I've sat in a lot of leadership meetings over the years, and I can usually tell within about ten minutes which people around the table can actually talk about the business, the unit economics, the product roadmap, the market pressure the company is under, and which people can only talk about the business in HR language. Engagement scores. Policy updates. Headcount plans. Not because those things don't matter. They do. But they're not the same as understanding how the company actually makes money and where it's exposed.

That gap isn't a knowledge problem you fix with another certification. The real skills gap in HR was never about how much HR experience someone has. It's that most HR practitioners were never trained to understand the business they work inside of.‍

‍We Trained a Generation of HR Practitioners to Be Functional Experts

The traditional HR career path is built around functional depth. Learn compliance. Learn policy. Learn the employee lifecycle. Get certified. Move up. It produces people who are genuinely excellent at HR. It doesn't reliably produce people who can sit across from a CFO and understand why a pricing change just made the headcount plan obsolete.

The data backs this up. Korn Ferry research cited by AIHR found that roughly three-quarters of business unit leaders see HR as lacking basic business acumen skills, 41% of HR professionals themselves acknowledged a business acumen gap, and 28% said they lack the ability to turn strategy into action. That shows up downstream too: only 55% of CEOs view HR as a genuine strategic partner. That's not a knock on HR people. It's an admission that the traditional training pipeline was never built for the job HR actually has today.

Kara's Path Is the Exception That Should Be the Rule

I got to see what the alternative looks like in a recent conversation with Kara Wilson Oliver, VP of People Operations at DealMaker, on the Unmuted Podcast. Kara spent 15 years building products in Toronto's startup ecosystem before she ever set foot in HR. Her realization, in her words, was that organizations are really just the most complicated product of all.

That reframe changes everything about how you approach the work. Instead of asking "what policy do we need," a product mindset asks what problem you're actually solving, who it's for, how you'll know if it worked, and what you'll change if it didn't. Kara applies that thinking to culture, leadership, org design, and AI adoption. She didn't get better at HR by learning more HR. She got better at HR by bringing a fundamentally different set of problem-solving tools into it.‍

‍Business Acumen Isn't a Nice-to-Have Anymore. It's the Job

This isn't just a nice story about one leader's unconventional path. AIHR's Future-Ready HR Skills Report, based on research spanning 961 HR teams and 13,665 HR professionals, found that only half of HR teams believe they have the right skills to deliver impact, and business acumen is one of three capabilities that consistently falls short, alongside digital agility and data literacy.

Here's the uncomfortable part: the same research found 73% of HR professionals rate their own business acumen highly, while commercial fluency, the actual ability to apply business concepts to real decisions, remains consistently low. Confidence and capability are not the same thing, and right now, a lot of HR is confidently under-equipped.

HR Keeps Optimizing the Wrong Layer

When HR isn't fluent in the business, it tends to build programs that look good on paper but don't move anything that matters. A July 2025 Gartner survey of 222 CHROs found only 47% believe their culture actually drives employee performance today. That's roughly a coin flip on whether the culture work HR owns is connected to outcomes leadership cares about.

‍Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report points to why: HR, like finance, IT, and legal, was built for efficiency and control within its own silo, which creates a growing gap between the function and the rest of the business and limits an organization's growth and agility. You can't close that gap with better programs. You can only close it by understanding what the business is actually trying to do.

‍What Business-Literate HR Actually Looks Like

None of this means throwing out HR expertise. It means adding a layer most training programs skip. In practice, that looks like:

• Reading the P&L and the board deck, not just the engagement survey results
• Understanding unit economics well enough to know why a headcount ask will or won't land
• Knowing how the product or service actually gets built and sold, not just who sells it
• Partnering as often with Product and Finance as with Legal and Payroll
• Hiring and developing HR talent for problem-solving range, not just years of HR-specific experience

‍A Final Thought

I don't think the answer is fewer HR credentials or more of them. I think the industry has been optimizing the wrong variable. We kept asking "how much HR experience does this person have", when the better question was always "how well can this person understand and solve a genuinely complex business problem”.

The best people leaders I know aren't the ones who know HR the best. They're the ones who understand the business well enough that HR becomes just one of the tools they use to move it forward.

If you want to hear the full conversation with Kara Wilson Oliver on applying a product mindset to HR, culture, and AI adoption, check out episode 84 of the Unmuted Podcast, powered by ScaleHR.

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