Summary: Outdated views of HR continue to impact trust and credibility. By continuously listening to feedback, taking and communicating action, HR can gain the trust it deserves.

From the days of ‘personnel management’ to HR’s now strategic position within organisations, the scope of the profession has changed significantly. However, outdated views of HR still endure, impacting the trust people have in the HR function and the credibility of the profession.

How many of these do you still hear today?

• HR looks after hiring and firing
• HR only gets involved if you’re in trouble
• HR = red tape and bureaucracy
• HR works for the managers/organisation.

And I’m sure there are more!

How did we get here?

As custodians of people policies, it is common for HR to be perceived as ‘enforcers’, ensuring managers apply policies correctly, supporting and managing individuals appropriately.

The perception of HR ‘working for the organisation’ is understandable. HR teams play a vital role in managing risks for the organisation. Not only ensuring people practices adhere to relevant employment laws, but also the risks that arise from employee relations issues.

Over time, the purview of the profession has expanded to encompass all elements of the employee journey and experience, including culture, wellbeing, inclusion and reward, and more. 

Beyond the transactional elements of ‘personnel management’, HR now has a broad strategic role responsible for the organisation’s most important resource: its people.

Naturally, this presents a paradox between ‘managing’ employees, while being responsible for creating a positive employee experience.

As custodians of people policies, it is common for HR to be perceived as ‘enforcers’

What can we do?

We need to understand our current state of employee experience, both with the organisation and, specifically, the HR function. This will help to identify areas of improvement and measures of success.

1. Focus on activities that will improve perceptions of organisational justice, which will help to build trust. Decisions affecting individuals will likely link to people policies

2. Focus on fostering psychological safety, where individuals can be themselves, communicate and participate safely, without fear of negative consequences

3. Take action and communicate the outcomes. Evidencing the impact of actions will build credibility and trust in the HR team, and with the organisation.

How to get started

Carry out a perception survey or use feedback groups, find out how employees perceive the HR function and why. Some of the findings may not be what you want to hear, but this will give you the information you need to make meaningful changes.

Be sure to include different levels. The relationship with HR changes with each level and so too will people’s perception of the function.

Look at the bigger picture. What does your data tell you about your current employee experience? Look at engagement survey results, sickness trends, turnover and leaver feedback, plus any other feedback you can gather from colleague representatives or network groups.

Taking action

Feedback and ideas are only effective if they are acted on. Review what your data is telling you and identify the areas for improvement.

Look out for quick wins that you can use to demonstrate immediate action and build momentum. Some improvements may take more time. Highlight those that will have the most impact and prioritise them.

For example, if query response times or communication is an issue, what can you do differently? Maybe create a central inbox that is always covered, use a CRM, introduce SLAs and improve internal processes for managing queries.

Close the loop

For any feedback activities, it’s important to let people know what has resulted from their input. This demonstrates that you have listened and builds trust through action. Furthermore, it will support psychological safety, encouraging people to continue sharing their thoughts in the future.

Even if you are unable to act on something, still let people know. Share how you have reviewed the feedback and explain why it has not been possible, or if an alternative has been considered instead. Transparency and understanding the decision-making process will support individuals’ sense of organisational justice and trust in the process.

Keep going

One and done is destined for failure. Focus on continuous improvement.

Periodically seek feedback to identify if your actions have achieved the desired results and highlight where further improvements are needed. Allow time between feedback activities to continue taking action and communicating updates.

You don’t need to wait for structured review activities. Capture feedback informally through the everyday interactions your HR team are having with colleagues and managers.

Remember to regularly review your broader people data and use it together to support more well-rounded decisions.

One and done is destined for failure. Focus on continuous improvement

Further improvements: Key areas to focus on

Beyond the specific improvements identified through the activities above, there are some general areas you can focus on to help improve individuals’ trust in HR and with the organisation.

1. Communications plan

While there are certain things HR are unable to communicate due to confidentiality, there are plenty of communication opportunities to share what HR has been involved in and improve people’s understanding of the function.

Partner with your communications team to create a structured communications plan, aligned to your people strategy. Use a variety of communication methods and channels to reach people around your organisation.

Find the right balance between necessary business updates and positive HR-related updates to keep people informed and maintain momentum.

2. Policies and procedures

Review your people policies and procedures. While they need to be up-to-date (especially with the recent Employment Rights Act 2025 changes), they need to be easy to understand and accessible.

Are they written in simple language, formatted clearly and consistently, and all in one place where people can find them?

Individuals may not like a policy if they are the subject of its enforcement, but they should be able to clearly see how and why decisions are made. The same applies to performance review processes, remuneration and development or anything that affects their experience at work.

3. Manager capability

Ensure managers are trained to understand key policies and procedures. More importantly, focus on developing managers’ people skills to better support their teams and particularly to build their confidence in having challenging conversations.

Consider a managers’ induction for new and existing managers alike, to build capability and consistency across your management population.

4. No more ‘HR said…’

The use of HR to protect managers and leaders from being the bearer of undesirable news needs to be eliminated.

This may be part of a larger piece of work on leadership behaviours, developing communication skills or commercial awareness learning.

Instil the importance of accountability, encouraging managers to own decisions about their team. Improve their understanding of their place within the organisation and owning decisions on behalf of the organisation.

5. HR’s internal processes

Are your HR team’s internal processes up to scratch? How long does it take to respond to queries? If different team members receive the same question, would they give a similar response?

Work within the team to identify better ways of working and establish standard operating procedures with SLAs, so all HR colleagues can resolve queries consistently and efficiently.

Monitor your performance alongside the feedback you receive from the activities detailed above.

The use of HR to protect managers and leaders from being the bearer of undesirable news needs to be eliminated

More than trust

Taking steps to build individuals’ trust in HR will improve trust in the organisation.

Listening to individuals to inform continuous improvements throughout the employee journey will improve employee experience. 

By continuing to take action and measuring and communicating its impact, HR teams will build trust and credibility with individuals and leadership alike.

Your actionable insights

• Inform your approach with feedback and people data to prioritise areas you need to work on
• Focus on actions that will support individuals’ perceptions of organisational justice and psychological safety, which will build trust
• Remember to ‘close the loop’ so people know they have been listened to and that their feedback is valued
• Shout about what you do: plan regular communications to maintain momentum, promoting the work HR are involved in and the impact it has
• Focus on continuous improvement, with periodical feedback exercises to measure success and identify future actions.

If you enjoyed this article, read: Why good leaders don’t have all the answers

The post The HR trust gap: Learning from employee experience to build credibility appeared first on HRZone.

The post The HR trust gap: Learning from employee experience to build credibility first appeared on HRZone.

Summary: By looking at where leaders are really spending their time and building the capability that enables leaders to let go, HR can help equip leaders to navigate today’s uncertainty.

One of the biggest leadership risks in the current economic climate is hiding in plain sight. 

As growth remains subdued, margins squeezed and organisations pursue ever greater efficiencies, many senior leaders are being pulled deeper into the operational day-to-day.

Against this backdrop, getting more hands-on can feel like responsible leadership. Get closer to the numbers. Scrutinise performance. Make more decisions. Step in when things aren’t moving quickly enough.

Here’s the danger. The tougher things get, the more tempting it is for leaders to spend their time on the dance floor, at exactly the time their organisations need their view from the balcony.

Leaders need the dance floor and the balcony

The dance floor and balcony metaphor is a useful way of thinking about leadership.

On the dance floor, leaders are immersed in the action: solving problems, making decisions, responding to colleagues and stakeholders, driving delivery and dealing with what is happening now.

From the balcony, they gain altitude. They can see a wider perspective: patterns, connections, emerging risks, opportunities and unintended consequences that are much harder to see from the middle of the action.

Neither is inherently better. Today’s leaders need to be brilliant at both. More importantly, they need to flex between them.

Economic uncertainty, AI, continuous transformation, competing priorities and changing workforce expectations mean leaders cannot simply sit on the balcony ‘doing strategy’. They need to understand what is happening on the ground.

But if they spend too long on the dance floor, their perspective narrows. Urgency starts driving choices. Short-term delivery crowds out longer-term thinking.

PwC’s latest UK CEO Survey captures that tension: CEOs report spending 55 per cent of their working time focused on the next 12 months, while 35 per cent question whether they are doing enough to ensure the medium- to long-term viability of their organisation.

So how can HR help?

The tougher things get, the more tempting it is for leaders to spend their time on the dance floor, at exactly the time their organisations need their view from the balcony

Start with where leaders are really spending their time

Before launching another leadership initiative, examine what leaders actually do. Ask your senior leaders to look at two weeks of their diaries and categorise their time: 

• Running today’s business 
• Improving today’s business 
• Creating tomorrow’s business.

How much is consumed by operational meetings, internal problem solving, reviewing detail and decisions that could be made elsewhere?

How much is genuinely focused on customers, future capability, AI, emerging risks, new opportunities and the choices that will shape the organisation in three, five or 10 years?

This is not a time-management exercise. It is a leadership diagnostic.

Build the capability that enables leaders to let go

We also need to challenge a common assumption: leaders aren’t always trapped on the dance floor purely because there is too much to do. Sometimes they haven’t built enough capability and ownership beneath them to leave it.

A senior leader complains that everything comes to them. Yet they keep providing the answers, making the decision or stepping in when something becomes difficult. A dependency loop develops.

‘They aren’t ready, so I need to step in.’ If a leader continually steps in, when do their people get ready? This is where HR can make a fundamental difference by helping to embed a coaching culture throughout the organisation.

Coaching needs to become a way of leading: asking rather than telling, building people’s judgement, encouraging them to solve problems and strengthening their confidence to make decisions. Three simple questions can change a conversation:

1. What do you think?
2. What options have you considered?
3. What would you do if I wasn’t here?

Every time a leader coaches rather than rescues, they build capability somewhere else in the organisation.

Let go, but don’t let accountability go with it

Leaders then need the courage to genuinely delegate. Delegation is not passing down a task while retaining every meaningful decision. It means being clear about the outcome, who owns it, the authority they have and the boundaries within which they can act, then allowing people to lead.

That becomes harder when results are under pressure. The temptation is to pull control upwards. HR can help leaders ask:

• What is it only I can do?
• Does this really need to sit with me? Who else could own this?
• Have I given them authority as well as responsibility?
• Am I prepared to let them do it differently from me?

There is an important counterbalance. Empowerment without accountability creates ambiguity. Accountability without empowerment creates frustration. People need real ownership and clarity about what they are accountable for. Leaders then need to follow through and hold them to it.

The combination of coaching, ownership and accountability strengthens capability throughout the system and reduces organisational dependence on a handful of senior people.

We also need to challenge a common assumption: leaders aren’t always trapped on the dance floor purely because there is too much to do. Sometimes they haven’t built enough capability and ownership beneath them to leave it

Protect the balcony

Even then, leaders need to deliberately create altitude.

HR can help put balcony time into the operating rhythm: protected thinking time, leadership meetings that deliberately move beyond operational reporting, and regular conversations focused on external change, assumptions and future choices.

• Instead of: ‘Are we on track?’, ask ‘What are we seeing now that may require us to change direction?’
• Instead of: ‘What’s the solution?’, ask ‘What pattern are we seeing?’
• Instead of: ‘What are you going to do?’, ask ‘What might we be missing because we’re too close to it?’.

Capability isn’t enough

There is one final challenge. Most experienced leaders already know they need to delegate, coach, prioritise and think strategically. The problem isn’t always capability. It’s capacity.

Capability is what a leader knows how to do. Capacity is how much of that capability they can still access when pressure, complexity and emotion increase. Under pressure, an empowering leader can become controlling. A strategic thinker becomes tactical. Everything starts to feel urgent.

That is why leadership development now needs to go beyond adding more skills. HR needs to help leaders retain perspective, think clearly, shift their approach and make better choices when pressure is at its highest.

The objective isn’t to get leaders off the dance floor altogether. It’s to build organisations that don’t require them to live there.

The leaders who navigate today’s uncertainty best are those who know when to step in, when to let go and when their greatest contribution is to step onto the balcony and see what everyone else is too busy dancing to notice.

Your actionable insights

• Audit where leaders are really leading from. Look at how leaders are balancing delivering today’s performance with strengthening and shaping the organisation for tomorrow.
• Embed a coaching culture that grows capability throughout the organisation, giving senior leaders the confidence to let go and others the confidence and capability to step up.
• Create real ownership. Delegate authority as well as responsibility, clarify decision rights and hold people consistently to account.
• Protect deliberate ‘balcony time’ for leaders to spot patterns, challenge assumptions and make the strategic choices only they can make.
• Build leadership capacity as well as capability so leaders can retain perspective and flex between strategic and operational leadership when pressure rises.

Read another article by Carole Gaskell: Why leadership capacity is the real root of sinking engagement

The post How HR can get leaders off the dance floor appeared first on HRZone.

