Marie Rolston  0:02  
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Sabrina Baker  0:52  
Welcome back to The HR Connection on the HR HappyHour Media Network. I'm Sabrina Baker, CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions, and in just a second, I'll be joined by Marie Rolston, an HR business partner with Acacia, as we talk about this idea of influencing from the middle. What do you do when you are in a small environment and you are not taken seriously, you are seen as administrative or tactical, and you want to have influence? You want to be able to offer insight, but no one is taking you seriously. We have been there. We are there often with our clients, and we want to share our experience and some tips and tricks we have learned to gain that influence. I'm going to warn you, though, and I say this in the episode, it absolutely takes time. Let's get into it. 

Marie Rolston  1:45  
So I want to kick us off with a story about something that I navigated last year, because I just know that something like this is happening somewhere in small businesses, and it's probably even happening with some of our listeners right now. Last year, I was working with the CEO who was working through a growth phase in his organization, he he had this legacy sales manager who obviously tenured, but he had all of the relationships with clients and with vendors, but at the end of the day, he really wasn't delivering results and he wasn't really contributing anything to the sales. Anytime the CEO would try to discuss these performance issues with the sales manager. There was just always something that would come up from the sales manager that would completely derail any kind of follow through from the manager at all to me as HR, you know, the pattern was obvious, and I would definitely flag it when the CEO would vent to me, but all the CEO would do was look at me and say, okay, Marie, you know, I hear you. Let me think about it, but nothing would actually happen. Now, at the time, I told myself that I didn't have the capacity to keep pushing this problem and just continue getting shut down. But I also told myself that the CEO was also waiting for things to slow down, to take any real action. But things didn't slow down, because they never do right? And in the meantime, sales were getting worse, and the CEO was just getting more and more frustrated. Now I'm going to stop there with the story, because I would love to hear from Sabrina. You know, what do you think of my story so far?

Sabrina Baker  3:20  
Yeah, so I think this story encapsulates the real problem that small business HR practitioners have. So if you remember, we kind of focus on small employer versus small business. Small employers, one to 500 employees. We don't care about revenue. So small employer, one to 500 this is something your story that I know our listeners have dealt with or are going through. And what we think about small business practitioners is we think that they have a time issue, or we think that they have a capacity issue. And those things are true. There is a lack of time, and there certainly is a, you know, capacity is a commodity in a small environment, but really what your story shows and what I think the biggest challenge, and this is unique to us. This is unique to something that I say is: it's not capacity, it's not time, it's influence. That is absolutely the number one challenge that small business HR practitioners are facing. And if they had the influence, then the time and the capacity would be less of a problem. There's still, I'm not saying that those go away, but they would be different. They would show up very, very different. And so today, I really want to talk about that. I want to take your story and talk through this influence issue. And how can our practitioners that are listening influence from the middle when they don't have the authority, when they don't have the voice, when they're not invited into meetings that they need to be but they still have to influence, because if we can fix that influence problem, then we can fix a lot of our struggles that we are facing inside of small organizations.

Marie Rolston  5:00  
Yes, and that is exactly it. And again, that's what today is going to be about, because I do think that most HR folks, especially when something isn't moving, just assume the problem is capacity. But as you said, we don't think that that's it, right? And that's what we're going to dig into today.

Sabrina Baker  5:17  
Okay, so let's get into why this is the real problem? Why do I say that influence, not capacity, not time, is the real problem? Part of what happens inside of small environments, and I think I don't know that this is actually really unique to small environments, is that CEOs, founders, CFOs, whoever's hiring the HR person, they see that role as very administrative. They hire them to handle things we talked in the last episode about all things people fall to that person, right? Everything that is people, everything that has to be either bad news delivered or even event organizing, everything that people related to people falls to that individual. And so that's how they are seen. That's what they are hired to do. They are hired usually when the people issues get to be too large, when the CEO, or whoever is hiring them is dealing with so many people issues, they realize they need a person to handle it. So they don't see HR as somebody that can influence they see HR as somebody who can handle some paperwork, who can handle some tough documentation, or deliver some tough news, they do not see them because they've never experienced good HR usually, or they've never had HR even, or they just have this mindset about what HR absolutely is. And so the HR person comes in and they get handled all of this tactical work.

Marie Rolston  6:44  
Yes, and when you are buried in tactical work, you don't even have the time or the space to show up in any other way. So it's just that perception that keeps reinforcing itself, right? And what we see over and over again, here are HR folks working really hard and knowing what needs to happen, yet they can't get anyone to act on what they're bringing to the room. So again, the conclusion that most people draw is that they need more time, and obviously I get it from my story. You can hear that I was there once too, but after working through these kinds of situations, I've come to realize that time is always the wrong thing to chase first, and that's because if people around you actually heard you, you'd get the resources to fix that buried problem, you'd get the leadership to move on the things that you've been flagging, and you'd get the buy in that would make your job actually manageable. You know, if capacity is what you're actually after, then you have to understand that you build capacity by building influence, because you can't out organize your way out of not being heard.

