5️⃣ The 5 capabilities that a strategic HR leader needs to master

TL;DR

5️⃣ The 5 capabilities that a strategic HR leader needs to master 

🪜 5 HR Leaders. 5 Archetypes. 5 Ways to grow strategically

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

The 5 capabilities that a strategic HR leader needs to master 

If I asked you, “What does a strategic HR leader look like?”, who would you picture?

Probably someone who seems to have it all together.

They have a board meeting tomorrow, but they're not spending tonight scrambling to pull together HR data. They already have what they need. Instead, they're thinking about what it means for the business and sense-checking their perspective with strategic HR peers they trust.

The next morning, they walk into the boardroom ready to contribute to the business conversation, confidently challenging other execs and connecting the people agenda to what the business is trying to achieve. And when the founder is wrestling with a difficult decision, they turn to them and ask: “What do you think?”

Isn't that the picture we have in our heads when we imagine a strategic HR leader?

And isn't that picture also a little daunting? 😣

Because hidden inside that one person are actually 5 different capabilities.

Put all 5 together, and we get a pretty good picture of a strategic HR leader. So of course that picture can feel daunting when you look at it and think you need to become all 5 at once. 

Your career gives you opportunities to master different strategic capabilities

There’s a Malaysian saying I grew up with that captures how I think about our career journey:

Little by little, over time, it becomes a hill.

When we look at someone further along in their career, we see the whole picture. What we don’t see are all the small things they learnt and practised along the way.

Becoming a strategic HR leader works the same way. You want to build mastery across all 5 capabilities, but you don't need to master them ALL at once. Instead, ask yourself:

Perhaps right now you're buried in operations and everything feels urgent. Your opportunity might be to become a Strategic Navigator: learning what really needs you, what can wait, and what you need to stop or delegate to create space for more strategic work.

Or perhaps you've just been promoted and suddenly you're sitting on the exec team. You have a perspective, but you find yourself wondering whether you know enough to challenge everyone else in the room. Your opportunity might be to become a Confident Challenger: learning to trust your judgement and use your voice.

I've always believed that the environment you're in can be one of our best teachers.

We just need to recognise what it's giving us the opportunity to master.

What will you master next? 

I built the 5 Strategic HR Archetypes quiz to help you identify which capability your current environment is giving you the opportunity to master.

But before you get your result, there are 3 things I want you to remember:

1. It’s not a personality test
Your archetype doesn't tell you WHO you are. It helps you notice HOW you're operating right now.

2. Your archetype is context-dependent
Change your role, manager, company, level of seniority or the challenges you're facing, and you may get a different result. Different environments bring out different development needs.

3. You need all 5 archetypes
You'll keep building mastery across all 5 throughout your career. The quiz simply helps you identify which one to focus on now.

Sedikit-sedikit.

You don't need to build the whole picture at once. Focus on what your career is giving you the opportunity to master next.

5 HR Leaders. 5 Archetypes. 5 Ways to grow strategically 

Sedikit-sedikit. Strategic mastery is built little by little. And often, your current job is showing you exactly what to build next.

I’ve had the privilege of watching 5 HR leaders do exactly that. Their jobs presented them with very different opportunities… although, at the time, some probably felt more painful than helpful🙈.

But they recognised the opportunity in front of them, focused on mastering that capability — and it changed how they showed up, the influence they had and, and for some, where their career went next. 

Astrid: Buried Operator → Strategic Navigator

Astrid Riber Poulsen's instinct has always been to see what needs doing and pick it up. Her opportunity was to stop equating being valuable with taking on more, and become much more deliberate about where she spent her time.

One thing she actively started doing was evaluating and connecting the impact of her work to business goals, and learning to be OK with putting nice-to-have projects in the backlog or holding the people who should be doing the work accountable.

Today, in a new role, Astrid is already operating much more strategically: working closely with her CEO on business priorities and taking ownership of strategic projects rather than simply absorbing whatever needs doing next.

Andrei: Unheard Expert ➡️ Trusted Advisor

Andrei Perevalov already had the People expertise and could see what was happening in the People data, but he wasn't always confident connecting it to what the business was worried about. So he decided to learn finance and how investors think, so he could connect his perspective to the wider business. 

He then shifted his conversations from typically starting with People to starting with what the business needed. It changed the conversations he was able to have with his CEO and CFO.

“I'm not an HR leader, I'm a Business Leader. That reframing completely changed how I show up in my monthly CEO and CFO meetings.”

Liv: Untapped Talent → Business Driver

Liv Bennett wanted to move beyond being a People leader who supported the strategy to become someone who helped shape it. Through STEP UP MBA, she deliberately deepened her understanding of the business — from business models and go-to-market to financials and funding. 

She started contributing more during exec meetings and recently, she was asked to lead a business strategy alignment workshop. Read that one more time: she led a business strategy meeting!

At the end, her Product leader, who is commercially sharp, data-driven and not easily impressed, asked the room to applaud (I was so proud of her!).

Missy: Self-Doubter → Confident Challenger

When Missy Strong told me what she was carrying by herself, even I thought: 🤯. She was working on onboarding, career frameworks, performance cycles, L&D, workplace and events — SOLO.

She knew she needed another person. And for nine months, she'd been making that case.

The answer kept coming back: no.

At some point, repeated rejection starts to make you question your own judgement. But Missy persisted and saw this as an opportunity to put what she'd learnt in STEP UP Bootcamp into practice: challenge the decision by making her case in terms the business cared about. She connected her People strategy to company OKRs, showed what the investment would unlock and took it back to the founders. 

This time: yes.

Marie: Lone Climber → Empowered Leader

Marie Krebs had been Head of People Experience and knew she was good at her craft. But she'd struggled to get exec buy-in for some of her People initiatives, and wanted to become more commercial — to better connect the work she was doing to business impact. 

So when she made her next career move, she deliberately chose a builder role rather than chasing a bigger title. She wanted to do work she could do well, so she had the capacity to learn more about the business.

And because she learns best with others, she actively built relationships with HR leaders in the STEP UP Boardroom — people she could bring questions to, sense-check her thinking with and learn alongside.

Over time, Marie developed her business acumen. Her CPO recognised how much more commercially she was thinking about People strategy and saw her as increasingly ready to stretch towards a more strategic role.

What is your opportunity?

Five capable HR leaders, at five different moments in their careers.

Astrid didn't need what Andrei needed. Andrei didn't need what Liv needed. Missy's environment was teaching her something different again. And Marie deliberately chose an environment that would give her space to learn.

None of them was trying to become the whole picture at once. They focused on the capability their career was asking them to master next.

So when you look at your archetype, don't see it as a label for who you are. See it as an opportunity to decide what you want to master next and what could change when you do.

Little by little, you build the strategic HR leader you want to become.

What do you need to STEP UP next?