The post How HR can get leaders off the dance floor first appeared on HRZone.

They are increasingly the architects of performance connecting strategy with capability, policy with behaviour, investment with adoption and leadership ambition with day-to-day execution.

That shift is being driven by pressure from every direction. Organisations are:

• Trying to improve productivity while facing persistent skills shortages
• Investing in AI without always redesigning work or preparing people to use
• Navigating changing employment rights, evolving workforce expectations and continued uncertainty.

All while asking managers to maintain performance, trust and engagement. 

A new perspective on people practice

The data shows the strain: more than a quarter of UK vacancies (27 per cent) are skill-shortage vacancies, while real-terms employer training spend per employee has fallen by 29.5 per cent since 2011.

These are not separate HR challenges. They are business constraints. 

Transformation slows when critical roles remain unfilled. Decisions are delayed or applied inconsistently when managers lack confidence. Technology adoption stalls when employee trust is weak. And when learning investment is disconnected from operational priorities, capability gaps remain and returns are difficult to prove.

Neil Carberry, Chief Executive of the CIPD, has made this connection explicit: “Look at almost any challenge facing employers – AI, employment rights, productivity, workforce readiness or organisational change – and somewhere within it there is a people question”.

His argument is not that the profession should demand greater recognition simply because its work is important. It should earn influence by demonstrating the problems it solves, the capability it creates and the organisational performance it unlocks.

That requires a more commercial account of people practice. 

When learning investment is disconnected from operational priorities, capability gaps remain and returns are difficult to prove

The true measure of value

Activity is not impact. Completion rates, policy launches and programme attendance may indicate movement, but they do not prove value. Boards need to understand how people decisions affect productivity, retention, absence, time to competence, customer outcomes, organisational risk and the ability to deliver strategy.

The profession must therefore become more confident in demonstrating measurable business value. That does not mean reducing people to numbers. It means connecting evidence about people with the measures organisations already use to make decisions.

A strong proposal for learning investment shows which performance constraint it addresses. A credible case for AI identifies the workflow being improved, the risks being controlled and the value expected. A workforce plan sets out the cost of inaction as clearly as the proposed intervention.

This is also where people professionals can unblock the things holding performance back.  Their perspective crosses organisational boundaries. They can see where strategy is being obstructed by capability, where structural decisions are undermining accountability, where management practice is creating avoidable risk and where change is being introduced without the conditions needed for adoption.

The role is not simply to identify friction. It is to bring evidence, judgement and practical routes through it.

Policy change brings the same test

The Employment Rights Act and strengthened employer duties require organisations to update policies and processes, but compliance alone will not produce better workplaces. 

Carberry has argued that the real test is what changes because we were there? His conclusion is direct: “If we want greater influence, we have to expect greater accountability”.

A profession with an active voice in policy must engage with regulation before it becomes a last-minute implementation task. It must understand the intention of reform, contribute evidence to public debate and translate legal requirements into operational practice. 

That means equipping managers, examining workplace risk, strengthening employee voice and measuring whether interventions change behaviour. The profession’s institutional voice is strongest when it is grounded in what works.

CIPD research shows 45 per cent of organisations are still at the experimental stage with AI, and sanctioned ‘shadow AI’ use is a growing governance risk

People teams are at the centre of tech

The same principle applies to technology. AI is not simply a procurement decision for IT, nor is it a productivity promise to be accepted without scrutiny. Its success depends on job design, data quality, workforce capability, governance, employee confidence and human accountability. 

These sit directly within the profession’s remit. People teams should shape adoption from the outset, defining where human judgement remains essential and measuring whether investment improves work rather than simply accelerating existing problems.

That runs from everyday questions about safe use to designing teams that blend humans and AI agents. CIPD research shows 45 per cent of organisations are still at the experimental stage with AI, and sanctioned ‘shadow AI’ use is a growing governance risk which is why CPOs, not just CIOs, should lead workforce adoption.

One shared conversation

No organisation can solve these questions through a single discipline or viewpoint. This is why bringing the profession together matters.

Taking place on 4-5 November 2026 at Manchester Central, the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition, brings the connected challenges of Digital Transformation, Change Management, Skills and L&D, and the Employment Rights Act into one shared conversation. 

Across keynote sessions, practical case studies, interactive workshops and peer discussions, strategic questions will be tested against operational experience.

Dedicated Insight stages explore Employee Engagement, Leadership and Learning and Future Workforce. Interactive features create opportunities to examine practical applications in the Navigate AI Area, work through legal procedures through Mock Tribunals and explore career pathways in the Careers Hub.

The exhibition floor connects peers with more than 130 leading suppliers, while Member Central provides a dedicated space for CIPD members to come together for guided networking and learning sessions around shared interests and workplace challenges. 

Across both days, Carberry will be hosting a Q&A forum with CIPD members.

This concentration of evidence, practice, policy and professional experience is vital because the profession does not need more disconnected commentary. It needs decisions. It needs practical frameworks that can be adapted immediately, measures that can withstand boardroom scrutiny, and examples that reveal both what worked and what did not.

A new direction

The direction is clear. The people profession is moving from process ownership towards designing organisational performance, without abandoning the standards, fairness and human judgement that give it purpose. 

Growth starts with people, but it becomes real when people professionals convert insight into execution, remove the barriers holding organisations back and make their contribution visible through the outcomes that matter.

Join us to learn, connect and turn insight into impact with practical solutions. Secure a Conference pass or claim your free exhibition ticket for 4–5 November 2026 by clicking here.

The post From support function to operating force: The people profession’s next chapter appeared first on HRZone.

The post From support function to operating force: The people profession’s next chapter first appeared on HRZone.

“Did you actually believe any of that?”

That question, asked in the car park and not the boardroom, is the sound of a low trust culture. If you’ve watched The Traitors, you know the formula: a few people hold all the information, decisions are made behind closed doors, and anyone who asks the wrong question gets banished. It makes brilliant television. In a business, it makes a toxic environment.

After years in HR, I’ve seen versions of the castle in organisations of every size. It rarely starts with bad intent. It builds through small behaviours nobody challenges until they become “how things are done here”. These are the five I see most.

1. The favourites everyone can see

I worked with a managing director whose sales manager could do no wrong. The rest of the senior team could see it, and the only explanation anyone could find was the personal relationship between the two. 

Trust in the MD’s decisions drained away, first in the leadership team and then below it. Nobody has to announce a favourite. People work out that who you are matters more than what you do and adjust their effort accordingly. 

This not only damaged the profit line, but turnover increased and engagement dropped.

2. One rulebook for the money makers

I regularly saw top performers come and go as they pleased. They had no rules because they brought in the money. Everyone else watched and drew the obvious conclusion: the rules only apply to people who aren’t profitable. 

That isn’t a policy, it’s a pecking order. And the day you try to discipline anyone else for the same behaviour, you’ve handed them their tribunal argument.

If you’ve watched The Traitors, you know the formula: a few people hold all the information, decisions are made behind closed doors, and anyone who asks the wrong question gets banished

3. Feedback that never arrives

I’ve lost count of the times a manager has rang me wanting to go formal on an underperformer. When I ask what they’ve done so far, the answer is often nothing. No conversation, no clear expectations, no explanation of what the person isn’t hitting. 

Avoiding that conversation feels kind. It isn’t. The employee has been guessing for months, and the first they hear of a problem is a formal meeting. That’s not performance management. It’s unreasonable.

4. Promises made on someone else’s behalf

“I’ll get you a pay rise.” Said to keep the team sweet, before a director has signed anything off. 

It happens all the time. Morale lifts for a week. Then the budget says no, or says nothing, and the manager goes quiet. 

The employee hasn’t just lost the rise. They’ve learned that their manager’s word means nothing. 

CIPD’s Good Work Index 2026 found only 61 per cent of employees agree their manager can be relied upon to keep their promises. “I’ll push for it, but I can’t promise” beats a yes that never lands.

5. Concerns raised, nothing done

I’ve seen it firsthand. Staff raise an issue, usually through an engagement survey, though there were other routes. The senior leadership team discusses it, decides to ignore it and carries on focusing on sales. 

An ignored concern doesn’t disappear. It erodes trust, and it can turn into a health and safety incident, a mental health problem or a whistleblowing claim. The person who raised it is later described as “not a good fit”. In the castle, that’s called being banished, and everyone else gets the message. Silence isn’t agreement. It’s your early warning system switching off.

The true cost of a Traitor culture

In the castle, it’s a game. At work, it’s livelihoods and mortgages, and the bill lands on the business. 

CIPD’s Good Work Index 2026 found that 52 per cent of employees who don’t trust their leaders to act with integrity say work damages their mental health, against 15 per cent of those who do. 

Beyond that:

• Turnover: the best people leave first because they have the most options
• Absence: stress and disengagement show up in your sickness figures
• Legal risk: unfair dismissal, discrimination and whistleblowing detriment claims, plus the management time they swallow
• Lost effort: people do what they’re told and nothing more and productivity suffers.
• Reputation: employees talk, and so do your clients

In the castle, it’s a game. At work, it’s livelihoods and mortgages, and the bill lands on the business. 

How to spot the signs

• The same themes in grievances or exit interviews about one manager or team
• Similar conduct, different outcomes
• Meetings where nobody disagrees, and the real conversation happening afterwards
• Rumours travelling faster than official communication
• People who raised concerns leaving the business
• Resignations or absence clustered in one area

What you can do about it

Explain the why, early 

You don’t need consensus, but people need the reasoning before the rumour mill supplies its own.

Audit for consistency

Compare disciplinary and grievance outcomes. If similar cases ended differently, find out why before an employee does.

Have the conversation first

No formal process until expectations have been set out clearly and in writing.

Stop managers promising what they can’t deliver

Agree what they can say about pay and make “I don’t know yet” an acceptable answer.

Make speaking up safe, visibly

Respond to concerns and protect those who raise them. The law already does for protected disclosures, and your culture should too.

Listen to your data

Exit interviews, surveys and absence trends show where trust is breaking. Act on them.

Ask your team the question

Run an anonymous survey on whether people trust how decisions are made, then share the results and what you’ll do about them, even when they sting.

Who in your business has stopped telling you the truth?

Trust takes years to build and one badly handled moment to lose. Leadership teams who ask this honestly find the cracks now, not in front of a tribunal panel.

If your team were asked whether they trust how decisions are made, what would they say? When did you last ask?

If you enjoyed this article, read: Framework: How to read your team’s culture without launching a transformation programme

The post Banished for asking the wrong question: Five signs of a Traitors culture appeared first on HRZone.

The post Banished for asking the wrong question: Five signs of a Traitors culture first appeared on HRZone.

The toolkit remains as fresh and shiny as it was on day one. It just stops being opened, is quietly forgotten and the aspiration and reality become unrealised and irrelevant. 

This is a pattern we see repeatedly in our work at TMP Worldwide. The data we collect across campaigns reinforces it. 

The Outthink Employer Brand Index is our proprietary benchmark of employer brand performance. We’ve evaluated more than one thousand organisations globally, each scored by a strategist across 10 indicators running from search visibility and social reach to content, employee experience and candidate experience. This means we’re constantly comparing what employers claim with what they can actually show.

Across the hundreds of UK organisations we’ve evaluated, the distance between what’s claimed and what is experienced is wider than most talent leaders would expect.

The distance between what’s claimed and what is experienced is wider than most talent leaders would expect

Employers tell, but they don’t show

Of the employers scoring highest in the values and proposition segment – meaning their proposition is clearly explained and their values are stated on the careers site – 43 per cent score low when it comes to content. 

That indicator looks at how compelling recruitment content is and whether it authentically showcases real employees, is regularly updated and appears in a variety of formats. 

These organisations can articulate exactly who they are, but they lack the evidence to back it up. Nothing brings it to life in a way employees or candidates would recognise. The result is an emotional gap. That is why most EVPs fail in practice.

By framing the EVP through the actions and experiences of real employees, you can safeguard against an empty proposition. Let your employees tell the stories of their career journeys, which automatically adds authenticity and credibility to the conversation. 

Let a manager describe what they expect in someone’s first 90 days in their own words rather than the company’s. Show the texture of an ordinary working day, captured by the people living it, in a relatable, easily understood format.

There is no shelf life, only a widening gap

There is no explicit shelf life for an EVP, and no standard review cycle we’d recommend. 

An EVP decays the moment the distance between what it claims and what the organisation visibly does grows wide enough for a candidate to notice and question this. Sometimes that takes five years. Sometimes all it takes is one Glassdoor review. 

Of course, where the organisation has been structurally altered – via a merger or acquisition, the emergence of a significant new competitor, a radical change in the cultural fabric of your sector (did someone mention AI?) –  that’s a trigger to rethink your story. 

While we’re on the subject of AI, the Outthink Index highlights something worth pausing on. Of the organisations we assessed against our AI indicator, 60 per cent give candidates no visible guidance on how AI features in their application or selection process. 

