People leaders need authority to turn influence into strategy

Solving strategic problems can earn influence before authority

For a decade, People leaders have heard a consistent prescription for earning a seat at the strategy table: learn the business, become comfortable with finance, stop pitching HR programs and solve business problems. That prescription explains how a leader becomes useful in consequential discussions because business fluency improves judgment. Success in those discussions can then create influence. Authority is a separate organizational choice about who owns the decisions and management behavior behind the work.

Auger’s distinction has three levels. Access means entering the discussion, while influence means changing how the organization understands a problem. Authority means having the decision rights required to make the resulting system work. Sound judgment can create access and influence, while Michelle Auger’s experience at Highline Partners shows that authority depends on how the organization assigns ownership.

The distinction reaches beyond C-suite CHRO roles because strategic work often happens below that level. Auger is director of people strategy at Highline Partners, where People sits below the C-suite and she has no formal CHRO title, a structure she says characterizes more mid-market businesses than HR executive-search coverage suggests. Melina Gillies is vice president of people and culture at Zensurance and previously served as chief people and customer experience officer. Both entered strategic conversations before receiving explicit mandates, and neither regards strategic standing as permanently guaranteed.

Their experiences put a harder test around the familiar question, “You got your seat at the strategy table, now what?” Capability remains essential because useful influence depends on sound judgment, but a durable role also depends on explicit ownership, decision rights, management accountability and an organizational expectation that the People perspective will shape decisions. The practical question is what changes after a People leader successfully solves a strategic problem. The answer determines whether the leader has influence over an individual decision or authority over the system behind it.

Business fluency makes a People leader useful early

Gillies’s experience explains why the conventional advice about business fluency has endured. A People leader entering a strategic or technology discussion often joins colleagues who have accumulated months or years of history, assumptions, customer knowledge and familiarity with financial pressures. Gillies accelerated her understanding by asking what decision the group was making, which constraints could not move, what operational success required, and where similar efforts had previously failed and why. Those questions let her contribute while she was still acquiring context.

The questions worked because they exposed unresolved issues that affected the decision. By Gillies’s account, meaningful impact became visible after about a month, shortening the period when she was present but still learning how to contribute. Strategic participation in that situation depends on identifying which missing facts and assumptions can change the decision. A leader can then add value while continuing to build the institutional knowledge colleagues already possess.

That approach also changed how Gillies interprets the standard instruction to learn finance. Financial vocabulary is useful, while the deeper requirement is understanding how the business produces value because an organizational recommendation has to connect to that mechanism. “If I don’t understand how the business makes money, where it’s losing money, what customers value, or what creates bottlenecks, there is no way I can overlay an organizational plan that adds value,” Gillies said. Business-model knowledge then gives a People leader a basis for choosing which organizational intervention matters.

Leadership development shows how that basis changes the work. A generic proposal can begin with an HR activity and then ask the business to accept its value. Gillies begins with pressures such as growth or a more complex workforce model, identifies where managers lack the capability to handle those pressures, and builds training around the behaviors the business requires. The business requirement consequently determines the People intervention.

Gillies gained another view of the same mechanism from her former combined remit as chief people and customer experience officer. Putting employee and customer experience under one leader allowed her to compare those two streams of information and test whether they pointed to the same underlying conditions. Workforce signals could then be evaluated alongside the outcomes customers were experiencing. That comparison expanded the evidence available to her in strategic discussions.

Broader evidence makes pattern recognition more important, and fast pattern recognition creates a communication problem. Gillies can reach the consequences of a pattern before colleagues have followed the intermediate reasoning. “I may have moved from point A to point F in my head while the room is still processing point B,” she said. A sound recommendation can consequently look like a leap when colleagues cannot see the reasoning between the initial observation and the conclusion.

Gillies addresses that problem by making the intermediate reasoning visible. She lays out the decision, the relevant signals, the expected impact and the recommended action before asking the group to act. “My value is in seeing the connections early,” she said. “But my leadership discipline is making those connections usable to everyone else.” Expertise becomes influence when other decision-makers can inspect the reasoning and use it themselves.

That influence establishes the useful part of the conventional strategic-HR prescription. Business-model understanding, disciplined questions and transparent reasoning let a leader contribute before accumulating every piece of context in the room. They also make People expertise legible in the terms other executives need for a decision. Once the decision depends on other leaders changing their own management behavior, however, a second question appears: who has the right to require that work?

The compensation case exposes the boundary of influence

Auger encountered that second question through a compensation decision that initially seemed narrow. Highline Partners leadership wanted to reduce a senior employee’s compensation over performance concerns, and Auger considered those concerns substantive. Yet the expectations behind them had never been established with the employee, connected to compensation as a stated condition or supported with documented feedback. The proposed pay action was therefore carrying a management judgment that had never been properly communicated.

