How HR gets a seat at the table

One of the biggest challenges faced by HR teams is the struggle to get a seat at the table for important strategic conversations. When it comes to the direction of the whole business, C-Suite often doesn’t consider HR or People topics until it’s much too late.

Even in businesses with a CHRO or an active Head of HR, they are often only brought into the decision-making process once the CEO, board members, and leaders of more “prominent” departments have set an agenda. They’re then tasked with making that agenda work, whether that’s possible or not.

We all know that the input of HR can prevent the failure of big projects and can enrich any strategy with better deployment of people and training. So why is HR often left out? And how can you make sure that you get to be in the room when key decisions are being made?

This article lays out potential strategies that will help get you there.

But why is HR left out of the conversation?

Gallons of ink have been spilled about the importance of HR – how they can save a business time and money and protect it from potential lawsuits. We all know that, so why is HR still considered an afterthought?

Well, when it comes to sensitive strategy and planning, CEOs and board members might want to reduce the number of voices to the bare minimum, at least until the core decisions have been made.

Here are some common misconceptions that get HR cut out of the conversation:

Anyone can “do HR”

At the senior management level, almost everyone has managed people. They may have worked with HR and People & Culture teams to structure and restructure their own departments. They might have been influential in mass layoffs or huge hiring projects. They might even have participated in some HR-led projects.

Does that mean they can “cover HR”? Not really.

They might be able to spot some of the most obvious risks and pitfalls in advance, but they won’t see everything. They don’t know your HR strategy inside out, they’re not experts in employment law, and they don’t know how your existing plans might support or undermine their choices. They don’t know the full potential of the tools your department uses. They don’t have a good overview of the challenges different departments are facing right now.

As an HR leader, not only do you often have access to privileged information from department heads and individual employees (often before anyone else does), but you also have the training and experience needed to implement change.

Leaders will seamlessly organize their own departments

Who needs HR to support change management? Surely, good communication from the boardroom to department heads is all that you need to change company strategy?

Maybe in a utopia.

In reality, HR knows which teams and managers are already struggling with communication, which teams feel pushed to their breaking point by their current workload, and which teams are at risk of losing key employees.

Every Head of HR knows that some department heads can be trusted to deliver big news in their own way, and others will need more support. You may need to take different approaches for different departments, and some will respond better to challenges than others. Additionally, big changes may come with questions relating to working hours, bonuses, or compensation, and those questions can only be answered holistically with HR in the room.

HR’s KPIs are pretty stable

If your HR team has been successful in the past years, you might have a very predictable retention rate. You might find it easy to recruit with a strong employer brand, and you might get great results in your annual employee engagement surveys. It’s easy for CEOs and CFOs to take these results for granted and overlook the work that goes into maintaining this positive environment.

Therefore, they don’t think that big changes can have a huge impact on HR’s KPIs. In these cases, disappointing results aren’t because HR’s performance has decreased but because the new strategy has moved the goalposts for HR altogether.

Big corporate restructuring, changes in the products and services offered, mergers and acquisitions – all of these momentous decisions mean that the entire equation that HR has been working with is now different. Power dynamics change, expectations of compensation and workload shift, and even the skills that each department most values may have to change. And in that sea of change, HR is supposed to help the workforce stay stable and engaged.

If HR isn’t at the table to influence the strategic decisions and how to roll them out, the C-Suite will find themselves with far more fluctuation and unpredictability, which may bring their new strategy crashing down in failure after just a few months.

HR is just an administration job

This is an old but resilient cliché. Particularly in large, traditional companies, HR teams are associated with plenty of form-filling, box-ticking exercises. HR makes sure that boring (but essential!) processes happen—payroll, employment contracts, annual reviews, etc. Most employees only interact with HR when they need help with these processes, so they don’t see the strategic work that HR teams also do.