This is the single biggest shift in how candidates prepare for a job application, and most employers have said nothing about it. That lack of information is its own gap between claim and reality, and candidates are already reading it, conscious of who’s being clear and transparent and who has yet to take a clear position.

By framing the EVP through the actions and experiences of real employees, you can safeguard against an empty proposition

Three ways to keep your EVP honest

If you want your proposition to hold up, these are the practices worth building in.

1. Audit the evidence, not the messaging, once a year

Take each of your EVP pillars and list what a candidate could find on your careers site or social media channels that support it. If a pillar has no artefact behind it, it is a slogan.

2. Give your people the means to tell their own stories, not just permission

Brief a group of employee ambassadors, give them parameters to work in and track how much of your careers content originates outside the marketing team.

3. Agree what the EVP is actually for before you touch it again

Volume hiring, hard-to-fill specialisms and retention all pull a proposition in different directions. Name the priority, then judge every asset against that one thing. You can always introduce Talent Value Propositions under your main EVP to appeal to specific role types or regions.  

An EVP is not a message to be optimised. It is a claim to be evidenced. The organisations getting this right are the ones that show, not just tell.

Curious how your employer brand compares? Check out the interactive Outthink Employer Brand Index on our website. 

This article is part of a new content partnership between HRZone and TMPW, bringing you research, practical insight and expert perspectives on the changing talent landscape.

Explore more from TMPW on employer brand, candidate experience, recruitment and the future of talent.

Read an article by Sara Naveda, Head of TMP Worldwide: AI isn’t the problem with your hiring process. Your silence is.

The post Is your EVP past its expiry date? appeared first on HRZone.

The post Is your EVP past its expiry date? first appeared on HRZone.

Summary: Great work doesn’t speak for itself in a hybrid era. By sharing progress, gaining third-party endorsement and reframing impact in business terms you can raise your profile, and by creating space for staff to share wins, leaders can make visibility fairer.

If you want to secure a promotion or pay rise, it’s no longer enough to be great at your job and hope someone will notice.

While hybrid working may offer enormous benefits, from improved work-life balance to opening up a wider pool of opportunities, it’s also making some employees invisible. This is a major stumbling block when it comes to career progression.

One in three women said being visible to senior leadership was among the behaviours most rewarded in promotion decisions, according to recent research by HiBoB. Its fifth annual Women in the Workplace survey of 2,000 UK professionals in 2026 also found that 31 per cent of women cited constant availability as an important factor.

When you work remotely, you lose some of the more informal moments to demonstrate your value; a spontaneous conversation, a quick update over coffee after a successful project or colleagues overhearing your ideas. 

Your contribution can fly under the radar, especially if you’re in the ‘my results speak for themselves’ camp.

So, what’s the secret to getting your work noticed by senior leaders without resorting to shameless self-promotion?

Invisible value isn’t valued

I’m seeing an increasing number of clients finding it difficult to get their work the visibility it deserves.

Some are struggling to get seen in a fully remote role in a global company. The situation can be trickier if their manager works in a different time zone, leaving them with little time to connect.

I’ve also seen this happen when a manager and colleague are on different teams; the employee finds it impossible to show how they’re meeting their objectives for promotion.

Alternatively, someone may be struggling to get their entire function seen and valued by senior leaders. They keep working to make their team visible and valued, leaving them exhausted.

The common thread? People are working really hard but are stuck in a constant battle to feel seen and valued.

Why is this important to leaders? Because when work achievements regularly go unnoticed, it can negatively impact your business.

Staff may experience feelings of inadequacy, dissatisfaction or lower confidence. Or they take on more work to show how valuable, risking burnout. This can all result in disengagement and lower productivity.

In addition, I’ve noticed certain functions are more likely to struggle with getting their achievements seen.

The work of teams like learning and development, wellbeing, internal communications or marketing is often focused on preventing problems rather than producing headline numbers. So it’s easier for senior leaders to underestimate these teams.

But visibility shouldn’t feel like a hidden advantage reserved for louder colleagues or those who spend the most time physically in the workplace.

People are working really hard but are stuck in a constant battle to feel seen and valued

Where ‘quiet bragging’ comes in

Not everyone is comfortable broadcasting their achievements at every opportunity.

The good news is, you don’t have to. There are some subtle ways to get your achievements seen by those who matter, and help you hit your career goals.

The key to ‘quiet bragging’ is to be deliberate; think strategically about what gets seen, by whom and when. Keep it factual, useful and evidence-based.

Quiet bragging for individuals

1. Share the process, not just the result

Most employees only mention their finished work or final achievements. 

Try talking about a decision or progress while mid-project. This could be in a team update, a one-to-one meeting or a Slack thread. 

This makes it look like you’re thinking out loud rather than going for the cringe of self-promotion. Use the three Ps framework to help: Priorities, progress and pressure.

2. Map your thinking

Visibility is also about people seeing you think. 

Asking a question in a meeting or offering a considered view when it’s not required can help to raise your visibility in the room. This is really useful in a remote setting.

It’s not about speaking up more. It’s what you say that counts. 

3. Let others speak for you

If your colleagues know about your work, they can share it with their managers in their own work updates.

This type of third-party endorsement lands as evidence and is powerful for building your profile. 

Start with a stakeholder mapping exercise to understand who your key stakeholders are and what the relationship is like, and then take a considered, conscious approach to building this. 

4. Keep a ‘Brag File’

This is a simple document recording your achievements. Capture all your contributions, problems solved, projects completed, new skills, positive feedback and outcomes.

Then when performance reviews or promotion conversations roll around, you’re prepared and not relying on your manager’s memory. It’s also useful for CV updates.

Aim to bank your wins while they’re fresh; review your Brag File weekly or keep it open on your computer and make regular updates.

The key to ‘quiet bragging’ is to be deliberate; think strategically about what gets seen, by whom and when. Keep it factual, useful and evidence-based

Quiet bragging for teams and functions

1. Mind your language

Translate your function’s impact into language that your leadership team or key senior leadership team member understands. 

Functions like learning and development, wellbeing or internal communications often measure themselves in activity, like running sessions or engagement scores. 

But leaders think in risk, retention, capability and how any activities track to the annual plan.

Ultimately, it’s the same work reframed. For example, ‘we ran 12 workshops’ becomes ’we improved staff retention by x per cent’. It’s a slight shift but it gets the information heard differently.

2. Seeing is believing

Create moments where leaders see your work directly rather than a summary of it.

A report is easy to skim past. But inviting a senior leader to sit in on a session, review a real case or hear directly from someone the team has supported tends to shift perception faster than any slide.

3. Natural visibility

Ultimately, remote working makes it much easier for achievements to slip under the radar. Invisible work often isn’t valued, even when it makes an impact. 

But adopting some ‘quiet bragging’ techniques can get you seen without appearing boastful.

It’s less about ego and more about sharing evidence so people can recognise your value, even when you’re not in the room.

Leaders have a role to play too. Building a fairer culture for visibility can have a big impact, for example, creating opportunities for staff to share their wins, or not simply rewarding those who shout loudest or who are physically in the workplace.

In 2026, being great at your job definitely still matters. But making sure the right people know about it matters too.

Your actionable insights

1. Share the process, not just the result: Talk about a decision or progress while mid-project.

2. Encourage colleagues to share your achievements with their managers in their own work updates.

3. Keep a ‘Brag File’ and bank your wins while they’re fresh.

4. Translate your function’s impact into language that your leadership team members understand. 

Read another article by Emma Georgiou: The Drama Triangle: Why your conflict training isn’t reaching the people who need it most

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Over half of enquiries to Business Disability Forum’s Advice Service are about meeting the needs of neurodivergent colleagues. And with an estimated 15 per cent of the UK population believed to be neurodivergent, employers are recognising that supporting neurodivergent colleagues to thrive is fundamental for business. 

Yet while many employers see the value of a diverse workforce, the City & Guilds Foundation’s Neurodiversity Index Report 2026 suggests a significant gap between managers’ confidence around neurodiversity and the practical support that neurodivergent team members receive.  

1. Understand neurodivergence

Managers cannot deliver the support that neurodivergent colleagues need without first gaining an understanding of how neurodivergence can impact on a person’s working day.

We all process information differently and this affects how we experience the world. People who are neurodivergent process information in a way which differs from what is considered typical. 

The term neurodivergent covers a wide range of conditions, including ADHD, autism and dyslexia. It also covers lesser-known conditions such as Development co-ordination disorder (dyspraxia), Tourette’s Syndrome and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). Some people may experience multiple conditions. 

Neurodivergent colleagues can bring many strengths to the workplace. This can include the ability to grasp concepts quickly and see “the big picture” in a way that others may not or, conversely, having an eye for detail and the ability to spot patterns.  But people who are neurodivergent often also face barriers working in a world not designed to meet their needs.

Barriers will vary depending on a person’s condition and their personal experience. Some common barriers include difficulties with time management and organisation, understanding workplace expectations and following verbal instructions.  

Neurodivergence is not experienced consistently. Factors such as stress, fatigue, illness, sensory overload, changing routines and overall wellbeing can affect someone’s experiences.

Managers should focus less on labels and more on barriers

2. Understand the manager’s role

Common mistakes managers can make include assuming that a diagnosis is needed before they are able to offer a colleague support. Or that a diagnosis tells them everything they need to know. 

Every neurodivergent person’s experience is different and people who have the same diagnosis may present differently from each other. #

Managers should focus less on labels and more on barriers. Instead of asking: “What is the diagnosis and what does this mean?”, rather ask: “What is making work difficult for you right now, and what can I do to help?”.

3. What to do when an employee shares they are neurodivergent

Some colleagues may feel uncomfortable sharing that they are neurodivergent as they may have experienced stigma or negative feedback previously. This makes the manager’s response even more important.

• Thank the colleague for being open
• Ask what support might help
• Focus on barriers rather than conditions or assumptions
• Listen carefully to their experiences
• Work together to identify solutions
• Reassure them about their value to the team
• Book in a time to follow up with them.

Some employees will already know what works for them and may suggest practical adjustments themselves. Others may be less certain and need guidance. HR teams should offer advice on adjustments and direct managers and colleagues to a workplace needs assessment if unsure.

4. How to spot when someone may need support

Of course, a colleague may not know they are neurodivergent or recognise that they need support. Many adults with neurodivergent conditions are undiagnosed. 

Managers should never attempt to diagnose a team member. But there are clear signs that someone may be struggling and could benefit from additional support, including:

• Persistent fatigue or exhaustion
• Anxiety about workload or performance
• Perfectionism that impacts productivity
• Sensitivity to negative feedback
• Frequent minor errors despite strong capability
• Fluctuations between intense focus and distraction
• Difficulty coping with uncertainty or change
• Sensory sensitivities to noise, light, temperature or smells
• Finding social interaction and meetings particularly draining.

These signs can have many causes and do not automatically indicate neurodivergence. The key is to approach conversations in a collaborative way. 

Asking about any difficulties the person is experiencing and the support they need will often be more productive than focusing on whether a particular condition is involved.

5. Make adjustments that work

The most effective adjustments are developed collaboratively. What works well for one person may be unhelpful for another. Managers and HR teams should also remember that support is rarely a one-off exercise. Adjustments should be reviewed regularly to ensure they remain effective as circumstances change.

A manager should work with the employee to identify what adjustments could help reduce or remove barriers. HR professionals can help managers identify adjustments that might work and to navigate the adjustments process. 

Put any adjustments in place as soon as possible. Waiting for adjustments can cause anxiety and negatively affect productivity. Remember that small changes can make a big difference and not all changes cost money. 

Review adjustments regularly to see if they are working and whether further support is needed. Make sure colleagues have time to learn new strategies and technologies and factor this in before assessing effectiveness.  

Asking about any difficulties the person is experiencing and the support they need will often be more productive than focusing on whether a particular condition is involved

A practical approach

A ‘Way of working’ document is a practical approach that many teams find helpful. The document is an easy way for team members to share their preferred ways of working with their manager and each other to gain the most productive and supportive environment for everyone. 

This can include preferred communication methods and timings for contact. Also, information about working styles that help them be productive and changes in behaviour that may show they are struggling as well as how they would like colleagues to respond.

The documents should be regularly reviewed and, if colleagues are comfortable to do so, discussed openly as a team. This allows colleagues to be aware of each other’s needs regardless of the presence or absence of disability or neurodivergence.

It is also a helpful way to spot and resolve any potential clashes where one colleague’s needs may conflict with another’s. A discussion can help determine work arounds which ensure everyone gets what they need and feels comfortable with the outcomes. 

Business Disability Forum’s new Supporting neurodiversity in the workplace: a practical guide for managers, provides tips and advice on discussing and putting in place adjustments, and links to factsheets on neurodivergence and common adjustments. 