Sabrina Baker  7:44  
Exactly! So bandwidth is the symptom. Lack of influence is the disease. And again, I think that this is, you know, for our listeners, this is going to be a little bit odd, because normally, what podcasters, what people who are at conferences, say is you need better time management and you need more bandwidth. You need to create more bandwidth, especially if you're an HR department of one, right? Like, think about that group. But the reality is, we can't add time. We know that you have the hours and the day that you have, and what we know to be true, because it happens inside our business, is that you can have the best time management in the world and still not get it all done. It's there's still going to be stuff to do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, because that's the nature of the beast that we are dealing with. And so what we have found is that when you can can capture the influence, when you can get that influence with your senior leaders, with your team, with your employees, then you start to get them to listen to you about the capacity, about the bandwidth, about the things that you can implement in the organization that are actually going to make it better. Marie, I'm going to test you for a second. What do I say all the time inside our organization? We live, breathe and die by...

Marie Rolston  8:59  
The relationships we build!

Sabrina Baker  9:01  
The relationships we build! Not by our skill sets, not by what we know, not by how good we are, and certainly not by how good we manage our time, but we live, breathe and die by the relationships we build. Because inside of those relationships, then we bring the influence that we need. Okay, so that first piece, that first problem of why HR doesn't have the influence was a perception problem, just the way that that we are perceived coming into an organization. And we see this with our clients. This is not this is not unique to anybody in house. This is the way we're normally brought in. It's a very administrative undertaking. And then we start to kind of weave our influence, and they see that, oh, we can do so much more, and we can give them so much more advice, and we can actually help grow their business. Grow their business. The second reason why small business HR people don't have the influence from the get go is a structural problem, and this is why, again, I know like people are going to get sick of hearing me say this, but when I say that small business HR is not just small HR, it is its own discipline. This right here is one of the reasons why, and it is because inside of a small organization, everything is reactive. You have a founder, potentially, if the founder is still in place, who is probably a great visionary, they maybe have a great product idea. They're great, you know, at figuring out their service, but maybe not so good at building the structure of an organization that they are leading. And so rather than building for the future, rather than scaling for where they're going, they are very reactive, sitting in the moment. And that's not just HR. There is a lack of structure inside the entire organization.

Marie Rolston  10:39  
And the lived reality of that is you become so reactive that every interaction with leadership is just you delivering something hard, right? So you show up to deliver a problem or a situation, just something that needs their attention right now, and that's what the pattern is. So over time, without anyone meaning for it to happen, you just become the person associated with fires instead of insight or or the one simply highlighting whatever broke this week, right? And when you think about the work that you're actually doing really well, like managing the things that didn't become a lawsuit, or that conversation you had that kept someone from quitting on the spot, unfortunately, no one is seeing that. Nobody gets to thank you for the problem that never happened. So leadership has nothing to go on except what they see. And what they see is someone who shows up when things go wrong. Something that I really want our listeners to hold on to right now is that what I'm describing is not a competence problem, it's a positioning problem, and those require completely different solutions.

