Before we jump in, remember that we are our entire body graph. We’re not just our type, our authority, our profile, centers, gates, channels and other aspects of your design. They all contribute to how we experience life. In this episode, we’…

Read more

Have you run your Human Design chart? If not, access your free chart here: Human Design for Leadership — EngageHR

Before we jump in, remember that we are our entire body graph. We’re not just our type, our authority, our profile, centers, gates, channels and other aspects of your design. They all contribute to how we experience life. In this episode, we’re intentionally looking at type through one specific lens so you can begin recognizing what it might look like in real life. Some of what I describe may feel incredibly familiar, and some may not, and that’s okay. Another part of your design may influence how this shows up for you. So don’t use this as another box to put yourself in, or someone else. Use it as something to notice, experiment with-- experiment with, and get curious about. Remember, Human Design is the Science of Differentiation.

Let’s look at what Manifesting Generators look like in real life, where their strengths lie and where they may have some challenges, as well as how they know if they are operating in alignment or if they need to examine things more deeply before they burnout.

Manifesting generators make up around 33% of the population. They are not a type on their own. They’re a variation of the generator type, which in total make up about 70% of society. Manifesting generators are a little different than pure generators, though and we’re going to explore that here.

MGs have that generator energy, and they’re here to build, create, develop and master just like a generator, but there’s something a little different about the way manifesting generators tend to move through the world. They move quickly, they skip steps, change directions and they can have many interests at one time. In reality, they can be seen as part Generator and part Manifestor.

MGs may start something, realize it’s not for them anymore, and move on to something completely different. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re inconsistent, scattered or can’t commit. It honestly just means that they’re a manifesting generator. One of the biggest lessons for manifesting generators is learning that you’re not necessarily here to follow the traditional path from point A to point B to point C. Sometimes you go from A to B to F back to C and you realize you don’t need to stop at D at all. And somehow you still get to where you’re supposed to go. This is manifesting generator energy.

There’s a very distinguishable difference between a manifesting generator who is using their energy correctly and one who isn’t. And one of the easiest ways to recognize it is by paying attention to what they’re feeling. Satisfaction versus frustration. It’s the same for a generator as well. But manifesting generators can sometimes experience anger when they feel blocked, controlled or slowed down.

Read more

If not, you can run it here for free: Human Design for Leadership — EngageHR

Before we jump in, I always want to remind you that we are our entire body graph. We’re not just our type, our authority, our profile, centers, gates, channels, and other aspects of your design. They all contribute to how we experience life. In this episode, we’re intentionally looking at type through one specific lens so you can begin recognizing what it might look like in real life. Some of what I describe may feel incredibly familiar, and some may not, and that’s okay. Another part of your design may influence how this shows up for you. So don’t use this as another box to put yourself in, or someone else. Use it as something to notice, experiment with, and get curious about.

Let’s talk about Generators in Real Life. Generators are here to build what lights them up.

Generators make up about 70% of the population. That includes about 37% Pure Generators and 33% Manifesting Generators. Manifesting Generators aren’t technically their own type; they’re a variation of the Generator.

There are some distinguishing traits between the two, though, so I’m going to dig into Manifesting Generators in their own episode. For now, let’s focus on the pure Generators.

Generators can be referred to as builders, and I think that’s such a great way to understand their energy, it’s one of a Generator’s greatest assets. Generators are here to build and create. They’re here to take something and give it their sustained energy to make it into something real.

Read more

Generators in leadership are interesting because they’re not necessarily here to lead by being the person who starts everything. Instead, they lead by building what lasts through their consistent energy, mastery and devotion to what truly lights them up.

Generators lead through magnetic energy. If they’re lit up by something, their team feels it. And because Generators are designed to respond (their strategy), when their team comes to them with a roadblock, issue or question, that’s their time to shine. They respond by removing those roadblocks, answering questions, solving problems and helping improve things that are already there.

Read more

If not, you can do that here for free:

Human Design for Leadership — EngageHR

One thing I’m always going to ask you to remember before we jump in is that we are our entire body graph. We’re not just our type, our authority, our profile, centers, gates, channels, and other aspects of your design. They all contribute to how we experience life. In this episode, we’re intentionally looking at type through one specific lens, so you can begin recognizing what it might look like in real life. Some of what I describe may feel incredibly familiar, and some may not, and that’s okay. Another part of your design may influence how this shows up for you. So don’t use this as another box to put yourself or someone else in. Use it as something to notice, experiment with and get curious about.

