Strategic HR is thinking, operational HR is doing: what a load of bobbins

What do you think about the following statement? Strategic HR is thinking, operational HR is doing.

I think it's crap (never one to mince my words…)

There's so much more to it than that, but the fact that this gets repeated so often is part of why so many HR professionals end up underselling what they do and don't even get me started on the perception that strategic work is "better" than operational work, because that's a whole other conversation.

Strategy itself isn't complicated. It's how you're going to close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. We've covered this A to B thinking before.

The idea that once you become a Head of HR you stop "doing" and start only "thinking", or that if you're in a more operational role you only do and never think, just isn't true.

There's a balance, of course, and it's true that the balance shifts more towards doing when you're in operational work, because that's the nature of operational work. Things have to move, cases have to get resolved, processes have to run. But senior HR people aren't sitting around all day just thinking grand thoughts. It would be dull as ditch water if that was the whole job. I'll admit it was a genuine fear of mine when I started to move into more senior roles in my HR career; that I wouldn't have anything to actually do. I couldn't imagine what a role like that would look like. I was very wrong.

What does change at a senior level is the way you think about what you're doing. You're constantly asking how this particular piece of work moves the organisation forward, how it closes the gap between A and B, whether this is going to speed up or slow down progress. It's a consistent reframe of everything to make sure the organisation stays on track.

In an operational role, you're usually working a process or a case and your job is to execute it well and keep legal risk down. In a more strategic HR role (and I'd argue there's no such thing as a purely strategic HR role) the work is definitely less process-driven, although you never get to step away from process completely.

When I was a Global Head of HR, I spent a lot of time directing the team below me, but I was still pulled into operational issues regularly, particularly when it involved a senior person or significant legal risk. In these situations, I wasn't necessarily brought in for my strategic capability, I was brought in because I had more experience, more knowledge of these types of situations and more years of actually doing that kind of work than anyone else on the team.

If you've got a complex case with serious legal exposure, you put your most experienced person on it. The two employment tribunals I went to in my career, one in Switzerland and one in the Netherlands, both happened when I was in that senior global role, precisely because I was the one with the experience and the capacity to handle that pressure. Did that make me less strategic? No. It reflected the depth of experience I'd built up by that point.

The other half of this debate is something that gets missed even more often: operational work itself can be strategic.

If your business strategy has identified that you need people with specific skills, because without them you can't meet client obligations or hit production targets, then going out and finding those people isn't an administrative task. It's strategic, because you don't hit the goal without them.

The same logic applies to L&D. If there's a skills gap that's going to hold the business back and you close that gap with a properly thought-through development initiative, that's strategic work.

It applies to ER too; restructuring, performance management and capability issues, when done properly and for the right reasons, are all moving the business closer to where it needs to be.

So it's entirely possible to work strategically at any level in HR. Most people in HR roles below Head of HR often don't know what the business strategy is, because nobody tells them. It gets shared with the Head of HR and often stops there.

If you're leading an HR function, that's on you to fix. Your team needs to know what the business is trying to achieve, how far off it currently is and what's likely to get in the way, because without that, you can't expect anyone below you to connect their day-to-day work to anything bigger.

It's a mindset shift that's available to everyone in the HR function, provided someone actually tells them what the organisation and the team are aiming for.

Do you actually know what your business strategy is and could you explain it to your team in a way that changes how they see their own work? Could you actually explain it in a way that makes someone think differently about what they do?

If you can't do that yet, that's something worth working on.

Drop a comment below, I'd be interested to know where you're at with it.