You don't need to have written an HR strategy to be strategic

I get a lot of HR professionals telling me they don't think they can be strategic because they've never created an HR strategy document. Let's get one thing straight from the outset — a strategy doesn't need a document attached to it. Yes, it's helpful to have a documented plan or roadmap, but it isn't essential.

In my own HR career I was more than once asked to create an HR strategy document without having access to the business strategy. I threw something together because that's what you do, but with what I now know about strategy, how utterly meaningless that document must have been. I was guessing in the dark about what was needed and what might actually benefit the business.

HR strategy is part of the business strategy, not separate to it

There doesn't need to be a separate HR strategy document. What should come out of the business strategy are the initiatives, milestones and goals for the HR team that will enable them to support the overall business strategy.

And don't even get me started on the word 'alignment'. It's a bugbear of mine.

When I think about something that is aligned, I think of railway tracks — parallel, headed in the same direction, absolutely, but they never actually come together. They are always separate. What I prefer to think about instead is the gym ropes we had at school: one overall twisting rope made up of multiple smaller pieces of twine that form the whole together. That's how HR strategy should fit within business strategy.

A mistake we make across the board is treating HR as if it's somehow separate to the rest of the organisation. I can't be the only one who has referred to 'the business' whilst in an in-house HR role, as if it's some kind of separate entity. If we use language that keeps us separate and act like we are separate, we make it much harder to focus on work that actually furthers business goals.

It's worth remembering that at the core, we are simply people experts in an organisation, just as Finance are the money experts. Nobody would expect Finance to create a strategy in isolation from the business, and HR shouldn't be any different.

People are almost always part of the answer

HR strategy is simply the parts of the business strategy that impact people or require a people-based solution. Given that there isn't a single organisation on earth that can function, succeed, grow or fail without people, you'll find that most strategic milestones involve people — and that HR sits right at the centre of achieving them.

Most business problems will require more, less or different people to solve them. It might be different skills, different locations, different responsibilities or a different number of heads, but people are almost always part of the answer.

This is why I find it staggering that so many organisations still don't include HR in business planning and strategy conversations. They aren't going to achieve much of anything without people, so why not have the people experts in the room from the outset? A lot of this comes down to perceptions of HR, which is worth a conversation in its own right.

So if you've been telling yourself you can't be strategic because you've never written a strategy document, that's not the issue. The issue is whether you understand the business strategy well enough to shape, challenge and contribute to it. Those are very different things, and confusing the two is part of what keeps a lot of HR professionals stuck.