Sabrina Baker  11:42  
Yeah, so if we think back to our last episode and things that we have said before, it's that inside of human resources, there's all this invisible work, and that is exactly what you were just describing. The no one sees the lawsuit that didn't happen, no one sees the employee relations issue that didn't blow up, or, you know, the person whose birthday it was who got the card last minute, because you realized there was nothing in place, even though that's not something you should be doing in the first place isn't HR, but that's a whole other episode, right? So there's this invisible work that HR does that is highly influential. It's amazingly influential, and yet it goes unnoticed. Because to your point, when is, when are the leaders going to actually see you? They're going to see you. When things go wrong, they're going to see you. Going to see you when you're delivering bad news, when you're in the room because you're about to terminate somebody or handle the layoffs, or you have to tell them about a lawsuit that did happen, right? And so they only see you when there is something negative or something tactical, something administrative. And so they just start associating you with that rather than you with some as somebody who actually has some influence. I actually have a story about this. A few years ago, back during the pandemic, we had a client who brought us on. I had been in the business for nine years at that point, so I had, you know, a pretty good understanding of what was going on with small businesses, but we had a client around 60 employees. They brought us on, and they immediately started just shuffling administrative work at us, right, tactical work, all of that stuff. So, fantastic. Fine, we can handle that. And that's usually what we do when we come in anyway. We do an audit, we figure out all of the compliance stuff, and then, you know, we kind of move on to the other things. About three or four months in, they were talking about changing PTO and changing things that are absolutely conversations I should have been a part of. And instead of bringing me in, they would tell me after the fact. And so it gave me the opportunity in those meetings to say, well, actually, here's what I'm seeing with other clients. Or actually, I'm wondering how your employees are going to take they were, of course, wanting to take time away, because nobody ever wants to get more. You know, I'm wondering how that's going to go with your employees. And you could literally see the shock on their face that I was bringing them those kinds of questions, that I was asking things that they hadn't thought about. And they expected to come into that meeting, tell me what they wanted to do about PTO and me just roll it out. That's what they expected. And when I started asking questions, they were like, Oh, this, this is very different. And I had the CEO say to me, look me in the face and say, I just didn't think that you were capable of giving us that kind of insight. And at the the moment, I really got offended, because I was like, What? What on earth did I do to make him feel like I was ignorant, right? I couldn't accomplish this. And the reality is, as I was driving home and, like, dealing with that, that aftermath, it was I had done nothing. It was I had come in and started doing exactly what we should do, which is the tactical kind of stuff, getting that, you know, getting our house in order, as we say. And that was my first opportunity to show that insight and to show that influence. And then I thought about what would have happened if I hadn't taken it, what would have happened if I had just rolled out the PTO policy as it was? First of all, I would have dealt with amazing backlash. But, but what would i What would have happened. They would have never seen me as insightful. And so it is important, I think, for our listeners, that they understand this is not competence. It is not It happens to all of us. It is positioning. It is how they see you. And it's not even it's not even aggressive on their part, or it's not even like nefarious on their part. I don't know what the right word is, but they're not doing it on purpose. They're not doing something mean towards you. This is just how they see HR. 

Sabrina Baker  15:24  
All right, Marie, so enough of all that. I think we've explained it. I think what I want to do now is, let's start talking about, how can we start building influence? What are some things that we have done, some tried and tested things that we have done to start building that influence with our clients? I before I even get into it, though, there are four things, but I want to say this. First, this takes time. This is not something that you were going to do overnight. That client that I just gave you the example of, even though I had that moment with PTO that was about, I don't know, five, six months in, it still took a long time for me to get to the level of influence that we ended up with when you came in, that that was a high level of influence with that client, and they really were listening to us. It took years. So sometimes this is an easy fix, right? Some you'll have some CEOs, some CFOs, who start to see you as that insightful person and that influential person, and they start asking you all kinds of questions and asking you to be involved in everything. Other times it doesn't. And so before we get into the shifts, and I'm sure I'm going to repeat myself with that before the end of this episode, but just know that this is something you're going to have to work at. It is something that you're going to have to keep taking opportunities to do, because it does not happen very quickly that often. So with that, let's start with the shift. So the first shift is change what you bring to leadership. So as we said earlier, it is a positioning problem. They see you as the person who is potentially always in the thick of problems, and that's just the nature of your job, but you're kind of always in the thick of that, and so you want to change what you bring to them by: stop leading with the problems and start leading with patterns. You are going to be in the thick of the problems. You are going to be the one who's noticing high turnover or low employee engagement, or that somebody does need to be terminated, or whatever it is. You're not going to change the nature of that, but you can change the nature of how you talk about it. And so let me give you an example of this. There is a stark difference, just a massive difference between saying our turnover is at 9% which is really high for us, versus saying we have lost nine employees in the sales department last month. Here is what that is doing to our ability to meet our revenue goals, and here's what I think we need to be doing about it. Massive difference, right? And just delivering a number versus delivering this pattern that you see like, what is that number telling you? What is that turnover number telling you, digging in deeper, so that going in that one step further, because when you cannot wait, when you when you stop waiting for them to ask you what the solution is, and you just start giving it, then they start seeing you as a problem solver, which is a very different conversation.

Marie Rolston  15:24  
That's exactly what happened with the sales manager situation that I was opening up with. You know, for a long time, the conversations I was having with the CEO were really just the two of us being frustrated together, right? So he would tell me what happened. I would validate it. We'd talk about how hard it was. And while I would like try to push things forward, nothing actually moved. So I stopped doing that, and I started documenting everything. And then I started to go back to him with a picture instead of a problem. It was this pattern of what was actually happening and what it was costing the business. When I started approaching it that way, something completely shifted. And so the CEO, he realized that he had been so close to this person, you know, so tangled up in the relationship that he couldn't actually see the real business problem. So when I finally stepped out of the emotion and showed him the data, he finally could see what was going on and that right there, that is the difference between showing up with a problem and showing up with a documented pattern.

