Be More Strategic….but When?
If you’ve ever been told to be more strategic in your HR role… but your entire day is spent reacting to whatever comes across your desk…that’s the reality of most HR professionals, especially HR Departments of One.
Welcome to What HR Was Never Taught - a Podcast series about the things no one told you when you got into HR.
Because somewhere along the way, HR professionals started being told to be strategic…to think bigger….to have a seat at the table…but no one actually showed us how to do that, especially while we’re juggling everything that comes at us every single day.
So, if you’ve ever felt stuck reacting, but expected to be strategic…you’re not alone.
And more importantly…you’re not doing it wrong….
In this podcast series, I’m going to share what I’ve learned through my own 20+ years of HR experience, what actually works and the shifts that can help you start thinking and showing up differently in your role.
This isn’t what you learn with your HR degree or HR certification. It’s real life, real situations and real conversations that HR was never taught.
“Because I want to talk about something no one really ever says or even understands—HR is being asked to be strategic, but most HR roles are actually designed for reaction.”
When I was an HR Department of 1, I can remember my days included:
Benefits Questions
Employee Issues
Leadership Questions
Payroll Questions
Payroll Processing
Performance Management
Meetings
Attendance
Reporting
Open Enrollment
Filling in for the receptionist when they were out
Chasing leaders for timesheets
Training and Development
Compliance
Safety
Workers Compensation
Succession Planning
Recruiting
Job Mapping
Job Description Creation and review
Random drug testing
Company Newsletters
Pay Increases
Employee Changes
And whatever else I missed that also showed up at my desk
I remember feeling like my entire day was spent putting out fires and then being told I needed to be more strategic and I wondered what in the world that even meant, because I wasn’t slacking. I was doing my job and working REALLY hard.
And something else I see with a lot of my clients…As an HR Department of 1…you can tend to also be the intake system for your entire company. And what I mean by that is…Everything comes to you. Emails. People stopping by your desk. Quick questions that turn into bigger problems. How many times have we had a quick question inform us of something else we didn’t even know was happening that isn’t ok? So instead of just that quick question, we add 5 more things to our plate? This can be things that have nothing to do with HR…and things that technically do—but shouldn’t all require you.
You’ve become the place where everything lands. Not because someone decided that intentionally…
but because there’s no other structure. So it just… defaults to you.
Someone has a question?
They come to you.
Something breaks?
It gets routed to you.
A manager doesn’t know how to handle a situation.
They ask you.
A process doesn’t exist.
You’re expected to figure it out.
And over time… this becomes normal.
You become known as:
the helpful one
the responsive one
the one who “just handles it”
But what’s actually happening underneath that…
You’re not just doing HR anymore.
You’ve become the intake system for everything no one else owns.
And the problem with that is…
If everything comes to you, everything becomes your responsibility.
Not because it should be.
But because that’s how it’s currently structured.
Or more accurately…Not structured.
Most HR professionals I talk to think they’re overwhelmed because:
there’s too much to do
they need to prioritize better
they need to manage their time differently
But that’s not actually the root of the problem.
The real problem is:
There’s no system for how work gets to you—so you’ve become the system.
And when you are the system…
Everything feels urgent, personal and like it requires your response.
So of course you’re reacting all day.
How could you not be?
And the hardest part is…
You do this because you really do care.
You want to be helpful.
You want to support people.
You want things to run well.
But without structure…
That helpfulness turns into over-functioning.
And over-functioning turns into constant reaction.
You start wondering…
“Why can’t I get ahead?”
“Why does everything feel urgent?”
“Why am I constantly putting out fires?”
But…even though you’re working hard, you’re not working hard on the right things. you can’t be strategic if you are always in reaction mode.
Being strategic requires space, the ability to think ahead and time you actually don’t have.
It’s not that you don’t know how to be strategic, it’s that HR roles weren’t and honestly still aren’t setup to be strategic at a lot of companies. They are setup as support functions 99% of the time…the place where employee stuff is handled.
The problem isn’t you. You’ve proven your capable of doing the work, you have the HR experience and you know what you’re doing, you’ve just been operating in a system that prioritizes reaction over strategy.
One small shift you can take today…awareness. Because when we start to be aware, we start to view things differently.
So today, start noticing how often you are reacting versus choosing to work on….and before you respond to something, pause and ask yourself “is this actually strategic or just urgent?”
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, because I see so many HR professionals being asked to step into strategy without being given the space to do it.
If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to keep listening, because we are going to keep unpacking what HR was never really taught…
And if you know someone who wants to move from reactive to strategic, this is exactly the work that I’m starting to build.
And at one point, I was the HR Department for 3 separate companies under the same umbrella with 4 locations, so you can imagine how that went…multiply the above list by 4.
“If this made you think, or you found yourself saying ‘yes, this is exactly it’—you’re in the right place.
We’re going to keep unpacking what HR was never taught… and what actually works in real life.