Welcome back to the HR Connection, the podcast built solely for those managing human resources and a 1 to 500 employee headcount. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am your host and the founder and CEO of Acacia HR Solutions. We are an embedded fractional HR support firm working in that small employer space. So today I really want to talk to you about what no one tells you about being the only HR voice in the room. Maybe you are getting a new job, you're stepping into a new HR role, maybe you've been in one for a while and you are experiencing these things. I want to call them out. I want to talk about them, and I want to talk about how we have navigated them over the last 15 years because certainly when we come into client relationships, we are often the only and sometimes the first HR voice they have ever, ever heard. If you're not already subscribed, please do so now so that you can continue to get our content, and let's jump right into it. One of the things that happens to me quite regularly is that someone will take a HR job. So somebody in my network will go and they will get an HR job in a small business, and maybe they never had small business experience. Maybe they were used to having a full HR team or a couple of people around them. Maybe they just weren't the owner of the function. You know, maybe they were a generalist or something, and they weren't really owning the function. And then they go and they move into a role where they could be the solo HR practitioner, or they could be, um, the director now. They are the leader of the HR function, and they are the ones who are going to be responsible for really everything. And maybe they're lucky enough to have a place at the leadership table, and they have all of these, you know, great conversations that they're going to be able to have. And they quickly learn that being the only HR voice in the room can be difficult. And they will come to me after they've started this job and they've had this job for a couple of months, and they will say, "Everything that you say about working small business and human resources is true." And so today I want to talk about what that actually looks like. Like, not the LinkedIn version, not the pretty version, but the reality that I know to be true. I want to give you a couple of hard truths that I have learned over the last 15 years, and that if you are have been operating in a small business for a while, you've probably already experienced. But, but really, if you are just starting with a small business, if you are thinking of making a transition into a small business, you are going to experience these, experience these, and I don't think anybody realizes it. I don't think it's something that people want to talk about. Small business life is not easy. It is very, very different. Um, as I always say, and you'll hear me say a million times on this podcast, small business HR is not just smaller HR. It's its own discipline, and there are a lot of reasons why. And I think that the things that I'm going to tell you today, the reality of these things that you are going to face, is why. So are you ready? Let's jump right into them. All right, here's the first truth about being the only HR voice in the room. You can be completely right and completely ignored. You walk into a leadership meeting, you sit down with a leader, someone proposes something, right? You have your CEO come to you and propose something. Uh, it's a termination that they want to handle wrong, a policy that's going to create some liability, a practice that you think crosses a line. And you say very clearly and very obvious, like, "This is illegal," right? You could give them the regulation, you can explain the exposure, you can do all of the things that would make a rational human being say, "Okay, you're right, we shouldn't do this." But in a small business, sometimes you do all of those things, and the meeting just keeps going. They nod their head like, "Okay, noted," and they go on with their idea. There is this specific kind of professional disorientation that really nobody prepares you for. In most functions inside of a business, if you're the expert in the room and you flag a problem, people will stop. If marketing flags a marketing problem, people stop and listen. If finance marks a financial issue, they have everybody's attention. In HR, and especially when you're the only HR voice, there's really no second expert to back you up. And if the CEO, the CFO, and the VP of sales have all collectively decided they don't care, or they're willing to run the risk, then nothing changes. I have literally had CEOs say to me, "What is the risk? So if we do this, you're telling me that this thing is illegal." And I'm not talking about, you know, they're, they're not paying overtime or they're hurting people. I'm not suggesting anything that egregious. I'm saying maybe they misclassify an employee or, uh, you know, something along those lines. And they will literally say to me, "Well, what's the risk? So what happens if I get caught? How would I get caught? What happens if I get caught? What's the fine? Because if the fine's 40,000, maybe I'm okay paying that." And, and so you can tell them all the right things, and they can decide that they either do not care or they're just willing to run the risk. And if they're willing to run the risk, then you essentially are ignored. So your documentation that you have, which you absolutely should be doing, protects the company legally, but it does not protect the decision. Now, I will tell you how I have worked through this because it can be really, really frustrating. One of the biggest ways that I have kind of trained my brain to work through this is to realize that I don't own the risk. In most of these situations, the misclassification