Sabrina Baker  19:07  
Yeah, you know what I think is interesting about that is a lot of times we think CEOs are ignoring us, or we think that they're they just don't care about the problem. But I think probably what happens is he didn't know what to do with that problem. He didn't know what where to go with it. He didn't know how to have a conversation, or did he need to have a conversation, or what were possible outcomes? And I think that that's why this showing patterns is so important. And then as we go into shift to that, that story you tell, we almost have to become really good storytellers in HR, because the story you tell with whatever's going on then gives them something to latch onto, rather than to just being like, oh, turnovers at 9% what does that mean for me? I don't know. What is that good? Is that bad? I don't know, but changing that to this is particularly what's happening in this department now. It gives them a direction. All right, so shift number two, Marie is to connect HR work to business outcomes. Outcomes. Now that is one I know that is easier said than done sometimes, but if you really start to dig in, you should be able to figure out, how do does the work that you're wanting to do? How does whatever it is that you're proposing, how does it connect to business outcomes? CEOs, COOs, CFOs, they respond to a few different words, and the things that they respond to are revenue retention and risk.

Marie Rolston  20:28  
Yes, and this is exactly where I think a lot of HR folks leave value at the door. So I'm just going to keep going with your turnover example. But you know, think about it. You go to a CEO and you say something like, turnover is a moral issue, they're going to nod and they're going to move on. But you go to the same CEO, and you say something like, we've lost three people in that department in six months. And then here's the average cost of what it is to replace that person. That conversation is going to go somewhere. It's the same problem, but different language, so you're going to get a completely different result.

Sabrina Baker  21:01  
Okay, Marie, so shift number three is to pick one visible win and make it legible. So pick something that you are working on, something that you are fixing, and then make that very visible. You don't want to wait for some strategic planning cycle, that which you may not even be invited to. Right? You want to think about internally in your HR processes, in the things that you are doing, what is one thing that's creating drag right now? And so we have an HR connection podcast episode on our main channel, not on the HR Happy Hour Network, but on our main channel, where we talked about our process, right? We talked about our three steps in how you look at what is creating drag inside the organization from a people perspective, and then how do you work through that? So we have first stabilize, then streamline, then optimize. That is our process, and I don't want to go too far into it today. It's definitely something that they can listen to in a different episode, but that is where you think about going through that process, figuring out something that you're going to optimize or stabilize, and then making that a win, making that very visible, making it something that that people didn't even realize needed to be worked on or needed to be changed, but you're going to absolutely go do it right, spend your time fixing it because it's creating drag for you and everybody else, and then you're going to make sure that it is known.

Marie Rolston  22:31  
So here's what that actually looks like in practice. So a few years ago, I had a client where onboarding was a complete mess. Nobody owned it. Managers were winging it, and new hires were definitely showing up confused on day one, while this wasn't a catastrophe, it was a slow drain. So I quickly put together a simple 30 day onboarding checklist. I walked two managers through it, who had new hires coming on board. When the onboarding was finished, I sent the CEO a two sentence note. It said something like, we had a new hire start this week. We used the new onboarding process, and it went smoothly. Just wanted you to know, and that's it. The note, it wasn't anything dramatic. We didn't have a big meeting about it or anything like that. But six months later, when I proposed a bigger project, that same CEO said to me, Hey, you remember that onboarding thing that actually made a difference, and that was such a big moment in my career, and testament to the fact that small wins, they don't have to be loud, they just have to be visible.

Sabrina Baker  23:33  
Which then leads me into the fourth and final shift, and this is probably my favorite one. It's one that I say all the time to us, and I know that when we come into a new client, we are always trying to build relationships, not just with our point of contact, but with all the leaders in the organization. And this last shift is why. So the last one is to build relationships before you need them. And particularly what I'm talking about here is with other leaders. When you are the HR person who maybe doesn't have the influence you need or you want, you want to find a leader who has that sphere of influence that you're trying to get, and that's a relationship that you build strong and hard.

Marie Rolston  24:17  
Honestly, this is the one that took me the longest to internalize. Why while leaving in house HR. So, as an in house HR professional, my MO was to make relationships with everybody, because, as you say, you just don't know when you need it. But when I came into this consultant space and I started acting more as an HR leader, I really thought that my goal was to get the top leaders first, and that was kind of it. And while that is ultimately what you're working toward, the path there usually runs through the people around those top leaders. So for instance, I had a client situation way back when, where I was really making slow progress with the owner, but I had actually built a solid relationship with one of the directors who was in the room for every major conversation. At some point that director started referencing the work I was doing with them in meetings. And this director, they weren't like quoting me directly. They were just kind of incorporating what I had been saying to them. But over time, I noticed the owners starting to track differently when those ideas came up. Now that was cool, and I didn't get credit for it, and that's totally fine, because what mattered is that the idea landed, right? The business moved, and my relationship with the owner got a lot easier after that. I think the key takeaway here is that influence, it doesn't always have to have your name on it, as long as the influence is happening. 

