Building your Credibility as an HR Professional: 4 Steps to Being Heard at the Leadership Table

Author : Heather Kerr

As business practices continue to evolve, so must our role in Human Resources. We cannot just demand a seat at the leadership or decision table because it is the “thing to do.”  We must earn and own our seat, and we do that by being credible business partners.

How can you ensure that your voice as an HR professional is one of a credible contributor to the business? Here are four steps to building credibility and owning your seat as a business partner:

1.       Learn the language of the business.

What is the language of the company you work for? Some employers might use acronyms (even the same acronym to mean different things), jargon, and colloquial terms to describe the business, and if you aren’t speaking that language you are going to be left out of the conversation.  If sales are talking about a “customer of scale”, or if operations are discussing its most recent NCR (non-conformance report) do you know what that means and can you participate in the conversation? If not, it’s time you start doing a thorough review of your company dictionary.

2.       Know the Business

An effective HR Business partner will take time to learn all aspects of the business including financials, sales, and operations.

Being financially intelligent about the company you work for will demonstrate a desire to build understanding of the company’s performance. What are the last quarter’s earnings, do you understand the profit and loss statement, balance sheet and sales targets of the company? If this all feels like a foreign language to you, put intro to business finance on your next professional development plan. Businesses thrive on dollars and cents, and if you don’t understand where the company is financially, you cannot offer effective solutions.

Understand the company sales and marketing function. Who are your customers, what % of market share does your company have, who are your main competitors, what are the growth targets for sales? Knowing the product or service your company offers and what makes it unique will allow you to ensure your recruitment, retention, and even culture strategy perfectly aligns with what the business offers the marketplace.

Learn the company operations. How does your company make their product or deliver their service? What challenges or bottlenecks do they face? What goals are they trying to carry out? Understanding how the company makes the good or service they are selling will allow you to offer solutions that create an impact on the business itself.

3.       Get Involved in the Culture

Understand what people “do around here.” To learn the culture better, observe and ask your people leaders: “what character traits do the top 5 employees in this specific department have that make them successful?” Answering that will help you both understand what the company values about its employees and move beyond a paper record of the company mission and vision statement. When you understand the keys to your employees’ success, you will be able to craft HR Programs that are effective and valuable to both the company and the employees.

4.       Execute

You can spend all the time in the world gathering information, researching, observing and generating ideas, but if you aren’t’ executing on those ideas and actually solving the problems of the business, you won’t be taken seriously as a business partner. Use your knowledge of the company to generate genuine business solutions that meet the needs of the organization and resonates with employees.

Following these steps can help you demonstrate the value you bring to the business. During this process, these additional two tips may be helpful in solidifying your relationships with your business partners.

1.       Do what you say you will do

Don’t over promise and under deliver, and don’t leave people hanging. Engineer out forgetfulness whenever you can. Use automated reminders, schedule recurring meetings, take notes, carry a pen and paper, leverage your calendar, do whatever you need to do in order to track your tasks, but make sure you follow up with people. Nothing kills credibility with your coworkers faster than them never hearing back from you. It ruins trust and tears down relationships.

2.       Focus on the “Can”

Due to the nature of our roles, HR can be seen as a department of naysayers. Often referred to as the “fun police”, HR can be left out of important conversations around the decision table because others think HR will shoot down the idea. To combat this assumption, try to provide your partners with showing them what they can do, offer multiple options, highlight risk and reward in each option, and then let them decide the best course of action. Starting with “you can’t do that” will get you a one-way ticket to being left out in a silo.

HR professionals cannot just demand a seat at the table because we want it, we must earn it. We can do that through proving we are a credible partner, capable of understanding the company’s product, operations, and culture. This process takes time and effort every day, but once it is accomplished, you will be contributing to solving genuine business problems, and truly owning your seat at the table.  

Sources

Collins, Allan. Unwritten HR Rules, 21 Secrets for Attaining Awesome Career Success in Human Resources. Success In HR Publishing, 2011

Collins, Allan. The New HR Leader’s First 100 Days.  Success in HR Publishing, 2017

Paton, Mike. “Accountability, To Be or Not to Be”. EOS Worldwide, https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/95940-eos-accountability-be

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post belong solely to the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of CPHR Alberta.