Your analysis was right, and that's unfortunately why nobody used it. You've had the file open in a meeting, and you decided not to put it on the screen. You're probably right not to. In the next 15 minutes, you're going to find out why that room schedules you after the decision, and what a year of that really cost you.
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to The Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is the podcast that helps HR executives move beyond the support function and become business first, the right hand that your company can't run the company without. Because the top chair is not an HR job, it's a brand new identity. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and this is episode 159, and it's a Monday, so that means you just have me.
There's a version of this conversation that's running everywhere right now, and it's about storytelling. Sharpen the narrative. Put the finding in one sentence that your CEO can repeat. Lead with a recommendation. That advice is correct, and it will also not work. What stands between your analysis and the decision has nothing to do with the analysis or even how you say it. It comes down to when the thing was built and what it was built to prove.
Now you're in that chair because somebody decided that workforce is a business variable. Business variables show up when the call is still open. Stay with me, and you're going to be able to sort out the numbers that you already own into the ones that can move something and the ones that can only describe. And that sort is going to change the next six weeks of your life.
Here's what I want to show you today. The most persuasive number that you own is the one the CEO has the least use for. The shelf that you build to prove the function works is why nothing on it moves a decision, and what a year of presenting it better is going to cost you.
But before we get into today's episode, I want to say a quick thank you. A shout out this week to Valerie in Mexico City. Thanks for being a part of this community. And everyone that's tuning in, whether you're joining from Dublin, Ireland, or Charlotte, North Carolina, I appreciate you being right here. Okay, let's dive into this thing.
I'm going to put you in the room that you are probably in earlier this year. It's operating plan review, not the strategy offsite, the one where the money actually gets assigned. Your COO wants commercial teams that are stood up in two new regions next year. Your CFO is arguing the ramp, 12 months versus 18. And the call closes today, and everyone in the room knows it.
And you have the leadership readiness analysis. It's open on your laptop. Six weeks of your team's best work, 41 leaders, the most rigorous thing that your function produced all year. And your CEO went around the table on the ramp question. Finance answered, ops answered, the region president, but then he skipped you. And he skipped you warmly, a nod on the way past.
And you've had a while to think about that and what that nod really meant. So let me say what I think it meant. He wasn't shutting you out. In his head, he had already put you on the other side of that decision. We decide where we go, and you build the plan once the number lands. And if you asked him about it, he'd tell you that it was a compliment and he'd half mean it.
So the workforce half of a 12 versus 18-month call got answered in the room from memory, in one sentence, by an ops executive with nothing behind it. And then on Thursday, you put the readiness analysis into the quarterly deck where it got a good reception and changed nothing.
Now, look at what's moving across the field, because this is not a story about you being bad at your job. I'm sure you're really good at your job. And that sometimes is the problem.
Mercer ran its Global Talent Trends study this year across 12,000 executives, HR leaders, investors, and employees. 57% of the C-suite named people analytics as the single people initiative most likely to generate a return this year. And 27% of them believe that their HR team effectively advises them on human capital risk. So let's put that plainly. They want this more than they ever have, and about three in four don't believe that you're the one delivering it.
Then look at what Mercer found we actually have on hand. Individual and team productivity, benefits ROI by employee group, and how effectively HR is meeting its own internal needs. Read that last one twice. The intelligence most available to us is in fact intelligence about us. Mercer has a name for that pattern. It's called insight theater.
Now, back in episode 151, we talked about the CEO who can recite the hurdle rate for every business unit and go blank on which two roles break the strategy. That's the same gap that we're talking about here. It's one layer down. Capital data gets built to close a decision. Talent data gets built to describe a population. Do you see the difference?
So the question is why does a leader this competent keep carrying the wrong object into the room? As you'd imagine, I think there are three traps, and all three are yours.
The first one is that you think that this is a translation problem. You hear about that all the time. So you invested in the translation, the storytelling workshop, the one-slide version, the analytics hire out of finance. And every single move was a real improvement. And everyone improved the delivery of an object that's built for a different purpose. You can make your report on the function beautiful. You just can't make it decisive, because being decisive has nothing to do with being good.
Here's a second one. And this one also has your fingerprints on it. Your business believes talent contributions can't be quantified against results. You've known for years that that's wrong, and yet you've never been able to move it. So look at what you did instead. You started answering the questions you could answer completely. Six weeks, 41 leaders, a defensible methodology. You didn't put a number on the ramp question in March because that number would have carried a range. And a range is something that you have to stand behind in a room full of people who do this for a living. Precision became the substitute for standing.
