Defining Strategic HR

That was the question posed as I joined a panel at the recent state-wide SHRM meeting in Louisville. It’s a question that’s been asked for decades — and yet, most HR leaders still seem to be searching for the silver bullet answer.

Let’s be honest: it’s not that mystical. HR strategy is often over-complicated and under-commercialized.

The premise is simple: understand the business you’re supporting.

If you don’t know the company’s value drivers — where margin is created, how revenue scales, what growth bets are being placed — you can’t credibly call your work “strategic.”

Once you truly understand the business model, you can deploy your HR expertise to solve business problems, not just HR ones. Learn the operating model. Know which business units are accretive and which are lagging. Understand how the P&L behaves as you scale. Only then can you prioritize the people initiatives that move the needle.

Too often, HR leaders start by fixing “HR things” — optimizing internal processes, tightening compliance, streamlining leave management. Those matter, but they’re table stakes. They don’t move EBITDA.

No one in the C-suite is celebrating a cleaner HRIS workflow when a core business unit is underwater because of open sales territories.

The mindset shift is this: be a business operator first, an HR expert second.

When you look through that lens, you naturally align HR delivery to the areas of the business that actually create enterprise value.

A few examples from my own time as the HR exec for a fast-growing data and technology firm in Louisville:

We were expanding rapidly — 20–30% annual revenue growth — and had just completed six acquisitions in 18 months. My role quickly became clear:

1. Scale the leadership and HR infrastructure to match the growth trajectory.

2. Build a repeatable people due diligence model for future M&A.

3. Design a world-class onboarding and assimilation experience for newly acquired teams.

Each of these moves was tightly linked to our growth thesis. They created visible impact at the C-suite level and generated the kind of political capital that fuels long-term influence.

The takeaway is simple:Don’t default to internal HR wins. Get out of the function and into the business.

Because when you do, you’ll realize that HR success and business success aren’t separate at all — they’re one and the same.

Strategic HR for the win

#HRBusinessPartner #Strategic HR #Talenta