“It was like an aha moment. I completely fell in love with it.”
Natale Mastoroudes is talking about an elective she almost didn’t take while studying for an Operational Research degree at LSE. The elective? Organisational behaviour. Nearly twenty years and several continents later, she is still in HR, still learning, and still, she says, hooked.
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Natale Mastoroudes is a senior HR leader and former Chief People Officer with almost two decades of experience across tech, fintech, and international businesses. She has led people functions across multiple countries, helping organisations scale, navigate complexity, and turn people strategy into business success, without breaking the humans in the process.
She defines HR as the crossroads between business, legal, finance, and psychology. “And there’s real tension within that,” she says. This tension arises when the different departments of an organisation have blinkered goals: business wants results, legal wants compliance, and finance wants efficiency. But the individuals, the people behind the roles, want meaning, growth, recognition, and fairness. HR sits in the middle of all of it, managing stakeholders who often want incompatible things.
This is where the line from her bio enters the conversation. She is a big advocate for success for all her companies, “without breaking the humans in the process.” A lot of companies, she says, “confuse resilience with endurance. And there is a difference between the two.” Endurance is pushing through until something breaks, whereas resilience understands that yes, sometimes you push, maybe there is a product launch coming up, a deadline, an unforeseen crisis, but what comes after matters just as much. The team needs recovery time so they can develop their adaptability, but also to be ready for the next growth period.
“When something breaks, it becomes expensive. It becomes time-consuming. It can impact not just the people, which is a really big deal, but also the business.”
The sustainable path and the commercially smart path, she argues, are the same path.
To build a sustainable team, there also needs to be transparency around leadership and the values of the company. “The culture of the company is a lot more than the writing on the wall,” she says. It is not just what gets done, but also what gets tolerated. A high performer who receives special treatment because they bring in revenue sends a message to everyone else in the organisation, whether leadership intends it or not. “That shapes your culture. The gap between what companies say their values are and what the lived experience of employees is has been one of the most consistent misalignments I see.”
Her advice to any CEO who wants a stronger people culture this year is built around one word she thinks is missing from most organisations. Clarity.
“That’s what any self-respecting CEO should invest in,” she says. Aligned leadership. Capable managers. A consistent message from the CEO down to every employee.
“If everyone is on the same page, bringing in different thoughts and different perspectives, you are basically navigating the boat, the bus, the organisation to where you want it to go.”
Natale Mastoroudes is the second guest on The Future Makers: HR Leaders. The full episode, including her view on what the HR department will look like in five years, why well-being is not yoga in the workplace, and what she worries about for people just entering the industry now, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers: HR Leaders, hosted by Annetta Benzar, is a series of conversations with people leaders focused on hiring, workplace culture, leadership, workforce transformation, talent strategy, learning, performance and building the workplace of tomorrow.
A production of The Future Media.
