How often have you heard the lament that HR needs to be more strategic?
If you type “strategic HR” into Google, you’ll get hundreds of millions of hits. Not a precise measure, I realise, but it does point to something. There’s a lingering unease that HR is still seen as transactional. Reactive. A service desk rather than a strategic partner.
And yet, being strategic in the face of relentless operational pressure is hard. When I was HR Director at the BBC, I would regularly have back-to-back operational meetings all day. Employee relations issues. Senior leader fall-outs. Urgent hiring challenges. By the time I got back to my desk, it would be late afternoon and I’d think, “Right. Now I need to have some big thoughts. I need to innovate. I need to take the organisation forward.”
And more often than not? I’d go home, collapse on the sofa, and watch TV.
I simply didn’t have the head space to be strategic.
Balancing short-term demands and long-term thinking is one of the toughest parts of working in HR. The operational work is urgent, visible and emotionally persuasive. Someone is upset. A leader is frustrated. A team is under pressure. It feels irresponsible not to respond immediately.
Strategic work, on the other hand, is quieter. Slower. Less visible. And far easier to postpone. Of course, there is nothing wrong with responding to operational needs. In fact, ignoring them would be irresponsible. You earn trust and credibility by being responsive, reliable and grounded in the realities of the business. Leaders do not want an HR partner who floats above the day-to-day, talking abstractly about the future while today’s problems burn.
But the danger comes when HR becomes so consumed by the immediate that it never creates space to think beyond it. Too much focus on the transactional and HR becomes a service desk, valued for responsiveness but not influence. Too much focus on the strategic and HR risks becoming detached, idealistic and irrelevant.
The most effective HR professionals manage to do both. And often, they do it simultaneously.
So how?
One powerful shift is this: stop seeing operational issues as distractions from strategy. Start seeing them as strategic signals.
Grievances, performance problems, spikes in attrition, repeated leadership conflicts – these are rarely isolated incidents. They are symptoms. They tell us something about culture, capability, clarity or leadership maturity.
The HR partner who simply fixes the immediate issue may be efficient. The one who steps back and asks, “What is this really telling us?” is operating at a completely different level.
Instead of trying to clear transactional work as quickly as possible so that “proper” strategic work can begin, use the operational work as your raw material. When you notice the same type of issue cropping up, ask yourself:
Where exactly is this showing up? Is it the same function, the same leader, the same career stage?
If I looked at these cases together rather than separately, what story would they tell?
Am I being asked to fix a symptom quickly that might point to a deeper structural problem?
If nothing changed, what would this pattern look like in twelve or eighteen months’ time?
These questions don’t require a separate strategy day or an offsite. They require a shift in mindset. The strategic opportunity is often sitting inside the operational conversation you are already having.
But here’s the harder bit. Strategic thinking usually requires you to challenge leaders on issues they would rather not confront. It is much safer, emotionally, to stay in the space of transactional problem-solving. The task is clear. The outcome is immediate. You can see that you’ve been helpful.
Strategic work is messier. More ambiguous. It plays out over longer time horizons. This is where judgement comes in. Not every operational conversation is the right moment to lift things to a more strategic level. Leaders are usually most receptive to future-focused conversations when they feel heard and supported in today’s pressures.
But we also have to be careful not to use that as an excuse to keep postponing the bigger discussion. If you wait for perfect conditions, you will wait indefinitely.
Often, it’s about small, thoughtful reframing. You might say, “I’m noticing a similar issue in a couple of areas – does that surprise you?” Or, “Do you think this is more about individual behaviour, or something structural?” Or even, “What would make this less likely to land on your desk again in six months’ time?”
Those questions don’t derail the operational issue. They build on it. They use today’s problem as a bridge into tomorrow’s conversation. Over time, this changes how leaders experience you. You are no longer simply the person who fixes problems as they arise. You become the person who helps them make sense of what those problems mean.
So perhaps being strategic is not about carving out huge swathes of uninterrupted thinking time. Perhaps it is more about how we choose to think about the work already on our desk.
The short term and the long term are not always competing priorities. They are connected. Every operational issue contains within it a strategic question. Our job is to spot it, to name it, and to have the courage – and the judgement – to raise it.
That is how we move from being reactive to being influential. Not by abandoning the day-to-day. But by seeing it differently.
And if you’re a senior HR leader wanting to create more space for strategic thinking, influence and impact, our next CPO Programme starts on 24 September.
