Why I'm Betting on HR Excellence

I was 26 the first time someone told me, to my face, that I hadn't earned the room I was standing in.

I'd made the jump from corporate event planner to the C-suite in under two years. Youngest person at the table. Only woman in most of the rooms I walked into. Everyone else had two decades of institutional knowledge I hadn't had time to accumulate yet, and I knew it, so I did what a lot of people do when they get a seat they're not entirely sure they've earned: I padded the edges. Nothing dishonest. Just a confidence that ran slightly ahead of the experience underneath it.

The company's controller asked to meet during my first week. She told me something hard about her family. I leaned in, nodded, and said the two words every leadership seminar had trained into me: “I understand.”

“How would you understand?” she said. “Are you married? Do you have kids?” 

She wasn't hostile. She was precise. And precision, when you've been performing value you haven't actually shown your work on, lands harder than any raised voice ever could.

I've carried that question through every HR seat I've held since then. Not, “How would you understand,” but the version underneath it: How would anyone know? How would the board know HR moved the number? How would the CEO know the culture work was worth the spend, and not just a good feeling with a slide deck attached?

For 20 years, the honest answer was: they wouldn't, not really. HR has been asked to justify its impact without a consistent way to show it. We got the budget. We got the seat. We never got the math.

That's the gap SHRM's HR-X was built to close, and it's the reason I'm staking this column on it. 

HR-X is the first research-validated standard connecting HR performance to the outcomes a business already tracks: revenue, retention, growth. It's built on data from more than 1,250 organizations, scored across four dimensions — Functional Acceleration, Talent Optimization, Market Discernment, and Organizational Impact — covering 16 practice areas and more than 70 sub-practices. The headline number should stop every CEO mid-sentence: each one-point gain in HR maturity is worth roughly $62,000 more revenue per employee. Companies at peak HR maturity hit their financial targets 90% of the time. Companies at the bottom hit them 44% of the time.

Nearly 90% of organizations are still sitting in that bottom half.

I'm not betting on HR-X because it's SHRM's newest standard. I'm betting on it because it's the first time in my career I've been able to hand a CEO a number, instead of a feeling. “HR is doing great work” has never once won a budget fight. “Our HR maturity score predicts a $62K swing per employee” wins the room before you've finished the sentence.

Here's what's coming: in June, SHRM brings all four dimensions of HR-X to Chicago for HR-X Live! — four days built entirely around this framework, ending with a SHRM HR-X credential that proves what you did with the number, not just that you sat through a session about it. HR excellence stops being a matter of opinion. It becomes a matter of fact, and by summer, something you can actually carry into the room. 

But a number on a dashboard has never been enough on its own, not once, not for HR and not for anything else worth funding. You still have to walk it into a room and make someone believe it. Proof gets you a hearing. What you do with the hearing is a separate skill — the one most of us in HR were never trained on, and the one HR-X LIVE! spends four days teaching alongside the framework itself.

That's what this column is. Starting now, once a month through June, I'll take one piece of the HR-X framework and one real decision in front of a real HR leader, and work through what the data says, what it doesn't say yet, and how to carry it into the room so it actually changes the outcome. Some months, that means the numbers. Some months, it means the conversation you're avoiding having with your own CEO. By June, when SHRM brings the whole framework to life in Chicago, the answer stops being a maybe.

If you lead HR, or you're the CEO deciding how much to trust the person who does, I'd start asking the same question that controller asked me. Not how would you understand. How would you know?

Curated. Connected. Credentialed.