Now, the C-Suite should know better, but most of them don’t come from an HR background. In their career paths, their departments were the star performers, and they had a deep understanding of the value those departments added. HR was just the cheerleader, recruiting, facilitating, and opening doors for real star performers who made money for the business.

They don’t understand the value that HR has added to their careers, and the often-invisible work that People & Culture teams do that has made their success possible. From onboarding to learning and development, HR is present throughout the employee lifecycle to support other teams. Their skills and areas of responsibility are more varied than most other employees realize.

In the rest of this article, we’ll discuss how HR teams can make their work more visible, and how to best highlight the impact they have on the business. With higher visibility of their strategic success, HR leaders will either be invited or invite themselves to the most important conversations.

What can HR Managers do to get included in key discussions?

In order to get into a strategic position, you may need to shift your mindset. Yes, you need to be prepared to get involved in internal politics and to stand up and get some attention. However, you also need to make sure that you have space in your head and in your workday to take on strategy work. As you climb up the hierarchy, you must become better at delegating, and you have to step away from small, painful tasks as much as possible. If you, as a head of HR, are still chasing people down for their timesheets, it will be hard to get your colleagues to take you seriously as a long-term strategic thinker.

This mindset shift may be uncomfortable, but at the top level of strategic planning, you need to be comfortable with discomfort. The C-Suite doesn’t need a yes-man (or yes-woman) to nod along quietly while they pitch huge changes.

The suggestions below are things that many HR managers are already doing, at least partially. However, it’s helpful to understand them as useful for individual career development and tactics that you can deploy to strengthen your position within an organization.

And if you find that, despite deploying all of these tactics, you’re still being stonewalled, then maybe you’re not in the right environment for you. Luckily, pursuing these tactics will also make you a highly employable HR expert.

1. Stay educated

You’re never done learning. This becomes more important the more senior you get, and the further your career takes you from your initial qualifications.

Use your training budget for professional development, subscribe to newsletters and podcasts, and read the latest industry magazines. Your employer should have a training budget for every department, make sure that yours doesn’t go to waste. HR doesn’t just provide guidance for learning and development, but they should also be able to access it themselves.

While learning, keep collecting fresh ideas and stay up to date with how experiments have worked at other employers. You might not be able to implement a four-day-week or a new benefits package, but you can keep an eye on how it’s working out for other employers. And when someone senior asks for your input on a current HR trend, you’ll have your opinions and reasoning ready to go.

The biggest challenge with this point is finding time to stay educated while dealing with a huge number of daily tasks. More senior employees and managers often struggle to prioritize their own learning.

Here are some simple ideas to help you combat time pressure:

• Block time. Only you can know what amount of time you can block per month, but it’s important that whatever you choose, whether it’s an hour a week or an afternoon a month, that it’s in your calendar and ringfenced from interference.
• Delegate what you can. To be able to participate fully in strategic decisions, you must give up any micro-management tendencies. Trust your team to get things done, and only take on the operational tasks that really need your expertise. Remember, the goal is to be present at more meetings and strategy sessions with senior staff and C-Suite, so you need to clear unnecessary tasks from your to-do list so that you have the capacity to take part properly.
• Be prepared to invest your personal time. If we’re going to be realistic, then there aren’t enough hours in the workday to have a full-time job and truly immerse yourself in HR news and research. But if this is your area of expertise and it's where you see your career progressing, then you need to be willing to spend a few hours of personal time each week on the current HR landscape.

2. Control the things you can

If you’re struggling to get into the room for big strategy decisions, then begin in a micro way. Within your own team and department, undertake projects and changes that you theorize will help not only a small group but the company as a whole.

Develop your own best practice based on experience and experimentation, and when managers from other departments ask for advice, you’ll have usable templates and ideas that they can easily implement.

