To introduce the idea of the hands-on HR director, I have to take you with me to Sydney in 2009.
A candidate is being interviewed by the HR manager of a Sydney-based bank. After the presentation of the company, the candidate asks a question :
- « So what about work-life balance? »
The HR manager answers that there is a program for that, one that guarantees the balance. Far from convinced, the candidate tells her he is surprised.
- « You talk to me about balance, and I can see plainly that you look exhausted. And yet you only work in HR. »
The implication being: imagine what it must be like for the people who actually work.
I have started this article with that small and entirely true story to show that the image of HR is no better overseas than it is anywhere else, and that the problem is anything but new.
You will hear the same joke around the world: when HR calls you, either your pay is wrong or your job is gone.
| The complaint | The uncomfortable part | The way back in |
|---|---|---|
| No seat at the tableHR leaders describe their exclusion from executive decisions as something done to them by leaders who fail to see the strategic value of people. The complaint is common, sincere and only half true. | Legitimacy was never heldCalling this a crisis assumes the credibility existed first and was then lost. Recognition of HR as a strategic actor has rarely been secured anywhere, which changes the question from how it was taken away to how it might be earned. | The hands-on HR directorThe hands-on HR director spends a tenth of their time working on the floor, a tenth selling to customers, and a tenth outside the organisation entirely. Legitimacy, credibility and esteem are each earned somewhere different. |
Where the HR director actually sits
Beyond the poor image, let us get to the real subject. HR exists to support the development of the business and the wellbeing of the people in it, rather than to make friends. The real question is why most HR directors are still absent from the executive committee.
Always having to prove their legitimacy
The function is too often seen as an administrative cog, or worse, as the team that hands out bad news between two afterworks. Things are changing and the HR function is becoming more strategic, mostly in the pages of HR magazines. On the ground it is a different story.
Year after year, in Australia as anywhere else, HR directors fight for their seat at the table where the big decisions get made. We are talking about a function that touches the overall performance of the business: recruitment, talent management, engagement, learning and quality of working life. Every one of those levers conditions competitiveness, and recognition still struggles to follow.
The crisis that should have changed everything
A mutating, many-shaped crisis that involves unemployment and a war for talent at the same time should have settled the argument. It should have revealed HR directors as the guardians of profitability, productivity and creativity.
It should have let the whole organisation see that HR was acting for the good of everyone and taking part in the creation of value. The awakening was brutal instead.
Reporting to finance rather than to the chief executive
In some organisations, HR has been reduced to executing decisions about human capital, on the grounds that talent management had become too strategic to be left to it. I have watched a steady drift over the past fifteen years, with more and more HR functions reporting into finance rather than into the chief executive.
The message is clear enough. Give us numbers, ratios and performance indicators. We reach a point where obtaining a learning budget or adjusting a remuneration policy means negotiating with procurement as though you were ordering office supplies.
Australia has handed HR one lever that this drift has yet to absorb. Managing psychosocial hazards is now an explicit work health and safety duty for employers, which places the psychological conditions of work inside a legal obligation rather than inside an engagement survey. That duty belongs to the people who understand how work is designed.
A legitimacy problem HR built for itself
Let us speak frankly. Calling this a crisis assumes the profession was legitimate and credible once, and then stopped being so. Recognition of HR as a genuinely strategic actor has never really been secured.
What if the problem came from inside
HR people are often heard lamenting their exclusion from the key decisions of the business. Understanding why requires going past the usual shortcuts. Blaming a leader who is insensitive or blind to the strategic role of human resources is a little too easy, and it makes HR look like it endures the situation rather than controls it.
Here is where it stings. Before pointing at the chief executive who gives us no place, the honest question is whether HR has earned its place.
Speaking the language of the other functions
We can of course roll out the classics of HR reporting: turnover rate, employee satisfaction and engagement levels, recruitment conversion ratios and quality of working life. All of it is useful, and none of it is enough to be seen as a key business actor, because it stays inside internal reporting rather than crossing into a business conversation.
