Why are you asking me the same questions as the Finance Director?
Something that drives me absolutely potty is when business leaders not only don't invite HR to planning meetings or conversations about the future of the business, but actually appear shocked that we'd want to be there.
The most prevalent perception of HR in the non-HR world is of the people who hire and fire, who are guardians of policy and culture and who make sure everyone stays out of trouble or tribunal. Beyond that, I genuinely don't think it enters their heads.
Without exaggeration, I think about 95% of the issues I've ever seen a business need to resolve have had people at their core.
Pretty much every employee issue could have been resolved with better communication, or any communication at all. Retention problems more often than not come down to poor communication, poor leadership or both. Untrained and unqualified managers create more issues than they solve. Us-and-them battles within organisations supposedly working towards the same goals disrupt progress constantly. A senior leader's inability to make tough decisions can actively damage a business. Letting toxic behaviour pass rather than addressing it creates bigger problems further down the line. A lack of training and skills development lets competitors pull ahead. Resistance to change leads to outdated, bureaucratic processes that slow everything down. Not learning from mistakes keeps you at a standstill.
It's very rare that some external force majeure contributes entirely to the slow progress or downfall of an organisation. It's almost always people — their knowledge, skills, behaviour and approach.
The question that caused a minor crisis
That's the first conversation I like to have with leaders who can't see why HR would need to be part of business conversations. What are the key issues holding the business back? What's the cause of those issues?
Brace yourself though, because leadership teams are often so unprepared for those questions to come from the HR person that their reaction alone tells you everything you need to know.
My favourite example is an HR Manager I worked with whose CEO genuinely wailed "Why are you asking me the same questions as the Finance Director?" It was meant to sound like a complaint, but what it actually revealed was that nobody had been asking the right questions at all — and now suddenly two people were.
The HR Manager hadn't done anything outrageous. She'd walked into a conversation about business goals and started treating it like a business conversation, which apparently was radical enough to cause a minor crisis. The CEO's discomfort wasn't really about HR overstepping. It was about being held accountable in a way he hadn't anticipated, by someone he'd assumed would stick to the people admin and stay out of the strategic end.
What he should have said — what was actually true — was "Why are you asking me questions I can't answer?" Because that was the real problem. He just now had two people shining a light on it instead of one.
How to have the conversation without putting people on the defensive
That moment is a good illustration of why framing matters so much. You can facilitate these conversations without people going on the defensive — I've done it many times in my due diligence work. You start gently by asking about goals, then move into how achievable those goals are, what's happened previously, what might slow things down, and so on, until you get to the real issues the business is actually facing. It doesn't feel like an interrogation when it's done well. It feels like someone finally asking the questions that should have been asked a long time ago.
Which brings me to the language we use. I talk fairly often about the negative impact that the words "Human Resources" or "HR" seem to have on people — the immediate narrowing of expectations, the assumption that you're there to manage process rather than contribute to strategy. When you position yourself simply as the people expert in the business and demonstrate that by helping leaders figure out people-based problems and solutions, everything clicks into place. Not talking about HR as a separate function or entity, but just talking about the business, the people in it and how they're contributing to, or getting in the way of, progress.
Have you ever been in a position where you've gently challenged a leader or leadership team in this way — asking the strategic questions rather than waiting to be invited into that conversation? In my experience, the first time is always the hardest, and most people are far more capable of having that conversation than they give themselves credit for.