If you found this article useful, read: What HR leaders get wrong about AI and disabled employees

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Summary: Research from Hult International Business School found that silo working is dominating despite understanding of the importance of collaboration. Five dynamics are making collaboration difficult to sustain. 

Our research with over 1,000 global leaders reveals a striking paradox: 90 per cent describe collaboration as essential for performance, innovation and long-term success, yet more than half report that silo working continues to dominate daily practice. 

Many organisations loudly endorse collaboration while unexamined, unnamed forces quietly undermine it.

This matters enormously right now. Organisations face competitive disruption, AI transformation and geopolitical volatility: challenges that no single function or leader can solve alone. These are precisely the problems that require people to think, decide and act together.

For senior HR leaders, this tension is both familiar and frustrating. The question is no longer whether collaboration matters, but why it proves so difficult to sustain. Our research — which underpins our new book, The Leader’s Guide to Collaboration, reveals that the answer lies not in a lack of goodwill, but in five subtle dynamics that quietly erode collective effort. We call them saboteurs.

1. Stuck in a silo

The silo mentality is consistently the number one saboteur. 

Under pressure, leaders retreat into their own domains, protecting resources, safeguarding metrics and focusing on immediate deliverables. This feels rational in the short term. The unintended consequence is a narrowing of perspective. Leaders hold information more tightly, cross-functional collaboration becomes conditional and organisational energy fragments.

As Dr Malte Gerhold, Director of Innovation at one of Europe’s leading healthcare charities, observed: “It’s strange how quickly people identify with their silos”. What begins as sensible boundary management gradually hardens into defensive behaviour.

How to diagnose it

Look for teams that consistently deliver within their boundaries but struggle to contribute beyond them. Listen for territorial language: “that’s not our problem”, “that’s a matter for HR.” Track where cross-functional projects stall. Often, the blockage is not capability but mindset.

The question is no longer whether collaboration matters, but why it proves so difficult to sustain

2. Wrong prioritisation

Forty per cent of leaders in our research believe they lack sufficient time to collaborate. Valerie Gervais, Head of Learning at Saint-Gobain, put it plainly: “People do not avoid collaboration consciously; they just get on with their jobs. This focus is often the enemy of collaboration”.

This is not simply a workload issue. It reflects deeper assumptions about what counts as ‘real work’. Leaders cancel alignment meetings and squeeze cross-team initiatives into overloaded schedules. The result is a damaging paradox: organisations that profess to value collaboration but structurally deprioritise it.

How to diagnose it

Audit how collaboration time is actually allocated in calendars versus how it appears in values statements. 

When collaborative work is repeatedly squeezed out and scheduling decisions are driven by hierarchy rather than genuine business need, the message to people is clear, whatever the rhetoric from the top.

3. I’m taking the credit

In hierarchical and political environments, recognition flows towards those with titles and authority, regardless of actual contribution. 

When people feel their efforts are absorbed into someone else’s success, trust erodes. They become more cautious, less willing to share ideas, and increasingly focused on protecting their own visibility.

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant identifies three types of people at work: givers, takers and matchers. Where takers dominate. 

Givers, those who share ideas, facilitate others and build collective success, become disillusioned. One experience of unfair credit allocation can shift someone’s orientation from collaborative to self-protective, and these shifts are contagious.

How to diagnose it

Listen to how success is attributed in leadership conversations, town halls and performance reviews. Is credit shared generously, or does it cluster around the most senior names? A simple pulse survey asking whether people feel their contributions are genuinely recognised can be instructive.

4. I want the rewards

Kevin Martin, Chief Research Officer at the Institute of Corporate Productivity, argues that individual incentive structures are the most powerful structural barrier to collaboration. 

Most performance management frameworks still reward individual achievement, even while strategy calls for cross-boundary working. People respond rationally to what is measured. If personal delivery is what’s incentivised, that is where effort will flow.

How to diagnose it

Map your formal incentive structure against the collaboration behaviours you want to see. Are bonus schemes, promotion criteria and performance objectives built around individual results alone? Are there any mechanisms (however small) that explicitly reward collective outcomes?

When people feel their efforts are absorbed into someone else’s success, trust erodes. They become more cautious, less willing to share ideas, and increasingly focused on protecting their own visibility

5. What’s our goal?

Perhaps the most fundamental saboteur is the absence of shared purpose. 

Collaboration requires far more effort than coordination. It relies on a clear and compelling sense of why people are working together. In our experience, this is absent more often than leaders realise. Without a genuine ‘why’, collaborative efforts fragment. Energy is spent on alignment rather than progress.

As Dr Gerhold puts it: “If there is not enough sense of commonality in what the organisation stands for, it’s very difficult to bring collaborators together”. When the purpose is clear and meaningful, collaboration becomes more intuitive. People invest in relationships, navigate tension and contribute beyond their formal roles.

How to diagnose it

Ask project members to articulate, in their own words, why this collaboration matters and what success looks like. If answers vary significantly, the purpose has not been genuinely established. Shared purpose is not a slide on a deck; it is a conversation that has happened.

Five insights for HR leaders

Understanding the saboteurs is the first step. Acting on them requires attention to the 3Ps: Purpose, People and Process.

1. Anchor collaborative initiatives in shared purpose. Before launching cross-functional work, invest time establishing a genuine ‘why’ – one that people have shaped, not just received.
2. Build the capability, not just the aspiration. Collaboration is a skill many leaders have never been taught. Invest in relational competencies: active listening, sharing credit, navigating disagreement and building trust across unfamiliar boundaries.
3. Redesign structures that undermine collaboration. Examine performance management and recognition frameworks. Even small adjustments in shared objectives, such as celebrating team success in senior forums, can begin to shift behaviour.
4. Protect time for collaboration as a strategic priority. Joint working will not happen by accident. Build it into how time is allocated and how priorities are set. Less collaboration, done well, is more powerful than over collaboration or poorly executed collaboration.
5. Make the saboteurs visible and name them. These dynamics persist because they are rarely surfaced. HR has a distinctive role in creating conditions for honest conversation through team reviews, 360-degree feedback and culture diagnostics.

Collaboration does not fail because people resist it. It fails because the environment pulls them in a different direction. 

By identifying and addressing these saboteurs through attention to purpose, people and process, HR leaders can shift collaboration from aspiration to practice and unlock far more of their organisation’s collective potential.

Your next read: Five steps: Your guide for leading with greater clarity

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Summary: Line managers can’t observe everything their people do, particularly across shifts, projects and matrix teams. Using policing as an example, this guide shows how to gather timely, firsthand feedback and weigh it fairly at review.

Quite often, formal accountability and firsthand observation can diverge in shift‑based, operational organisations. For instance, in policing, supervisors who complete performance reviews often don’t see much of the work they are expected to evaluate.  
 
This is because police work is 24/7, can involve rotating shifts, temporary postings and acting roles, and many decisions are made by frontline supervisors or peers rather than a single line manager. 

Research and practitioner guidance from organisations including the College of Policing note that this structure complicates traditional annual appraisal models, because the most meaningful evidence of performance is held by shift sergeants, field training officers, project leads, peers and other frequent collaborators, rather than the formal reviewer. 

This gap can create predictable problems for the supervisor: incomplete evidence, recency bias and missed development or recognition opportunities. Supervisors shouldn’t be expected to be omnipresent, instead observations from other colleagues should be portable, timely and useful, allowing supervisors to fairly weigh this feedback at the point of review. 

Map where the work was seen 

Supervisors should begin each review cycle by documenting where the employee worked since the last review, and who directly observed them. 

They should also identify whose accounts matter to the review process, meaning evidence and feedback should be gathered from shifts and temporary assignments, acting roles and projects.  

Gather targeted eyewitness evidence 

Managers can broaden feedback sources, but should focus on specific and firsthand examples rather than general impressions. A concrete account of how an officer coordinated colleagues during a complex incident from a colleague who was with the employee in the field is far more useful than a generic “good team player” comment from an office based peer. 

In order to keep feedback focused and actionable, HR should ask observers to record: 

• What happened 
• The context 
• The impact and outcome 
• The behaviour or capability was demonstrated 
• Any suggested next steps for development or recognition.

Supervisors shouldn’t be expected to be omnipresent, instead observations from other colleagues should be portable, timely and useful

Capture feedback while it’s useful 

Observers should be encouraged to contemporaneously record meaningful observations and not wait until the time of the performance review to recall or present information. 

Timely entries preserve context, reduce memory distortion and allow managers to act, whether it be recognising strong performance or addressing concerns, while the situation is fresh.

Incorporating the evidence

While collecting observations is valuable, it’s also important to interpret them correctly. Supervisors should incorporate the following to verify the feedback, so they can provide a balanced judgment of the employee and not simply aggregate opinions: 

• Assess source credibility – did the observer have direct sight of the behaviour? 
• Check specificity – is the example concrete and linked to role expectations? 
• Look for patterns – do similar themes recur across contexts and observers? 
• Resolve inconsistencies – probe or discount unsupported claims 
  

Link feedback to recognition, development and progression 

If role based competencies are measured as part of performance reviews, observations can also be recorded against these as evidence for promotion and development. 

The feedback provided can be used as evidence to answer: 

• What has the employee consistently demonstrated? 
• Which strengths are established and which are emerging? 
• What evidence supports readiness for greater responsibility? 
• What experience would close remaining gaps? 

By matching expectations to the level of responsibility, conversations on readiness for the next promotion can be held at review time. 

Stretch opportunities, such as acting assignments, mentoring, targeted training to close gaps and validate readiness can also be created during the annual review. 

These principles can be applied in many other workplaces

The need for continuous feedback isn’t unique to policing, it exists across many public and private sector organisations. 

For instance, doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals work across wards, departments and multidisciplinary teams. Local authority employees contribute to cross-functional projects and partnerships. 

In the private sector, employees may split their time across client accounts, project teams, regional operations or matrix management structures where different leaders see different aspects of their work.

As organisations become more complex, collaborative and specialised, the traditional assumption that a line manager directly observes most of an employee’s contribution becomes less reliable.

More meaning, better accuracy

In complex, collaborative organisations, fairness depends on capturing the work that actually happens. Portable, timely, role-linked observations let those who see the work record it, and help managers understand it. 

When managers synthesise that evidence thoughtfully, performance decisions become more accurate, development more targeted and recognition more meaningful.

As organisations become more complex, collaborative and specialised, the traditional assumption that a line manager directly observes most of an employee’s contribution becomes less reliable

Practical continuous feedback implementation tips for HR

1. Keep it simple: Provide a brief template and conduct short training sessions for observers in order to produce better entries. 
2. Respect governance: Processes should be designed to align with collective agreements, privacy rules and audit requirements. 
3. Train observers and reviewers: Teach objective observation, bias awareness and how to link examples to competencies. 
4. Choose secure tools: Digital systems make observations portable, but they must be auditable and access‑controlled. Data security is essential 
5. Frame feedback positively: Emphasis development and recognition to avoid perceptions of surveillance. 

If you enjoyed this, read: Framework: How to read your team’s culture without launching a transformation programme

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Research proves that this is a critical mistake. A report from Bain & company shows that: “Only 12% of business transformations achieve their original ambition, and those that do differentiate themselves by the way they manage talent”.

If talent is the vital factor, why are HR leaders left outside the room where strategic decisions are being made?

Running the HR function well is no longer enough

Rupert Brown, former CPO, researching for his book ‘Lost in Transformation’ met accomplished leaders who found themselves left out of the early conversations about transformation.  

He learned that one reason why HR leaders can fail to build a strategic presence is because of the operational pressures that are more familiar: “Their comfort zone pulls leaders back to HR expertise rather than transformation work”.  

However, when any leader wants strategic influence, they have to work for it. It takes time to build commercial credibility and trust. It’s a tough lesson to arrive too late to the table. “You can’t do a quick charm offensive when you suddenly want strategic influence,” says Brown.  

If you want business leaders to involve you instinctively while strategy is still taking shape, they need to know in advance the value that HR leaders can add. This is translating strategy into the leadership capability, organisation, culture and workforce changes needed to deliver it.  

Building strategic influence demands its own strategy

Many HR leaders feel that deliberate influencing can be seen as being political. They are conscious of their responsibilities to role model integrity and feel that there is a dilemma between pushing themselves forward and being seen as ethical and objective.

However, they need to become much clearer about the outcomes they really want for themselves and for the HR function, and to make conscious choices about what will help them to achieve them. 

If the desired outcome is that the CHRO is someone the CEO automatically involves in the early stages of strategic thinking, then building that profile and credibility has to become a priority in its own right.

If you want business leaders to involve you instinctively while strategy is still taking shape, they need to know in advance the value that HR leaders can add

Take control of how time is spent

Brown identified ‘Energy Vampires’ that suck up time. HR leaders may be hard-wired into employee relations case management, hiring and operational meetings and problem solving with stakeholders rather than shaping the agenda.  