Now, let’s look at our Generator Employees

So generators are the builders of society. If you have a generator on your team, which chances are you do since they’re about 70% of the population…you have someone who’s going to do the work.

And if you are a generator, you’re satisfied when you’re doing something that lights you up and you have sustainable energy for it. At work, generators are designed to build, develop, improve and master. This can look like becoming exceptionally good at their craft. Things like developing a business over time, creating repeatable processes, taking an idea and turning it into something tangible,or simply having tremendous stamina for work they truly enjoy.

The important distinction is that generator energy isn’t unlimited for everything. Generators are energized by doing what they love and drained by continually doing things they don’t like or that aren’t right for them. An aligned generator at work may think, “I can’t believe I get to do this,” or “I can’t believe I get paid for this.” And they may work really hard, but there’s satisfaction in doing it.

While a generator who isn’t aligned can look equally productive from the outside, but internally they’re thinking: “I have to do this” or “I should do this.” or “Everyone’s depending on me.” "I already said yes.” And eventually frustration and depletion set in and if that continues long enough, burnout can and will follow.

Read more

I mean…it’s a great song!

You may have noticed…this publication is shifting to focus more on Human Design…and I want to share why:

For more than 20 years, my world was HR and Leadership. I have spent my career thinking about people. And then I discovered Human Design and my immediate thought was “This is such a great tool to improve our emotional intelligence!”

I have LOVED getting to know myself better and only wish I could have had this tool in my 20s, but alas, here we are…so my goal is to share it far and wide with as many people who may be interested to learn about it, themselves and the people in their own lives.

For now the title of the publication is going to stay the Intentional Leader, but the paid subscriptions are going to be a bit different. I’m looking at what Human Design looks like in real life. I’m not so much trying to teach Human Design, but trying to share what a Generator Leader may look like in the workplace, where they could experience challenges and ultimately burnout. I’ve started doing workshops with HR professionals on Leadership by Design where I share what Human Design looks like in Leadership and in employees. And I’m SO excited to bring this tool to you!

My first launch is a separate podcast episode for each type and then episodes on what each type looks like in leadership and at work. I’ll probably eventually add more about relationships and parenting, but for now we’re sticking with work-life situations. I’m sticking with audio, because I love listening on the go and these are mostly 15 minutes or less, so you can listen on your commute, or on your way to pick your kids up from school or events or when you’re heading to the store or taking your walk.

This isn’t meant to be work, this is meant to be awareness.

We all don’t communicate, lead, work, parent or navigate change the same way. And yet, so much of our world is built around trying to get people to fit into the same mold. We’ve heard the comparison to plants (and I love plants), but when I get a new plant, I have to move it around to various places in my house to find where it thrives best. One may do well in my living room, while others thrive in my office. And sometimes they’ll be in one space and do completely fine, but you move them to another space and they blossom.

So, if a living thing like a plant is particular about where it thrives, humans are much more complex. Having spent a long time in the corporate life and ultimately experiencing burnout, I have a strong desire to prevent others from experiencing that. And the more I learn about Human Design, the more I find myself saying “That makes SO much sense!” or “If I would have known that was a sign…"

Things about myself, my career and honestly, the people in my life made a lot more sense. That’s what I want to explore more, here. Not Human Design as something that lives on a chart, but how it shows up in everyday life.

What does it look like being a burned-out generator at work?

What does it look like when a Projector is leading a team?

What happens when you reach a point in life where the person you’ve spent years being doesn’t quite fit anymore?

That’s where I want to focus. And while we can and will explore what it means at work, we can’t ignore that humans are more than their work personas…they have lives outside of work, so I’m focusing on relationships…how does it show up in our relationships with ourselves and our relationships with others, no matter where we are and what capacity we are in…

Taking Human Design out of the chart and looking at how it shows up in real life - how we work, how we lead, how we love, parent, make decisions and navigate change.

That’s Human Design in the Wild and I’m ridiculously excited about where we’re going.

If Human Design is completely new to you, don’t worry, I’m starting at the beginning and I’m going to keep it practical.

You don’t need to know what a center, gate, channel or authority is…we’re gonna cover all that…and how it shows up in your life, not just in the bodygraph and the textbook definition.

If you want to get started, you can run your Human Design chart on my website at:

Human Design for Leadership — EngageHR

I hope you’ll come along on this ride.

