Skip ahead
“Why do we even need HR?”
Have you ever heard those words and frozen up?
Many CEOs may think that startups fail because of an inferior product or poor marketing. In reality, startups fail because underlying people problems and HR issues eat the company from within.
HR plays a pivotal role in writing your company’s success story. But you can’t act in isolation; you’ll need your CEO’s support to get things done.
I’ve advised and led HR at 150+ companies, and during that time I’ve learned what works when working with the C-Suite… and what doesn’t. This guide breaks down how to build that partnership, what alignment actually looks like, and how to get your CEO to see HR as a strategic lever rather than an administrative necessity.
Why a Strong Relationship With Your CEO Matters
You and I both know that HR is so much more than an “admin function” in a startup.
Does your CEO know that, though?
As an HR leader at a startup, your relationship with the CEO will be the biggest determinant of whether you shape a high-performance organization or spend your days cleaning up preventable messes.
Beyond the basics, a strong relationship with your CEO gives you:
- Strategic alignment: When your priorities align with your CEO’s, execution becomes easy. When they don’t, every decision becomes a battle.
- Better collaboration: Would you rather be stonewalled at every turn, or share the load with a passionate executive who can help enforce your decisions? By collaborating with your CEO, you can implement an HR strategy more efficiently than if you were doing everything on your own.
- Trust and buy-in: No one likes to be micromanaged. If your CEO trusts you, then you get a bit more leeway and slack in how you do things. That means more freedom to shape the culture, the ability to design a hiring process, or a seat at the table in strategic decisions.
A good relationship with your CEO gives you the freedom and flexibility to make an impact felt throughout the company. Doing that, though, can be easier said than done.
Where HR and CEOs Need to Align
You may not ship code or join sales calls, but your work shapes the entire organization. When the C-Suite wonders why HR matters in the first place, remind them you hold the keys to the following:
- Organization structure: How the organization is put together has a profound impact on the company’s ability to execute on its strategy. HR is a key partner in influencing the org structure, and partnership with the CEO here is critical.
- Culture: You can’t shape the company culture on your own, but you can help serve as a compass for your leadership. You’ll need to partner with your CEO on this to build buy-in and enforce the culture throughout the company.
- Talent and hiring: Your CEO likely has a clear idea of who fits in the company and who doesn’t. This directly aligns with your role in defining the ideal candidate profile and building a hiring process to attract and evaluate new hires who meet your company’s needs.
- Performance management: The company’s philosophy around performance and how it defines and measures performance is important. Working with the CEO to align employee performance with company goals is critical to business success.
- Career progression: Likewise, in smaller companies (under 50), your CEO may have opinions about who moves through the organization and how quickly. You’ll play a role in shaping internal mobility.
- Perks and benefits: Your CFO holds the purse strings, but your CEO will have opinions on benefits that give the company a competitive advantage. When attracting top talent is harder than ever, this is a key area for you to collaborate.
- Compensation and rewards: Compensation philosophy, what we pay employees, and why, is a very important and strategic element that goes beyond the financial numbers.
- Technology investment: Similarly, while your CFO sets the budget, your CEO has a heavy thumb on the scale for areas they care about. If you can show the business value, it becomes one of your CEO’s priorities.
As you’ll see below, the key is not to frame these purely as HR concerns. Your job is to show how your concerns directly align with your CEO’s top priorities. Next, I’ll share some tips for building a good working relationship with your CEO.
Methods for an Effective HR CEO Relationship
Your CEO cares about one thing: the success of your company. We know that the HR activities from the previous section have a direct role in shaping how successful your company is, so it’s HR’s responsibility to connect those dots for the CEO and to demonstrate impact.
Connecting those dots starts with understanding the business: who your customers are, how the company makes money, and how the business operates. Then, you can start working with your CEO early in your tenure and show how your priorities align with or directly impact theirs.
No idea where to start? Follow these tactics:
- Learn your CEO’s language
- Be data-driven
- Communicate regularly
- Think strategically, not just tactically
- Take ownership
Learn your CEO’s Language
Your CEO cares about many of the things that you do; the problem is that they aren’t concerned with HR frameworks and best practices. That’s not necessarily an issue; it’s just something to remember.
Most CEOs I’ve worked with care about things like:
- Hiring
- Burn rate
- Runway
- Churn and revenue
- Funding
- Product, marketing, and sales
Your job is to frame HR issues and goals in terms that matter to your CEO.
That means, if there are issues with employee engagement, frame them in terms of their impact on product, marketing, or sales goals. If there is no strong employer brand, frame it around the challenges you’ve had with identifying and hiring good-fit candidates.
Position HR as the path to your CEO’s goals, and you’ll have a far more receptive audience.
Be Data-Driven
The most effective CEOs I’ve worked with use data to help drive decisions, which means they won’t settle for anything less for the requests hitting their desks.
If you want to get your CEO’s attention (and respect), then present facts and figures along with your asks, rather than appearing to shoot from the hip. That data could be things like:
- Cost of turnover
- The cost of hiring and training
- How long new hires last in your organization
- Performance by team
- Team workload capacity
- Employee engagement, including downstream effects on productivity
If you aren’t bringing in the right people, show the cost this has on the organization or the impact it has on runway. If your hiring process is full of holes, calculate the costs these cause for your team.
It’s not that your wants and needs aren’t valid, but it’s about sharing them with numbers that will get your CEO’s attention.
Communicate Regularly
It’s simple, out of sight, out of mind. This might be hard to swing depending on your company size, industry, and your CEO’s schedule, but I recommend setting up a recurring cadence to meet.
It doesn’t have to be weekly. You could meet every other week or monthly; I recommend keeping an open line of communication (over Slack/Teams, for example) and using these meetings to discuss strategy. However often you meet, the goal is to set aside dedicated time to discuss the company’s direction, the performance of your HR strategy, and people risks.