Here are some examples: 

• Changing structures of 1:1s and annual reviews. Test these within HR and optimize them based on feedback. Remain open to criticism. Once you have a good template, roll it out to new managers and get their feedback on how it works for other departments.
• Communication and meeting structure. Become the most efficient department in the organization. Learn from other teams, such as IT or Innovation teams, to see what works for them and figure out if less traditional processes work for your team. Maybe a daily stand-up will help your junior team members find their voice and become more efficient – you’ll never know unless you experiment.
• Become leaders in digitization. HR often has a bad reputation for paperwork and box-checking. To the extent that you can, push for more digital solutions that lift the load from your own team and others. Don’t just implement solutions for single problems, consider the long-term potential of technology options and how they could futureproof the organization’s people strategy. Lean on the IT department for support if necessary – see them as an ally.

3. Celebrate success and spread the message

Once you have some successes under your belt, don’t keep them within the department. Be proud of your wins, share them in the appropriate internal channels, and offer to share details with other team leads.

If your HR team has experts in Employer Branding, you might need some of their marketing know-how to help sell yourselves and your success to the rest of the organization. From public speaking to copywriting, there are a lot of skills from Sales & Marketing that can benefit HR. You need to strike a balance – you don’t want to seem as though you’re bragging. Instead, you should convey that you’re a valuable resource that other departments should make the most of. And that can be a fine line to tread – you don’t want everyone to think you’ll do their work for them, but you do want to be seen as experts.

Consider how you want to tell your story internally, both as an individual and as a department. Identify the channels you can use, from internal intranets to all-hands meetings, and what information is appropriate for which audience. Then head to step 4.

4. Become an internal influencer

Once you’ve done the hard work – stayed learning, conducted experiments, developed some great results – and you’ve decided on your HR team’s story, consider becoming an internal influencer. By this, we don’t mean an Instagram-style influencer, but the original meaning of the term: a person with influence, someone with a great reputation for ideas and how to implement them.

Again, this takes some time and effort on your part as an HR leader, but the payoff can be huge. The more other Team Leads and department heads consider you to be an approachable, supportive presence, the more you’ll be invited to help them with their decision-making. This can be great for your career, as well as the profile and reputation of the entire HR department. Don’t be frustrated if this doesn’t happen overnight, this is a long-term investment in gaining your peers’ real trust. It’s very much a marathon, not a sprint.

Here are some ways that you can become an internal influencer:

• Be proactive in finding coaching opportunities. Maybe you can run training courses and informal office hours for new managers and those who want a refresher on any key skills. Help them to problem solve for their department while sharing your own philosophy and best practices on leadership.
• If your organization has a mentoring program, sign up as a mentor and take time to develop a relationship with a future leader from another department. During your mentorship, you’ll be able to show them how HR plays a role in supporting every other department and can encourage them to call on you for advice whenever they’re planning big changes. You’ll also get a deeper understanding of how other teams and departments function across the business.
• Exchange with other team leads and department heads. Many leaders want to spend time networking with their peers, but not all of them have strong motivations to make the first move. Be the person who reaches out first—whether you’re organizing lunches for other leaders on your level or informal after-work drinks, be the hub of the wheel, the person who brings everyone together.
• Prove you can be trusted with other peoples' problems. This advice underpins all the others. There’s no point in encouraging team leads to share their challenges with you if you simply use their problems as leverage. You need to develop an intuitive understanding of what can be kept private and where you can give people the support to solve their own problems before it needs to be escalated. And be honest and transparent when you have to report something to senior management. 

5. Leave your internal bubble to learn

If HR only engages with HR and department heads, then you won’t make much long-term progress. Granted, other department heads have a big role to play in terms of inviting HR into the decision-making process, but everyone in the organization has something to offer.

By being curious about the day-to-day experiences of employees in different departments, you can build a fuller picture of the organization, its challenges, and the employee experience.

If there are opportunities for you to learn about other teams, then try to take them up. Maybe IT is giving a presentation about their new system, or Legal is offering office hours where people can ask them questions. You might be able to sit in on a sales call or attend an industry event where marketing and sales pitch your company’s products or services. Make it clear that this is a personal interest, not HR snooping to ensure everything is up to standard. And if there are departments that you want to learn from, ask them whether you can shadow one of their team members for a day or two.

