How do we get business leaders to listen?

Why should they listen? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves. What’s in it for them? Are we clear about the business value of what we’re proposing, or are we speaking in HR jargon?

Getting business leaders’ attention can be hard. There’s so much noise around them and we have to break through that and get onto their frequency.

Let’s continue with the radio analogy. When our message doesn’t get through, we tend to think there’s something wrong with the other person – the receiver. If this were an actual radio, it’s obvious that we’d start by looking at the transmitter rather than the receiver. Is it tuned in correctly? Does it have enough power? Is there static?

We can get siloed in HR. Distance creeps in between the things we care about in HR and the things that worry business leaders. To us, the links are obvious – between engagement and profit, for example, or between leadership and retention. But if their receiver is tuned in to signals about profitability, that’s what we need to transmit.

To quote Dave Ulrich, HR isn’t about HR. We have to start from where our stakeholders actually are, not from where we think they should be.

If their main preoccupation is revenue and profit (which is fair and reasonable), then that’s where the HR position needs to start from.

In HR we tend to start with our own agenda – e.g. an intervention that we know is good for business and also best practice in our world, such as succession planning or DEI. We try to ‘sell’ it to them.

What if you could find out what’s really important to your business leaders and then align what you’re doing with that? We’ve developed a Strategic Roadmap that uses a survey and facilitation to open up robust discussions about what your leaders and managers want from HR – and how you’re doing currently.

We’ve had such great feedback from this that we’ve created a free ‘self-drive’ version to share with our community – you can download it here.

Contact me if you’d like to talk about the challenges of creating alignment between HR and the business. If you invest in that, everything else falls into place.