The Seat at the Table Nobody Told Me About
Finding Your Voice at the Table: Why Listening First Leads to Real Leadership
I spent all of my career in Human Resources, with the last fifteen years at an executive level in industries that were not designed with women in mind. Manufacturing. Engineering. Satellite communications. Construction. Rooms full of men who had been running things a certain way for a very long time.
In those rooms, I made a decision early. I was not going to mute myself to fit in. I wore bright colors and bold suits, things that made me feel feminine and powerful at the same time. If I was going to be in that room, I was going to be seen in it.
What I did not fully understand until much later was that being seen and having a voice are two very different things.
There were meetings early in my career where I was told to be quiet.
Not politely redirected. Not talked over. Told. Directly. To stop speaking. "What does HR know about our business?"
When you are the woman in the room with an opposing view and the men around the table do not like what they are hearing, they sometimes just say so. And I, a person who has never been afraid to speak her mind, went quiet.
Not because I believed I was wrong. Not because I lacked confidence in what I was saying.
I went quiet because I was afraid that pushing back would cost me my seat at the table entirely. Losing the seat felt more dangerous than losing the moment.
I told myself that was just how things were.
What I did not see at the time was what was happening outside of those rooms. Because every single one of the men who silenced me in those meetings came to find me afterward. Individually. Quietly. They came for guidance. They came to think out loud. They came to work through decisions they were not ready to surface publicly.
They did not want a policy. They wanted a thought partner. And somehow they knew, even when the group dynamic would not allow them to show it, that I was that person.
The board knew it, too. At one point, the president acknowledged that the real thinking driving our department was not coming from my boss. It was coming from me.
When the organization was acquired, my boss was let go. I was promoted into his role. For significantly less money.
I pushed back. There was not much leverage because the company had been sold and the new ownership held all the cards. So, I accepted it. And I carried that lesson forward. The lesson that your value and your compensation are not automatically the same conversation. That you have to make them the same conversation. That no one will do it for you.
It was not until years later, in a different organization and a different room, that something finally shifted.
We were in an executive meeting discussing compensation budgets. The CFO presented his recommendation, and the CEO turned to me and said he would not move forward without my input. Not my sign-off on paperwork. My opinion on the decision.
I had been doing meaningful work for years. But that was the moment I understood that my voice at a senior leadership table was not something I had to earn over and over again in every room. It was something I had built. And it was real.
I also learned something in that role that permanently changed how I think about HR.
I started learning the operations. Not just the people side, but the actual work. The processes. How each person's role connected to the next. How LEAN and ISO procedures either helped or hindered the people working within them. How quickly you could see who was afraid to be exposed when a broken system came to light, because vulnerability about being replaced looks a lot like resistance to change when you do not know what you are looking for.
And I saw something that has never left me.
People are not assets. They are people. They show up every day wanting to know that the work they do matters. They are not there to do bad work. They may not be chasing a promotion or a title. But they want someone to notice that their contribution moves things forward. That without them, something stops.
When I started truly understanding what each person did, not their job description but their actual role in the organism of the organization, everything changed. How I coached managers. How I advised executives. How I thought about performance and culture and leadership.
HR stopped being a function that handled problems. It became the function that could see the whole picture when no one else could.
I did not have a voice in some of those early rooms. But I had the conversations that happened after. And those conversations taught me more about leadership than any executive meeting ever did.
I learned that the most powerful thing a people leader can do is not enforce a policy. It is create the conditions where people feel safe enough to bring their whole selves to the work. Where a manager can admit they do not have the answer. Where an employee knows their contribution is seen.
I spent years sitting at tables where I was told to be quiet. I used the time to listen. To learn. To understand what people actually needed when no one else was in the room.
That is the work I still do today.
Kristin S. Harrison, MBA, is a Fractional HR Executive and the founder of Personalized HR Solutions, LLC. She works with small and mid-size businesses to build the people foundation that allows organizations to grow, lead, and perform at their best. Learn more at personalizedhrsolutions.com.
