I’ve been thinking recently about what all my years working in HR actually taught me.
There are the obvious things, of course. Employment relations, organisational change, recruitment, leadership development, the intricacies of policy and process. I’ve spent a lot of my career sitting somewhere in the middle of organisations, where business decisions and people’s lives have a habit of meeting.
When I think about what has stayed with me, though, I keep coming back to judgement. More specifically, the kind of judgement that develops when you’ve spent years dealing with situations where there isn’t an obvious answer.
I don’t think I understood that earlier in my career.
Back then, being good at your job seemed to involve knowing. Knowing the legislation and policy, understanding the process, being across good practice. There was a certain comfort in that. If you knew enough, surely you could work out what to do.
Except people rarely arrive in neat, policy-shaped situations.
Two people can walk away from the same conversation with genuinely different experiences of what happened. A manager can be convinced they have a performance problem and, once you start asking questions, discover there is much more going on. A decision can be entirely reasonable from a business perspective and still be handled in a way that causes unnecessary damage.
Over time, I became much more interested in the space between what initially appeared to be happening and what was actually going on.
Employee relations will teach you that fairly quickly. You learn to listen to the first version of events without settling on a conclusion too soon. Sometimes one conversation reveals a piece of information that shifts your understanding of the whole situation. Sometimes the context changes how you see something you thought was reasonably clear.
One question has stayed with me from those years: What do I actually know here?
It’s surprisingly useful. It creates a little distance between the information in front of you and the conclusions you’re beginning to form. It gives you room to notice where you’ve filled in a gap yourself or accepted somebody else’s interpretation as fact.
That small amount of space can make a considerable difference to the decision that follows.
Organisational change brought a different version of the same question.
A restructure can make perfect sense on paper and still be led poorly. There are times when organisations have to make decisions that people won’t welcome. Roles disappear or change. Work moves. The business rationale may be completely sound.
How people are treated while that happens stays with them.
People remember whether someone was prepared to answer a difficult question properly. They notice when communication becomes vague because managers are uncomfortable with what they have to say. They know when consultation feels meaningful and when everyone in the room suspects the decision has already been made.
There is no way to make every organisational decision easy for the people affected by it. But the way you go about it matters enormously. You can be clear about what is happening and thoughtful about how you communicate it. You can make a difficult decision while remaining conscious that somebody else has to live with the consequences.
And that was often where leadership became much more visible to me.
Organisations can spend an enormous amount of time defining what good leadership looks like. Yet some of the clearest examples I’ve seen have happened in fairly ordinary workplace conversations.
A manager has to talk to a previously strong employee whose performance has changed. Someone is deeply disappointed about missing out on a role. A team is unsettled by change and wants answers their leader doesn’t yet have.
Those situations reveal a lot about how someone leads. Can they listen properly while still holding their position? What happens when the other person becomes upset or angry? Can they take responsibility for a difficult decision without retreating behind HR, policy or “the business”?
Those conversations have probably shaped my understanding of leadership more than any competency model. They showed me that judgement isn’t only about reaching a sound decision. It is also present in what happens once another person is sitting across the table from you.
Hiring raised another set of questions.
We form impressions of people remarkably quickly. Someone seems confident or senior. Another person feels as though they would fit easily into the team. A candidate reminds us, consciously or otherwise, of people we’ve worked successfully with before.
The interesting part is what happens to those impressions once we have them.
I’ve heard comments like, “They didn’t feel senior enough.” Or, “I’m not sure they’d fit here.” Sometimes, “The other candidate had more presence.”
Whenever I hear language like that, I want to know more. What did we actually observe? What does “senior enough” mean for this particular role? What are we seeing in one candidate that we’re overlooking in another?
Fair hiring depends on good process, but the quality of the thinking within that process matters just as much. Judgement is always present. Becoming more conscious of how we’re using it gives us a better chance of making a considered decision.
Maybe that’s what experience has changed most for me.
I used to assume that the longer I worked, the more certain I would become. I thought experience would eventually make decisions easier because I would have seen enough to know what to do.
I’m less convinced of that now.
Experience gives you a considerable body of knowledge to draw from. You remember what happened when an organisation avoided the difficult conversation for six months. You’ve seen a seemingly straightforward performance issue become much more complicated once someone asked a better question. You know how differently a decision can play out once it leaves the meeting room and reaches the people affected by it.
All of that becomes part of how you read a situation.
I’ve also come to understand that experience doesn’t guarantee we’ll always feel confident about what we see.
There can be periods in a career when we question our read of things more than usual. We hesitate where we might once have spoken. Something we would previously have said without too much thought stays in our head instead. We can know a great deal and still wonder whether we’re the person who should say it.
I’ve become curious about the gap. Judgement accumulates over a career. Our confidence in expressing it seems to be much less constant.
And perhaps that’s part of what leadership evolution asks us to pay attention to. What we carry forward from all those years of experience matters too.
There’s a lot of conversation about how leaders need to keep developing, and of course we do. There will always be things worth reconsidering and ways of working that no longer suit us.
But I wonder whether there are also times when the more useful question is what we already know that we’ve stopped trusting.
A long career leaves us with a considerable body of knowledge, much of which becomes so familiar that we barely recognise it as expertise anymore. We notice things because we’ve encountered some version of them before. We know when the first explanation probably needs another question. We can sometimes sense when a process has become more important than thinking properly about the situation in front of us.
We’ve also lived through the consequences of decisions that once existed only on a piece of paper.
That experience accumulates quietly, and I’m paying more attention to it these days.
There will always be situations where reasonable people look at the same information and reach different conclusions. Experience doesn’t remove that complexity, and it certainly doesn’t make every judgement correct. What it gives us is a deeper well to draw from when we have to decide what we think.
Perhaps the question I’ve landed on is slightly different from the one I started with:
What have I learned to see that I no longer notice I know?
I’m not sure I have a complete answer yet, but it’s a question I’m interested in keeping.