Strategy isn't what most HR professionals think it is

Whenever I run a session or webinar on strategic HR, I ask people what they think it actually looks like in practice. Sometimes I use a word cloud and ask people to add words or expressions they associate with strategic HR. There are always similar themes:

• Future focused

• Big picture

• Proactive

• Project work

• Data

And then when I ask about specific things they've worked on that they consider strategic HR, these are the three most common answers:

• Implementation of a new HRIS

• Employee engagement survey

• Succession planning

What's wrong with these answers? On the surface, nothing. In reality, quite a lot.

None of these are inherently strategic. In fact, nothing is inherently strategic. Future focused or big picture work might be strategic, but it might not be. It depends entirely on your organisation's strategy — and that's the part that confuses people.

Work is only strategic if it helps move the business towards that strategy.

Each organisation will have its own strategy (or not — more on that another time) and so anything you do in pursuit of that strategy is, by its very nature, strategic. It sounds very simple because in theory it is very simple, but we have a tendency to overcomplicate things massively.

A to B. That's it.

I tend to think about strategy very simply. It's how you get from where you are today to where you want to be — the route between point A and point B.

The trouble is, many organisations are not able to articulate where they want to get to, or where they are right now. And I'm sure you can imagine how hard it is to plan a route between two points if you don't know what either of those points are. You can't. All you can do is guess.

Quite often in HR we set off in pursuit of future focused goals without knowing whether it's the future the business actually wants or needs. We implement things like employee engagement surveys without really understanding whether there is actually a problem with engagement, or whether fixing that problem will even enable the organisation to move closer to where it wants to be. I've worked in HR departments where the plan for the year was determined purely by things the Head of HR thought would be beneficial — best practice, things that were popular in the wider HR profession — with no real regard for what the business was actually trying to achieve.

The questions that matter

If you really want to think strategically as an HR professional, the most important things you need to understand are:

• What is the business trying to achieve?

• Where does it want to be in x years' time?

• How far away from that is it right now?

• What might prevent it from getting there?

Strategic work is less about what you're doing and more about whether it's influencing decisions, shaping direction, or deliberately choosing what not to do. If you can't answer any of those questions, how are you supposed to influence decisions or shape solutions that move the business any closer to its goals?

This is exactly where most HR professionals get stuck — and it's not because they're not capable. It's because nobody ever told them that this is what strategic actually means.