A text from a leader exposed a further weakness because it combined an observable performance issue with personal frustration. Auger responded by tracing what the company had actually promised, which turned an individual compensation question into a review of the compensation system itself. Leadership believed bonuses were entirely discretionary. The way bonuses had been communicated and administered had created less discretion than leadership thought it possessed.

That review revealed a wider disconnect among employee expectations, individual performance, company performance and actual compensation. Those elements were inconsistently linked, so managers and employees could reach a pay decision with different understandings of what the company had promised and what performance determined. Changing one award would have left the same ambiguity in place for future decisions. Auger therefore moved from the individual case to the mechanics governing future awards.

She personally built a new compensation model tying bonus opportunity to individual performance and EBITDA. To make the proposed mechanics concrete for leadership, she used real employee data, market benchmarks and budget scenarios. The model turned an ambiguous dispute about one person’s pay into a system connecting performance judgments with company economics and compensation outcomes. Leadership approved it.

Approval made the division of responsibility inside the model important. Designing a structure in which performance judgments could affect compensation fairly belonged to Auger’s role, while the manager still had to make and communicate the performance judgment when the work occurred. “The manager needed to establish expectations, communicate them, give feedback, and document what happened,” Auger said. “My role was to build the structure that made those judgments fair and defensible.”

What happened next showed why those roles had to remain distinct. Leaders liked the model and began sending Auger criticisms of other senior managers for her to retain and use in the new structure. The compensation system had improved, while the management practice supplying its inputs remained largely the same. “I realized I had solved the compensation problem without solving the management problem,” Auger said.

Leaders were still assessing performance privately and passing their assessments to People for later use through compensation. That practice placed Auger between an undocumented management judgment and the system meant to use it. “I was becoming the place where unspoken frustrations were stored,” she said. Her ability to turn unclear concerns into usable structures was making it easier for managers to leave an uncomfortable part of their responsibility with HR.

The result reveals a risk for highly capable People teams. An expert function can make weak management practices more sustainable when it accepts unresolved judgments, reconstructs them and converts them into a process or outcome. The organization gets a cleaner system, while managers can defer expectations, feedback and documentation until a later HR process forces the issue. Strategic usefulness can then preserve the operating behavior that created the original problem.

Auger’s distinction among access, influence and authority identifies where the compensation work stopped. Access put her into the discussion about the employee, and influence allowed her to shift the question from one bonus decision to what the company had promised and how compensation should operate as the business grew. That analysis changed the decision under consideration. The remaining issue was control over the management practices required to operate the approved model.

Authority would have supplied that control. The model depended on documented expectations and feedback, yet Auger lacked the decision rights to require those management practices. A strategically sound compensation structure could consequently depend on inputs that managers were still free to withhold or handle privately. The gap lay in organizational authority over the behavior required to run the system.

“I had mistaken being asked to solve a strategic problem for being given a strategic mandate,” Auger said. “Good work does not redistribute authority by itself.” Her experience separates the quality of the solution from the allocation of accountability around it. A People leader can diagnose the business problem, build a stronger system and persuade leadership to adopt it while existing decision rights remain in place.

That separation also changes how executives can evaluate HR’s role in difficult employee matters. Passing an unresolved performance judgment to People can look like use of an expert function, but the transfer can move managerial work into HR. When People becomes the repository for judgments managers should establish, communicate and document, greater HR involvement can conceal weaker management accountability. The amount of involvement therefore says little by itself about the clarity of the mandate.

Evidence of capability leaves role definitions intact

The compensation case mattered to Auger partly because earlier experience had taught her to expect a different result from successful work. At larger organizations, demonstrating broader capability had tended to produce broader responsibility; in one case, she helped build the internal operating structure supporting a major national account. Highline Partners also received the compensation model well. Even so, her remit did not expand into financial planning, organizational design or formal ownership of systems she had been asked to create.

That outcome led Auger toward the organization’s inherited definition of People. Highline Partners’ founders had built a successful company through industry knowledge, judgment and relationships, and they had not previously worked with an experienced senior People function. The People role consequently formed around problems they already categorized as HR. Broader work could demonstrate Auger’s capability while leaving that underlying category unchanged.

“My mistake was assuming the work would make that capability self-evident,” Auger said. “It did not.” Her experience shows why repeated demonstrations of competence have limits as a strategy for expanding a mandate. Evidence can change how leaders perceive an individual’s ability, while role definitions and decision rights are established through organizational choices. More evidence of breadth does not make those choices automatic.

That gap between demonstrated capability and formal role also shaped Auger’s decision to pursue further development. Auger says she is now nine weeks into Wharton’s executive COO program, which she pursued partly because her experience had exceeded what her title communicated and she wanted a credential that could signal that breadth. She does not expect the program to change her current role. Instead, it has affected how she frames business problems, beginning with the required outcome and translating an ambiguous current state into a clearer view of what the company needs next.