Carrying weight means speaking the language of the other functions. The question worth sitting with is why HR does not adopt the same metrics as finance or sales, and demonstrate the impact of HR action on growth and profitability instead of compiling figures about colleagues.
One structural argument is already there for the taking. Gallup measures that 70 per cent of the variance in a team’s engagement traces back to its manager. The function that selects, trains and promotes those managers owns the largest single lever on discretionary effort in the organisation, and rarely says so in those terms.
Leaving the office is not enough
Competency and job frameworks have at least forced HR to lift its head from the spreadsheet and go out to the operation, unless of course that work was outsourced to consultants. Leaving your office to discuss position descriptions with teams still falls short of involvement in the business dynamic. It is organising and structuring.
Involvement means understanding market pressures, commercial objectives, budget constraints and the development strategy in depth. It means talking in numbers, results and transformation. It means ceasing to be perceived as a support function and becoming an engine.
As long as HR stays in the posture of an administrator rather than adopting the posture of a strategist, it will remain in the shadows. Legitimacy, credibility and esteem are earned rather than claimed. Instead of waiting for an invitation to the table, create your place.
Which HR metrics actually earn a seat at the table
Two families of measurement exist, and they produce very different conversations with an executive committee. Choosing between them is the first practical decision an HR leader makes.
The classic HR indicators and where they stop
The familiar set does real work. It tells you what is happening inside the workforce, and it stops at the boundary of the business conversation because it describes a state rather than an effect.
- Turnover rate
- Employee satisfaction and engagement levels
- Recruitment conversion ratio
- Quality of working life
The business metrics that change the conversation
The second family measures the same activity by its consequence. Each one connects an HR decision to a number another director already tracks, which is what makes it audible in an executive meeting.
| Business metric | What it measures | Who else already tracks it |
|---|---|---|
| Campus penetration rate | Visibility and attractiveness of the employer among future talent | Marketing |
| Performance of new hires at 6 and 12 months | Real effectiveness of recruitment decisions | Operations |
| Return on learning investment | Training correlated to productivity gains and career progression | Finance |
| Cost of acquiring talent against business impact | Medium-term value of a hire rather than its price | Finance and sales |
Use the third column as your selection rule. Start with the metric already tracked by the director whose support you most need, because a shared number opens a conversation that a new one has to earn first.
Field note
The headline I refused, then accepted
An earlier version of this argument was published in a business daily, under a title I did not choose: « HR, what exactly are you for? » I disliked it immediately. It felt cheap, deliberately provocative, and unfair to a profession that carries more weight than it gets credit for.
The reaction taught me something the article itself had missed. HR readers wrote in, and almost none of them defended the profession. They answered the question. They described what they had stopped doing, the meetings they were no longer invited to, and the parts of their role that had drifted into administration without anyone deciding it. The provocative headline had produced the most honest conversation I had had with that audience.
I have kept the lesson since. The question of what HR is for lands as an insult when it comes from outside and as a strategy when HR asks it first. A function that can answer it in business terms has already begun to earn the seat it is asking for.
Becoming a hands-on HR director
Three practices, each costing a tenth of your time, each earning a different thing. Legitimacy comes from the floor, credibility comes from the customer, and esteem comes from outside the building.
Legitimacy is won in the trenches
First action, simple and concrete for an HR leader in search of legitimacy: spend 10 per cent of your time on the ground. Not to count, analyse or interview, but to lend a hand. And not only filing paperwork. A wall to paint, a truck to unload, a pallet to wrap, the front desk to cover. Get to work.
Yes, it will get your hands dirty, and it will give you the chance to learn another trade. You never know.
The hands-on HR director knows the work their colleagues actually do. They understand the pressures and challenges people face on the ground, which requires becoming familiar with the trades and processes of the business by spending time there, observing and talking.
