"Strategic" is the most overused word in HR

I see far more people on LinkedIn with the word "strategic" in their job title than I suspect are actually working strategically in their HR roles.

I was definitely one of them. There came a point several years back when the Business Partner model was extremely popular and just having HR Business Partner wasn't deemed enough anymore to distinguish experience or seniority. So people started adding "Strategic" to the front of job titles. Sometimes it's not even the job title — sometimes people describe themselves as strategic in their LinkedIn bio because they think it's what organisations want to hear.

And it is what they want to hear. But more often than not, the person with the title isn't working strategically, and the person interviewing them doesn't actually know what strategic looks like.

I'm aware that sounds extremely cynical. But I can only base it on a complete lack of evidence I've found for either side — it's a massively overused and chronically misunderstood word.

The one person who was actually doing it

When I was first developing what eventually became my SPICE programme, I put out an invitation to HR professionals who felt they were genuinely working strategically in their roles. I wanted to learn from them — to understand what they were doing differently, how they interacted with their leadership teams, how they thought about problems. Several people volunteered. Only one of them was genuinely working strategically.

The rest were doing HR operations. Some didn't sit on the leadership team at all, and those who did weren't being treated as peers or sufficiently included in business conversations. None of them could tell me in any real depth what the core challenges facing their organisation actually were. They all talked about HR — processes, programmes, initiatives, all perfectly valid, but not what I was asking about.

Apart from this one person. If she's reading this, she'll know who she is.

She had the kind of relationship with her CEO that she described as "trusted advisor and critical friend." He would call her on his drive into work in the morning and just talk through whatever he was focusing on that day — not from an operational or process angle, but across any aspect of the business, because he genuinely valued her perspective. Her HR team handled the bulk of the day-to-day work, and she spent most of her time focused on broader business issues and how people-based solutions might address them.

She was accepted as an integral part of the leadership team, her commercial knowledge was excellent, and she was operating at a level that most HR professionals would find quite uncomfortable — not because they couldn't get there, but because they've never been given the room to try.

I learned an enormous amount from her when putting SPICE together, because I hadn't experienced that personally in an in-house role, only later in my career through consultancy and due diligence work. I eventually invited her to speak to one of my SPICE cohorts because I felt they could learn so much from hearing her describe it directly.

The gap between title and reality

Since then I've become annoyingly attuned to the gap between what people's titles suggest and what they're actually being allowed to do. I worked with a Global Head of HR whose CEO insisted they personally run every single new employee induction, which consumed almost every Monday morning. They questioned it once, were told it had to be them rather than anyone on their team, accepted that, and continued spending hours every week on something that had no business being on their agenda. They didn't push back a second time.

What they could have done — and what I'd encourage anyone in that position to do — is reframe the conversation rather than simply repeat the objection. Saying "I don't think I should be doing this" is easy to dismiss. Coming back with "here's what I could be doing with that time, and here's the value that creates for the business" is a much harder argument to brush aside. It shifts the discussion from personal preference to business case, which is exactly the language that tends to land with a CEO who isn't yet accustomed to thinking of HR as a strategic function.

It also demonstrates the very thing you're trying to prove — that you think commercially and understand where your time is best spent. One declined induction won't change a culture, but a consistent, calm, evidenced case for how your role should operate absolutely can over time.

If we don't push for more strategically focused work, or challenge the prevailing perception of what HR is for, those perceptions won't change on their own. That's one thing we do have meaningful control over — how other people see us and what we allow them to expect from us.

Just putting a word on a job title or a LinkedIn bio doesn't make any of us strategic. Behaving strategically, asking strategic questions, and refusing to be confined to the operational lane is what changes things.

So here's something worth thinking about: if you stripped your job title away entirely and just looked honestly at how you spend your time each week, how much of it is genuinely strategic? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, what's one thing you could start pushing back on?