By being an interested face at these kinds of optional events, you signal to other teams that you aren’t just interested in them from a Human Resources perspective, but that you care about the work they do for the business. You may also end up better educated about the broader industry and ecosystem in which your business competes, making you a better discussion partner for senior management.

6. Take external opportunities

This piece of the puzzle is one of the biggest challenges—building your profile outside your organization. Having an HR executive with a high profile can benefit the organization’s employer branding strategy, but it will also benefit you as an individual, making you a more appealing prospect for other companies. This external validation can also prove to the C-Suite that you are working at the cutting edge of HR, that other HR leaders respect you, and that you have valuable insights to offer them.

Depending on your company’s policy about team leads and department heads speaking on behalf of the organization, there are a few things you can try. Preferably, you would collaborate with senior management to make sure that you’re sharing consistent messages about the company and its position on the current topics.

• Build a personal brand on LinkedIn. This will depend on your organization’s social media policy, but if you don’t share any identifiable information about employees or business strategy, you can generally post on your personal profile. Feel free to comment on the latest trends and news topics and be insightful without being overly controversial. You can also connect with other HR experts on the platform. This will help you to get your name out there as an expert in your field. An active LinkedIn profile will also make it easier to stay on top of the latest HR trends and conversations.
• Speak at conferences. Again, this will depend on whether your organization is happy to approve your participation, but if you work for a large company, then you might find it easy to get invites to speak at HR conferences, webinars, or roundtables. This is a particularly good venue for showing off any successes that you’ve generated internally, and to gather new ideas to try. Additionally, it will give you practice in public speaking and storytelling, both of which will help you be effective in front of C-level meetings.
• Participate in employer branding initiatives. If you have an employer branding strategy or even a team working on employer branding, then make yourself available to them as the face of HR. Record videos or give interviews for social media about your recruitment process, benefits, and any recent developments you’ve worked on. Repost their work on your personal profile and give them your full support. Their work is important to the long-term success of the business, and your out-loud and proud support will draw attention both to their success and your expertise.

7. Network, network, network

When you can’t open your own doors, you need other people to open them for you and invite you to the table. That can only happen when people know who you are and what you do.

It’s even better when they trust you personally, value your input, and actively want to have you on their team. You don’t need to be best friends, but when they put their team together, then you want your name to come to mind.

We’ve already discussed plenty of ways that you can build relationships—whether through formal coaching and mentoring or attending internal talks and events—but it’s worth repeating. There’s nobody in your organization who isn’t worth speaking to at least once to find out what their perspective is on their role and their place in the structure.

It’s nice to be close to the people in your department, but whenever you have the time and opportunity, you should be mingling with others. That can mean participating in initiatives like Mystery Coffee or being the person at the holiday party who introduces themself to someone new.

Not everybody finds networking easy, but if you have a couple of icebreaker questions to hand, then you’ll be chatting away easily before you know it. And you never know, they might be the person who will open the door for you.

8. Don't let the subject drop

If you aren’t being invited to the table, don’t take it silently.

Whenever you find out a snippet of a new strategy after the fact, remind the person you report to of the impact this decision will have on your work and that you weren’t included. Bring it up in your annual review and your 1-to-1s. Request strategic involvement as part of your goals for the year ahead. Where strategic decisions that were made without you are having a negative impact on your department’s goals and, therefore, the company’s goals, make a note of this in writing so that you can be prepared for future periodic reviews.

Yes, this might make you an uncomfortable colleague for some of your peers. This might annoy some of the most senior people. But at the end of the day, you are advocating for the whole business to be better served. You aren’t simply trying to raise your personal status; you’re trying to protect the organization from making unnecessary mistakes. You’re trying to safeguard the well-being of all employees.

And that is worth fighting for.