These meetings are also a great way to source feedback and input from your CEO to ensure that your strategies align. If you don’t surface risks early, your CEO will discover them through attrition or missed targets, and trust me, it will be more painful that way.
Think Strategically, Not Just Tactically
HR leaders who only manage tasks never influence the business. I’ve seen many HR functions that do little more than manage compliance, payroll, and employee relations, and the company always suffers as a result.
Rather than focusing solely on tactics, think about HR from a strategic perspective and stress that strategic focus to your CEO. By that, I mean prioritize things like:
- Designing org structures
- Coaching the leadership team
- Identifying future capability needs
- Pushing back on bad hires
- Frame HR as a strategic initiative, not a set of compliance to-dos.
From experience, CEOs will typically view HR based on the HR leaders they have worked with over the years.
If you’re lucky, they worked with highly effective HR leaders, which makes your job of influencing them easier. If they’ve only worked with HR in the realm of compliance, you have an uphill battle to climb, but it’s not impossible. Doing the above will make your value crystal clear and reinforce the fact that HR is a strategic growth function for the company.
Take Ownership
Be a partner, not someone who needs babysitting. Startups are chaotic. They’re not massive ocean liners with a defined course across the Atlantic; they’re more like pirate ships: everyone on board has a job to do, and there’s little room for passengers.
Your best bet at earning your CEO’s trust is to show that you can take ownership of your work and proactively seek problems out, rather than wait around to be told what to do.
By being proactive, owning HR functions across the company, and bringing solutions rather than problems, you can signal to your CEO that you’re the type of person who takes care of business.
Common Challenges to Overcome When Working With Your CEO
Those tips will set you up for success, but even if you bear them all in mind, you still may run into one of these common pitfalls:
- Misaligned expectations
- Conflict
- Changing priorities
Don’t let these discourage you or dissuade you from working with your CEO. Keep reading for tactics you can try to overcome each of these challenges.
Misaligned Expectations
Your CEO may think HR handles only hiring and payroll, while you may want to take on a strategic role or help shape the culture. Whatever the disagreement, if you let it fester unnoticed, it will become a source of conflict.
Be proactive about your beliefs, goals, and expectations for your role and communicate frequently if scheduling allows. I’ve learned not to be shy in my belief that HR is a growth driver for early-stage companies, and you better believe I make that clear on day one when I work with a client. If I don’t have internal data, I’ve found third-party data helpful in making a strong case. Again, CEOs will appreciate and often respond to hard evidence!
You don’t have to do this in a confrontational way, but stand firm in your opinions and follow my tips above to make your point.
Conflict
You will disagree with your CEO. In startup-speak, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Great HR leaders know this, and they plan for it. Managing conflict is worth its own separate post, so I’ll leave you with a few simple tactics to try the next time a disagreement occurs:
- Remove your ego from the conversation. It’s not about being right, it’s about finding the best path for the company.
- Use data to back up your claims, but be open to new data that may change your perspective.
- Be honest, but don’t go in with accusations. Use “I statements” rather than defaulting to “you,” which can feel like pointing a finger.
- Assume positive intent.
That last one is key. Startups can be incredibly stressful, but you can avoid even worse conflicts by pausing and assuming that the person on the other side of the argument, like you, wants the best for the company and themselves.
You won’t always agree with your CEO (and perhaps you’re not doing your job if you do), so the above can help mitigate disasters when those disagreements pop up.
Changing Priorities
One day, the company needs to increase headcount by 10%, and the next, you may need to prepare for a layoff.
Priorities change on a dime in startups, which can make them a source of constant stress. This often makes HR feel like they’re running on a hamster wheel, trying to catch up. This is a common source of conflict, so like the above, I find it’s best to take a step back from the chaos, take a deep breath, and find better questions to ask, like:
- What data suggests that priorities need to change?
- Why this and why now?
- How might we adjust to work around these changes?
- Are there other, less disruptive options that can help us achieve the same outcome?
And so on. You don’t have to go along with every single change, but you also don’t have to dig your heels in. A true strategic partner pushes back where it matters – if the strategy is bad or missing. That said, even if you disagree fiercely, remember from the previous section that there’s a time and place for ego, and disagreements are not it. In my experience, the best thing you can do is disagree and commit: There is no better way to show that you support the business and want it to succeed, regardless of whether you agree with the approach.
Take it From Me: It Pays to Have a Good Relationship With Your CEO
Like you, I work day in and day out in HR. I’ve worked in-house and fractionally with over 150 companies across the globe, and I have the battle scars to show what HR goes through in the world of startups.
I’ve worked with clients who boxed HR into compliance and suffered for it. One that comes to mind is one of the fastest-growing telecom companies in Africa, which had a revolving door of HR leadership and no idea how to equip HR for real strategic impact within the company.
This was one part HR problem and one part C-Suite problem. I was hired as a consultant and quickly reset expectations about what HR could accomplish. The result: a sharper HR strategy, a leaner team, 30% lower expenses, and a huge productivity boost.
It pays to have your CEO on your side.
Download the Free Startup HR Survival Guide
I’ve seen it time and time again: companies that do not prioritize HR or view it as a strategic function fail. It starts with poor engagement, turns into layoffs, and gradually ends with the company being sold for parts.
You don’t need an MBA to speak your CEO’s language or to get them on your side.
As you’ve seen in this article, it’s simply a matter of frequent and honest communication, and the ability to set your ego aside when conflict or disagreement arises.
Successful startups scale because they build the systems needed to attract and retain top performers, and equip them to do their best work. I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:
- How HR can drive growth
- How to hire
- How HR evolves as your company grows
And more! Fill out the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hyper-growth.
Nahed Khairallah