That deep knowledge lets an HR director make informed decisions and adapt policy to the realities of the operation. It also changes how they communicate, since a leader who has done the work can talk to anyone at any level, and can be transparent about objectives and expectations without sounding like a memo.
Credibility is built in front of the customer
Second, and as important as the first: spend 10 per cent of your time selling. No, that is not a dirty word. If selling is a required rite of passage for anyone heading into marketing, the question is why HR should be exempt.
To earn the respect and the ear of their colleagues, a hands-on HR director extends empathy beyond the workforce and out to the customers. Understanding a customer’s difficulty the way you understand a colleague’s builds a climate of trust that no internal campaign produces.
After all, HR people are the first to sell the organisation to future colleagues. They are also charged with selling new procedures, legislative changes and training to managers and teams, before we even mention negotiating with unions and employee representatives.
Negotiating and selling should be second nature for HR.
Esteem grows outside the building
Third element, and one to take seriously: spend 10 per cent of your time outside the organisation. I hardly need to remind you that HR is not alone in having a reputation problem, since the employer brand has one too. Staying shut in your office will change neither.
And I am talking about more than the bare minimum of joining an HR network. Offer your help to schools, go and speak at TAFEs and universities, turn up at industry associations and chambers of commerce.
A hands-on HR director stays attentive to the needs, expectations and worries of their colleagues. Regular meetings, one-to-one conversations and participatory workshops all gather views and suggestions, and they let an HR leader understand what people are actually dealing with before designing a solution for it.
Get out, learn and pass it on.
Turn credibility into influence over innovation
Once HR has earned its place, the next question is what it does with it. Discover how the function decides which new ideas ever get through the door in my article on the role of HR in innovation.
How I can help you build HR credibility
Credibility is rebuilt through practices rather than through a repositioning statement. I work with HR teams and their executive committees on exactly that.
Keynotes for HR teams and executive committees
On stage, I lay out why the seat at the table is earned in the operation rather than requested in a meeting, using field stories like the Sydney interview that opens this article. The objective is to move a room from grievance to strategy.
The format works well opening an HR conference, because it reframes the profession’s oldest complaint as a question it can answer itself.
Workshops to rebuild your metrics and your presence
In workshops, we take your current HR dashboard apart and rebuild it around numbers your finance and sales directors already track. Teams leave with a reporting pack designed for an executive committee rather than for an HR review.
We also design the practical version of the three tenths, adapted to your operation, so the commitment survives contact with a normal week.
Conclusion
Before talking about the strategic dimension of the HR role, the work is to rebuild trust through proximity, relationship and a share of physical work. The HR function has to spread itself through the organisation, do more than is expected, and perhaps move its desk into the middle of the operation rather than staying on the executive floor.
Legitimacy, credibility and esteem are earned in three different places, and none of them is the boardroom. That is the whole idea behind the hands-on HR director, and it costs three tenths of a working week to test.
Frequently asked questions about the hands-on HR director
What is a hands-on HR director?
A hands-on HR director spends around a tenth of their time working alongside operational teams, a tenth selling to customers, and a tenth outside the organisation with schools, universities and industry bodies. The practice earns legitimacy, credibility and esteem in three different places rather than claiming them from a job title.
Why is HR still not on the executive committee?
Partly because leaders undervalue the function, and partly because HR reports on itself rather than on business outcomes. Turnover and engagement describe a state inside the workforce. Metrics such as new hire performance at twelve months or return on learning investment describe an effect, and effects are what executive committees discuss.
Should HR report to the chief executive or to finance?
Reporting into finance tends to reframe people decisions as cost decisions, which narrows what HR can propose. Reporting to the chief executive keeps workforce strategy next to business strategy. The reporting line matters less, though, than whether HR can express its work in numbers other directors already use.
How does an HR leader start working on the floor without getting in the way?
Start by asking a team leader where they are short-handed this week, then take the shift rather than observing it. Doing real work removes the awkwardness of an audit visit. Keep it regular and small instead of staging one big immersion day that everyone recognises as theatre.