of an employee, I'm not going to be held liable. I'm not going to be the one who has to pay the fines. It's the company. It's the founder. It's the CEO. And so a lot of times when CEOs will say, "Well, what's the risk? I think I'll just take the risk," I will say, "Great, that is yours to own. You own the risk. I do not." And so I'm going to document this. I'm going to document this decision, um, and document that this is the way that you chose to go. And just know that if it's ever called into question, you're going to be held liable. The business is going to be held liable, but that's your risk and not mine. So you have to decide as that, that HR practitioner, uh, before you're even in that situation, where your line is. What is it that you will absorb because you feel like misclassifying an employee as long, again, as the employee is not being hurt in that, you know, you can document it and move on. That feels okay to you. But what do you feel like you need to escalate in writing, making sure it's documented to protect you more? And then what do you feel like you're going to have to walk away from? There could be a line that they do cross that you feel like is way too much. In our business, if we had, um, a client who was allowing sexual harassment to just run rampant, and we were bringing it up and they were doing absolutely nothing about it, we would walk away from that. We're not going to work with an organization that is allowing harassment, bullying, violent, any of those things. Of course, we would never do that. So as HR professionals, sometimes in small businesses, we have to, we have to be willing to look at the gray a little bit because there's going to be gray. It absolutely cannot be black and white. And say, "What are we willing to just kind of walk away from because it's not our risk? What are we willing to, you know, escalate and document just to make sure there's a protection of ourselves, but, but we're okay as long as we have that protection?" And then what are we willing to not? What are we willing to absolutely walk away from the business because they are accepting something that we're not comfortable with? That legal ceiling is really real, and it's one of the loneliest places in our professional lives, knowing something is wrong, saying it out loud, and then just watching it get buried. Again, nine times out of ten, you know, you can't be held legally responsible for their decision, but you should definitely document it. Uh, and then in the cases where you can, harassment, bullying, that's a, that's a really a different decision. And as I said, a line that we, we have drawn. So this is one of the areas that I think HR leaders should vet in an interview process. I think that if you are going into a solo HR role, or maybe you're going to be the lead HR, maybe they have like a generalist specialist and you're going to come in and be that lead, you should want to talk to that CEO, that founder, that CFO about their risk tolerance, about what happens when you find something out of compliance. How do they feel about that? You know, and I think you'll get a really good, uh, view of their risk tolerance, of how seriously they take this stuff. You know, we, again, I've certainly had CEOs say, "Yeah, well, yeah, if you find something out of compliance, I want you to bring it to me and we'll talk about it," versus "If you find something out of compliance, bring it to me and we will fix it." That's a very different answer. And so I do think it's something that HR professionals should definitely vet when they're walking into a small business. The second thing that nobody tells you about being the only HR voice in the room is that the room already has an opinion about HR before you even open your mouth. Some leaders have had HR people who were paper pushers. Uh, some have had HR people who protected bad managers. Some have had HR people who led layoffs badly or enforced policies without judgment or, you know, were just visibly out of touch with how the business actually ran. Every department, marketing, finance, HR, we all have our bad apples. And so you have some leaders that you could be working with that worked with a bad apple. You could also have leaders who just never, their HR was never allowed to be anything. So it's not the HR person's fault necessarily. It's just that they were never allowed to do anything but push paper. So those experiences, whatever the collective experiences are, they live in the room that you're walking into. They live in the leadership room. They sit in the chairs. They are in the body language of that leader who crosses their arms every time you start talking. You, as HR, are never walking into neutral territory, unfortunately. There is no one in the organization who probably hasn't experienced HR, and you are coming in with either a positive or negative connotation already. You're, you're walking into this, um, accumulated history, none of which is yours, right? None of it is anything that you've done. You're coming into this from day one. You can have people in the organization who never interacted with marketing. They never interacted with sales or finance. So they may or may not have an opinion. But HR, they've definitely, definitely interacted with HR, and they have this bias, again, positive or negative, that you're walking into. