Someone told me once that HR will never get a seat at the table because it is not commercial. I have thought about that a lot over the years. My answer is this. People are your biggest investment and the single thing that can move the commercial dial more than anything else. If that is not commercial, I do not know what is. The problem is not that HR does not belong at the table. The problem is that HR has not always made the case for being there in language that the table understands.

That is where you start. If you are walking into any conversation about strategy without financial numbers, you are already on the back foot. Every point you make needs to connect to cost, revenue, risk, or growth. Not engagement. Not culture. Not people experience. Those things matter, but they are not how decisions get made in a boardroom. HR people who get a seat at the table are not there because they are great at HR. They are there because they understand the business well enough to speak its language. Revenue, margin, headcount cost, productivity. If you are not fluent in those numbers, start now. Learn to translate what you know into terms that land in that room and do it before you walk in the door.

The most influential people in any organisation are often not the ones sitting at the table when decisions get made. They are the ones who shaped the thinking before the meeting even started. Find out who they are and make it your business to become one of them. Build those relationships before you need them. Informal coffees, understanding their numbers, knowing what is keeping them up at night. When you can give someone the data that supports what they are already trying to do, you become useful to them. And useful people get consulted early.

When HR is brought in too late, the business pays for it. Not in a soft, hard-to-measure way. In a very practical way. The change management piece gets missed. The implementation falls apart because nobody thought through how you actually get 200 people to do something differently in six weeks. The plan was commercially sound and operationally impossible. The business needed a change management plan. Nobody built one because HR was not in the room.

But here is the harder conversation. HR needs to stop just doing. Stop running the performance management process because it is on the calendar. Stop sending the engagement survey because you did it last year. Start asking why. Why are we doing this, what decision will it inform, what will we do differently based on the result, and what does that mean for the business? If you cannot answer those questions, do not do it. If you can, make sure the answers are framed in boardroom terms before you present them. HR is not an admin function. Stop performing it like one.

I have watched talented HR people wait years to be invited to the table. The invitation rarely comes. So, stop waiting. Set a plan for how you are going to get there. Who do you need to influence, what do you need to know, what relationships do you need to build, and what will you bring when you arrive? The seat is not going to be handed to you. Decide you want it and go and get it.