Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
HR has spent years trying to get leaders to listen — it’s time to change how we speak, think and show up.
This is the essential guide for HR professionals who are tired of being ignored, sidelined or frustrated by leaders who don’t ‘get it’. Drawing on years of experience advising senior teams and HR practitioners across the world, Lucy Adams exposes the common traps that stop HR from being heard and shows exactly how to change the conversation. Through real stories, practical tools, and behavioural insight, she shows how to earn credibility, challenge with confidence and build adult-to-adult relationships that make real change possible.
Whether you’re an HR business partner, people director or talent lead, Influential HR will help you shift from delivering processes to shaping strategy, from chasing buy-in to becoming a trusted partner whose ideas leaders act on. It’s time to stop waiting to be invited to the table and start being impossible to ignore.
Lucy Adams is one of the UK’s leading voices on modern HR and leadership. As CEO of Disruptive HR she has worked with thousands of HR professionals and business leaders globally, helping them transform outdated people practices and build more human, influential HR functions.
Previously the HR Director at the BBC, Lucy led major organizational change and gained first-hand insight into the challenges of influencing senior leaders. She is the author of the best-selling books HR Disrupted and The HR Change Toolkit, and co-hosts the popular HR Disrupted podcast. With her trademark honesty and wit, she inspires HR professionals to challenge convention and create real business impact through smarter, more human leadership.
Lucy is based in Stockbridge, UK.
Why aren’t leaders listening?
Part One: The best advice I ignored
Chapter 1: Why people managers struggle … to manage people
Chapter 2: Why don’t managers think HR can help?
Chapter 3: What we think about them!
Chapter 4: The confidence crisis (what we think about ourselves)
Part Two: A new deal with people leaders
Chapter 5: Change the power dynamic
Chapter 6: Show leaders you ‘get them’
Chapter 7: Set clear expectations and boundaries
Chapter 8: Give leaders things that actually work
Chapter 9: Sell and market to your leaders
Chapter 10: From influence to action
Chapter 11: Help them get better - but differently
Part Three: Build confidence, authority and courage
Chapter 12: Changing how we feel
Part Four: The journey to true influencer
Chapter 13: Use judgement to manage competing priorities
Chapter 14: From technical expert to trusted advisor
Chapter 15: Turn insight into influence
Chapter 16: You’re worth the investment
Chapter 17: Where this leaves us
About the author
Notes