"I don't know what 'being strategic' even means"
I'm going to take things back to basics, because it's always the simple questions that bother people the most. There's probably an element of not wanting to ask something out loud if you think it's a simple question — because shouldn't you already know this?
Not long after I got promoted into my first HR leadership role, I was told I needed to 'be more strategic'. I've mentioned this before, but what I haven't shared is that the instruction filled me with dread because, quite frankly, I didn't have a clue what they meant or what they wanted from me.
I remember going out for dinner with a close friend and telling her that I thought I'd made a mistake accepting the promotion because I didn't know what they wanted from me. I distinctly remember saying "I don't know what 'being strategic' even means."
At the time I was mortified to have said it out loud. I still felt it was something I should have known, and that not knowing made me some kind of failure.
I now realise of course that it absolutely wasn't the case. It's only to be expected if you haven't been asked to work strategically and aren't involved in strategy discussions in your organisation. It's also only to be expected when the vast majority of 'business strategies' aren't actually business strategies — they're a list of priorities dressed up as one. If the organisation you're working in doesn't have a real strategy, then you've never had anything strategic to connect your work to. You can't learn to think strategically in a vacuum. The environment has to give you something to work with, and for most HR professionals, it simply hasn't.
This is not a failing on your part
The reason I'm telling you this isn't just to make you feel better — it's because that conversation over dinner is almost word for word the conversation I have with HR professionals at every level, in every kind of organisation. The feeling that you should already know this, and the fear when you realise you don't, is so consistent that it tells you something important: you are not the exception here.
Every time I run one of my free webinars, I ask people to complete an anonymous questionnaire beforehand to help me shape the conversation. I also always ask what they would like answered in the session. These were some of the questions that came back from the session I ran in April:
I’m an ER Advisor. What practical things can I get involved with strategically that won't overwhelm their day-to-day case-handling practices?
What is the ideal personality and communication style of a strategic HR business partner role within any organisation?
How do you get good at being a strategic HR person?
How to influence the C-suite more
How do you become more strategic — and what makes someone a good strategic partner?
How can you start to position yourself to be invited into the business conversations?
In the current macro landscape, what is considered the most important strategic direction for HR?
I love it when these are the questions people have, because I know I'm going to be able to make a real difference in the space of one webinar. I get a genuine buzz from seeing the penny drop as people realise they absolutely do know this already — it just hadn't ever been explained to them properly before.
What these questions also reveal is a common misconception about being strategic: that it requires a specific set of skills, a particular personality type, or a certain way of behaving. Several of those questions are essentially asking "am I the right kind of person for this?" — and that tells you everything about how the profession has failed to explain what strategic thinking actually is.
There are obviously techniques and ways of asking questions that will get you further, but strategic thinking is an approach and a mindset rather than a skill. It's a shift, and some people need additional support making it — particularly when it comes to the confidence to try something new. But once they connect with it, the confidence tends to follow pretty quickly.
If you're sitting there thinking these are questions you should already know the answers to, ask yourself who was ever supposed to have taught you this. Because in most organisations, nobody was. You were just expected to arrive there somehow, as if strategic thinking was something you either had or you didn't.
It isn't. It clicks when it's explained properly, and once it does, it tends to stick pretty fast.
