Leadership in HR: It’s Not About Title, It’s About Impact
Dave Freedland, Waracle
Good evening everyone. I want to talk to you about leadership in HR. And very specifically not of HR, but of the skill set within it. And it’s not to detract from figurehead leaders, but more of a celebration of our people teams.
When I changed career, I noticed something. I noticed that we don’t recognize necessarily where leadership is happening and that HR are doing it every day. HR are shaping culture, they’re building trust, and they’re driving change. And yet, too often I see leadership being attached to a role or a title. We have senior leadership teams, we have team leaders, we have whatever, right? But leadership is a skill, a skill to be applied. And what’s more, just because somebody has leader or leadership in their entitle, it doesn’t mean that their delivering. The opposite is true. Some of the best leaders don’t have a role attached to it, right?
So let’s just pause and focus the lens a little bit. When I’m talking about leadership, I’m talking about the projection of self to influence others in a considered way, to taking in either people or impacts. And then the ability to change that for the best outcome. Think about situations that are most impactful to you. Our strongest memories are often the ones who are emotionally charged, okay? Having tough conversations, dealing with crisis, or challenging people, HR is leading. And if we think about how our culture is, how we do things around here, then the HR teams are the ones that are influencing it, they’re living it, they’re evolving it. But that includes the culture of leadership within an organization.
But is this being seen? Do we acknowledge that that is leadership? Are we naming that as leadership? That applied influence, or is it happening in the background and we’re just accepting that? And are we happy doing that? So let’s turn this from another angle, okay? Who is it that managers, leaders turn to for help? They don’t often go up, they’ll very often go to HR. Yeah. Why? Because they trust you and you know that they’re going to get the answer right. And not only that, HR will deliver difficult conversations. They’ll deliver difficult decisions. So when things become more impactful and more of an emotional touch point, it’s HR that are applying those leadership skills to do that.
We have onboarding, we have exit interviews, we have conflict resolution and policy implementation. All of these are potential applications of leadership within the employee lifecycle. Think how important that is to an organization. And if we establish that HR are leading throughout all of this, what are we doing to support them? There was more to that one, obviously. How is it that our HR professionals know whether to use a leadership style that is more transactional or more transformational in any given moment? How are they assessing the context, the people, or the situation they’re in? Without much influence it shouldn’t be trial and error. And where it’s not trial and error, where there are great resources and training are for people who have the role attached. There’s a lot of resources and a lot of time spent on people who are defined as leaders, but they may not have the most opportunities to display it.
Now, HR can become a center of gravity for leadership within an organization because it’s the applied leadership that is happening every day. If we’re going to achieve that though, we need to invest in our people. We need to have a conversation about leadership early in people professionals’ careers, and give the time and training for it. But importantly, we need to have the conversation and keep it going, keep people invested in it, right?
Now, if we do this right, what we have, that center of gravity becomes a hub of leadership. It becomes a safe and informed place for managers and leaders across the business to turn to when they need guidance and advice, as well as somewhere to take on some additional challenges and set that leadership culture. What’s more, when we have very well-trained leadership individuals within people all leaders will benefit because they have someone they can go to for good guidance and to set that foundational culture. They’re also generating trust within your organization, which is the currency that all leaders use when things get tough.
So my suggestion is that let’s stop calling HR just a support function, let’s call it what it really is, which is a leadership function and recognize and invest in it like it is one.
Watch the video of Dave delivering his session over on Vimeo >>>> DisruptHR Glasgow 6.0 – June 19 2025 on Vimeo
