If you’re lucky enough to have a CEO who truly understands, values and actively paves the way for strategic HR initiatives AND holds the leadership team accountable for following through…well…you can skip this note cuz you don’t need it.
For the rest of us, I’m going to share a FREE DOWNLOAD for having conversations with your CEO.
Getting Aligned with your CEO
If you are a visionary HR leader: always looking for innovative solutions and ways to improve HR practices then you are likely to come up against resistance from your CEO. And that resistance comes in all forms so sometimes it’s hard to spot.
What Resistance Looks Like
Even though you may feel included, respected, and recognized in your role, there are a number of ways innovative HR leaders come up against resistance. Here are a few. Do any of these resonate with you?Struggling with limited resources, which impacts HR’s ability to be strategic.Spending time trying to improve communication and collaboration among team members.Striving to gain more influence within the organization.Facing challenges related to diversity and inclusivity.Balancing the demands of HR leadership with self-care and work-life balance.Wanting to be recognized as a strategic partner rather than just a service provider.Feeling alone in the work of fostering a positive workplace culture and engagement.Struggling with the perception of HR as a cost center rather than a value creator.And these are in addition to what many of us have experienced including outright dismissal of HR imperatives.
What is an HR innovator to do?
As a result of my years of work both inside organizations as an executive leading HR teams and outside as a consultant, I’ve developed a reliable way to cut through the typical ropes of resistance and build allegiance toward common goals from the outset. How? By understanding what truly drives my client. Inside an organization, I have many clients depending on the specific task at hand: the CEO, my leader peers, the workforce as a whole, the individual employee. But at the end of the day, my real client is the organization and that’s the same client the CEO has. When I truly understand how the CEO is working to serve THAT client, only then can I align the HR initiatives with the right strategic objectives.
How to Align HR Initiatives with the Right Strategic Objectives.
Now, the answer to how to align HR initiatives with the right strategic objectives is going to depend on all sorts of things, but I’d like to share one example. It comes from my work as a consultant when a CEO asks me to help “fix” some aspect of the organization by way of leadership development. Here is your FREE Download: Aligning HR and Organizational Strategy (A conversation with the CEO). It contains 16 prompts to help you connect your vision of success directly to the CEO’s vision. Of course, you can modify it to fit your needs.
How to Elevate Your Influence and Achieve More Strategic Results
I hope you find the download helpful. Of course, your situation – and your CEO – is going to be unique. The prompts in the guide may not match your style or theirs. What to do? Well, that’s exactly what we work on in our live and on-demand programs. Our participants are smart, funny, HR leaders who aim to be trusted advisors to top leadership, influencing key decisions, and creating a workplace where employees thrive. I do hope you’ll join us at an upcoming program so you too can feel empowered and equipped to transform HR into a strategic force.
As always,
Be Uncommon.