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't shift it. You can. Uh, and we have talked about this on the podcast before. I've talked about it on the YouTube. There's a whole, um, video on, you know, what do you do when, when people say HR isn't your friend? It, it absolutely can be shifted, but it takes longer than it should. It is absolutely not fair. And sometimes the strategies that work are really counterintuitive. Because the, the best way, the fastest way I have found to break down that bias is not to lead with HR expertise. It's to demonstrate business literacy first. So you would think that we might want to demonstrate how good we are at HR, but really it's almost like we have to hide HR and become that business, um, advocate first for, for us to be able to undo some of those biases. So understanding the revenue model, knowing the cost structure, connecting people decisions to operational outcomes, all of the things that we've talked about in past, um, episodes. When leaders stop seeing you as the compliance function and start seeing you as someone who thinks about the business, then you start to change that dynamic. But you have to earn it. And you're earning it against a deficit you didn't create. It's not even your fault. And it's really not fair, but it is a reality. I'm sure by now you have heard of the Bolt CEO who says he fired his HR team because they were causing problems. Um, I would argue if you read the whole thing, he really didn't fire them. He just renamed HR. But whatever, regardless, imagine coming in as the next HR person in that firm, or even if his top leaders were to leave and go somewhere else, they have a bias, assuming they agree with him on his HR take, then they have a bias that they're taking to their next organization about HR. And that HR person who comes into those organizations is fighting against that before day one, before they even get to do anything. So it's probably out of this list the most unfair and the one that we didn't even cause 99% of the time, but we still have to fight against. And that then makes this next hard truth, this next reality of being the only voice in the room, even more, um, felt, like felt even harder. So the, the third truth about being the only HR voice in the room is that HR is lonely. Small business HR can be really, really lonely, and especially if you are in HR department of one. And it's not because of personality or circumstance. It's just by design. Professional distance is not optional in this role. It is load-bearing. You just cannot be close friends with the people you may have to investigate or terminate or deliver hard news to. You can't easily go to after-work drinks with the team that you may have to restructure. You can't vent about leadership to the employees or vent about employees to leadership in the way that peers vent to each other, right? It's just not something that we are able to do as freely as others. You hold onto, we, we have so much information that we know that we hold onto information that isolates us, right? We know who's on a performance plan. We know what's coming in a lot of announcements before they happen, good and bad news. We also know the parts of people's lives that their colleagues don't, right? Because maybe they've come to us with, uh, medical situations or personal crisis that explains kind of, you know, maybe a behavior pattern or something they're going through, but you can't share that openly. You can't, you know, you, you can't go on and tell people that. So that information just kind of sits with you and it just stays there. And it's really costly to your own mental health and to your own feeling of satisfaction in your work. Now, the solution here is not to remove professional distance. Uh, it's necessary and it protects everyone. The solution is to build your network laterally. So other HR professionals outside your organization, a peer group, a community where you can speak, uh, without, you know, kind of violating confidentiality, like finding other HR people who get you. If you listened to our last episode, we had, uh, Caitlin Samson on, and one of the things that she talked about was her HR group. She's very, very involved in her local, uh, HR chapter, and she talked about how amazing that has been for her. And especially if you are in HR department of one, I think that you have to build a community of other people who you can just vent to sometimes, right? Like, not even that you, you always need them to be able to help you through HR things or HR questions. You do, but sometimes you just need to vent a little bit and, and you can't as freely do that with people inside your organization. If you don't build that deliberately, then the loneliness that you're going to feel, it just compounds over time and it becomes something that can affect your judgment. I've seen HR people cross the line. I've seen the HR person who becomes way too close with a colleague and starts sharing things that they shouldn't, or that colleague feels like they have some special privileges or something. That HR person who allows themselves, um, to get so isolated, they can't think beyond the way that the company does things is another issue of this. Sometimes you get so entrenched and so isolated into your company and what you're doing that if you don't have that network and you can't, you know, you can't really brainstorm with peers and you don't have that network outside, then you have no other frame of reference. And I think both of those, the HR person who gets way too close to, uh, employees or to colleagues, and then also the HR person who isolates themselves so much that they can't see beyond their loneliness, I think both of those can be, um, career enders. I think they can just burn out and stress and just a realization that HR is not maybe for them can happen in both of those situations. This is really kind of the point, right, of this podcast and everything that we do at Acacia is bringing a voice to those people who are working inside a one to 500, even if you're in the larger numbers, if you're in the couple of hundred employees and you have a small team, maybe you have another person or two. If you are the director, the VP, and you are, are supposed to set high-level