Running on Empty: The Support Gap Facing Senior HR Leaders
Earlier this year an independent company published a survey of HR professionals, the third year running they have done so, and one finding stopped me in my tracks: only 13% of HR professionals feel their own mental wellbeing is properly supported at work.
For some context, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts the number of people working in HR across the UK at 476,000. Do the maths and that means more than 414,000 HR professionals are not getting the wellbeing support they need from their employer. I have been in corporate HR for over 20 years, and not feeling supported by an employer while still being expected to support everyone else has been part of my own lived experience, so this one landed personally.
Whatever your role in HR, L&D, Talent Acquisition or anywhere else in the function, you will know how often managers and colleagues come to you when they are struggling with a peer or someone in their team. They might need to have a difficult conversation, or communicate a decision they know will cause conflict or have bigger consequences, and they want someone to share the weight with. We are expected to empathise, reassure and help them find the support they need, and it can feel like we are giving a little bit of ourselves away so that they can succeed. When we are running on empty, there is rarely anyone we can borrow from.
The story underneath the statistic
Most people reading the report will assume the 87% figure is about HR people struggling to cope. The most common stressors reported are excessive workload, poor management and lack of support, which tells me this has very little to do with HR professionals needing more knowledge, skills or experience. They have already worked in HR and they know what good looks like.
HR has grown enormously over the past century, from the transactional personnel function of the early 1900s, through the more employee-focused era from the 1970s onward, to the strategic people and culture remit it holds today. The scope of the job has widened at every stage, while the support around the person doing it has never kept pace, and that gap is where burnout, quiet confidence erosion and decisions made alone that should never have been made alone come from.
Why more training isn't the answer
When a senior leader needs support, the quickest fix most organisations reach for is knowledge and skills, so in come courses on time management, resilience and wellbeing. The trouble is that these only teach HR professionals how to take on more, and the structural gap in the business stays exactly where it was.
What senior HR leaders need is someone who understands the job at their level, with similar knowledge, skills and experience, who can help them carry the strategic weight. That is why training commissioned in response to a statistic like this so often makes the problem look solved on paper while quietly leaving it with the person who was already carrying it.
Why this hits harder inside an MSP
For senior HR leaders in MSPs and IT support businesses the gap is sharper still. In technical businesses, strong technical people are routinely promoted into people management because it is treated as the only next rung on the ladder, and being good at the technical role does not automatically make someone a good manager. Someone has to close that gap, and it is usually the HR leader, coaching first-time managers through the basics of managing people on top of their own job.
Add the isolation of being the only senior HR voice in the building, and often the only non-technical voice in the leadership room too, and it gets heavier again. The higher you climb the more likely you are to be the only one like you in the room. That is a structural pattern rather than a coincidence or a personal shortcoming, and it leaves the most senior HR person in the business with nobody at their level to think alongside.
What actually needs to change
Closing this gap takes structure rather than more knowledge or more coping strategies: a relationship with someone at peer level who understands HR, who can be a genuine thinking partner, and who gives you the professional backing to say no to work that was never HR's to carry. That is a different kind of support from a training course, and it is the kind that changes what the role feels like day to day.
If you want to make a start, these are the actions I would put first:
Find a peer-level thinking partner outside your business, such as a coach, mentor or senior HR contact, and get regular sessions in the diary so they are protected.
Take your hardest people decisions there first, so they have been properly pressure-tested before they reach the leadership room.
List everything on your desk that was never HR's to carry, agree with your CEO or leadership team what HR is actually for, and use that as your basis for handing work back.
Block out thinking time each week and treat it like a meeting with your most senior stakeholder.
Choose one person in your team to develop and hand them a piece of work you currently hold.
Pick one strategic HR priority and set a date to bring it to the leadership team.
When that structure is in place, three things tend to shift together:
Decisions get clearer, because there is finally the thinking space to absorb, reflect and act with confidence rather than bouncing from one urgent call to the next.
Teams move from being directed to being developed, because the leader running them has stopped firefighting long enough to invest in people rather than just manage output.
The strategic HR work that should be happening starts landing in a way the whole organisation can feel, rather than staying trapped in your head for lack of time to bring it forward.
That 87% figure describes a role that was never built with the scaffolding it needs, carried by people who are very good at building scaffolding for everyone else. If you are reading this and recognising yourself, the answer is professional support that understands exactly what the role demands, so you can think clearly, lead well and stop carrying it all alone.