And the third trap is the calendar. Your reporting runs on a cycle, quarterly, annually, board meetings. Allocation decisions don't fit that schedule. They happen when a deal moves, when a competitor prices something, when a plant goes down. A function reporting on a calendar arrives after a decision that happened based on an event. And anything arriving after a decision is a description, it's arithmetic.
So traps two and three run on the same force. Your measurement infrastructure was built to answer one question, which is whether HR is working. It answers that question beautifully. The problem is that's not the right question.
So let's get at what's actually running underneath all of this. A decision is a specific object and it has three properties. Somebody owns it, it has a date, and there are at least two options that are still live on that date. All three have to be true. Miss one, what you have is a topic.
So a number becomes useful to a decision when it changes the ranking of those options before the date. Truth's not the test. Rigor, not the test. Changing the ranking before the date, that's the test.
So now hold up your own work against that. Your engagement read has probably no owner. Your readiness analysis has no date, and your attrition trend has no live options attached to it because it describes something that already happened to a population. I've talked about that before. Most of our metrics are trying to lead the business forward using their rear view mirror. Every one of those things happens to be true, by the way, but none of them is a decision.
So what does your shelf look like? I've watched a lot of really good, talented HR leaders work this very same way, under the same pressure. And I've been in the seat myself, and I knew the room needed an estimate on the live question with a range on it, my name next to it. I also had a board deck that was due in nine days and a function to run. So early in my career, I finished the complete answer to the settled question because that was the one I could finish. I got the rigor right. But as a result, I was never in the decision. And that's the pattern, and the architecture is what produces it.
So the metrics create the mandate. And that's what I mean when I talk about measurement as governance. What you measure defines what the system believes you are producing. And you've been measuring how well the function runs. So that's what the system believes that you produce. You spent your entire career measuring whether the function is working. But here's the hard truth. Nobody in the building has a decision that turns on the answer to that question. Which means the problem was never how good the number is or how right. It's whether the question it answers is still open.
And hold on, because here's where it stops being about data. A support function reports on itself, because reporting is what a support function gets measured into. The chair you're climbing towards decides what the enterprise measures and when it arrives. That's a different job. And it isn't the one that you have to be handed. Nobody else in that building is going to build the workforce instrumentation. The measurement architecture has been yours the whole time. The problem is you've been pointing it at yourself.
So here's the climb. These are the three moves, and I think the first one runs inside of your very next staff meeting.
Play number one is get a list of the allocation decisions that close in the next 90 days. Your CFO almost invariably is going to have it, or your chief of staff might. And I mean not the ones that are already really made. I mean the pending calls. Which regions are going to get funded, whether the ramp is 12 or 18 months, whether the plant runs two shifts or goes back to three. Kind of mark the three where the answer is going to turn on people. The first version of that list, by the way, is going to be long because you're going to write down the decisions that you have an opinion about. And unfortunately, most of those are probably closed.
Play number two is take one of the three and then put a number on it before a date. One page. That's a range that you're going to defend in the room, because that range beats a precise number that arrives too late. That's the step. You stop reporting on the function and you start instrumenting a decision that hasn't yet closed.
And play three is take one standing report off the calendar. You know which one. It's the recurring package that no one has ever acted on. And it has survived four years because pulling it felt like conceding something. Tell the distribution list you're going to be replacing it with 90-day decision lists. What you keep sending is what the business keeps believing you're for. So you need to give them something else to believe.
And one thing I want you to carry out of here today is being right about the workforce and being inside the decision are not the same thing. And only one of them is going to be on somebody's calendar. Choose wisely.
Okay, and before we finish, let me say the part I wish someone had pulled me aside and said to me. The most persuasive number that you own is the one the CEO has the least use for, because it's evidence about the function working. And there's no allocation in that building that turns on it. The shelf doesn't move decisions because you built an answer to a question about yourself. And it answers one thing and nothing else. Every quarter that you continue to spend presenting it better is a quarter the room spends learning that you arrive after the decision closes.
And that's the whole job. Move beyond leading the support function. Become the person that your CEO cannot run the company without.
And one last thing, if something we talked about here today resonated with you, let's take 30 minutes on the phone. Love to connect with you. You tell me what's happening. I'm going to help you find the architecture underneath. And hopefully what to do next. Calendar link, you can find it in the show notes, or you can find me at mytalentsherpa.com.
And that's the summit for today. Thanks for climbing with me. Till next time, keep raising the bar. Keep putting numbers on the decisions that are still open. And keep on climbing.
