Stop Asking For Permission: 3 Moves To Make HR Strategic
I’ve been running HR in tech and telecom for more than 15 years, and for much of that time, I questioned whether I truly belonged among the leaders running fast-growing organizations and making decisions that affect millions of dollars and hundreds of people.
When you are a CFO, no one questions it; everyone knows you earned it through years of study and credentials. When you build a product, plenty of people can’t quite follow what you do, because it takes a specialized education and skill set. But when you work in HR, so many people treat it as a soft factor that anyone could handle.
When you are a CFO, no one questions it; everyone knows you earned it through years of study and credentials. When you build a product, plenty of people can’t quite follow what you do, because it takes a specialized education and skill set. But when you work in HR, so many people treat it as a soft factor that anyone could handle.
Part of that is fair—the entry point into HR is not especially high. But when I look back at my own experience, at what my colleagues do and at what I hear from guests on my podcast, Built by People Leaders, I see something else. It is the people function and L&D that help executives deliver their most ambitious plans. No M&A closes well without HR understanding the work structure, the skill sets, the cultures being joined and the communication the process demands. No launch into a new market or country happens without HR reading an unfamiliar job market and finding the right people on unknown ground. Covid made it obvious: Overnight, business leaders realized they needed a strong people function simply to keep going.
That tells us HR’s impact is real. Almost everything the people function touches—who gets hired, how fast they become productive, why they stay or leave, how quickly the whole organization learns—shows up directly in business results. The harder part is making that impact clear and visible to both the business and people leaders themselves.
In most companies I work with or talk to, HR falls into one of two roles. The first is the policy guardian, who comes to believe the job is mostly telling everyone what they cannot do. That role matters because someone has to make sure the company follows its regulations, but it is only one side of the work. The second is the people-pleaser, full of enthusiasm for culture and perks, with little clarity about what any of it means or what the business gets in return. A ping-pong table might feel good, but it rarely changes how the business performs.
Over the years, HR professionals tried to solve this with the business partner model that David Ulrich introduced almost 30 years ago in his book Human Resource Champions. He argued that HR should act as a strategic business partner, wired into company strategy rather than stuck in administration. It was the right idea. Yet in organization after organization, the business partner became a firefighter, pulled from one urgent problem to the next with no time or mandate to fix the systems underneath. Studies of the model in practice have found it frequently failed to add the strategic value it promised.
So how do you earn real influence? The most successful people leaders I have coached and interviewed on my podcast do three things.
That tells us HR’s impact is real. Almost everything the people function touches—who gets hired, how fast they become productive, why they stay or leave, how quickly the whole organization learns—shows up directly in business results. The harder part is making that impact clear and visible to both the business and people leaders themselves.
In most companies I work with or talk to, HR falls into one of two roles. The first is the policy guardian, who comes to believe the job is mostly telling everyone what they cannot do. That role matters because someone has to make sure the company follows its regulations, but it is only one side of the work. The second is the people-pleaser, full of enthusiasm for culture and perks, with little clarity about what any of it means or what the business gets in return. A ping-pong table might feel good, but it rarely changes how the business performs.
Over the years, HR professionals tried to solve this with the business partner model that David Ulrich introduced almost 30 years ago in his book Human Resource Champions. He argued that HR should act as a strategic business partner, wired into company strategy rather than stuck in administration. It was the right idea. Yet in organization after organization, the business partner became a firefighter, pulled from one urgent problem to the next with no time or mandate to fix the systems underneath. Studies of the model in practice have found it frequently failed to add the strategic value it promised.
So how do you earn real influence? The most successful people leaders I have coached and interviewed on my podcast do three things.
1. Stop asking for permission.
Influence rarely arrives as an invitation. The people leaders who have it went and got it. They walked over to the sales director, the head of product, the CFO and asked what was making their work harder. One SVP of people and operations explained that bringing a perspective and a point of view that others don’t have builds trust and standing. You don’t wait to be handed a mandate. You bring something only you can see, and you keep showing up with it.
2. Get genuinely curious.
Whether you are joining a new company or a new industry, curiosity is what gives you information and helps you build trust and real relationships. Be curious about how the business makes money, about the personalities running each function, about what keeps the CEO up at night, and then ask and listen. From your first days in the role, get curious right away: about the team already there and even more about the person who just wrote the check. Curiosity is how your ideas become relevant enough that people accept them because they fit the way the business already thinks.
3. Attach a number to everything you do.
Every program you run should connect to something the business is trying to change: revenue, the cost of turnover, how quickly new hires start delivering, how fast the company adapts. As one of my podcast guests told me, if you can’t connect your HR agenda to your company’s income statement, you need to ask yourself why you are doing it. Think in terms of outcomes and results, not activity. For example, redesign the learning program because it lifts performance you can measure, or bring in AI because it cuts the time the work takes. And know the financial reality you are in. Even a good idea lands badly if you ask for another million for benefits in a quarter when sales are down.
It took me years to stop asking whether I belonged among the people making the big decisions. I was asking the wrong question. No one was ever going to hand me that place; I earned it by doing work the business could use and talking about it in terms the business understood. You can do the same, starting now. Leave your department, and go talk to the business. Ask what they are really struggling with, listen and come back with ideas only you could offer, each one tied to something the company is trying to achieve. That is how you stop waiting to be invited into the important conversations and find you are already part of them. Whether you are new to HR or you have led people teams for years, the day you stop asking permission is the day the work truly begins. Every company deserves that kind of HR leader.
Follow me on X or LinkedIn. Check out my website.
This article was originally published on Forbes Coaches Council
Influence rarely arrives as an invitation. The people leaders who have it went and got it. They walked over to the sales director, the head of product, the CFO and asked what was making their work harder. One SVP of people and operations explained that bringing a perspective and a point of view that others don’t have builds trust and standing. You don’t wait to be handed a mandate. You bring something only you can see, and you keep showing up with it.
2. Get genuinely curious.
Whether you are joining a new company or a new industry, curiosity is what gives you information and helps you build trust and real relationships. Be curious about how the business makes money, about the personalities running each function, about what keeps the CEO up at night, and then ask and listen. From your first days in the role, get curious right away: about the team already there and even more about the person who just wrote the check. Curiosity is how your ideas become relevant enough that people accept them because they fit the way the business already thinks.
3. Attach a number to everything you do.
Every program you run should connect to something the business is trying to change: revenue, the cost of turnover, how quickly new hires start delivering, how fast the company adapts. As one of my podcast guests told me, if you can’t connect your HR agenda to your company’s income statement, you need to ask yourself why you are doing it. Think in terms of outcomes and results, not activity. For example, redesign the learning program because it lifts performance you can measure, or bring in AI because it cuts the time the work takes. And know the financial reality you are in. Even a good idea lands badly if you ask for another million for benefits in a quarter when sales are down.
It took me years to stop asking whether I belonged among the people making the big decisions. I was asking the wrong question. No one was ever going to hand me that place; I earned it by doing work the business could use and talking about it in terms the business understood. You can do the same, starting now. Leave your department, and go talk to the business. Ask what they are really struggling with, listen and come back with ideas only you could offer, each one tied to something the company is trying to achieve. That is how you stop waiting to be invited into the important conversations and find you are already part of them. Whether you are new to HR or you have led people teams for years, the day you stop asking permission is the day the work truly begins. Every company deserves that kind of HR leader.
Follow me on X or LinkedIn. Check out my website.
This article was originally published on Forbes Coaches Council