Why HR professionals were set up to struggle with strategy

I spent the first chunk of my HR career being told I was good at my job without anyone ever telling me what good actually looked like at the level above me. When I got promoted into my first Head of HR role and someone told me I needed to be more strategic, I genuinely didn't know what they meant. I wasn’t being falsely modest, I actually had no idea. I remember sitting at dinner with a friend and saying "I don't know what being strategic even means" and feeling like I'd just confessed to something shameful.

I now know I wasn't alone in that and the more people I work with, the more obvious it becomes that this isn't a personal failing, it's more of a structural one. If nobody expected HR to be strategic for decades and nobody in your organisation was doing it, then who exactly was supposed to teach you? You can't learn something from someone who isn't doing it and you can't practise it in an environment that doesn't ask for it. The expectation was there, but the conditions that would have made it possible wasn’t.

There are also a lot of misconceptions floating around about what strategic HR actually looks like that make it harder to recognise even when you are doing it. Ask most HR professionals what counts as strategic work and you'll get a fairly consistent list: succession planning, employee engagement surveys, implementing a new HRIS. On the surface, none of those answers are wrong. The problem is that none of those things are inherently strategic either. Whether any piece of work is strategic depends entirely on whether it's moving the organisation closer to where it's trying to get to. That's it.

Which means the first thing you need to know, and where most people get stuck — is where the organisation is actually trying to get to.

This sounds obvious until you start asking the question and realise that most organisations can't answer it clearly. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked a CEO what the business strategy is and been told "we want to grow." I heard it from a small engineering company that had been in operation for over forty years and still wasn't measuring its own revenue streams or margins. I've heard versions of it from businesses of every size.

Growth isn't a strategy, it's a desired outcome. A strategy is how you're going to get from where you are now to where you want to be. Without a starting point or an end point, you can't plot a route and you definitely can't tell whether anything you're doing is helping you progress along it.

When I am doing management due diligence work (going into organisations seeking private equity investment and assessing whether their strategy and leadership team hold up), I see this close up repeatedly. What organisations present as a strategy is usually a collection of goals, priorities, aspirations and vague directional statements. What it rarely is, even in companies that are performing well, is a clear articulation of where they are today, where they're going and what the specific obstacles are likely to be. If the people running the business haven't worked that through, HR has nothing to connect its work to. You end up focusing on activity, best practice or what feels right, rather than what actually needs solving.

I had a coaching client who sent me her HR strategy ahead of a session so I could look at it beforehand. It was perfectly reasonable; engagement work, culture development, some training. Looked like a solid plan. My first question was what problems in the business she was trying to solve with it. The answer was fairly vague. My second question was what the biggest challenge the business was actually facing. She paused and then told me they had lost thirty percent of their clients the previous year. Thirty percent, in one year, because a director of customer success and a head of sales actively disliked each other and the fallout was being absorbed by the customers. That was THE problem, but her HR strategy had nothing to do with it. She rewrote it completely, focused entirely on that issue and they didn't lose thirty percent of their clients the following year. None of what she ended up doing was unusual or particularly complex. The difference was that it was aimed at addressing a real and critical business issue.

This is also why the idea that HR strategy is something separate from business strategy has always bothered me. It isn't, it's the part of the business strategy that requires a people-based solution, and given that virtually every business problem eventually comes down to people - their skills, their behaviour, their relationships, their decisions, it turns out to be a fairly significant part of the overall strategy. Framing HR as something that needs to "align" with the business strategy is part of the problem. Alignment implies two parallel things moving in the same direction but never quite touching. What you actually want is something more integrated than that - HR as a strand of the overall thing rather than a separate track running alongside it.

Perceptions of HR outside of the profession definitely affect how much strategic space HR is given. A lot of people have only ever experienced HR as the function that turns up for the difficult conversations, manages the process and then leaves again. If that's what someone's entire experience of HR amounts to, they're going to see you as an admin function regardless of what your job title says. And the uncomfortable truth is that we have sometimes reinforced that perception ourselves, by talking about HR as if it were a separate entity, by showing up only when there's a process to run, by building agendas around recruitment updates and ER cases rather than asking what's actually going on in someone's world.

The good news is that overcoming the above issues is less mysterious than it sounds. You don't need a strategy document, a seat at the top table or a better job title. You need to be able to answer the A to B question well enough to connect your work to it and you need to show up in ordinary, non-HR situations consistently enough that people experience you as someone embedded in the business rather than someone who only appears when things go wrong. And you identify and understand people’s perceptions of HR and actively work to change them. It's a mindset and an approach more than a skill set but once it clicks, it tends to change how you see almost everything you do.

Which of these — understanding the strategy, connecting your work to it, or changing how you're perceived — is the hardest one for you right now?

Drop a comment below, I'd be interested to know.