Marie Rolston  25:41  
Sabrina, so we've done a lot of talking, and now I want to give a couple examples about what influence actually looks like when it's working. I have, I have a client right now where I do have real influence. You know, I genuinely enjoy showing up and working with them every single week. My perspective, it matters to them. When I bring something, they move on it. And the work we're able to do together because of that trust, it's a completely different experience than a relationship where I'm still earning my way in. On the flip side, I have another client where I've been working for a long time to build that trust, and there is a relationship there, but this leader is definitely skeptical of everything that I put out there when I think about it, you know, she doesn't take my word for things easily. And honestly, I have to work a lot harder to get the same outcomes, because I haven't fully cracked what matters to her most yet. You know, I haven't found that language that actually lands with her. Now, when I think about those two clients, both of them, they need the same exact things for me, but the experience of doing the work couldn't be more different. But when I think about what got me to a real place of influence with the clients, where it is working, it's always the same thing, right? I did the work to understand their business. I figured out how they thought, what they prioritized, what wrist actually meant to them, and when my moment came, I was ready. You know, I wasn't scrambling, because I was already in sync with them. And again, you know, Sabrina, you said this just a few minutes ago. This is not something that's going to happen overnight, right? It is 100 of those small moments we talked about earlier that build up to that big one. So here's what I really want our listeners to take away from today: The hardest part of this job is not the workload. It is showing up every single day, feeling like you see the problems, you know what needs to happen, and nobody is moving. You know that feeling it has a name. It's an influence problem, and influence is something you can build on purpose over time, even without a different title or a CE formally given. It really starts with patterns instead of problems, and it grows when you learn to speak the language of the business. Because we know things like this take time, we want to give you some tools and resources to help with this. So next month, Sabrina and I are going to talk about what we call ready mode. This is going to be how to triage and survive When Everything Feels urgent at once, because we know that influence takes time to build, and in the meantime, you still have to get through the week, so that's going to be coming in April.

Sabrina Baker  28:12  
Yeah, I think it was important for us to set up this influence conversation. We recognize that influence is the problem, but it takes a long time to build. And so in the meantime, what, what do you do? And so that ready mode guidelines is something we adopted, what three years ago, or something. And so it's been really effective in helping us with our capacity, our bandwidth. And I'm really excited to roll that out to listeners. I wanted to mention a few other things that are coming up. First of all, if you want to connect with us more, we have a weekly podcast called The HR C onnection that you can subscribe to and listen to us every single week talking about these same kinds of topics. We have these exclusive episodes on HRHappyHour, but our HR connection is our weekly podcast, and then we also have an upcoming cohort that we will be launching April 17. This is designed for HR people managing human resources in a small environment. We are calling it the HR department of one cohort. You don't have to be an HR department of one you just have to be managing human resources in a small environment. It is going to be a community group where you get online once a week with 15 to 20 of your peers, people who are doing the work that you are doing in a small environment, with the same challenges, with the same lack of budget, lack of resources. And Marie is going to be hosting that I will be guest hosting at least one of the sessions, which I'm super excited about but it is going to be such a good opportunity for those who are struggling with some of the things that we've been talking about to come together and learn more around how we navigate some of this stuff every single day with clients, but then also hear from their peers on how they're doing that as well. How are they facing some of those things that are really big challenge to them? So that's coming up. We'll have that link for you in the show notes. 

Sabrina Baker  29:59  
Marie, I think this was a really good conversation. I'm glad that we are starting here and talking about influence, and recognizing that many of our listeners do have to influence from middle they have to influence when they aren't given the title, they aren't given the authority, and they have to figure that out, but then knowing that it's going to be really important for us going forward, to talk about what do you do in the meantime, while you're building that influence, what else do you do? So I'm excited about the future episodes where we start to roll that out.

Marie Rolston  30:26  
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it is a lot of fun to talk about this stuff, and I wish that early on in my career, I had something to listen to like this, because these are the hard conversations. These are the hard truths that we're talking about, and they are it can be really impactful for our listeners. So anyway, Sabrina, as always, thanks for your time. Listeners, we'll see you next time. 

Sabrina Baker  30:45  
Yep, we'll see you next time. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai