Lessons from the Forrest Gump of HR

Adam Morris has spent two decades building and rebuilding HR operations across nearly every type of organization—from startups to universities to some of the world’s most admired companies like American Express, Google, Ford Motor Company, and now Atlassian. His mentor calls him “the Forrest Gump of HR”. 

That range gave him something most HR leaders don’t have: a full spectrum of organizational maturity to draw from. At Population Services International, he was introducing performance appraisals for the first time. At American Express, he saw some of the most sophisticated HR operations in the world. The ability to meet organizations wherever they are on that spectrum became, as he puts it, “sort of one of my secrets.”

Across all of it, one pattern holds. The thing that drives the need for HR support isn’t organizational size—it’s dynamism. At Google, he had a 400-person organization and a 60-person organization. He spent orders of magnitude more time on the smaller one, because it was growing fast and everything was in flux.

“Where you have really stable organizations, HR is a nice-to-have, but not a must-have, right?”

Growth creates opportunity—more resources, more strategic focus, new roles opening up. But it also creates a sense of loss. Long-tenured employees watch new people flood in and feel like they’re losing the company they built. Leaders who once interviewed every hire have to let go and trust others to hold the bar. That letting go, Adam says, sometimes only happens after something goes wrong—or after “a lot of prying to get that change to happen.”

One of Adam’s own leadership lessons came when he was leading HR for a rapidly growing startup while managing a large team for the first time. The weight of the business crushed his management practice.

“I was just barely trying to keep my head above water, and so oftentimes what I would do is prioritize what the business’s needs were over what my teams were. I would cancel one-on-ones frequently.”

After a year in that mode, the damage was clear. He’d lost followership. He didn’t have the goodwill that he now sees as absolutely paramount. The lesson reshaped how Adam leads teams and guides other leaders: no matter what, your team needs to know they are your top priority.

He compares 1:1s to going to class in college. Skip the lecture, and sure, you can do something else that sounds more attractive at the time—but then you spend four hours studying to make up for it. Cancel your one-on-ones, and the time comes back to you in turnover, disengagement, and broken trust.

“If you can’t invest the time to go have a meaningful 30-minute meeting once a week with each person on your team, then I think you really need to take a step back and look at what you need to do.”

That conviction about showing up for your people shaped how Adam thinks about developing managers at scale. Specifically, Adam champions a deceptively simple intervention he calls  “manager community.” At Google, overseeing HR for a robotics project growing from 100 to 200 people, he was the sole HR practitioner. So once a month, he gathered all the managers for 90 minutes: 30 minutes of content on a specific friction point in the employee lifecycle, 30 minutes of breakout case work, 30 minutes of group discussion.

“Over the course of 12 months, I can fundamentally change the whole experience of every employee and build the knowledge of my managers. And I’m just creating 30 minutes of content and some structure.”

He’s launched these communities at multiple organizations since, including Google Tokyo, where it took on a life of its own. The format is adaptable—even a less structured version where managers simply gather monthly to share use cases and challenges can build meaningful community and capability.

But none of the sophisticated interventions matter if the fundamentals aren’t in place. Adam describes a hierarchy of needs for HR: structured people data at the base, then clear expectations and job architecture, then performance processes, then talent development at the top. Too many organizations, he’s found, skip straight to progressive ideas without building the foundation underneath.

“If they don’t have a job description, or know how they’re going to succeed, if they aren’t getting basic feedback, if their manager is completely in over their head, then all of that stuff goes out the window.”

His closing advice for leaders maturing their organizations was refreshingly concise: “be deliberate.” Be deliberate with how you lead, what values you transmit, how you show up in a room. Early in his career, he received feedback that he needed more executive presence. He assumed that meant polish—better words, smoother delivery. It wasn’t that at all.

“My executive presence has not been about words or polish, it’s been about being more deliberate and thoughtful in what it is that I’m providing.”

At Atlassian, he sees what that deliberateness looks like at full maturity. Nearly two decades ago, the co-founders hit an inflection point where they couldn’t interview every new hire. They sat down, wrote their values on an envelope, and those values still show up in daily conversations across a 13,000-person company. 

It’s a case study in everything Adam advocates—slowing down at a moment of dynamism, getting the fundamentals right, and trusting that a small, deliberate investment compounds over time. Whether you’re an organization of 50 or 13,000, clearly articulated and constantly reinforced values are, as he puts it, “a superpower that will help you scale.