180 | (Day 5) The Strategic HR Sprint – Making Strategic Work a Priority

Hello and welcome to the fifth and final day of the Strategic HR Sprint. And first of all, I'd like to say huge congratulations.

If you've been following along over the last few days, it means you've invested time in yourself, you've reflected on your organization, you've identified an important challenge, and you've started to think much more strategically about the difference that you can make.

I really hope you've enjoyed the Sprint, and more importantly, I hope it's helped you see that being strategic isn't something that's reserved for senior leaders. It's something every HR and people professional can develop.

Throughout this sprint, we've looked at building your confidence, understanding your organization more deeply, and identifying where you can make a big difference.

But there's one challenge that often remains and that still might be remaining, and that is finding the time to actually follow through on your ideas and plans so that you are then doing the strategic work. Most HR professionals don't spend their days constantly firefighting because they want to, they do it because people need them.

Questions come in, priorities change, unexpected issues crop up, and before you know it, another week has disappeared. The trouble is that strategic work rarely feels as urgent as everything else. But that doesn't stop it from being incredibly important.

And one of the biggest mistakes we can make is assuming that strategic thinking or strategic planning or strategic action will somehow happen in the gaps between meetings or once we've finished everything else on our to do list. The reality is that there will probably always be another email to answer, another meeting to attend, or another problem to solve.

If we don't deliberately make space for strategic work, it's very easy to find it slipping into tomorrow. That's why today's worksheet is all about designing your ideal strategic week.

If you've already signed up to this free Strategic HR Sprint, or you should have the worksheet sitting in your inbox ready and waiting for you. If you haven't signed up yet, just go to brightskyhr.co.uk sprint join the free Sprint and you'll receive all the materials that go with it.

And then, rather than simply asking yourself now, how can you squeeze in another task? I'd like you to step back and think about how you want your working week to look.

If you want strategy to become a regular part of it, the worksheet starts by asking you to think about time. When are you realistically going to protect time for strategic thinking? How often would you like to have it?

And perhaps most importantly, when are you actually going to book it? Into your calendar, then the worksheet will encourage you to think about your energy.

We often assume that strategic work can happen whenever we happen to have a spare hour or minute. But strategic thinking often needs some of our very best thinking. So, so ask yourself, when do I tend to think most clearly?

If you can try to protect one of those higher energy times for your strategic work rather than leaving it until the end of the day when you're mentally exhausted, the worksheet then asks you to think about your environment. Where do you do your best thinking? Where can you be the most focused? For some people, that's a quiet meeting room.

For others, it's working from home, a coffee shop, or even while they're out for a walk. After that, the worksheet encourages you to think about creating more space for strategic work. Could any of your meetings be shorter?

Are there meetings that you don't actually need to attend? Could some tasks be delegated, automated, batched together, or perhaps even just stopped altogether?

One question I particularly encourage you to think about is if someone looked at your calendar over the next month, or would they be able to tell that being strategic is one of your priorities? Finally, the worksheet asks you to think about protecting your focus and keeping yourself accountable.

It's all very well putting a regular slot in your calendar for strategic thinking, but how often does something urgent creep in and take its place? What boundaries could you put in place to protect that time? And who or what could help you stay committed to it?

Perhaps it's blocking the timeout in your calendar and switching off your notifications. Perhaps it's asking a colleague to be your accountability partner. You don't even have to be working on the same project.

You can simply agree to spend some focused time working on your own priorities and then check in afterwards to see how you both got on.

By the time you've finished the worksheet, my hope is that you won't just have a good intention to be more strategic, you'll have a realistic plan for making it happen.

And one of the reasons I created the Essential HR Planner was because I know how difficult it can be to protect time for strategic thinking when your diary is already full. But it's much more than a calendar.

It's designed specifically for HR professionals, and it includes all sorts of things, including monthly planning pages, strategic reflection prompts, and tools to help you stay focused on what matters most. Every month I also run a free 45 minute online planning session exclusively for planner owners.

At the beginning of each session, everyone decides what they want to focus on, and then we spend some quiet time working on our own priorities before checking back in together at the end. It sounds incredibly simple, but accountability like this really can make such a difference.

Knowing that someone else will be asking you how you got on makes it far more likely that you'll protect that time and you'll do what you say you're going to do in it, instead of letting something else take over. You'll also find an optional AI prompt, along with today's resources in your email. Throughout the Sprint, we've used AI in different ways.

Today we're going to use it as a thinking partner and also as an accountability coach.

The prompt sitting in your inbox that you can copy and paste into your favourite AI chat tool will guide you through a coaching conversation based on the challenge and the ideas to overcome it that you've identified during the sprint. So rather than giving you lots of advice, it will ask questions to help strengthen your commitment and increase the chances that you follow through.

Of course, if you'd rather just complete the worksheet and put your plan into action, that's absolutely fine too, but the AI prompt is there for you as an optional extra if you think you'll find it helpful. Before I finish, I'd like to leave you with one final thought. Five days ago, we began this sprint by talking about strategy as shaping the future.

I hope that now strategy feels a little less mysterious than it did at the beginning. You don't have to wait until you become an HR Director or Chief People Officer to start thinking and acting strategically.

You don't need permission, you just need to keep asking good questions to stay curious, to understand your organization and the environment it's operating in, and to focus on the challenges that matter most. And of course, to protect the time you need to think about them and work on them.

Because strategy isn't one big moment, it's the small decisions you make every week about where you choose to focus your attention. Thank you so much for taking part in this strategic HR sprint.

I really hope it's helped you to feel more confident about becoming a more strategic HR professional, and that it's given you some practical ideas that you'll continue using long after the sprint has finished. I would love to hear how you get on.

So if you've enjoyed the Sprint or there's something that you found particularly helpful, or you have any questions about it, please do let me know by commenting on the YouTube video or by replying to one of the emails that you will have received from me each day of the Sprint. Thank you so much for spending these five days with me.

This HR Coffee Time podcast will go back to normal now that the Sprint's finished, which means I'll be releasing an episode every two weeks instead of every day.

Please do hit subscribe if you're on YouTube or follow if you're listening in a podcast app like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and then that means you'll be alerted when new episodes are out. I hope you're going to find future episodes helpful too, so take care and goodbye for now. I hope to see you again soon.