Who this is for:

1. If you’ve been curious about understanding yourself and others more

2. If you’re worried about burnout

3. If you’re a leader and want to understand how others see you

4. If you want to increase your own self-awareness

5. If you have always been curious about Human Design, but don’t want to take a course or read a book

6. If you love to listen to things to learn

7. If you’re frustrated, angry, bitter or disappointed and you’re just not sure why.

8. If you want to feel more satisfaction, peace, success and joy in your life.

We spend our lives conditioning ourselves and being conditioned to behave a certain way…and a lot of this actually turns out to be the opposite of who we were created to be.

But….somehow we made this normal.

I mean, I’m not saying everyone should go around not having manners or not respecting others.

But, is working in an office or on a plant floor for 40+ hours a week really where we thrive?

We were taught we had to go to college, get a degree and then get a job.

I did all of that…

But, I couldn’t help but feel like I was dying on a vine at my jobs. Not all the time, but there were definitely times I felt that way, probably more often than not.

Now that I study Human Design, I can look back and see why…

I’m a Generator. I was created to respond to things that come to me. Not create like a manifestor, but respond. Not advise like a projector or get involved in a lot of things like a Manifesting Generator.

If things weren’t coming to me, I didn’t have anything to respond to.

And my generator motor couldn’t use its energy.

During my career, I did best in chaotic environments, where things were always coming to me, then I always had something to respond to, usually more things than I really needed to respond to as well as things that I shouldn’t have been responding to.

Environments that ran like smooth machines, I struggled in. I had an amazing mentor and boss for about 6 years of my HR career, in a well-established location that had most everything in place already and a tenured workforce. Corporate would send us projects, so I would have that work, and the regularly scheduled work would also get done, but not having chaos to respond to, I was unsure of what to focus on.

If I had understood my Human Design back then, I would have understood that I needed things to respond to in order to not feel like I was wasting away in corporate. I would have then known that I needed to leave my office to find things to respond to.

This self-awareness would have helped me in many ways. Not only would I have felt better internally and had things to spend my energy on, I would have had the opportunity to learn new things, I would have been exposed to more than just HR, I would have been seen as a more strategic partner and less as just an HR professional.

The impact knowing and studying my Human Design would have had on my career would have helped to move my career along much more quickly.

Human Design is a self-awareness tool that allows us to better understand ourselves and who we were created to be, it helps us to understand why some things may be harder for us than other people as well as why some things may be easier for us than others. It helps us understand how we were created to move through the world and use our energy. How we make decisions and how we best interact with the world.

If I would have known that my strategy was to wait to respond, I would understand that I had to go out into life and find things to respond to…if you sit in the same spot everyday, things may come to you, but you’ll miss out on growth and development and new experiences by not engaging with life and exposing yourself to new opportunities.

And understanding that my body makes my decisions long before my mind, and that sometimes my mind overrides my body with the wrong decision. If I would have understood this years ago, I wouldn’t have overridden my gut feeling that I was making a bad hire. I knew it, I felt it in my gut, but my mind overrode the feeling because we tend to think we need to make decisions with our minds and not our bodies. In reality, if I would have listened to my gut response, I would have saved myself and my team some real struggle.

There is so much that we can learn from our Human Design, as well as from that of those around us, if only we take the time. The increase in emotional intelligence can change your life, relationships and career.

This is why I’m incorporating Human Design into Leadership and HR. There is so much that we override with our mind that we shouldn’t have to. We over-think, we try to talk ourselves in or out of something when our body already knows the answer. Once we understand how we make decisions, how we use our energy and how we move through society, we can more fully function as who we were created to be and ultimately be more successful in all aspects of our lives, as a result.

If you’re interested in learning more about your own Human Design, you can run your chart at Human Design for Corporate Leadership — EngageHR

Read more

I have seen so many people looking for work, including my family and friends, and I want to help. I know people can’t always afford a career coach, so I wanted to provide something accessible to all job seekers to help them in their search. Things aren’t what they were 5 years ago in the job market. Applying online the old-fashioned way isn’t working.

W…

Read more

Have you ever walked into a meeting, shared your HR knowledge, but no one heard you and you walked out of the meeting thinking “I don’t understand. Why won’t they listen to me? I know what I’m saying is right”

I’ve been there, too. It’s frustrating! This is why I created the Undeniable HR Leader program.

I’m Danielle, an HR Mentor and Strategic HR Advisor…

Read more

When someone comes to you with a problem — a complaint, a frustration, a situation that isn’t fair — what happens inside of you?

