Strategy isn’t just for senior people

I had a conversation recently with an HR director in which we were talking about her team, how they were performing, what she wanted from them next and during the conversation she said something I've heard fairly regularly; that strategic thinking was really her job and her team's job was to execute well underneath her.

She absolutely wasn't being dismissive of her team because she really rates them, but this is just the model many of us have learned, that strategy sits at the top and gets handed down and nobody else has anything to do with it.

I wouldn't argue that strategy is set at the top, but it doesn't mean that no one else should be thinking or operating strategically.

The way I like to look at it is that if you think of strategy as just getting the business from A to B, it means that anything anyone does in service of that movement from A to B is being strategic, regardless of where they sit on the org chart.

The junior HR advisor handling a messy ER case is being strategic, if they're doing it with an understanding of what it means for the team and the business and if the correct handling of that ER case is going to help the business move closer to "B". The level of a person in the organisation might change the scale of impact, but it definitely doesn't change whether their actions count towards the end goal.

When only the senior people are expected to think this way, you end up with functions and teams and individuals operating in silos, sometimes actively working against each other without realising it, because nobody told them they were supposed to be pulling in the same direction or what that direction should be.

People often lose sight of the fact that if the business doesn't succeed, that has consequences for everyone in it, including them. Human nature, politics, ego are all examples of things that get in the way of this far more often than they should.

There's a part HR plays in this too, because it's not just other functions creating these silos; we're often guilty of it ourselves.

HR gets accused, fairly often, of abusing power. I literally got an Instagram message recently from a friend who said she had worked with an HR Manager who totally abused her power. I've never personally experienced having any real "power" in an HR role, so when I hear that accusation I think what people are actually describing is probably disconnection from the rest of the business — which positions us as outsiders and then leads to even more of a misconception about what we do than usual.

We're often seen as the function that turns up for the icky process, the policy conversations, the termination meetings and generally when something unpleasant needs handling. If we just show up, do the bit we're there to do but don't mix with anyone outside of that moment, people start to see us as separate, or as gatekeepers guarding something and appearing only when there's a gate to enforce.

That perception isn't really about power, it's more about the fact that we've let ourselves become a separate function rather than people who are genuinely embedded in what's happening day to day. We show up, we do the procedural thing, we leave, but then we act surprised when people don't trust us with anything that isn't procedural.

You can't build relationships if you only show up in the moments that require formality and then wonder why nobody sees you as approachable the rest of the time.

The fix for this is about showing up in ordinary conversations with no HR agenda, so that people experience us differently more regularly before they ever need us for something difficult.

This is exactly where the A to B point comes back in. If you're someone who's only ever in the room for policy and process, you've got no chance of being seen as strategic, regardless of your job title. If you're embedding yourself in daily conversations about what the organisation is actually facing, you're building the business understanding that lets you ask better questions and make a more effective contribution.

So if you're sitting in an HR role wondering how on earth you're supposed to be strategic when nobody's inviting you to the strategy meetings, the answer is more straightforward than people make it out to be.

Show the same curiosity about the business that you'd want others to show about your function. Learn what it's trying to achieve, where it actually is right now, where it wants to get to and what's likely to get in the way. You don't need to have the P&L memorised and you definitely don't need a seat at the top table to do this. You simply need to be able to answer the A to B question at a high level. From there, how you show up changes.

It even changes casual conversations. "How's things going for your team at the moment?" at the coffee machine becomes a strategic conversation rather than small talk, because you're actually listening for what it tells you about progress towards where the team's trying to get to.

It changes ER conversations too. The question isn't just what happened and what's the process — it's how is this affecting what the team's trying to achieve. Ask it that way and you're having a strategic conversation about an employee relations issue even if you typically wouldn't think of it that way.

What do you think? Is this something you recognise in your own organisation? Drop a comment below.