That framing has made the organizational requirements of growth more explicit for Auger. “Strong relationships, good instincts, committed employees, and a favorable market can carry a company quite far,” Auger said. “But growth becomes more difficult when the strategy remains informal and the business has not clearly identified the skills, decision rights, and operating structure it will need next.” Growth therefore raises the same authority question at company scale: the organization has to define how work and decisions operate as earlier informal arrangements become inadequate.

Wharton has strengthened Auger’s fluency and confidence, while she remains unsure whether it has changed the internal response to her. For her, the program has clarified the difference between making a stronger business argument and receiving greater organizational authority. Gillies’s experience explains how business-model understanding can improve a leader’s contribution to decisions. Auger’s later experience shows that decision rights are allocated through a separate organizational process.

A durable seat requires a defined division of labor

Once capability and authority are separated, durable strategic participation becomes a division-of-labor question. For Auger, the company needs to define what its senior People role owns and why, while she needs to exercise the authority she already possesses more deliberately. A former colleague recently sharpened that second requirement by challenging her to turn what she hears into explicit contributions instead of simply absorbing it. Listening had long been identified as one of her strengths, but the information she gathers becomes strategically useful when she names the business problem it reveals.

Auger has consequently become more willing to identify an apparent employee problem as a management problem. She is also more willing to treat an isolated compensation question as evidence of a wider weakness in how the company defines performance. Making those observations explicit tests whether People is expected to shape the decision or provide input at leaders’ discretion. Voice matters because authority has practical effect only when the person holding it exercises judgment.

The individual leader’s voice covers only one side of that division of labor. Auger identifies compensation architecture, performance systems and organizational design as areas that require defined People ownership, along with routine participation in relevant financial and operating discussions. Defined ownership gives the function responsibility before a dispute appears. Routine participation supplies the operating and financial context needed to exercise that responsibility while decisions are still being formed.

Management responsibility then has to connect to that People ownership. Managers own expectations and feedback; People builds the systems those judgments operate within and translates patterns across the organization into actionable business terms. The compensation case shows the dependency between the two roles because a system tied to performance requires managers to establish and communicate performance judgments. Clear People authority therefore works only alongside clear line-management accountability.

“For me, the seat becomes durable when both things are true,” Auger said. “I take the risk of saying what I see, and the company expects that perspective to help shape its decisions. Otherwise, I may have access and influence, but my authority still depends on whether the observation is welcome in that particular moment.” Her standard places durability in an organizational expectation: People is expected to exercise defined judgment even when that judgment creates discomfort.

That expectation also requires enough capacity for a senior People leader to do the work. Gillies delegates more operational problem-solving and has become deliberate about which meetings need her involvement, because she credits a strong HR operations team with being able to carry delegated work. Her ability to allocate attention to strategic questions is therefore supported by capability beneath the senior role. The design of the team affects how much of the leader’s time can move toward those questions.

For leaner teams, the same capacity mechanism creates a different trade-off. “More often than not, HR teams are lean and the leader might also be the doer,” Gillies said. “In that case, the trade-offs are more impactful and have to roll hand-in-hand at smaller doses working toward the same goal.” A leader who remains responsible for substantial hands-on execution has less work available to delegate, so strategic participation has to grow alongside operational delivery.

That constraint is especially relevant to People leaders below the C-suite in mid-market organizations. They may have to prove strategic capability problem by problem while retaining operational responsibilities, and delegation depends on having a team capable of taking the work over. Their path can therefore involve smaller shifts in where time goes alongside explicit work on ownership and decision rights. Strategic standing is partly a leadership capability question and partly a choice about organizational design.

Those choices become easiest to see when responsibility becomes uncomfortable. Access is visible when a People leader enters the discussion, and influence is visible when the leader’s reasoning changes the decision. Authority becomes visible when the leader identifies the supporting management practice required for that decision and the organization recognizes the function’s right to insist on its part. In Auger’s compensation case, that standard reaches the point where managers must establish expectations, communicate feedback and document performance while People owns the structure that makes those judgments fair and defensible.

Key takeaways for leaders

• Build business fluency to earn influence: People leaders gain strategic standing by understanding how the business creates value, identifying constraints and connecting workforce decisions to financial, customer and operating outcomes. Making that reasoning visible helps other executives act on the insight.
• Define authority behind strategic systems: Compensation, performance and organizational systems depend on management practices that People teams may lack the authority to require. Executives can close that gap by assigning clear decision rights alongside system ownership.
• Separate capability from mandate: Successfully solving a strategic problem demonstrates capability, but organizational authority changes through explicit decisions about ownership and accountability. Companies should define the People function’s remit rather than expecting successful projects to establish it organically.
• Make strategic participation durable: Companies create a durable People role by combining defined functional ownership, management accountability and routine access to relevant financial and operating discussions. People leaders reinforce that mandate by naming the business implications of workforce patterns as decisions are formed.
• Match strategic expectations with capacity: Senior People leaders need enough operational support to sustain strategic participation while core HR work continues. Organizations with lean teams can deliberately shift responsibilities and decision rights as operational capacity grows.