else.

What no one tells them, and what no one told me when I was starting out, is just how isolating the HR seat actually is once you sit in it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I keep meeting HR pros who feel something they can’t quite name. They’re good at their jobs. They’re respected by their leadership. They’re delivering on the work. And still, something feels off. They feel isolated in a building full of people. They feel disconnected from colleagues they used to be close to. They feel tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

The reason is structural, not personal.

You Are the Keeper of Secrets

In HR, you carry information other people don’t have access to, and that information shapes every interaction you have at work:

-The colleague at the desk next to yours might be in a confidential investigation you’re managing.

-The friend you grab lunch with might be on a list of potential layoffs you can’t talk about.

-The manager who jokes with you in the hallway might be getting feedback from you next week that changes their entire career trajectory.

-The team member you’ve coached for three years might be on the receiving end of news you have to deliver before the end of the month.

You can’t say any of it. You’re not supposed to. The integrity of the work depends on you holding what you know.

But those secrets can make building genuine peer connection inside your own organization difficult. There’s always a part of you that’s filtering, calculating, holding back the thing you actually know.

This is the part of the job that no recruiter mentions, no graduate program prepares you for, and no LinkedIn post celebrates. And yet it’s the daily reality for most of us.

Why Internal Friendships Don’t Solve It

A lot of HR pros try to solve the loneliness by leaning into internal friendships. They find a few people they trust, and those people become their support system at work.

This works, until it doesn’t.

The moment one of those trusted people becomes part of a confidential matter, the friendship has to shift. The moment leadership asks you to weigh in on a restructuring, you can’t talk to your work friend about the stress of it because they might be on the list. The moment a complaint comes across your desk, you can’t process it the way you’d process anything else.

The work creates its own walls, and you can’t take them down without compromising the role.

I’m not saying internal connection is impossible. Some of the closest friendships of my career have been with colleagues. But you can’t build your entire support system inside the company you’re paid to protect, because the role will eventually require you to choose between the relationship and the work, and you won’t always get to choose the relationship.

What Actually Works

What works is community outside of your organization.

It’s other HR leaders who have held the same kinds of secrets, who have made the same kinds of calls, who have lost sleep over the same kinds of decisions. People who can be a sounding board without it ever becoming gossip. People who can give you a real answer because they’ve been there themselves.

This is the kind of community I’ve been working to build, and the response has shown me how badly people want it. HR pros walk into one of our spaces and within minutes, you can see something settle in their shoulders. They’re not the only HR person in the room anymore. They don’t have to translate. They don’t have to hold back.

They get to be HR pros around other HR pros, and that alone is a kind of relief that’s hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it.

The Permission Piece

Part of what I want to give people is permission. Permission to admit the role is hard in ways that don’t show up on a job description. Permission to need community that exists outside your company. Permission to take care of yourself with the same care you give to everyone else’s people problems.

You shouldn’t have to choose between doing your job well and having people in your corner. Both should be possible, and both are, once you stop trying to find every kind of support inside the four walls of your employer.

If you’re an HR leader reading this and you’ve felt some version of what I’m describing, I want you to know two things. The first is that you’re not the only one. The second is that the answer isn’t to push through it alone.

Build a network of HR people who get it. Show up at events that don’t feel cold or stale. Find your HR besties, the ones you can actually call when something heavy lands on your desk. The work is too important, and you are too valuable, to do it in isolation.

Check out our upcoming events to find the right one for you: www.cwchr.com/events

The seat is lonely. It doesn’t have to stay that way.