BinDawood Holding

Anas AlNawab is the Head of Human Resources at BinDawood Holding, where he champions employee experience, HR technology and strategic workforce transformation. He drives leadership development, process automation and culture initiatives that strengthen organizational performance and support innovation across one of Saudi Arabia's leading retail groups.

The future of HR isn't about being invited into the room. It's about being ready to lead once you're in it.

Early in my career, I sat in a strategy meeting where everything had already been decided. The growth targets were set. The markets were chosen. Then someone turned to me and said, "Let's bring HR in to help with the rollout."

We'd been handed the how long after the what and the why were locked. And here's the part I've had to sit with over the years: we'd partly earned it. HR had spent so long being the team that ran the process, owned the policy, and cleaned up after decisions that the business stopped expecting us to shape them.

That's the real problem. Not that HR keeps getting invited in too late — but that too often, when we finally get in, we're not ready to add anything the business couldn't have figured out on its own.

So let's stop lobbying for a seat. Let's become the people the room can't make a decision without.

1. Be useful before you ask to be heard

You don't earn strategic credibility by talking about being strategic. You earn it by understanding the business as well as the people running it.

Can you explain, in two sentences, how your company actually makes money? What's eroding the margin this quarter? Which three numbers does your CEO check first thing Monday morning? If you can't answer those, no framework or seat at the table will fix it.

Business fluency is the entry fee. Read the earnings commentary. Sit in the commercial reviews even when there's no "people item" on the agenda. Walk the floor, the warehouse, and the stores. When you can connect a hiring delay to a missed revenue target — in the language the business uses — you stop being support and start being a partner.

2. Tie every people decision to a business outcome

People drive performance. Everyone nods at that. Then HR walks into the boardroom with "engagement is up 8 percent" and watches the room's attention drift.

“ You don't earn strategic credibility by talking about being strategic. You earn it by understanding the business as well as the people running it. “

The number isn't wrong. It's just not connected to anything the business is trying to win.

Try the other version: "We cut regrettable attrition in operations by 12 percent this year. That protected roughly four months of ramp-up time per role and kept our busiest stores fully staffed through peak." Same HR work. Completely different conversation. One is an activity. The other is a result the business already cares about.

Run that test on everything you bring forward. Workforce planning isn't a headcount spreadsheet — it's whether you'll have the capability to deliver next year's plan. Leadership development isn't a training calendar — it's your succession risk on the roles that would hurt most if they emptied out tomorrow. If you can't draw the line from a people initiative to a business outcome, either you haven't found it yet, or it isn't worth doing.

3. Prove it first and then tell the story

Influence follows impact — not the other way around. You won't argue your way to the table with a better slide. You'll get there by moving something the business was already worried about.

So, pick one. One metric leaders genuinely lose sleep over — turnover in a critical function, time-to-productivity, leadership bench strength — and go move it. Then tell that story simply: here's what we did, here's what changed, here's what it was worth.

Resist the urge to prove your value with volume. A dashboard with forty metrics says you're busy. One clear outcome, told with conviction, says you're credible. Credibility is what buys you the next, bigger conversation.

From Participating to Leading

For most of HR's history, we've been brought into the conversation late and asked to support a direction someone else set. The opportunity now isn't just to be included earlier. It's to lead.

That shift sounds simple and isn't. It takes the nerve to speak up in conversations where HR hasn't traditionally had a voice — and the discipline to back that voice with something real. It means trading the comfort of owning the process for the risk of owning an outcome.

The best HR leaders I've worked with made one quiet change in how they showed up. They stopped asking how can we support the business and started asking how can we shape it. Everything else followed.

We're better positioned than anyone to influence not just how organizations perform, but how they grow, adapt, and hold together under pressure. The question was never whether HR deserves a seat at the table.

It's whether we're ready to lead once we're there.