Seve Romero spent his entire career inside one organization. He started at 17 as a retail sales associate at Finish Line and worked his way up to Senior Vice President of HR for Finish Line and JD Sports. That’s a long time in one place, and he’ll be the first to tell you it never felt that way.
We get into the athlete mindset early, because it genuinely shapes how Seve approaches his work. Growing up, sports were everything for him, and the competitiveness and attention to detail that came with that followed him into his career. The interesting part is where he applies them:
“I don’t look at myself as an HR leader or professional. I look at myself as a business leader, and what I try to do is obsess with every little detail about the business, even things that by and large in my day to day aren’t at all HR responsibilities.”
That framing runs through everything we cover. He cares about margin, commercial levers, and consumer behavior just as much as the people side, and he’s made that integration the foundation of how he shows up at every level.
His path into HR was an accident, technically. He was expecting a product merchandising internship and ended up in talent acquisition instead. He said yes anyway, and it clicked fast. There’s something in recruiting that suited him immediately: you have to understand the business to find the right people for it. That connection between business knowledge and people decisions has guided him ever since.
I spend a good amount of time with Seve on what it looks like to build a long career inside one company and still keep growing. Finish Line acquired several businesses over the years, and JD Sports eventually acquired Finish Line. He describes that experience this way:
“While it’s been one company, it’s felt like ten different companies. I’ve had responsibilities that were at the macro level, overseeing support of 18,000 employees, now it’s north of 20,000, from an HR standpoint, but within that, I’ve also supported what I would say are mom and pop businesses that operate completely differently than a typical corporate organization.”
The biggest lesson from those transitions: you can’t take what worked in one place and assume it transfers. Every situation requires its own read.
He’s also finishing his MBA at Butler University, which he started at around 31. He pursued it because he wanted to go deeper into business, and any career benefit from that was secondary. His advice for anyone considering continued education: get honest about your reason first, because the credential on its own won’t move you forward the way people tend to assume.
The leadership development conversation is where things get particularly useful. Seve talks about a CFO he watched step into a full general management role, and the way that person consciously rethought how to operate in the new context:
“The way he was able to evaluate what his new role required that his other didn’t, and change his leadership style, change his core business decision making drivers… he was so good at saying, who I was in this role, I need to be somebody different in this role.”
He also gets into his approach to stretch assignments, and this part of the conversation stayed with me. Most leaders talk about developing their people. Seve gets specific about what that actually looks like in practice:
“You have to let go. You have to let people find their own ways of achieving the ultimate outcomes. You have to let them try something, and even if you have the foresight to say, that’s probably not going to work, sometimes you just got to let it go and let them realize that, because that’s how they’re going to develop in the best way.”
The question of how HR leaders get to a point where they genuinely shape business strategy comes up naturally from there. Seve’s view is that you have to hold both things at once: a genuine commitment to employees and a clear understanding of what the business needs. Those don’t always align, and when they don’t, the skill is in being transparent about why a decision went the way it did.
Near the end, Seve shares that he’s about to move to the UK for a global talent development role. He hasn’t even been in his current position for a full year, but the opportunity showed up, and he had to take his own advice:
“I always tell people, especially early in career, just say yes. Somebody asks you to go do something, you can always go back and do what you did before, but you may not always have that opportunity to do what you’re being asked.”
Part of the decision was personal too. He’s getting married this year, and his fiancée Kate was genuinely excited about going. The combination of a professional stretch and a shared adventure made the decision easier than he expected.
He closes with a thought that’s worth sitting with:
“Being really, really good at your job doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be really, really good at your next job. You see that most when people transition from a technical expert or a subject matter expert into a leadership role.”
From there, he makes the case for humility as a genuine growth tool. Get comfortable not having the answer. Write down what you don’t understand in meetings and then find someone who can explain it. He makes a solid case for why most people avoid doing exactly that.