By Christina Nielsen, Content Marketing Specialist, October 2025
As an HR professional, you often find yourself caught between the expectations of top management and the needs of the organization. You must act as both a strategic partner and a supportive presence—while navigating informal power dynamics and cultural nuances that rarely appear in any organizational chart.
So how can HR create real value and gain a clearer strategic position within the company?
That’s one of the questions Betina Stage, Strategic HR & Leadership Consultant at CfL, discusses with host Henrik Eriksen in an episode of CfL’s podcast Ledelsesrummet.
With more than 20 years of experience in HR—both as a consultant and HR director—Betina Stage is a business-driven HR professional who has long served as a close sparring partner for executive teams and management groups. At CfL, she works with HR, coaching, and leadership development, teaches on HR courses, and leads several professional HR networks.
Drawing on her experience, she shares in the podcast her perspective on what it takes for HR to create genuine organizational value. Here are her key takeaways:
The HR role often exists in a field of tension. On one hand, HR is expected to support executive management and act as a strategic sparring partner. On the other, HR must be available to leaders and employees—handling everything from well-being and development to conflict management and change processes.
At the same time, every organization—including yours—has what Betina Stage calls “the alternative organizational chart.” This chart is shaped by culture: the informal relationships and power structures that influence collaboration and decision-making.
HR is often at the center of these invisible processes and must be able to navigate them with both professional expertise and human insight.
Part of this clarity also involves the psychological contract—the informal agreement built on trust, support, and respect for HR’s role. It creates security when HR needs to bring forward difficult insights or challenge leadership decisions.
This alignment of expectations must also be continuously renegotiated, as the organization and its context evolve.
Expectation alignment is closely linked to HR’s maturity level. In the podcast, Betina Stage describes four stages of HR development:
Understanding your organization’s maturity enables HR to adapt its role and communicate realistically about what it can—and should—contribute.
HR’s strength doesn’t lie only in relationships and intuition but in the ability to support decisions with data. According to Betina Stage, working data-driven has become “the new black” in HR—it’s about having a documented foundation to navigate from.
When HR works data-driven—through analyses of well-being, retention, absence, competence development, and leadership quality—it becomes possible to connect HR efforts directly to business objectives.
Data gives HR a shared language with top management and increases credibility in the decision-making room. This doesn’t mean everything must be reduced to numbers, but rather that HR can document the impact of its initiatives and make clear how people contribute to the company’s results.
According to Betina Stage, HR’s role as a strategic partner depends on the ability to lead upward—to actively influence executive management’s understanding of how HR supports the business.
This requires both courage and clarity: you must articulate how HR’s work contributes to the company’s success and insist that the human factor is part of the strategic conversation.
When HR has a clear mandate, a solid data-driven practice, and a trust-based relationship with top management, HR becomes not just a support function—but a strategic force within the organization.
On this course you can strengthen your role as HR Business Partner and contribute more significantly to the creation of value in your organisation.
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