How to Become a Strategic HR Leader

 Hi, I’m Danielle, founder of Engage HR and the Intentional HR Leader program. I’m an HR leadership coach supporting professionals who have gotten the degree and the certifications, but who still feel stuck in their roles. I have over 20 years in HR leadership experience for brands like General Dynamics and Volvo, and now I support leaders and HR departments of one in growing and developing their leadership skills and confidence through my Intentional HR Leader program.

Welcome to the Strategic Minute Podcast, where we take a deep dive into an important leadership topic, understand the problem, and develop a practical solution.

Today we’re going to talk about how to gain respect in HR, not through personality, but through positioning.

A lot of HR professionals are drowning in tactical work and feel like an admin in these roles. You’re drinking from a fire hose, just trying to keep your head above water and you don’t even know how to be strategic.

Today, I’m gonna help you take your first step to becoming a respected, strategic HR professional.

Let’s look at it practically.

What’s landing on your desk the most?

Is it time sheets, performance issues, supervisors asking for support?

Let’s start there. And we’ll use the intentional HR leader framework: what is our desired outcome and work backwards.

So if it’s supervisors asking for support, what is our desired outcome?

We want supervisors to know what to do without having to come to HR for everything, right? So a measurable, desirable outcome could be: In 90 days, supervisors confidently handle routine management situations without escalating to HR, unless legally or strategically necessary.

Supervisors tend to escalate when they don’t have clear expectations, they’re afraid they’re gonna do something wrong or they don’t know the standard. So, in order for us to achieve our desired outcome, what needs to be true?

Supervisors need to have clear expectations. They need clear performance standards, a clear documentation process and clear escalation guidelines.

When do they come to you?

If what good looks like is undefined HR becomes the safety net to make sure they’re doing things correctly.

A lot of supervisors are promoted for technical skills, not leadership ability. So in order for us to achieve the desired outcome, supervisors need to know how to have those performance conversations, how to give feedback, how to document and how to manage conflict. And, they need to have a basic understanding of employment risk. Without these skills, the escalation to HR is actually protecting themselves.

So let’s ask ourselves, are supervisors feeling afraid of making a mistake? Unsure that HR is gonna support them if they do it on their own, or that they’ll be blamed if they do something wrong.

This is why everything is being escalated to hr.

So in order to stop that escalation, we need supervisors to have psychological safety to make reasonable decisions, clarity on what HR will support and define the decision making boundaries. Supervisors need guardrails. That’s why the employee handbook becomes their North Star.

Do the supervisors know when HR should be involved? Some escalations are appropriate, don’t get me wrong. Do they know what legal risk is? What requires HR approval? What is within their own discretion? In order to make your supervisors more independent, you need to implement clear expectations.

And this may be hard to hear, but HR needs to stop rescuing, too. You’ve been enabling these supervisors and their behavior. If you answer every question, fix every issue, rewrite every email, conduct every difficult conversation. You’re training them to be dependent on you. HR needs to redirect, not rescue, ask coaching questions instead of solving the problem.

We have to tolerate that initial discomfort because I know we wanna help. It’s in our DNA usually whenever we take an HR position, right? But we need to stop saying, we will handle it and start asking them questions like, how would you like to approach this situation?

So in order for our desired outcome to occur: In 90 days, supervisors confidently handle routine people management situations without escalating to hr.

Unless legally or strategically necessary, we need to have clear expectations that are defined and communicated, developed leadership skills. What kind of training have these leaders had? What kind of coaching? Are they getting clear decision boundaries? What can they make a decision on and when should they consult you?

What are we doing to reinforce the desired behaviors and to continue to grow and develop our supervisors’ leadership abilities? And we need HR to stop absorbing everything we coach instead of solve. Reactive HR answers the question, while strategic HR designs the capability that prevents the question.

That’s the difference between an admin and an architect.

Now let’s make sure we toot our own horn to leadership. A lot of times we forget to do this instead of telling them we’re working to solve the issue of supervisors coming to us for help, we say we have identified development opportunities for our frontline leaders and are creating a leadership framework to reduce their dependency and strengthen frontline accountability.

Doesn’t that sound a lot better?

Strategic HR isn’t about answering every question that’s on your desk. It’s about asking why does this keep coming to me? What system is missing? How do we prevent this from happening over and over? When you move from responder to designer, you stop being an admin.

This week, I want you to identify one recurring issue that keeps landing on your desk instead of solving it, ask what capability gap is creating this and what system could prevent it?

Design the solution. Don’t just deliver the response. The truth is respect doesn’t come from being busy. It comes from being valuable to the organization. When you see trends, design systems, don’t react every time an incident occurs.

For example, instead of handling attendance issues one by one, build a standard for attendance. This sets clear expectations for everyone and gives guidance on how to handle attendance issues and build credibility.

HR gains respect when it shifts from reactive to intentional, from absorbing everyone’s emotions to advising strategically on ways forward, from reporting head count and attendance to raising concerns of the impact issues may have on the business, from people pleaser to culture standard setter.

If this episode resonated and you’re realizing you’re capable of more strategic influence, I highly recommend we conduct your leadership diagnostic on a call to determine where you already shine and where you could be a little more polished. Through the Intentional HR leader program, I support mid-level HR professionals and HR departments of one in building the structural thinking and confidence required to move from firefighting to frameworks.

You don’t need another certification. You need containment, perspective and intentional development.