How’s your personal alignment as we begin a new year?

HR leaders are core to driving the right culture and values, and this makes personal alignment crucial. How are you feeling about yours as you begin a New Year?

It’s a particular challenge to be authentic as an HR professional. We can get caught between differing stakeholder needs, conflicting business priorities, and of course conflicts between staff and their managers or between team members.

My question is – how often do we allow ourselves to consider what we actually think?  I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s had to ‘front’ and implement interventions or decisions that actually didn’t sit very well with me personally. Sometimes life in HR can feel like walking along a tightrope of personal integrity.

What choices do we have, in reality? There can be times when we actually don’t feel that we can choose – we feel stuck with how things are, or it’s too late in the process to be able to change them.

A key learning for me, when I was in corporate life, is that I had more impact when I engaged with key stakeholders earlier in the decision-making, planning or budgeting process. I could earn myself the right to choose by building relationships more proactively – ie. ahead of time.

So, getting to the point where you feel truly authentic often follows doing some work on getting fully aligned – recognising areas where you don’t feel comfortable, and tackling them.

As you move into 2026, it may be that there are some conversations that you are not having, and if you were to have an honest, straight conversation then you might be able to either change a situation, or alternatively to come to terms with it.

Until we get our own alignment clear, it’s difficult to be, or to be seen to be, authentic. This kind of dilemma often comes up in my coaching conversations. Message me if you’d like to explore how coaching could work for you.

Upcoming events:

• HR leader small informal roundtable: AI in HR – Thursday 15th January
• Webinar: How to present HR’s value to the business – Tuesday 20th January
• Workshop: Increase your impact in HR Business Partnering – Tuesday 27th January 2026
• Workshop: How to position HR as a strategic partner through influence – Tuesday 10th February 2026