Do you feel it? Like actually feel it — their frustration, their disappointment, their anxiety — before they’ve even finished the sentence?

And then do you spend the rest of the day carrying it?

If you said yes — this episode is for you.

I’m Danielle — HR Mentor, Strategic HR Advisor, and founder of Engage HR. This is What HR Was Never Taught — the private podcast where we talk about everything this profession hands you without ever showing you how to carry it.

A colleague came to me a while back. They had been told they were going to be promoted into a new role. They had been given that promise directly and the leader even calculated, in front of them, what their new salary would be. And then — they were told the role didn’t have approval. The promotion wasn’t happening. Keep in mind, this position was never posted, it was never something that the leadership team had discussed in a leadership meeting. It was something HR (Me, I was HR, and HR department of 1) had never even heard of or about.

They came to me to talk about it. And I felt it immediately. The unfairness of it. The way a promise like that lands in a person — how much you start to build around it, how much you allow yourself to hope — and then having it pulled away with no real reason given.

And that was something I wasn’t going to let go.

I went to the leader. This was a senior leader, a member of the leadership team. The Head of Finance. I told him directly that what he did wasn’t right. That you don’t promise people roles, especially roles that don’t exist, yet. That the impact of that kind of decision on a person is real.

And then I went back to my colleague and I apologized. Not because the broken promise was mine. But because they deserved to hear from someone that what happened to them wasn’t okay. That they weren’t overreacting. That the disappointment they were feeling made complete sense.

And then — and this is the part I want you to hear — I put it down.

Not because I didn’t care. Because I had done everything that was mine to do. I felt it. I acted on it. I named it to the person who needed to hear it. And I apologized to the person who deserved one.

That was the full circle of my responsibility at that point. And I had to let the rest of it go.

That’s not coldness. That’s discernment. And it took me a long time to learn the difference.

But I want to be honest with you — because that story has a clean resolution and a lot of my HR career didn’t.

For most of my corporate life, when employees came to me with complaints — frustrations about their manager, concerns about the culture, things that weren’t fair — I internalized it. I took it home. I let it live in me longer than it needed to.

That’s what happens when you’re the person everyone brings their hardest things to. You start to feel responsible not just for hearing it — but for fixing it. For resolving it. For making sure nobody leaves a conversation with you still hurting.

And when you can’t fix it — when the system won’t move or the leader won’t listen or the situation is genuinely outside your control — you carry the weight of that too.

That’s a very specific kind of exhaustion. And it doesn’t show up on any job description.

But the moment that taught me the most about this — the moment I understood in my body what emotional absorption actually costs — was Covid.

During the pandemic I was responsible for managing our employee Facebook group. We had filed for unemployment for our employees, and they were receiving unemployment plus a supplemental payment to cover up to 80% of their pay. Which sounds straightforward. Except it wasn’t. Unemployment systems were overwhelmed. Payments were delayed. People were scared about their income, their families, their futures.

And they brought all of that to the Facebook group.

Here’s the thing about social media that anyone who has ever managed a public-facing group knows — people say things on a screen that they would never say to your face. The frustration comes out harder. The anger comes out louder. And it lands on whoever is managing the space.

That was me.

I was absorbing their fear about unemployment. Their frustration with payments that hadn’t arrived. Their anxiety about systems that were completely outside my control. And I was doing it in real time, publicly, with nowhere to put any of it.

I had to walk away for a bit. Not permanently. Not irresponsibly. But I had to limit my time on it — create some boundary around my exposure — because I could feel what it was doing to me.

And here’s the tension I lived in during that time: I wanted to walk away AND I wanted to make sure everyone got their answers. Both of those things were true at the same time. And managing the space between them — that was the work.

I shared some survey responses in earlier episodes. I want to share a few more today — because they live right at the heart of this.

Someone wrote:

“HR leaders have the weight of the organization on their backs.”

Someone else wrote:

“If you put your heart and brain into your work, it’s very difficult to divorce who you are at work from who you are outside of work. When you’re defeated at work, it’s hard not to let it affect how you feel about yourself as a whole.”

And this one:

“I’m tired.”

Two words. Just like the person who wrote I am drowning. Two words that carry the weight of someone who has been absorbing everyone else’s experience for so long that they’ve lost track of where theirs begins.

That’s not weakness. That is what happens when an empathetic, deeply feeling human being is handed the emotional infrastructure of an entire organization — with no training, no container, and no one asking how they’re doing.

