The day you stop asking permission is the day the work begins

Hi Reader!

For years, I didn’t want to say I worked in HR.

I’d been running people functions for more than 15 years — Deloitte, a Swedish bank, then telecom, cloud, a startup selling software to governments in emerging markets. And still, when people asked what I did, I hesitated. Say you’re the CFO and no one questions it. Build a product and people respect that it takes a skill set they don’t have. Say you work in HR, and a lot of people hear a soft factor anyone could handle.

Part of that is fair — the entry point into HR isn’t that high. But I kept looking at what the work carries. No M&A closes well without HR redesigning the work structure, the skill sets, the cultures being joined. No launch into a new market happens without HR finding the right people on unfamiliar ground. Almost everything the people function touches — who gets hired, how fast they deliver, why they stay, how quickly the whole company learns — shows up in the results.

So the impact is real. The harder part is making it visible.

It took me years to stop asking whether I belonged among the people making the big decisions. I was asking the wrong question. No one was ever going to hand me that seat. I earned it by doing work the business could use and talking about it in terms the business understood.

That’s what I wrote about in Forbes Coaches Council this week: three moves that turn HR from a support function into a strategic one.

Stop asking for permission. Get genuinely curious. Attach a number to everything you do.

The full piece is worth your ten minutes — it’s about what I’ve learned across every company I’ve built a people function inside and what my quests share on the Built by People Leaders Podcast

I’ll leave you with the shortest version of all of it: leave your department, go talk to the business, and come back with ideas only you could offer — each one tied to something the company is trying to achieve. Whether you’re new to HR or you’ve led people teams for years, the day you stop asking permission is the day the work truly begins.

One more thing worth celebrating — CLICKING turns one this month. The team-building strategy I wrote for overloaded leaders is still doing its work, and the Kindle version is 99 cents for another week. If you haven’t read it yet, this is the time.

Talk to you next Thursday

Daria

P.S. Some of the sharpest people leaders I know — from Snowflake, Workday and other fast-growing companies — talk about what they're doing to make HR matter. It's all on my YouTube channel.