Extricating themselves from these may be difficult. But is the only way to secure time to build and nurture the strategic relationships that will ensure involvement

A leader’s calendar is one useful test. If strategic influence genuinely matters, time needs to be scheduled and protected for understanding the business, building senior relationships and thinking ahead, and not dominated by the operational demands of running the function.

Five ways to build strategic influence before you need it

1. Be ‘a business leader who happens to be in HR’

Know how the organisation makes money, what drives performance, where the risks sit and which measures really matter. 

Strategic credibility grows when senior colleagues seek your view on the business, not only on HR. 

Keep strengthening that commercial knowledge so you can contribute confidently to discussions well beyond the traditional HR agenda.

2. Manage your time strategically

Take time to think proactively about what you want and then how to achieve that.  

Operational challenges are important, but they can crowd out time for understanding the business, building senior relationships and thinking strategically. 

Strategic influence will, in turn, enable you to promote the interests of your team and win the resources you need to effectively support the transformation.

3. Build positive political intelligence

Understanding how power works does not mean compromising your integrity. 

Map the stakeholders who shape important decisions, understand how influence really travels through the organisation and identify where you need stronger relationships before the next major change begins. 

The aim is to contribute while leaders are still deciding what to do, not after the decision has been made.

Strategic influence will, in turn, enable you to promote the interests of your team and win the resources you need

4. Be courageous and use your depth and breadth of insight

Commercial understanding and good judgement make constructive challenges easier. 

HR also has uniquely broad visibility across the organisation. This can give the CHRO a perspective that few other senior leaders possess.

Good people data strengthens that position. Use reliable people analytics to move discussion beyond instinct and anecdote, connect workforce issues directly to business risks and decisions and show what is happening, why it matters and where the business may need to act differently.

5. Invest in building trust

Trust grows through consistency, judgement and the way you handle difficult conversations. The CEO needs to know that you understand what the business is trying to achieve and that you will challenge constructively when the evidence or your judgement says it is necessary.

Treat trust as something you build continuously: be dependable under pressure, respect confidences and be clear about where you stand. 

Trust also runs both ways. Strategic partnership is stronger when the CHRO knows their judgement will be respected when they are not in the room.

Strategic influencing starts before transformation

None of this can be created quickly when transformation suddenly becomes urgent. The relationships, judgement and credibility that give a CHRO or HR leader genuine strategic influence accumulate through everyday choices long before that moment arrives.

That is why the best time to earn the seat next to the CEO is before there is a transformation program to discuss. 

Do the groundwork early and HR is far more likely to help shape the strategy, rather than simply deliver decisions that have already been made.

For more insights, you can attend the webinar: ‘How to be a strategic partner to the CEO’.

If you enjoyed this Five Steps article, you can read another: Five Steps: How HRBPs can become culture change accelerators

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It fails in the meeting where a bad engagement score lands on the table. The room gets uncomfortable, somebody suggests a listening session, somebody else says maybe it’s time for a values refresh, and within 40 minutes there’s a plan. Visible, schedulable, reportable next quarter.

Not one person has asked what’s actually growing here, or why.

I’ve spent years inside other people’s cultures, and I can tell you the thing that predicts whether culture work lands. It isn’t budget. It isn’t executive sponsorship. It’s whether anybody diagnosed the problem before they started solving it. 

Skip that step and you spend a year treating symptoms while the conditions underneath carry on exactly as they were, which is the organisational equivalent of putting makeup on a zombie and calling it alive.

The good news is that the first honest look doesn’t need a 12-month roadmap. It needs you to be willing to look at four things and not flinch.

The four conditions

I created a framework called SERN to make this looking easier. Soil, Exposure, Roots, Nutrients.

It came out of a pattern I kept noticing. I’d walk into two organisations with near-identical values statements, similar budgets, equally well-meaning leaders. In one, people were thriving. In the other, people were surviving until a better offer came along.

The difference was never the diversity statement or the good intentions. It was the growing conditions, and nobody was looking at those.

1. Soil is the cultural reality of your organisation 

Not the values on the careers page. What people actually experience on a wet Tuesday. It’s accumulated history, old grievances nobody resolved and the quiet lessons people have learned about what genuinely gets rewarded around here.

One team I worked with had psychological safety on the wall in a lovely font. That same year, the two people promoted were the two most aggressive people in the building. Everybody learned the real lesson inside a fortnight. No workshop was ever going to unteach it.

2. Exposure is who gets the light

Who presents to the board, whose name goes on the deck, whose work quietly gets absorbed into somebody else’s success story. Exposure patterns tell you who the organisation has already decided is going places.

Leaders love to file this under confidence. She needs to put herself forward more. He should speak up in meetings. Then you look at the last two years and the same three people have been handed every visible project going. That isn’t a confidence problem.

3. Roots are the informal networks holding the whole thing together

Whisper networks, group chats, the woman on the third floor everyone goes to in a crisis even though it appears nowhere in her job description. Roots are where your real culture lives. Not the town hall. Never the town hall.

Strong roots keep organisations upright through genuinely appalling weather. They’re also where the truth gets stored, which is why leaders are usually the last people in the building to hear it.

4. Nutrients are what people actually need to grow

Real development, genuine influence over decisions, sponsorship, protected time, safety. Not the perks. A team can be fed on pizza Fridays and still be starving.

Nutrients are almost never spread evenly, and how they’re distributed tells you plainly who this place thinks matters.

t’s accumulated history, old grievances nobody resolved and the quiet lessons people have learned about what genuinely gets rewarded around here

Four questions to ask before you plan a single thing

Here’s the practical bit. Before your next culture initiative goes anywhere near a calendar, sit down and answer these four. One per element. No survey required, no budget, nobody’s permission.

Soil

Look at your last three promotions or high-profile assignments. What behaviour did they genuinely reward, and does that match what you say you value?

Exposure

Name everyone on your team who has presented to senior leadership in the past six months. Now name everyone who hasn’t. Sit with why that second list looks the way it does.

Roots

When something goes wrong, who do people go to first? Is that person in that role on the org chart, and are they recognised for it or quietly being drained by it?

Nutrients

Who has had a real growth opportunity this year? Who has been called reliable or steady for three years running? That word is very often where careers go to sit down.

The rule I give clients is blunt. If you can’t answer all four with evidence rather than a feeling, you’re not ready to plan anything. Go and find out first.

What you’ll find

Answering those four honestly usually goes one of two ways.

Sometimes it’s a relief. The problem turns out to be far more specific than the mood in the room suggested. One unresolved incident sitting in the soil. One manager hoarding exposure like it’s the last packet of biscuits. Nameable, and considerably smaller than the transformation programme somebody was about to propose.

The other outcome is less comfortable. You lay the four answers next to each other and they all point the same way. The conditions are producing exactly what they were built to produce, the pattern is older than you are, and it doesn’t sit inside your remit.

That’s still enormously useful. Knowing which of those two you’re dealing with is the difference between fixing something and performing the fixing of it for eighteen months while everyone gets quietly more tired.

Strong roots keep organisations upright through genuinely appalling weather. They’re also where the truth gets stored

Where the first look runs out

Let me be straight with you about the limits, since pretending they don’t exist would waste your time and mine.

Four questions get you an honest first look at your own team. They won’t get you your organisation. That has nothing to do with how capable you are. People don’t tell the truth about soil toxicity to the person who writes their review. Root systems are invisible on purpose, since they exist precisely because the official channels weren’t safe. The more accurate your suspicion, the less likely anybody is to confirm it to your face.

There’s also the small matter of you standing in it. Everybody is nose-blind to their own culture, which is why the most useful question in the room is nearly always the one everyone stopped noticing was strange.

This is where diagnosis becomes proper work rather than a good conversation. Reading the four elements against each other, knowing which finding is the cause and which is the symptom, gathering what people won’t say out loud, and turning all of it into a sequence somebody can actually act on. That’s method, and method is what I do for a living.

Start with your own patch this week regardless. Culture work doesn’t begin with a plan. It begins with looking at what you’re already growing and being willing to admit you grew it.

If you enjoyed this practical framework, check out another: Framework: Four steps for turning failure into fuel

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Summary: Leadership development works best when managers stop measuring their worth by how quickly they solve problems, and instead judge conversations by whether people leave feeling more capable and confident.

I spend a lot of time working with HR teams who invest heavily in leadership and management development. They want managers to have better conversations that build confidence, ownership and capability.

I’ve noticed a pattern. The leaders and managers I’ve worked with across different organisations rarely fall back into old habits because they’ve forgotten the training. 

They slip back because they haven’t shifted their beliefs about the role. They still believe what I believed when I first became a line manager. 

That good managers are the ones with all the answers. The person everyone turns to when the going gets tough, or when problems need solving. 

It’s time to shift beliefs about the leadership role

In my early career, I wasn’t a terrible manager. I cared deeply about my team. I worked hard and I wanted everyone to succeed. The problem was, if someone asked for help, I would jump on it. Fast. 

In fact, I liked being the person people came to. It made me feel valuable. 

The challenge was … they always came to me.

Most days felt like standing in front of one of those tennis ball machines. Questions came flying from every direction: “Jo, can you just do this?”.  “Jo can you just do that?”.

I’d answer one question, only for another to be lobbed in my direction.

At the time, I thought that was leadership and I genuinely thought that I was building trust.

It never crossed my mind that I might actually be building dependency. And unfortunately, that dependency was on me. 

Ask more, talk less

Eventually one of my own managers noticed something.  

One day he said: “Jo, while you keep answering everybody’s questions, you’ll always get more questions”. He followed it with:

“You’re not helping people to think. In fact, you’re holding the team back.”

I thought: “Hang on…what??”. 

I’d genuinely thought I was helping.

Then he said something that has shaped everything I’ve done since.

“The best leaders ask the best questions. You need to ask more and tell less.”

Looking back, that conversation didn’t simply change how I managed. It changed how I thought about leadership. Until then, I’d measured my value by how many answers I could provide. 

I’d mistaken being needed for being effective. Every time someone came to me with a problem, I felt I was doing a good job. What I couldn’t see was that the more my team relied on me, the less they were relying on themselves.

It never crossed my mind that I might actually be building dependency. And unfortunately, that dependency was on me

A new measure of success

Slowly but surely, I started measuring my success differently. Not by how many problems I solved, but by how often someone left a conversation believing they could solve the next one themselves.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I’d stopped doing everybody else’s thinking for them.

That experience has changed how I think about leadership development too.

Some people assume leaders and managers revert to old habits because they need another model, another framework or another refresher session.

In my experience, leadership development starts to stick when they stop:

• Seeing leading as something they do and start seeing it as part of who they are 
• Believing their job is to be the smartest person in the room
• Measuring their worth by how quickly they solve somebody else’s problem.

Because once that belief changes, something magical happens.

The questions change. The listening changes. The conversations become different. And, over time, culture begins to change too.

The hidden magic of asking questions

Not long after that feedback, I was working with one of my team. 

We were trying to solve a problem. Or perhaps more accurately, was trying to solve it. I was doing all the talking. All the thinking. I was emptying my pockets of all my best ideas. 

My team member couldn’t get a word in edgeways. 

Eventually, when I’d exhausted all my best ideas, exasperated, I stopped and asked one simple question:

“What would you recommend?”.

And with that, his best ideas came flooding out. And they were way better than mine.  

He had the answers all along. 

I remember thinking, “Why didn’t I ask him that question first?”.

It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times since.

Eventually, when I’d exhausted all my best ideas, exasperated, I stopped and asked one simple question

Is your conversation creating capability or dependency?

Perhaps that’s why the success of leadership development should be judged differently. Not by how many models managers can remember, but by what people think and feel after a conversation with them. 

Do they leave feeling more capable, more confident, more willing to think for themselves?

Or do they leave believing they still need the leader to provide the answers?

Every conversation has an impact. The question is whether it’s capability … or dependency.

Actionable insights

• Observe managers after leadership programmes, not just during them. The real test is whether their everyday conversations have changed.
• Encourage leaders and managers to pause before answering questions and ask themselves: Am I solving today’s problem or building tomorrow’s capability?
• Help managers reflect on how they define success. Is it being the person with the answers, or developing people who can think for themselves?
• Review the leadership programmes to ensure they challenge beliefs about leadership, not just teach new skills.

If you enjoyed this article, read: Why experts need to embrace the beginners mindset

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Summary: The first 30 days of a new leadership role are about defining your repurpose, building resilience and prioritising wellbeing. These crucial foundations will enable you to set yourself up for success.

Stepping into a new leadership role can bring pressure to make an immediate impact. But the strongest starts are not always about delivering quick wins. The early days are an opportunity to establish your leadership purpose, build resilience and set a clear direction for the road ahead.