strategy, you need people at that level to be able to talk to. And so, you know, we are really doing this every single day. We are doing this work across all levels. And it is my hope that this content reaches you because of that, because we can say things like, we know that you're lonely because we, I, I did this for seven years by myself. I know it's lonely. Um, before I had a team, now, of course, we have a team of, you know, many team members that we're able to bounce ideas off of and share things and vent to when we need to. But I did this by myself for a long time and I know how this feels. And so, um, that is kind of the point of all of this, this, uh, content that we share is saying like this hard truth about being the only HR voice in the room is something that no one thinks about, but it is really, really lonely. So everything above is true. And then this next fourth truth is also true, which is really, really, I think, a positive one. And that is that the work can be absolutely extraordinary. So Caitlin talked about this in our last episode, that moment that you help an employee navigate something that would have completely derailed them. Maybe it's a performance conversation that turns around a career. Maybe it's a policy that removes barriers someone was, you know, too afraid to even talk about. That manager, maybe you coach into being someone their team can actually trust. In large companies, HR impact diffuses. It becomes less hands-on. It becomes less one-on-one. Decisions, you know, go through committees and changes take quarters. It takes forever to get something done in a large organization. But in a small business, you move really fast and you see the results directly. Um, and that gap between something that you do and its effect on a human being inside your organization, it's really short. So in a large organization, it can take months to see some kind of impact. But for a small org, you can do something today and feel the impact this afternoon, tomorrow. And, and that is extremely rewarding, rewarding and extraordinary. And that is, it's kind of a meaning for us that's hard to replicate, right? The access to real consequence, good consequence, is one of the strongest arguments I make to people thinking about taking a role, even though knowing all of the other things that I've said, um, it is so, so rewarding. I often tell people it will be very difficult and you will be lonely and you will be misunderstood and you will not be heard and you will have this bias. But also, also, if you put the time in and you put the effort in, it can be one of the most amazing things about working in a small business. It's one of my favorite things, working with our small business clients. We aren't getting lost in the noise. We are absolutely making the music. And I know that that is corny, but it's so true. The job really gives you both. It gives you a ceiling and a floor, the loneliness and the impact. Anyone who told you only one side of that wasn't telling you the whole truth. Everything in a small business has a ripple effect. I find that when people say that HR isn't your friend, their experiences are often inside a bigger organization where HR did have little impact and their decisions were based in just what was best for the organization. It's so much easier to shift that mindset of HR not being your friend, not that I'm suggesting we should be friends with everybody. See previous post about the fact that we can't be and we have to keep a professional distance, but it's easier to really shift that mindset of what HR should be in a smaller org than it is in a much larger one. All right, so there you have them. Just to run through again, we have this legal ceiling issue. We have this hard truth around you can be completely right and completely ignored. Um, and then we have this idea that there is this bias before you even speak, before you open your mind, people have already made a decision about you and about HR that you are fighting against. And then we have the fact that, um, it's really lonely. It's structurally lonely because of the way that the role is designed and the idea of building a community. But then finally, that fourth one about being the only voice, uh, HR voice in the room is that it is absolutely and can be so rewarding to have such an impact. It's you and you alone. And if you are an HR department of one, you get to take all the credit for those things that you do. And that can be really, really rewarding. So if you are in a role already or you're considering it, you know, really what you need is reality. You need to understand the reality of what you are facing, knowing what you're walking into or what you're dealing with, making sure that you are building that external network before you need it, um, is really going to make a huge difference. You want to learn that business before you lead with HR, document everything. Of course, we always say that, right? Decide your lines in advance, kind of think about these things. And if you're already sitting in an HR role and you've been in it for months and you say, "Oh yeah, these four things, I'm facing all of them right now," take a minute and just think about them and think about what can I do to make sure that I'm protecting myself in each of these three areas. And then in that rewarding area, what am I doing that is so rewarding? What do I love about this? And, and am I making an impact? I'm sure that you will find that you absolutely are. I want you to find your Caitlin moment, find that moment like she shared in her episode where she was so proud of how she helped an employee because they do happen in small businesses every single day and they make it all worth it. Thanks so much for being here. You are doing such amazing work. I'll see you next time.