Understand Reality Before You Fix It: A Conversation with Agata Lesniak

Agata Lesniak's LinkedIn bio reads: owner, doer, builder, tester, solver. It's always day one. Better shipped than perfect. That's not typical HR speak, and that's the point.

Agata has built the people function of multiple Polish tech companies from absolute zero, no HR, no onboarding docs, no Notion, nothing. She's now Head of People at Bejamas, a remote-first design and development agency of 30-plus people across 10 countries. Before that she did employer branding and people work at LiveChat during its scale-up phase and at CallStack, and she started out in a medical clinic scheduling doctors. She's handled the full messy cycle, and she has strong, unsentimental opinions about all of it.

Titles mean nothing without a voice

Her belief that titles matter less than what actually works comes from watching it fail. You can be the director, the head, the VP of People, but by the end of the day it can mean nothing if you don't have a voice, if the founder doesn't actually let you decide anything. She's met plenty of senior HR people who hold the title and can't do a thing. Worse, when someone clings to a title for years, they start to assume they can't be wrong because they're at the top of the ladder, which quietly stops their own development, especially since the people around them become afraid to give direct feedback.

Employer branding: 50 people versus 200

At 50 people, employer branding is strategic but embryonic, and you can't separate it from the founder's persona, which is a great asset and a real challenge to manage. Every hire can change the company's DNA, and one bad hire at that scale is really loud. People know what the values mean in practice, "move fast" also means mistakes will happen, so you don't need campaigns, just truth and consistency, repeated. At 200-plus, it becomes structural: you're no longer shaping what the company is, but how reliably it shows up. The question shifts from "are we this?" to "are we still this?", which matters enormously when you're scaling fast.

Remote kills osmosis

Building a people function for a distributed team is a different craft, because in an office the shared physical context fills the gaps automatically. People pick up how decisions get made, how feedback is given, and what good work looks like just by watching. In a fully remote team like Bejamas, nothing fills the gap unless you design it, you can't rely on osmosis. So the people function has to turn common sense into an explicit set of rules and habits, written, repeated, modeled intentionally, and constantly improved. If it isn't made explicit, it simply doesn't exist.

Understand reality before you try to fix it

Her number-one move joining any company is to understand reality before trying to fix it. She's watched HR managers arrive with a detailed action plan already written, and she asks how that could possibly work in practice. Instead she talks to founders, managers, and employees to learn how decisions really get made, not what's on the org chart, but who people actually go to when something breaks, where they feel friction and unfairness, and what everyone avoids saying out loud. Skip that and every plan is built on assumptions. And if you're afraid to ask the uncomfortable questions, she says, you just become "a nice monstera in the room", decorative and useless.

Why HR is disliked, and when founders actually need it

HR carries the luggage of its history: it began as a controlling function tied to payroll and finance, the "big hand" of company decisions, and that stereotype lingers. It's also the one role that touches people financially in an impactful way, so everyone has opinions. Her sharper point is about timing. Founders say they'll hire HR "when we're big enough to need it," which means they wait until problems are visible rather than forming, performance issues, chaotic hiring, unhappy people, at which point the damage is already baked in and HR is reduced to being, in her words, the cleaning lady. HR can't reverse years of business decisions in a quarter. The earlier HR joins, the cheaper and cleaner the work is for everyone.

Hiring has flipped from speed to downside protection

The market has inverted since 2021. Then, hiring optimized for speed and upside, move fast or lose the candidate. Today it optimizes for downside protection: fewer, sharper, cheaper stages, closing fewer roles but with much higher confidence. Recruiters now sell the company's credibility and stability more than benefits or salary, because the supply of high-fit candidates is lower. And it's a two-way street, recruiters ghost candidates just as candidates ghost interviews, and both sides build the market. She also notes the layoffs mostly hit lower and mid performers, because companies fight to keep their best people.

Ego-less leadership and doing offboarding right

Ego-less leadership, for Agata, means staying objective and team-oriented, winning as a team rather than winning the argument. You can hold strong opinions without needing to win every discussion for your ego, a servant-leader, hands-on, down-to-earth approach whose biggest reward is that her team describes her the same way she'd describe herself. Check your ego in the wardrobe and do your work.

On offboarding, the part nobody discusses, she has firm rules: be transparent and timely, don't drag decisions out because delay breeds anxiety and rumors. Be clear about the reason without unnecessary optimism, be straight, they're adults. Only run an exit interview if the organization is genuinely ready to hear brutal, negative feedback. Give people time to process, prepare the knowledge handoff, and don't prolong it, keeping someone too long serves no one.

The underrated practice: invest in managers

Her most underrated HR practice is investing in managers, not just employees, especially at smaller companies. Too often a manager gets "congratulations on the promotion, now go lead," and is left on their own. Weak management is one of the top reasons people leave, which makes it a genuine puzzle why so few companies invest in developing their managers.

Key takeaways

Titles mean nothing without a voice. Authority without decision-making power is empty, and clinging to a title quietly stops your growth.

Remote kills osmosis. What an office teaches by watching must be made explicit, written, repeated, modeled, in a distributed team, or it doesn't exist.

Understand reality before fixing it. Talk to people, learn who they actually go to when things break, and don't be the nice monstera afraid of the uncomfortable question.

The earlier HR joins, the cheaper the cleanup. Waiting until problems are visible bakes in the damage and reduces HR to reactive cleaning.

Invest in managers. Weak management drives people out, yet companies pour development into employees and leave new managers to fend for themselves.

Frameworks worth stealing

Reality before the action plan

Before writing a single plan, map how the company actually works: who people go to when something breaks (not the org chart), where they feel friction, confusion, and unfairness, and what everyone avoids saying out loud. Ask the uncomfortable questions early. A plan built on assumptions instead of this reality will be built on nothing.

Candidate persona from the inside out

Don't build a candidate persona for external marketing, and don't start by benchmarking competitors. Start by looking at the people you already have and the ones you actually need, their challenges, struggles, and the gaps. Begin with a soft-skills profile grounded in your real team, then work outward.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

You can be the director or the VP, but by the end of the day it means nothing if you don't have a voice.

If you're afraid of asking the uncomfortable questions, you just become a nice monstera in the room.

The earlier HR joins, the cheaper and cleaner the work is, for the people and for the company.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Trust your guts and your talent, and just do the thing, without over-researching or checking what your favorite influencers would say. Whatever the outcome, you either learn or grow.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Don't be a perfectionist. It's a struggle rooted in her law and administration background and its hunt for the one truth, when often it doesn't matter and shipping beats perfecting.

What would you tell your younger self? Don't rush into university studies for their own sake. Start working first, then pursue education that actually serves the work. When she screens CVs, she cares far less about degrees than about the struggles someone faced and how they fought through them.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Work doesn't keep her up anymore, she's understood her demon and reached a more peaceful place. What remains is the volume of multi-context work that comes with a small company.

Favorite spot? A self-described crazy foodie, she points to Warsaw's Asian restaurants, hotpot and Korean BBQ especially, for the shared-cooking ritual that builds real connection.

Tool you can't live without? Not materialistic, sport. Gym, tennis, padel, hiking. Movement is what keeps her sane.

---

Agata Lesniak is the Head of People at Bejamas, a remote-first design and development agency spread across 10 countries. She has built HR functions from zero and previously worked in employer branding and people roles at LiveChat and CallStack. Find her on LinkedIn.