Define your leadership purpose

Many new leaders focus on proving themselves through quick wins, but lasting influence comes from leaders knowing what they stand for, says Tim Castle, Negotiation expert and performance coach at The Negotiator’s Edge.

“Effective leadership in the first 90 days starts with getting ‘crystal clear’ on what meaningful impact means to you. Take the time to learn who you are at your core, what you want to be known for and how you operate,” he states.

For Castle, meaningful impact mixes integrity, passion and commitment. It helps leaders make tough decisions, giving them an edge.

“If you don’t establish what you stand for from the offset, the world will tell you,” he continues. “Without direction, the risk is that new leaders drift, accept mediocrity and make decisions from a place of fear rather than aligned with strategy.

“While everyone else is rushing around, playing someone else’s game, those leaders focusing on staying true to their own values and purpose are playing a bigger game. This is what gets them into bigger rooms and a seat at the table,” Castle summarises.

Build emotional resilience

Taking on a new leadership role brings inevitable uncertainty, pressure and setbacks. This makes emotional resilience an important capability from the outset. Executive coach, mentor and transformation specialist Dr Claire Handby argues that resilience is often misunderstood as toughness or stoicism. 

“Real resilience is more nuanced than that. It is the quiet, steady belief that no matter what happens, there is a way through and I will find it,” she explains. At its heart is a powerful mindset shift of determination, and a ‘I can handle this’ attitude.

“Those four words carry enormous strength. This belief and attitude can help leaders respond to challenges without allowing setbacks to erode confidence or judgement. The mindset says: I’ve handled hard things before. I always find a way. And emotional growth followed as a result.”

Handby sees the early stages of leadership, at any level, as an opportunity to develop this capacity: “Every stretch and every discomfort also provides an element of training. New muscles are built, not just of skill but of self-trust”.

She concludes that for new leaders, building that resilience from the outset can provide the confidence and self-trust needed to navigate the challenges of the role and grow into the leader they want to become. “Remember: If you are feeling uncomfortable, that is where growth sits, so lean into it, not out!.” 

Effective leadership in the first 90 days starts with getting ‘crystal clear’ on what meaningful impact means to you – Tim Castle

Prioritise wellbeing from day one

According to Lesley Cooper, Founder of consultancy WorkingWell, it’s easy for new leaders to lose sight of their own wellbeing when they become responsible for setting the tone for their teams. Yet looking after oneself is essential to sustaining high performance in the long run.

“Much like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others, it means recognising the importance of self-care before attempting to support those around you,” she notes.

Her advice is to actively prioritise regular recovery. “It can feel as though there simply isn’t time to step back, with so many demands competing for your attention in the first few weeks. But scheduling time for self-care and staying mindful of your body’s basic needs puts you in a much stronger position to manage those demands,” she says.

“Some healthy habits include intentionally recovering energy every 90-120 minutes, incorporating exercise and movement, ensuring you eat nutritious foods and stay hydrated, and maintaining regular sleep patterns.”

She adds that visibly prioritising your own wellbeing helps foster a culture that recognises the relationship between wellbeing and performance. “Leadership is as much about what you permit others to do as what you do yourself, so modelling these behaviours sets the standard for your team,” she concludes.

Lead with vision, deliver with action

“One of the greatest challenges for new leaders is balancing two very different roles: visionary and operator,” points out leadership mentor Steve Muscat Azzopardi. The visionary sets the long-term direction for the business and its people. The operator, meanwhile, stays close to the day-to-day realities of running it. For new leaders, being effective means balancing both and knowing when to look ahead, and when to get closer to the action.

The visionary role is about creating a clear destination. Rather than relying on a vague mission statement framed on the wall, Muscat Azzopardi recommends using a “Postcard from the Future” to make the vision tangible. “Imagine your business three years from now. Who are your clients? What are you known for? What do you no longer do?,” he posits.

But vision only becomes meaningful when it informs what happens day to day. As an operator, leaders need to remain connected to the daily running of the business, understanding the challenges their teams face and being prepared to step in when needed. “Effective leadership is about holding both perspectives at once: keeping sight of long-term ambition while understanding what is required to move the business forward day to day,” Muscat Azzopardi states.

That means being deliberate about the choices along the way: “As a new leader, you need to be clinical in recognising which turns will move you up the mountain and which will instead send you off a cliff,” he states.

Visibly prioritising your own wellbeing helps foster a culture that recognises the relationship between wellbeing and performance – Lesley Cooper

Actionable insights

• Get “crystal clear” on your leadership purpose. Define what you stand for, what you want to be known for and what meaningful impact means to you. You can then make decisions from a place of alignment rather than fear.
• Build your emotional resilience. Develop an “I can handle this” mindset and lean into discomfort. Use setbacks and challenges to build self-trust and the confidence to navigate uncertainty.
• Prioritise your wellbeing from day one. Schedule regular recovery, movement, nutritious food, hydration and sleep. Looking after yourself puts you in a stronger position to support others.
• Make your vision tangible and connect it to action. Use a “Postcard from the Future” to define your long-term destination. Stay connected to the day-to-day realities required to move the business forward.
• Hold the visionary and operator perspectives at once. Keep sight of long-term ambition while understanding what is required day to day. Be deliberate about which choices will “move you up the mountain” rather than send you “off the cliff”.

If you enjoyed this article, read: The fragmented leader is finished: A new path to whole leadership

The post The first 30 days: Kickstarting your new leadership role appeared first on HRZone.

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Summary: Storytelling helps create shared meaning, vision and trust, making the change process more inclusive and successful. By engaging emotions and fostering a shared identity, stories enable teams to connect on a deeper level and drive positive change that data and rational arguments alone cannot achieve.

In today’s business environment, where innovation, engagement and resilience are key, HR leaders face an evolving challenge: building teams that thrive amid uncertainty. 

Surprisingly, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal doesn’t come from technology, frameworks or systems. It comes from an age-old human instinct: storytelling.

Storytelling is not just about sharing anecdotes. It’s about shaping identity, building trust and creating a sense of shared purpose that analytical metrics alone cannot achieve. As HR professionals or organisational leaders, harnessing the power of stories can mean the difference between a group of individuals and a cohesive team aligned by purpose.

Why stories matter in the workplace

Humans are hardwired for stories. Unlike static facts or data points, stories engage both logic and emotion, enabling people to interpret complex ideas in relatable, meaningful ways. 

Storytelling helps teams make sense of change, connect to goals and values, and feel inspired to act. It creates a shared narrative that fosters identity and belonging: two critical components for employee engagement and retention. Moreover, research on leadership communication underlines that authentic narratives build trust and empathy, two qualities vital for managing through uncertainty. 

When leaders share their ‘why’ – the underlying motivation and vision – they invite others to join them in co-creating a future, rather than simply following instructions. Without storytelling, attempts at transformation or engagement often fall flat because they fail to reach people on a human level​​.

The power of co-creation  

One of the biggest misconceptions about workplace storytelling is that it’s a one-way transmission from leader to team. In reality, the most effective storytelling is interactive and inclusive, where team members feel like active participants in shaping the narrative.

HR leaders can take inspiration from techniques in participatory storytelling, used successfully in multi-stakeholder environments where traditional top-down communication fails. 

Instead of prescribing values or change, organisations that co-create stories with their employees build stronger engagement because individuals see themselves reflected in the bigger picture. This sense of agency boosts both morale and accountability​​.

As an experiment, instead of launching a change initiative with a slide deck full of stats, invite employees to share personal stories about what the company’s mission means to them. Collate these into a collective narrative that celebrates diversity while at the same time uniting everyone under shared purpose.

Without storytelling, attempts at transformation or engagement often fall flat because they fail to reach people on a human level​​

Driving culture through story

Stories do more than communicate. They shape culture. In fact, many organisations already use this technique informally by recognising employee achievements through success stories, sharing customer-impact anecdotes in meetings or celebrating examples of going the extra mile during crises.

According to leadership best practices, story sharing succeeds when it reinforces desired behaviours and cultural norms. For instance, highlighting stories of collaboration and innovation sends a powerful message to teams on what is valued within the organisation. 

For example, Gillian Secrett, former CEO of the Møller Institute, adopted this strategy successfully by using stories to celebrate client satisfaction and internal teamwork, reinforcing the culture of excellence and service​​.

Context is key

It is important to remember, however, that one size does not fit all. Context significantly shapes how stories land. Timing, audience mindset and setting all affect impact. If your team has just finished a tense budget meeting, a visionary tale of innovation might not resonate. Instead, aligning storytelling with the audience’s emotional and situational context increases receptivity.

Some leaders even go a step further by immersing stakeholders in real-world experiences, enabling them to ‘live’ the story themselves, such as visiting project sites to witness positive change and talk to individuals on the ground. This approach moves people from passive listeners to active participants in the organisation’s narrative​​.

Storytelling is not just a soft skill; it is a strategic capability for HR leaders who want to build engaged, cohesive and resilient teams

The science behind storytelling

Storytelling works because it influences emotions and decision making more effectively than raw data. Neuroscience reveals that narratives engage both the rational and emotional centres of the brain, making messages stickier and more persuasive. 

For HR leaders striving to promote diversity, engagement or wellbeing, facts alone won’t shift behaviour but stories will.

Storytelling is not just a soft skill; it is a strategic capability for HR leaders who want to build engaged, cohesive and resilient teams. 

By fostering shared narratives, co-creating meaning with employees, and using stories thoughtfully in context, HR can transform workplace culture and amplify the impact of change initiatives. 

Stories humanise strategy, connect people emotionally to purpose and create a sense of belonging that statistics alone cannot achieve.

Actionable insights

• Start with your own story: Articulate your professional purpose and values authentically.
• Create spaces for story-sharing: From onboarding to team retrospectives, embed storytelling into processes.
• Balance personal and organisational narratives: Align individual experiences with company vision for stronger buy-in.
• Leverage multiple formats: Use digital platforms, town halls or informal circles – wherever your employees already engage.
• Celebrate small wins: Share stories of progress and learning, not just outcomes, to sustain motivation.

Your next read: The fragmented leader is finished: A new path to whole leadership

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Summary: Organisations have invested heavily in AI, yet employee usage is less than expected. The barrier is the environment, not the technology: culture, peer learning, focus time and workplace design determine whether adoption takes hold.

Every major technological revolution has changed what an organisation values. The Industrial Revolution reduced the importance of physical labour and increased the value of knowledge work. AI may be creating a similar shift. 

As access to knowledge, content generation and analysis becomes increasingly universal, the capabilities that become scarce are likely to become significantly more valuable. 

The challenge for most organisations is that many of these capabilities have historically been difficult to measure, develop and reward. Which is something HR needs to quickly figure out. Because as these activities become automated, organisations will rediscover the value of skills that are now far harder to replicate.

The first scarce skill is expertise

One of the more surprising findings from recent AI research is that automation does not appear to reduce the value of human expertise. In fact, it may increase it. 

Anthropic’s analysis of hundreds of thousands of coding sessions found that the most successful users were not necessarily the strongest programmers. They were the people with the deepest understanding of the specific problem being solved.

This has huge implications for workforce strategy. The competitive advantage is shifting from execution to judgement. AI can write code, generate reports and create content. What it cannot do effectively is understand organisational context, customer needs, business priorities or the nuanced realities of a particular industry.

In practice, this means experienced professionals may become more valuable, not less. The employee who knows when an AI-generated answer is incomplete, misleading or inappropriate possesses a capability that technology cannot easily replace.

The competitive advantage is shifting from execution to judgement

The second scarcity is agency

As AI systems increasingly generate recommendations, plans and solutions, there is a risk that employees become passive consumers of advice rather than active decision makers. Yet organisations do not create value through analysis alone. They create value through action.

Agency is the willingness to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. It is taking ownership when there is no perfect answer. AI can recommend a course of action, but it cannot be accountable for the consequences. 

Organisations must attempt to deliberately preserve opportunities for employees to exercise judgement rather than outsourcing every decision to technology.

The third scarcity is prioritisation

AI is exceptionally good at producing possibilities. It can generate hundreds of ideas, identify multiple opportunities and model countless scenarios. However, most organisations do not suffer from a shortage of options, they suffer from a shortage of focus.

As information has become abundant, prioritisation is now increasingly valuable. A critical leadership skill of the AI era will be determining what should be done with AI and what should remain human.

For HR leaders, this presents an important challenge. Many organisations have spent decades rewarding activity, responsiveness and volume. Future performance may depend more on focus, restraint and strategic judgement. When every opportunity appears viable, the ability to say no becomes a competitive advantage.

The fourth scarcity is human connection

The history of self-service checkouts offers an instructive lesson for AI. Retailers introduced the technology to improve efficiency, yet many later acknowledged they had underestimated the value customers place on human interaction.

Financial services organisations who outsource customer service to AI and later re-employed service agents realised the value of empathy in their consumer interactions. 