Here’s what I want to offer you.

Empathy is not the problem. Your capacity to feel what the people around you are feeling — to walk into a room and know immediately what the temperature is, to sense the tension before anyone names it — that is one of the most powerful gifts an HR leader can have.

The problem is that nobody taught you how to use it without it using you.

There’s a difference between feeling the room and being run by the room. Between being moved by someone’s experience and being consumed by it. Between caring deeply and carrying everything.

The most empathetic thing you can do for someone in pain is not to feel everything they feel. It’s to feel it, name it, act on what’s yours to act on — and then stay grounded enough to actually lead them somewhere.

You cannot do that if you’re drowning in their experience alongside them.

The framework I use — and it’s simple, but it works — is three questions I ask myself when I feel someone else’s weight landing on me:

Did I feel it? Yes. Good. That’s information. That’s your gift working.

Did I act on what was mine to act on? If yes — I named it, I addressed it, I apologized where an apology was owed. And I worked to prevent it from happening in the future. That’s the full circle of my responsibility.

Is what’s left mine to carry? If the answer is no — if I’ve done everything in my power and the rest belongs to the system, the leader, or the other person’s journey — then my job is to put it down. Not because I don’t care. Because I care enough to stay useful.

That’s the practice. It’s not perfect. I still feel the weight of situations I can’t fix. But I know now that absorbing someone else’s experience doesn’t help them. It just means two people are suffering instead of one.

I managed that Facebook group during Covid because those employees needed someone in their corner. I went to that leader because my colleague deserved someone who would name what happened. I internalized complaints for years because I genuinely cared about the people bringing them to me.

None of that was wrong. All of it came from the right place.

What was missing was the container. The practice of feeling without absorbing. The permission to put something down after you’ve done your part.

That’s what we build inside the Undeniable HR Program. Not just strategy and presence — the internal architecture of leading without losing yourself. How to stay empathetic without becoming the emotional infrastructure for everyone around you. How to care deeply and lead clearly at the same time.

Six weeks. Six people. Starting August 19th.

Applications are open through August 13th. This is the founding cohort — you will never pay less than this to be in this room.

The link is in the show notes.

And if you’re tired — genuinely, quietly, on the inside tired — I want you to know that’s not a character flaw.

That’s what happens when someone who feels everything has been carrying it alone for too long.

You don’t have to keep doing it that way.

More information here: Become an Undeniable HR Leader — EngageHR

You got the certification. You know the employment laws. You can document a termination in your sleep. So why did it feel like you had no idea what you were doing the last time a VP shut you down in a meeting, in front of the whole team?

That’s what we’re talking about today. Not the HR you studied for, but The HR nobody warned you about or taught you how to handle…

Welcome back to What HR Was Never Taught — the show for HR professionals who are tired of expecting those certifications and degrees to make them feel like a leader.

I’m Danielle. twenty-plus years in HR, most of it as a department of one, and I’ve spent the back half of my career doing the thing nobody tells you to do: figuring out why capable people get overlooked, and what actually changes that.

Today’s episode is a little more direct than usual. If you’re in a season where you’re tired of pretending everything’s fine — good. This one’s for you.

Let’s talk about Michelle, the HR professional who did everything “right” — SHRM certification, an MBA with a concentration in HR, ten years of HR experience — and still got talked over, still got blindsided, still felt like the last person in the room whose opinion actually mattered

We’ve been sold a lie in this profession: that if something feels hard, it means we don’t know enough yet….so we go get another certification. Another degree, but none of it touches the actual problem.

Because the problem was never our capability. We know HR. What we were never taught is:

• How to hold a boundary with someone who signs our paycheck

• What to do when the room disagrees with you and you’re the only one without positional power

• How trust gets built at the executive level — because it is not built the same way it’s built with our peers

That’s a training gap. And it’s nobody’s fault. But it’s costing you. HR isn’t struggling because you don’t know enough. You’re struggling because you were trained for the job on paper, not the job in the room.

Let’s talk about why this keeps happening — not just to you, but structurally, across the profession.

I see 5 reasons for this…

1. Undefined boundaries — nobody decided what’s actually HR’s job, so everything undefined lands on your desk - one of my clients was repeatedly informed about a clogged toilet. That’s not HR’s job…but no one else wants it…so why not?

