The HR impact quiz
A practical check on the skills and mindsets HR needs to stay credible and relevant today
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Working in HR can feel like a constant balancing act. You’re supporting leaders, handling risk, managing change and trying to improve how work gets done, while the pace keeps picking up and expectations keep rising. Some days you feel ahead of it. Other days you’re just keeping things moving.
This report reflects the patterns in your quiz responses. It highlights where you’re already making a difference and where a few focused shifts could strengthen your impact, without adding more activity or another initiative to manage. There isn’t a perfect score. The aim isn’t to judge you. It’s to help you decide what to focus on next.
If something feels a bit close to home as you read, that’s useful. It usually points to the area that will make the biggest difference to how confident and credible you feel with your leaders. And if something confirms you’re on the right track, that matters too.
1. Building credibility and influence
If you want HR to matter, get closer to the real work. Credibility doesn’t come from knowing the process or policy inside out. It comes from understanding what leaders are actually dealing with and helping them make progress when things are messy, political or under pressure. It also comes from bringing them something useful they don’t already see, and helping them make a better call because of it.
When you work like this, leaders see you as someone who makes their job easier. When you don’t, even sensible advice can feel abstract or slightly removed from what’s really going on, and it’s much easier to push aside.
Three things you could try
Pick one leader and get properly close to their world. Not to fix them. Not to impress them. Just to understand what their week actually looks like. Sit in on a meeting. Ask what’s taking up most of their headspace. Find out what’s making their job harder than it needs to be.
Before you offer advice, stop and ask yourself, “What problem are they trying to sort out this week?” If your input doesn’t help with that, park it. Make your contribution useful for what’s in front of them now, not what the HR calendar says should matter.
Bring one insight they don’t have. Look at hiring, retention or progression data and identify one pattern that could affect performance over the next six to twelve months. Share it as an observation, not a diagnosis, and use it to shape a better decision.
If building credibility and influence with your leaders is an area you want to strengthen, our HRBP Programme is built for exactly this.
2. Working from trust, not control
A lot of HR is built on a quiet belief that people can’t be trusted unless we keep a close eye on them. That belief creates more rules, more approvals and more checking. It also creates dependency. Leaders stop thinking, people stop owning, and everyone ends up waiting for HR.
Working from trust doesn’t mean being vague or hands-off. It means being clear about expectations and risk, then letting people use their judgement inside that. When HR works from trust, decisions move faster, ownership goes up, and leaders stop using process as a shield.
Three things you could try
Pick one HR practice and ask, “What are we currently holding onto that we could hand back to leaders or teams?” Start small. But start.
Ask leaders, “What do we want people to take responsibility for?” Then work backwards and remove anything HR is doing that gets in the way.
Find one process that treats everyone like a potential problem. Rewrite it for the majority, not the worst case.
3. Improving how work actually works
Most “people problems” are really work problems. Teams step on each other because no one is clear who owns what. Work slows down because there are too many handoffs. Priorities shift every week and good work gets stuck in approval loops waiting for someone senior to say yes.
HR can either react to the symptoms, or it can help fix what’s making work harder than it needs to be. At its best, HR helps leaders remove friction so good work is easier to do. At its worst, it adds more activity to a system that already isn’t working, which usually means more initiatives, more training and more conversations while the work still feels hard.
Three things you could try
Ask a leader to talk you through a recent piece of work that felt harder than it should have been. Get curious about where it slowed down, who had to sign it off, and where people felt they couldn’t use their judgement.
When someone says, “We need a restructure,” pause and ask, “What’s actually not working in the work?” It’s often decision rights, workload, unclear priorities, duplication, or performance issues that have been left to drift, rather than the org chart.
Run one small experiment to remove friction and see what changes. For example, you could move one decision closer to the work, remove one approval step, or clarify one role that keeps causing confusion.
4. Building leadership judgement, not dependency
When leaders default to HR for answers, issues get escalated instead of handled, performance conversations happen later than they should, and people experience process instead of leadership. It slows everything down, and it teaches leaders that HR will carry the discomfort for them.
This is where HR adds real value, not by stepping back, but by changing how it shows up. The job is to help leaders use their judgement and deal with people issues directly, rather than reaching for a policy every time something feels uncomfortable. In practice, that means less rescuing and more coaching, fewer ready-made answers, and more support that helps leaders feel confident making their own calls.
Three things you could try
When a leader asks, “What should I do?” respond with, “What are you thinking of doing?” or “What would you do if there wasn’t a policy?” The aim is to build their judgement, not hand them a script.
Treat one-off issues as one-off issues and deal with them directly. Resist the urge to create a new rule “just in case,” because that is how dependency creeps in.
- Give leaders a few simple tools they can use in real situations. That might be a short set of AI prompts to help them prepare for a performance conversation, or a quick checklist they run through before escalating something to HR.
5. Staying relevant as work changes
Work isn’t standing still. Tools are changing, the pace is faster and expectations of HR have shifted. If HR doesn’t adjust, it risks protecting ways of working that no longer make sense.
Staying relevant isn’t about chasing every new trend. It’s about regularly asking, “Is the way we’re doing HR actually helping people do better work?” When HR does this well, it looks beyond its own world for ideas, tests small changes and stops doing things just because they’ve always been done. When it doesn’t, it slips back into what feels safe, which usually means more process, more programmes and more activity that looks busy but changes very little.
Three things you could try
Test one AI or digital tool in a real situation this month and judge it on whether it makes work easier or better. For example, use it to rewrite a dense policy in plain language, build a simple manager guide in minutes, or analyse recurring themes in employee feedback.
Ask yourself, “If someone took over my role tomorrow, what would they quietly stop doing first?” Be honest, then choose one thing to stop.
Bring one idea from outside HR into your next leadership conversation, perhaps from product, marketing or customer experience, and ask, “If we designed HR this way, what would change?”
If you’re leading the HR function, our CPO Programme explores this at a more strategic level.
Want help putting this into practice?
If you want support from us, here are a few good places to start:
- The HRBP Programme. For HR business partners who want to step up their influence and focus on what drives performance.
- The CPO Programme. For senior HR leaders shaping the direction of HR and the wider people strategy
- Disruptive HR Club. Live and on-demand training, and practical tools you can use straight away.
- Disruptive Leaders. On-demand training for managers who want modern leadership thinking they can apply immediately.
