I was told I wasn’t strategic enough. Here’s what that taught me.
Why on earth did I choose strategy for HR professionals as my expert subject?
Because 'not being strategic enough' was something I was accused of in my own career, shortly after I got promoted to my first ever Head of HR role.
It was a little unfair really, as all of my roles in the prior 15 years had been focused on people operations and on reacting to situations that arose in the workplace. I had never been the member of the HR team to attend SLT or Board meetings and I had a mixed bag of HR leaders above me over the years who did or didn't share what was going on in the business with the rest of the team.
When I say unfair, I don't mean the accusation itself, I absolutely was NOT strategic. That was fair. What felt unfair was how quickly it came post-promotion, when I hadn't ever had the opportunity of working strategically previously, even in the organisation that promoted me and yet they expected me to flip almost overnight.
The sad reality is that when HR are not strategic or just not perceived to be strategic, we can't make the impact we would like. We get brought in too late, we're seen as delivery agents rather than decision makers, we don't get included in conversations we know we should be in and we just get asked to implement rather than shape. All of this happened to me and led to absolute frustration, knowing I could do more but being the only one who felt or saw that.
One of the big issues I see is that there are a significant number of misconceptions about strategy which I still hear repeatedly from HR professionals of all levels and which I once accepted as fact myself. Some of our lack of strategic thinking is definitely self-inflicted. We don't always ask, challenge or step in where we should.
I want to dispel some of those myths — to unravel what strategy actually is and to help you operate at a more strategic level, understand the misconceptions that surround it, and challenge the assumptions about the role of HR and how you show up in your own organisation.
Where the penny finally dropped
I'm not perfect and I'll never pretend to be. I made a lot of mistakes in my own journey to being more strategic. In fact if I'm honest, it was only when I started working as an HR Consultant in 2019 and suddenly had much more regular interaction with CEOs at each client organisation that the penny finally dropped.
I did consultancy for a year and then luckily I was able to take that knowledge to my next two in-house HR roles, which made a significant difference to how I showed up there.
In 2022, I started working with Catalysis Advisory as an Adviser. That role, which I still hold today, is management due diligence (MDD) — which involves going into organisations seeking private equity investment, interviewing and analysing the leadership team and reviewing the org strategy, then advising the PE company on whether it is a sound investment, whether they have the right leadership team in place to achieve the strategy outlined and whether the strategy itself is realistic.
As you can imagine, this work has given me a completely different perspective on strategy and thinking strategically than anything else I had done previously. It has enabled me to:
See what good and bad strategy looks like close up
Spot when leadership teams are kidding themselves
Understand what investors look for versus what HR think is important
I am therefore fairly uniquely placed — with this combination of in-house HR, HR consultancy and MDD work — to speak about the things I have seen organisations and HR professionals get right and get wrong.
Strategy is a lot more than a word in your job title or a meeting you're invited to. I'll be exploring what it actually means in practice, why so many of the assumptions HR professionals carry about it are wrong, and how to show up differently as a result.
I'd be interested to know what you think counts as strategic work — and what you've been told is 'strategic' that didn't actually feel like it.