2. Constant interruption — people bring you problems because they don’t know where else problems go, refer back to the clogged toilet. Or a broken door…or the vending machine ate their dollar…those aren’t HR, but somehow we taught people that if they have a problem, they bring it to HR…no matter what the problem is.

3. Immediate response gets rewarded — We solve these problems…because that’s what we do…we focus on what we can do to get this interruption gone from our pile of work as quickly as possible. It takes less time to call the plumber than it does to re-direct the employee to where they should go (which, you probably don’t even know, because it was never really defined…hence it landing on your desk) you solve it fast, everyone’s relieved, and you’ve just taught the org to keep doing this, keep bringing it to you, you’ll fix it.

4. Capacity erodes — there’s no room left for the strategic work you actually wanted to do, after all of these interruptions, the amount of time it takes to get back to the work you were doing. Did you know that it can takes 20-25 minutes to fully regain your focus after you have been interrupted, depending on the complexity of the task you were interrupted during. And even if it was a simple task, even losing 5 minutes to re-focus is a lot of time lost.

5. Reactivity becomes your identity — now the org only sees you as the person who handles whatever nobody else wants to touch because….you do….you called the plumber…while the Operations Director conveniently got to carry on with their tasks, uninterrupted by a clogged toilet or a hungry employee.

This loop isn’t caused by you being bad at your job. It’s reinforced by a system that rewards reactivity over response. And here’s the question I want you to sit with:

“What recurring issue has shown up more than twice this quarter — and what would it look like to respond to it instead of reacting to it again?”

Response = dealing with it once and for all. Fixing what is broken, instead of just solving the issue at hand. It’s answering the question, if everything were working perfectly where would this end up?

Let’s look at the clogged toilet….your desired outcome is to not be responsible for the clogged toilet anymore.

So, what does that mean?

Who else would/should be responsible for this?

Maybe you’re too small to have a facilities manager

Do you have a facilities maintenance tech?

Do you have a receptionist?

Put a note in the bathroom that if something isn’t right, notify the receptionist.

The same can be for the vending machine. These are things we don’t think about because we are too focused on just reacting to whatever comes across our desk, but if we just put a sign up on who to contact, we are stopping those interruptions that cost us so much valuable time.

This is the part I actually want you to walk away with.

You are allowed to stop absorbing everything quietly.

You are allowed to say, “This isn’t mine to fix by myself.”

You are allowed to walk into a room and expect to be treated like the strategic partner you already are — not because a title says so, but because you stop being invisible.

That’s not disrespectful. That’s not “not a team player.” That is the entire shift from tactical order-taker to trusted strategic advisor. And it starts with one decision: you stop waiting for someone to notice you’re ready, and you start acting like you already are.

If something in this episode made you a little uncomfortable — good. That’s usually where the real work starts.

If you’re ready to stop absorbing it quietly and actually build the skills nobody taught you — influence, presence, the ability to be trusted in rooms where decisions get made — that’s exactly what I work on inside the Undeniable HR Leader Program.

And if this hit home, send it to the HR person in your life who’s been carrying too much, too quietly, for too long.

You didn’t get into this profession to be invisible. Let’s fix that.

I’m Danielle. This is What HR Was Never Taught — because someone finally should.

Have you ever noticed that people tell HR to “be more strategic...” but no one ever says what that actually means?

For years, I thought being strategic meant attending more meetings, sitting at the leadership table or learning more about finance.

Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t.

Strategic thinking starts much earlier than those things. It starts with one question: What outcome am I trying to create?

Most HR professionals start with the problem:

• A manager missed a deadline.

• A leader is frustrated.

• Turnover is increasing.

• Conflict is happening.

And they react.

Strategic HR leaders do things differently.

They start by asking: If this were working perfectly, what would be happening?

Once you understand your desired outcome, you are able to see the actual issues leading to not achieving it. Most of the things we see as the problems are actually symptoms of the actual problems.

When you’re focusing on the desired outcome and working backwards, you’re actually putting out fires by redesigning the conditions that caused them in the first place.

That’s the difference between tactical HR and strategic HR.

Today I ask you…

What’s one recurring issue on your desk that you’ve been solving over and over again?

Instead of asking: “How do I fix this?” Ask yourself, “What outcome am I actually trying to create?”

Everything changes from there.

I’m Danielle, I help HR professionals think, influence and lead like strategic business partners by focusing on what they were never taught in their degrees and certifications.

P.S. This is exactly the kind of thinking we explore inside Undeniable HR Leadership Program.