Customers are generally comfortable using AI for straightforward transactional tasks. However, when situations become complex, emotional or personally significant, they continue to prefer human interaction.

This distinction matters because many organisational processes are not purely transactional. Employees, customers and managers often need reassurance, empathy and understanding as much as they need information. Technology can accelerate transactions, but it cannot fully replace relationships.

As information has become abundant, prioritisation is now increasingly valuable

AI may make wisdom itself scarce

Knowledge is becoming easier to access than at any point in history. Intelligent systems can explain concepts, generate analysis and provide recommendations in seconds. Yet wisdom is not the same as knowledge.

Wisdom requires context, experience, reflection and moral judgement. It helps organisations answer questions that technology cannot resolve. Just because a process can be automated does not mean it should be. Just because a decision can maximise efficiency does not mean it serves employees, customers or society. These are fundamentally human questions.

For HR leaders, the future skills agenda should not focus exclusively on digital capability. Technical fluency will remain important, but the capabilities likely to create sustained value are increasingly human ones: expertise, judgement, agency, prioritisation, empathy and wisdom.

LinkedIn’s latest Skills on the Rise research supports this direction. Strategic thinking, communication, relationship building, stakeholder management, adaptability and conflict resolution feature prominently among the fastest-growing skills. These are not capabilities that become less important as AI advances. They become more important because they become scarcer.

The organisations that succeed with AI will not be the ones that automate the most work. They will be the ones that become intentional about protecting and developing the uniquely human capabilities that technology cannot yet replicate. 

As intelligence becomes abundant, scarcity will determine value. The scarcest resource yet may be human judgement.

Actionable insights

1. Assess the conditions for adoption. Management support, cultural attitudes, scope to experiment and employee confidence determine whether AI tools get used or ignored.

2. Treat peer learning as a capability. Much AI learning happens informally, through shared prompts, discussion of use cases and observing early adopters.

3. Protect time and conditions for focus. Using AI well involves analysis, critical thinking and problem solving, all of which need sustained attention. Noise, interruptions, lighting, acoustics and air quality affect cognitive performance.

4. Design hybrid working around the task. Remote work tends to suit focused work, while the office supports relationship building and social learning. AI adoption needs both.

5. Challenge legacy workplace models. Many workplaces still prioritise density over concentration, and privacy over collaboration.

Gethin Nadin’s third book Heart in the Age of the Mechanical: What work we give AI, and what we keep human was published worldwide on 9 October 2026.

Read another article by Gethin Nadin: Seven principles for successful workplaces in this age of AI 

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Summary: HR professionals devote enormous energy to helping others thrive, but that outward focus can gradually erode their own wellbeing. Three reflective questions can help them reconnect with themselves, rebalance their purpose and build a more sustainable way of serving others.

Jacqui loves working in HR. Supporting people to become the best version of themselves gives her a deep sense of purpose.

Yet that purpose also became a source of pressure, because she was so focused on other people’s needs that she stopped noticing her own. She absorbed difficult conversations, made herself constantly available and treated exhaustion as evidence of commitment. And eventually, the work that once energised her began to drain her.

Jacqui is a composite of HR professionals the world over. Their circumstances differ, but the pattern is familiar: when you spend your working life filling everybody else’s cup, it is easy to overlook your own until it is almost empty.

The paradox of caring

HR professionals regularly encourage employees to set boundaries, seek support and protect their wellbeing. However, applying the same advice to themselves can feel strangely selfish.

This reveals a paradox. Being driven by service is valuable, but selflessness without sufficient self-care becomes unsustainable. Conversely, caring for yourself is not selfish when it preserves your capacity to care for others. The objective is therefore not to choose between selfishness and selflessness. It is to hold them in balance.

To achieve this, World Mental Health Day offers an opportunity to pause and ask three deceptively simple questions.

When you spend your working life filling everybody else’s cup, it is easy to overlook your own until it is almost empty

Question one: Who am I?

HR professionals can become defined by what others need them to be: adviser, mediator, confidant, problem-solver or steady presence during a crisis.

Jacqui had become so closely identified with being ‘the person who helps’ that saying no felt like betraying who she was. By reflecting on ‘Who am I?’, she recognised that her role was part of her identity, not its entirety.

She also acknowledged qualities she had pushed aside: her need for quiet, her creativity and her identity outside work. This gave her a more grounded sense of self, one that did not depend entirely on being useful to other people.

Practical action: 

List the roles you play at work and beyond it. Then ask: ‘Which parts of me are receiving energy, and which have I neglected?’ Choose one neglected part to make space for this week.

Question two: Why am I here?

Purpose can be both sustaining and consuming.

There is a selfish and a selfless dimension to it. We want to contribute beyond ourselves, but we also want our lives to feel successful and fulfilling. Problems arise when one side overwhelms the other.

Jacqui’s purpose had narrowed into an unlimited obligation to help. She reframed it as helping people thrive while allowing herself to thrive too. The contribution remained important, but sacrifice was no longer the measure of its value.

This is a lesson I have had to learn myself. Helping others has always come naturally to me. Asking for help has not. For years, I associated self-sufficiency with strength. Recognising that I could not live or work well in isolation made seeking support part of my practice, rather than evidence that I had failed.

Practical action: 

Complete two sentences: ‘The difference I want to make is…’ and ‘For that contribution to be sustainable, I need…’ If the second answer is continually absent from your working life, your purpose needs rebalancing.

Question three: How will I live?

Insight matters only when it changes how we invest our time and energy.

Jacqui stopped treating wellbeing as something she would address after the next difficult period. She built small practices into ordinary days such as protecting her lunch break, creating thinking time between emotionally demanding meetings, and having a regular conversation with someone she trusted.

She also paused before accepting new demands and asked: ‘Is this issue mine to carry?’ Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes the responsibility belonged elsewhere.

These choices didn’t change her level of commitment. But it did help her direct her energy more intentionally, where she became more present, made clearer decisions and supported colleagues without absorbing every problem as her own.

Practical action: 

Identify one recurring situation that leaves you depleted. Decide whether to stop it, share it, shorten it or recover deliberately afterwards. Put that decision into your diary rather than leaving it as an intention.

Recognising that I could not live or work well in isolation made seeking support part of my practice, rather than evidence that I had failed

Care must include the carer

The three questions form a continuing cycle, not a one-off wellbeing exercise because our identity evolves, our purpose needs reviewing, and our daily practice inevitably drifts.

For HR leaders, reflection is therefore part of responsible practice. You are not separate from the people whose wellbeing you work to protect and so directing some of your care towards yourself does not diminish your service to others. 

It makes that service more sustainable and, ultimately, more impactful.

Actionable insights

1. Remember that your HR role is part of your identity, not the whole of it.
   
2. Balance contribution to others with a clear understanding of what you need to thrive.
   
3. Translate reflection into small, protected practices in your diary.
   
4. Ask ‘Is this mine to carry?’ before automatically absorbing another demand.
   
5. Treat seeking help as a sustainable professional practice, not a personal failure.

If you found this article useful, read: When positive action works (and when it doesn’t)

The post What every HR leader should ask themselves about their wellbeing appeared first on HRZone.

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Summary: Unconscious gender bias continues to influence workplace culture, even in sectors that have become more inclusive. Everyday moments, along with media and pop culture, reinforce outdated ideas about who holds authority. Yet the business case for change is clear, as gender-diverse teams are linked to stronger profitability.

Unconscious bias and stereotyping determine how we perceive others, often without us even realising. 

In the workplace, these generalisations frequently revolve around gender. While the real estate sector has become more inclusive, echoes of its male-dominated past persist, and while developments have undoubtedly been made, the path to true equality is still being paved.

Caregiving and missed opportunities

For women, one of the most persistent gender stereotypes centres on caregiving. Maternity leave is, by default, seen as a given, and the obligation of raising children is assumed to fall on them. 

But it doesn’t stop there. Even when it comes to pets, the expectation lingers. For instance, the responsibility of organising a dog’s care is typically left to a woman. 

Age plays a significant role in gender-based biases, too; especially when women are of ‘childbearing age’. There’s a prevalent assumption that all women desire to become mothers which, in some cases, leads to expectations about their professional trajectories. 

These biases can result in missed opportunities, with employers making unfair judgments about commitment. At the same time, this archaic perspective also overlooks a growing trend: many individuals are proudly choosing to remain childfree.

Lost in translation

Communication barriers don’t just exist between different countries. They exist between genders, too. 

Despite speaking the same language, words can perpetuate dated stereotypes. To illustrate, when a woman is assertive, she’s regularly dismissed as “bossy” and when she makes firm decisions, she’s labelled “grumpy.”

This is where inequality takes root. For women who absorb this kind of ‘feedback’, self-doubt can creep in, making them question their place in leadership. 

Meanwhile, if a man were to stand in front of his team and say: “This is a priority, and that’s the next step“, he’d likely be praised as a strong leader. 

The expressions we use shape perceptions. And to shift those interpretations, our dialogue needs to adjust.

Assumptions in action

This bias runs even deeper than language. It seeps into everyday moments, small but telling, that expose deeply rooted gender preconceptions.

Take this example. Early in my career, I attended an event to present alongside three male colleagues. Before we even began, an older gentleman approached me and asked: “Where do I get a cup of tea?” . He didn’t ask the men standing beside me. Even my coworkers were taken aback.

It doesn’t just happen in the office, though. A member of our team recently went to buy a car. She was with her dad, yet despite it being her purchase, the salesperson bypassed her and spoke directly to him. 

While minor on their own, these snapshots collectively reinforce old-fashioned ideas about who holds authority – and who doesn’t.

The expressions we use shape perceptions. And to shift those interpretations, our dialogue needs to adjust

Pop culture and perception

Media has come a long way from the days when marketing campaigns exclusively depicted women under stereotypical identities – nappy adverts, for illustration, almost always portrayed women. 

In some ways, social media has played its part in shifting these narratives, but outdated views linger.

Take a 2023 article from Personnel Today. It featured an AI-generated image created by merging the faces of FTSE 100 CEOs (only 10 per cent of whom are women). The outcome was a strikingly familiar-looking figure named ‘Andrew’. A face that looked just like the majority of today’s CEOs. It’s a stark reminder that progress is still needed. 

There’s undeniable value in having more women at senior levels. It’s not just about fairness, it’s about impact. A study by McKinsey & Company shows that businesses with gender-diverse teams are more profitable. 

In fact, government data reveals that women now hold 43 per cent of board positions and 35 per cent of leadership roles across FTSE 350 companies, highlighting how leading names acknowledge diversity as a driver of success.

Tackling bias head-on

At LRG, unconscious bias workshops are available to any member of staff and form part of LRG’s forward-thinking EmpowerHER strategy, 

While education plays a crucial role in removing the limitations that come with unconscious bias and stereotyping, learning alone isn’t enough. Speaking up matters just as much. If we want lasting change, we need to support one another – men and women alike. 

That means calling out bias when we see it and backing each other in moments that matter.

Actionable insights

1. Offer bias workshops to everyone. Open unconscious bias sessions to all staff and make them one part of a wider inclusion strategy, as LRG does with EmpowerHER.
2. Encourage people to speak up. Education alone isn’t enough. Back men and women to call out bias when they see it and to support colleagues.
3. Watch the language used about women. An assertive woman gets called “bossy” while a man saying the same thing is seen as a strong leader. Get people to notice how they describe colleagues.
4. Question caregiving assumptions. Don’t assume women want children, that caregiving falls to them, or that either says anything about their commitment. Many people are happily choosing to stay childfree.
5. Use real examples and the business case. Everyday moments, like being asked where to get tea, show how bias works. McKinsey research linking gender-diverse teams to higher profitability shows why it matters.

If you enjoyed this article, read another by Hannah Cooper: Promotion burnout: Are women less motivated to pursue promotions than two years ago?

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The development response is lagging. In 2025-26 assessments across government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, Noomii found that 73 per cent of high-potential leaders lacked capability in three or more critical areas, including judgment under uncertainty and cross-functional influence. 

The same analysis, citing Adecco, found that only 10 per cent of companies have structured plans to build skills for AI disruption.

Leaders are operating under unprecedented load, uncertainty and complexity. They are depleted, fragmented and asked to provide certainty while their own inner ground is under strain.

What this era asks is not another skill framework but ground: contact with self, clarity, energy, wholeness and presence.

In the age of AI, leadership depends on the deepest human qualities already present in every leader. Not skills to install, but capacities to awaken.

The split is not Industrial. It’s ancient

We inherited a model of leadership built for a different century – think fast, decide, execute, manage. It’s so deeply embedded in how organisations select and promote people that few have paused to ask whether it still holds weight.

The fracture runs far deeper than the assembly line. Long before industrial management, Western thought had already partitioned mind from body. Plato’s dualism cast the body as a prison for the soul, arguing the intellect thinks most clearly when dissociated from bodily sensation. 

