How HR Earns Credibility With the C Suite

There is a version of the people function that sits in every executive meeting and shapes none of the decisions. It presents, it is thanked, and the conversation moves on to the numbers. Most senior HR professionals have been in that room, and most of the advice on getting out of it amounts to being more strategic, which describes the destination without saying how to get there.

This page is about how. It is written for HR leaders and for the chief executives and finance directors who decide whether to listen to them, and it argues that credibility at that level is earned in a fairly specific way: by talking about people the way the rest of the room already talks about capital.

Why does the people function struggle to be heard?

Because it often brings the executive team a different kind of argument from the one the executive team is built to weigh.

A finance director arrives with a number, a range around it, and a view on what moves it. A commercial director arrives with a pipeline and a conversion rate. When the people function arrives with an engagement score and a programme, it is not that the content is less important. It is that it is presented in a currency the room does not trade in, and the room discounts it accordingly.

The discount is rarely hostile. It is habitual. Executives allocate attention to what they can act on and measure, and a case that cannot be expressed as cost, risk or time to result gets filed as worthy rather than urgent. Seeing it as a translation problem rather than a respect problem is where the fix starts.

What does a credible people case look like to a finance director?

It names a cost the business is already paying, quantifies it in terms finance can check, and proposes something that changes it within a period the board will still remember.

The strongest people arguments are already financial arguments and simply have not been written down as such. A senior role that has been open for five months has a cost in delayed work, agency fees and the time of the people covering it. For hard-to-fill leadership and specialist positions, a structured specialist recruitment process can reduce both vacancy time and the internal cost of carrying an open role. A team losing a third of its specialists every two years has a replacement cost the finance director could estimate in an afternoon. The people function usually knows these numbers better than anyone and presents them least.

None of this requires the people function to become finance. It requires it to source its numbers from the same place finance does and to stop expecting the room to do the translation.

Where does HR know things the executive team does not yet?

In the early signals of things the numbers will show later, and that advantage is only useful if it is used early.

The people function usually knows first when a key person is thinking of leaving, when a team has stopped functioning under a manager, or when a business unit is about to lose the capability it depends on. The executive team learns those things from the results, a quarter or two afterwards. That lead time is the function genuine strategic asset and it is squandered when the information is held until it is certain.

Bringing an early signal to the room, with the honest caveat that it is early, is what makes an HR leader worth having at the table. The executive team can decide whether to act on it. What it cannot do is act on something it is told after the fact, and a function that only reports what has already happened has volunteered to be an administrative one.

How should HR handle a disagreement with the chief executive?

Directly, with the evidence, once, and then either way with full support.

Credibility is tested most at the point of disagreement, and HR leaders lose it in two opposite ways. Some do not disagree at all, which makes their agreement worthless. Others disagree repeatedly after a decision is taken, which makes them exhausting. The position that holds is to make the case clearly and with the numbers before the decision, to accept the decision if it goes the other way, and to execute it as though it were their own.

The one exception is a decision the people function believes carries a regulatory, legal or conduct exposure. There the obligation is to say so on the record, in writing if necessary, and to keep saying it. A chief executive who does not want that from their people leader has not understood what the role is for, and the criteria a board should apply in choosing one are set out in our note on what actually predicts chief executive performance.

What does the executive team owe the people function in return?

Early access to the decisions that will land on people, and a straight answer about what is not up for discussion.

Credibility runs both ways and executive teams undermine their own people leaders more often than they realise. The commonest way is timing. A restructuring, an acquisition or a change of strategy gets decided, and the people function hears about it when it is asked to execute. By then the questions it would have raised, about who leaves, who stays and what the market will read into it, are too late to be useful and look like obstruction.

The second failure is ambiguity about what is negotiable. An HR leader asked for a view on a decision that has already been made will, reasonably, stop offering views. A chief executive who wants honest counsel has to say when a question is genuinely open and when it is not, and has to be seen to change something at least occasionally as a result of the answer. Nothing builds a people leader standing faster than one visible instance of the executive team having listened.

What changes in financial services and other regulated businesses?

The people function carries obligations the executive team is accountable for and often does not fully understand.

In a regulated business the people function is closer to the licence than it is anywhere else. For banking and financial services employers, senior hiring decisions can therefore carry governance and regulatory implications as well as normal talent considerations. Fitness and propriety, individual accountability regimes, remuneration rules and the evidence a supervisor may ask for about how senior people were selected all run through HR, and a chief executive who treats the function as administrative is exposed personally when a supervisor asks how a decision was made.

That is a source of standing an HR leader in these sectors should use. The argument is not that HR deserves a seat. It is that the executive team is carrying a risk it cannot manage without one. Keeping the senior people once they are appointed is the other half of the job, and we cover that in our piece on retaining senior specialists.