Who Holds The HRD?

I remember saying to a Chief Executive, 15 years ago when I was an HRD myself, that everyone else came to me and therefore I needed one or two people, including them, to whom I could turn.

It was a moment of honesty that many HR Directors will recognise immediately; the role demands that you hold others and the question of who holds you is rarely asked.

It's one of the reasons I find coaching and mentoring HR Directors, and other senior HR players, so rewarding.

I have written before about transition coaching and how everything in my career seems to come together in those sessions. Something similar is true here.

The question is why. What makes this particular subset of my practice feel so specific, and possibly so useful?

It begins with having done the job. Not a version of it but the actual thing. I understand the loneliness of the HRD role, the political complexity of sitting on an executive committee whilst also serving it, the tension between being the organisation's conscience and being a business partner.

The burden of confidentiality.

The moments when you are the only person who both can and should say the difficult thing - and the solitariness of that.

The conflict between what an organisation says it wants from HR and what it needs. Or, even worse, secretly wants.

A client does not need to explain any of this to me; I have inhabited that landscape. I've grappled with aligning a people strategy to a business strategy; I've debated with myself (and with others of course) which style of HR is needed; I've run functional transformations; I've influenced people whom I thought were beyond influencing.

Then there is the depth of my coaching & mentoring practice - and the fact that I can offer both, moving between them as the work requires. My coachees will know which mode we are in, even if we never name it. That fluidity only works if the experience behind the mentoring is genuine. It is.

And then there is something less familiar to many clients, but which I have come to regard as essential: my organisational supervision qualification and practice, from Hult Ashridge. What this brings to the work is a capacity to think systemically - to explore not just the presenting issue, but the forces surrounding it. The team. The relationships. The organisational dynamics that are always present, even when invisible.

For the person who holds everyone else, the question of who holds them - and how well - is not a small one.

I have been coaching and mentoring HR professionals since the late 1990s. Many of them have been senior players, many navigating significant transitions - in organisations, in roles, in themselves. That breadth of experience is what makes this work feel different from general executive coaching. It is not just that I understand the HR world; it is that I understand it from the inside, at depth, over time.

I am always working with at least one HRD or CPO - current or emerging - at any given time. It is work I actively seek out, because I believe I can genuinely be useful.

If that sounds like a conversation worth having, I would be glad to have it.