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 Hiii y’all, Greetings from Vancouver! I’m in town for a match with family & friends. How did the match turn out? Well…. Yesterday Egypt won its FIRST World Cup match ever!!!! My voice is shot but man WHAT A FREAKIN WIN. I will be riding that high for a very, very, very long time. In the spirit of nice things that bring you joy, I have some goodies for you too: 📚The Burn Book but make it fun and digital. A lot of folks were sad they missed out on signing the physical burn book at Transform. Soooo we fixed that! You can submit your most salacious, I need to get this off my chest or I’ll combust stories here. And… in a few weeks we’ll get together and I’ll read them live in an off the record hang. 🎧 A fresh pod ep in your ears!! This week I tap into your ears about some of my firsts and then I round out the episode with some HR Horror Stories. 📺 HR Therapy THIS WEEK!!! Actually this week, unlike last week when I said that!!! I just casually time traveled to tell you about the biggest challenges HR is facing like fraud, AI and HR tech we got a lotttt to cover. Now, onto today… I’m rounding out the “this is fine” quarter where I’ve discussed alllll the things that complicate HR’s role and today I’m covering how different business units or departments speak different languages. Sponsored by Go1 Nobody told you that half your job would be running a hostage negotiation with finance, IT, procurement, and the C-suite every time you want to do something that actually helps employees! 🙄 Go1's Buying Committee Report is a free, practical breakdown of how tech purchase decisions get made and what each stakeholder needs to hear. If you've ever watched a great learning initiative get gutted in a budget meeting, this report is for you! HR'S ROLE Are we speaking the same language? Have you ever been in a situation where you said something and the other person in the conversation walked away with a completely different understanding? Or no understanding at all... This happened to me quite a bit early in my career and let me tell ya, it’s painful. There's nothing worse than preparing for something you think (and it is) super important and when you deliver the thing (business case, ask, feedback, progress) you’re met with silence. And look, sometimes the person genuinely isn't listening. But sometimes? You're just speaking HR at someone who only understands finance or engineering or operations or INSERT A DEPARTMENT HERE. 🙂 Last week I talked about what is and isn't actually HR's job and how some of our burnout comes from never saying no to the stuff that isn't. cough boundaries cough. This week I want to talk about what happens after you've drawn that line. Because here's the catch nobody mentions: knowing what's your job doesn't help much if you can't get the rest of the business to actually hear you when you're doing it!! It becomes less of a boundary problem and more of a language problem. So today: how to actually speak the language of the departments you're trying to influence, instead of waiting for them to learn yours. Decoding departments: Here’s the dealio and what I want you to remember: every department is already fluent in something. Finance speaks in numbers. Sales speaks in quotas. Engineering speaks in tickets and time. Operations speak in process and scalability. And in HR we have our own language around culture and engagement. Sometimes when we’re navigating situations we're required to decode a department and deliver a message in a way they can understand. So, here’s my simple department decoder: 💰 Finance wants ROI and cost. "Engagement is low" goes nowhere. "Disengagement is costing us $X in attrition and backfill this quarter" gets their attention. Exact same data just different framing and said in finance’s language. Always, always, always bring it back to cost and ROI. And sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll work with a finance person who wants more than that but at the end of the day everything comes back to $$$. 💵 Sales wants speed and competitive advantage. Don't pitch a new performance process as "more development conversations." Pitch it as "reps get clarity on what's actually driving their comp, faster, so they can stop guessing what needs to be done and focus on what actually drives results." Sales doesn't always care about the framework but they def care about what it does for the number they’re chasing. Tie the intention back to the how does it help them achieve the great big thing they're chasing and you'll see more success it dealing with your Sales org. 🧩 Engineering usually wants logic and systems, less on the how it makes people feeling. This one took me a bit longer to learn. And honestly, I really struggled working with some Engineering leaders earlier in my career. Engineers might not want to hear "we’re doing this because it makes everyone feel good." They want to hear "here's the input, here's the output, here's why the system is built this way." Show your work to explain the logic and anchor potentially less on how it’s making everyone feel. And to be clear, it's not that Engineering leaders don't care how people feel, its more like they're genuinely curious in the systems being built and how things come together. ⚖️ Legal wants to know risk and exposure. Legal isn't trying to block you from doing your work, even when it sometimes feels that way. They're usually trying to answer one question: what's our exposure if this goes wrong. Bring them the risk framed in their terms and you'll get to move faster on the work that matters to you. ➡️ The throughline: every department already has a value system. Your job isn't to convert everyone to HR's value system. It's to show them how what you're proposing serves the one they already have. 🚨I read a stat a while back that only about a third of executives think HR understands the business… Not HR's intentions, not HR's effort, but the actual business!!!! That stat used to make me a tiny bit defensive. But if you step back, it kinda makes sense. We're fluent in people. We're not always fluent in P&L, or risk or ROI. If you want your other execs to think we understand the business, sometimes we have to speak a language that they understand and resonates with them. The actual move here isn't learning four new vocabularies overnight. It's one habit: before you pitch ANYTHING ask "what language does this person/department speak and how can I explain my HR initiative to them in a way that they will understand. What’s next: Next week wraps up our "This Is Fine" quarter arc and I'm pulling together everything I’ve covered into one finale that ties it together with where I think HR actually goes from here. Big shoes to fill with that topic! I'll def need this entire week to work on and think about that. Don't blame me if it's really long next week! (HUMAN) RESOURCES
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Sponsored by HiBob A lot of orgs are in the process of frantically scraping together an AI strategy, but forgetting the most important part!! 👀 HiBob surveyed 1,200 decision-makers across multiple markets to find out how orgs are tying AI capability to hiring and performance, and the findings are a lot more chaotic than your CEO's LinkedIn posts would suggest. 😬 SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 Hit the Wall, Gracie Abrams I know who Gracie Abrams is but I wouldn't call myself a super fan by any means. This song, however, has been stuck in my head for days!!!!! And it's making me do a deeper dive into her music. I still can't get over that her dad is JJ Abrams. The man who made Felicity and Alias!!! I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears. Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. | |||||||||||
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