Two thousand years later, Descartes formalised this into the modern mind, bequeathing the “thinking thing”, severed from the flesh it merely commands – and leadership theory absorbed that inheritance almost without resistance. 

That model isn’t failing because it was wrong for its era. It’s failing because AI has already out-competed it at the one thing it was ever optimised for –  fast, disembodied cognition –  forcing leadership to find its value somewhere else entirely.

Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience exposes the mechanism beneath this fracture: bodily signals mark a course of action as promising or perilous before conscious reasoning catches up, so a decision-making process that excises emotion and embodiment is not more rational.  It is simply blinder. The leader trained out of bodily awareness has not achieved purer judgment; they have amputated a sensing organ.

Leaders are operating under unprecedented load, uncertainty and complexity. They are depleted, fragmented and asked to provide certainty while their own inner ground is under strain

What leadership can learn from Eastern thought

Eastern traditions offer a genuinely different starting point for leadership: consciousness, body and matter were never split into separate, competing domains the way Western philosophy split them. 

Wisdom in these traditions is cultivated through the body, not achieved by escaping it. Danah Zohar’s Lao Tzu and Confucius Meet Heisenberg proposes that quantum physics’ vision of an interconnected, participatory universe has more in common with Taoist and Confucian thought than with the mechanistic worldview that shaped Western management theory. 

Frederick Tsao and Chris Laszlo’s Quantum Leadership makes a parallel case: “direct-intuitive” practices, many rooted in Eastern contemplative traditions, give leaders unmediated access to a felt experience of wholeness that purely analytical development cannot reach.

Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, in the research behind Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, interviewed more than 150 scientists and leaders and concluded that the deepest leadership capacity is not analytical horsepower but the ability to sense and act from a future still emerging. A capacity they trace explicitly to Buddhist and contemplative sources. 

What leadership can borrow here is simple: treat presence and stillness as a discipline, not a personality trait reserved for the spiritually inclined.

Whole Intelligence: the capability this era actually demands

Whole Intelligence names the integration of cognitive, emotional, somatic, spiritual and resonant capacity into one coherent way of showing up.

Cognitive intelligence long held uncontested authority in leadership theory; emotional intelligence later expanded that picture but still operates largely within the frame of the ego. 

Spiritual intelligence marks a further threshold – the capacity to step outside the ego, observe a situation from a wider vantage point and connect with states of awareness not bound by personal agenda. 

Cindy Wigglesworth’s SQ21 research names this capacity as measurable and trainable, not the preserve of the spiritually gifted few. Resonant intelligence names a further, complementary capacity: the ability to feel and follow resonance itself. To sense the unspoken frequency of a field before it becomes visible in words or data, and work with that field directly. And Somatic intelligence is the body’s capacity to hold, integrate and express the leader’s whole intelligence.

Whole Intelligence is what emerges when these are integrated. It is not an additional layer placed on top of existing competence – it is a return to wholeness itself, a recognition that the division between spirit, body and consciousness was never real to begin with.

Treat presence and stillness as a discipline, not a personality trait reserved for the spiritually inclined

Six first steps to Wholeness

1. Stop

Before responding to pressure, pause the reflex to act, judge or fix. 

Practice: for 10 seconds before any charged decision, silently name what is happening – “I am about to react.”

2. Ground in the body

Descend attention into the feet, pelvis and breath. 

Practice: four counts in, hold for two, eight counts out, five minutes each morning.

3. Take the meta-position

Set down every title, agenda and stake in the outcome to view the situation from a zero point. 

Practice: before a weighty decision, physically change your seat and ask what the situation itself requires.

4. Follow the resonance

Distinguish the embodied signal of genuine “yes” from the noise of ego or pressure. 

Practice: notice where in the body alignment or dissonance arises, and treat it as data.

5. Lead from the heartfield

Shift the centre of gravity from head to chest until a genuine quality of acceptance settles. 

Practice: before a difficult meeting, breathe directly into the chest for two minutes.

6. Act in embodied coherence

Before finalising a significant decision, ask which personal value it expresses, what behaviour it will reward in the system and whether that is consistent with the organisation’s stated values.

The task ahead is not another training module stacked on old architecture. It is helping leaders wake capabilities a two-thousand-year-old philosophical inheritance never made room for, and building organisations finally capable of recognising them when they appear.

Read another article by Zhanna Zhuravleva: Why change fails: The hidden games your organisation is playing

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A jam-packed agenda

Leadership and Insights Stage

The day kicks off with a 10-minute interactive warm-up, ‘Bodyrap!’, led by Ed Freitas of Orangeworks. From there, Daniel Dickenson-Hope of Kirklees College hosts ‘What is Expected of You as a Leader’. He draws on 20 years as a frontline CPO to lead a peer-to-peer conversation on what leadership really demands.

Tracey Darby of Wescom then takes the stage for ‘Leadership Accountability: The Hidden Cost of Getting It Wrong’. This session with make the case for accountability as a strategic business imperative rather than a soft skill.

Steve Gee of Blend follows with ‘The Hidden Cost of Leadership Teams That Think Alike’. This offers leaders a practical tool for spotting when their own decision making has narrowed, plus three steps for thinking more broadly.

Don’t miss the EX fireside chat, ‘Giving Employees the Tools for Success’, featuring Lee Thawley (MW), Paul Jones-Nolan (San Carlo Restaurant Group) and Kate Morgan (Fraser Group Financial Services) on what people actually need to do their best work.

Stay tuned for the closing debate – AI in People panel session. Details will be out soon. 

The Wellbeing Stage

After its own short energiser, the Wellbeing Stage opens properly with Peter Hall of UCA on ‘From Staff Voice to Visible Action: Building Inclusive Employee Experience in a Time of Change’. He will look at how staff voice and inclusive leadership build trust and engagement.

Rebecca Blundall of Therapy Centre Services follows with ‘Beyond EAP: A Proactive Approach to Employment Support’. This covers Employer Direct Referral and the value of early intervention in keeping people well and productive.

Join Pauline Miller, Executive Advisor, former Chief Equity Officer and founder of Leading Black Women, with ‘Turning Inclusion into Experience’, an honest look at what it really takes to build an inclusive culture.

Change Innovators will guide you through Roots to Resiliency – Creating a Life of Love, Compassion, and Self-Care delivered by Founder and MD Yvonne Thompson.

Join the Wellbeing in Work panel chaired by Debbie Kliener Director of Wellbeing in Work. Debbie will be joined by Seamus Corry, Pauline Miller and Catherine Wallace of Co-op Live for a lively discussion on Beyond Wellbeing Initiatives: What Actually Creates a Psychologically Healthy Workplace?

Experts will cover everything from leadership accountability to psychological safety and social health

The Employee Experience Theatre

Oddie Braddell of Orangeworks opens with ‘Beyond Teambuilding: The Power of Experiential Learning’, showing how experiential learning shifts mindsets and builds stronger, more collaborative teams.

Rich Cook of Mindset Practice follows with ‘Beyond Measurement and Awareness: How to Build Psychological Safety One Mindset at a Time’, challenging the standard measure-and-action-plan approach in favour of shifting teams from survival to growth mindsets.

Dr Lalith Wijedoru of BehindYourMask then asks ‘What Is Social Health? Stories of Human Connection in the Workplace’, exploring how employees stay connected to themselves, each other and their organisation in an age of digital disconnect.

Don’t miss Seamus Corry’s 20-minute masterclass, ‘Stop the Drain, Assess to Gain’, a practical session on assessing workplace wellbeing resilience and building it into an action plan.

The Exhibition

Running alongside the sessions, the exhibition floor features organisations including Everway, Bronze Sponsor,

Workbuzz, Yolo Wellbeing, Therapy Centre Services, Mindset Practise, Orangeworks, Event Supporter, Change innovators,

Blend, Event supporter, showcasing tools and platforms to support your workplace.

Entry is completely free for people professionals so reserve your spot today: Reserve your spot.

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Summary: Psychological safety is experienced in teams, and the everyday systems an organisation runs either support it or work against it. Pre-boarding is the quietest of those systems and the easiest to leave to chance. Here’s how HR can strengthen each of the Five Foundations during this crucial stage.

Pre-boarding covers the weeks between someone accepting an offer and starting work. The person has committed to a job they have not yet done, in a team they have not yet worked with, on the basis of what they were told during recruitment. What happens during those weeks either confirms that account or quietly contradicts it, and the person notices either way.

Neil Eastwood, a recruitment expert who advised us at Wellbeing Teams, drew on Skills for Care data from the social care workforce to show that the period between offer and start date is when people are most likely to change their mind [1]. We had not realised how important that stage was, and we lost people because of it.

For HR, this stage is visible only in data from other stages of the employee journey. Probation extensions linked to expectations nobody confirmed, first-week feedback about feeling unprepared and questions asked in week one that could have been answered four weeks earlier all begin here, and none of them are recorded here. 

Designing these pre-boarding weeks, instead of leaving them to administration, confirms what recruitment described and adds what someone needs in order to start well.

The Five Foundations in pre-boarding

The Five Foundations of psychological safety are Mattering, Clarity, Voice, Connection and Learning. They name the questions people are answering, often without realising it, in their everyday work.

Mattering asks whether I count here, and during pre-boarding it is expressed almost entirely through the reliability of communication.

Confirming start details, sending information in advance and acknowledging milestones all signal attentiveness, and silence is read as an indication of what the organisation will be like to work for.

The period between offer and start date is when people are most likely to change their mind

What Mattering can look like in practice

In Wellbeing Teams, new colleagues were invited into our Slack group within 24 hours of accepting a role. Over the following four weeks, while checks and references were processed, we ran a deliberate sequence: a personal text from the Wellbeing Leader, who would be their team leader, a small gift sent through the post in the first week and a handwritten postcard of our 10 promises to colleagues two weeks later. 

We also sent a couple of questions each week, to learn about our new colleagues and to answer theirs. Each of these came from the line manager. A manager with one or two new starters can do this whatever the size of the organisation. 

Buckingham and Coffman, drawing on Gallup interviews with more than 80,000 managers across 400 companies and a range of industries, found that how long someone stays is shaped most by the relationship with their immediate manager [2]. Pre-boarding is where that relationship starts.

Gaining Clarity

Clarity answers the question of what is expected of me here and how things work in practice. 

By the end of pre-boarding, a new starter should be able to answer three questions: 

1. What success in the first month involves.
2. Who decides day-to-day priorities.
3. Who to ask when something is unclear.

What Voice looks like

Voice answers a practical question: can I raise concerns, ask questions or disagree without it harming my standing here? 

Someone who has accepted an offer and has not yet started has every reason to stay quiet. So a scheduled conversation with their manager before day one is more than an open invitation. 

Recurring themes from those conversations show where the briefing materials need work.

How long someone stays is shaped most by the relationship with their immediate manager

Connection: a relational question

Connection answers a relational question: do I know what to expect from people here? 

Introducing relational context before arrival is what strengthens it. Where a team has Team Agreements, sharing them in advance shows the behaviours the team has agreed they want from each other.

Learning and experience

Learning answers a simple question: do we learn from experience? The evidence at this stage comes from new starters and their managers. 

Where the same questions recur across several starters, the materials can be adjusted before the next recruitment cycle.

Start by reviewing the pre-boarding in one part of the organisation, choosing where offers are declined late or where probation extensions reference expectations nobody confirmed. 

Where there are many hires, the sequence can be written once and used by every manager, so what each manager adds is the personal contact. 

The cost is mostly diary time, about an hour per starter across four weeks and most of it the manager’s, and the work it removes is the first fortnight spent answering questions that could have been answered earlier.

Actionable insights for HR

1. Give the period between offer and start date a named owner. It sits between recruitment and induction, which is why it goes unowned. Name who is responsible for contact during those weeks, what they will send and when.

2. Send the role descriptions again with the start date, and name the first month. Set out what success in month one involves, and who decides day-to-day priorities.

3. Schedule one conversation with the manager before day one. Put it in both diaries at the offer stage, and use it to invite questions instead of giving information that could have been sent.

4. Share the team’s behavioural expectations before arrival. Where Team Agreements exist, send them with an explanation of how they are used. Otherwise set out how the team handles feedback, disagreement and decisions, so none of it has to be worked out by watching.

5. Ask new starters in their first week what they wish they had known. Ask through someone other than their manager, since week one is when people are trying to make a good impression, and change the pack where the same gap appears twice.

Notes

1. Eastwood, N (2017) Saving Social Care, Rethink Press, and Skills for Care (2023) The State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England, Skills for Care, Leeds

2. Buckingham, M and Coffman, C (1999) First, Break All the Rules: What the world’s greatest managers do differently, Simon and Schuster, New York

Helen Sanderson is the author of Psychological Safety in Practice (Kogan Page, 2026).

Have you read part two of Helen Sanderson’s series?: How to build psychological safety into recruitment

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