Excellent Business Partnering

Before we set out a process to identify and develop capability, we want to explore what excellent business partnering looks like. The title 'Business Partner' is currently the title of fashion in the HR profession. We also know that during our 25+ years' experience of working in HR titles have their seasons. The profession has long been seeking to move into the strategic partnering space — indeed the shift from Personnel to HR Management was an earlier precursor of this. But there is still confusion about what this more strategic role (whether played out by generalists or specialists) looks like. As it is generally the current title of choice in HR, we will use the term 'Business Partner' for convenience. We predict that this title 'will, in time, fall…' out of fashion and will be replaced. So, irrespective of title, what we are more interested in is what this role really looks like. What do HR professionals do if they are working in this space? What does excellence look like?

Even David Ulrich recognises that there are quite different versions of business partnering in organisations. In a People Management interview (28 June 2007) he talks about the business partner title having broadened in organisations to a point where it describes a nearly impossible role: where HR Partners are expected to contribute across a very broad front and where, for many HR professionals, it has been easier to keep doing operational HR than the strategic.

Recent research (Box 1 summarises some key sources), along with our own experience of working with a wide range of organisations, suggests that excellent business partnering (whether HR professionals wear a generalist or specialist hat) embraces the following five characteristics:

1. Understanding your organisation's business. Without this understanding HR professionals cannot even begin to shape a business-focused people and organisational agenda. This means being fluent in the metrics and the language of your organisation. We must understand what it takes for our organisations to perform and be able to hold our own in conversations about customers, markets, stakeholders, financials, operations, etc. This requirement was identified by a number of our senior practitioners. Alison Grace (Rackspace) identified business awareness, commercial acumen and mental agility around numbers as key HR capabilities. Ian Muir (ESAB) also underlined the need for commercial fluency, including numeracy and financial literacy. Jerry Arnott (DWP) stated that 'what has increased in importance is an absolute necessity for HR professionals to understand their business and metrics/numeracy. These are areas that need to be beefed up considerably. The problem is that in many instances HR does not identify with the business or understand it'.
2. Building strong relationships with business colleagues. Much research and writing about business partnering focus on the need for HR professionals to demonstrate personal impact and credibility. The essence of partnering is an ability to change the kinds of conversations HR professionals hold with business colleagues. This means being confident to challenge colleagues, bring new thinking to the table, influence effectively and ask the kinds of questions that make people think differently. Strong relationships are relationships of equals. Ian Muir (ESAB), recalling his time as HR Director for Cable and Wireless International, stated that 'success as a Business Partner is much more the product of intellectual, physical and commercial alignment to the client. Building this relationship is critical and this happens on the fly, in corridor conversations as much as in more formalised surroundings. My desk was within 5 metres of the CEO's desk in an open plan office'.
3. Acquiring a new toolkit of expertise. Expertise must be developed in core HR disciplines such as talent acquisition, capability development, employee relations, etc. and in the areas of business change and organisational development. This means developing a strong understanding of change management tools and project management approaches alongside traditional HR subject areas.
4. Bringing this toolkit of expertise to the table in a way that is problem-led so that we work with our business colleagues to identify a solution rather than telling them, as 'the expert', what the answer is. We need to work in ways that build business commitment to and ownership of outcomes. Many authors are clear that excellent business partnering requires strong consulting, coaching and facilitation skills. Frances Allcock (BBC) pointed out that HR activity must be aligned to the organisation's strategy. If no time is made for senior HR professionals to engage in strategic conversations with business colleagues and to understand business problems, there will be resistance because HR will be seen as imposing solutions and how these products help the organisation to deliver its strategy is missing.
5. Focusing on the organisation's change agenda — shaping and delivering the strategy, developing and building organisational capability, addressing systemic organisational issues. Business partners need to be able to shape small- and large-scale organisational changes and bring the toolkit of change management and organisational development skills to help the business move forward successfully.

Box 1: Research on the role of the business partner

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Corporate leadership council — Building the next generation of HR-line partnerships (2007)

The Corporate Leadership Council (CLC) concludes that the strategic role is HR's most powerful lever for demonstrating business-level impact. The Council research demonstrates that the people in the role and the design of the job both strongly influence the effectiveness of the HR strategic role.

The person in the role

The CLC research argues that the implication of focusing on the person in the strategic role is critical. Effectiveness in the strategic role requires business analytics, leadership and persuasion skills. Business analytics drives strategic effectiveness, but only if HR can persuasively communicate them (i.e., using data-driven business cases to identify solutions tailored to customer needs has the strongest HR strategic impact). With the problem understood, the person in the HR strategic role must then be able to develop and defend a strong point of view regarding the answer and then take ownership for solution delivery.

The design of the job

The research also indicates that HR must re-examine the design of the job to improve performance. Successful design shifts the role from broad involvement across the HR touch points of numerous projects to deeper ownership on a select few high-impact projects.

Critical HR professional skills identified by the CLC are:

People skills	HR expertise	Implementation skills	Business skills
Influencing others Leading people Communicating clearly	Recruitment and retention expertise Performance and development expertise Compensation expertise Compliance expertise	Driving to results Managing projects Managing change Applying technology Managing vendors	Knowing your business Knowing business fundamentals Applying business analytics Taking a global approach

David Ulrich — A new mandate for human resources (1997), from partners to players (2001), masterclass on building sustainable value through your HR value proposition (2007)

Although he did not actually use the expression HR business partner, Ulrich is credited with the emergence of the HR business partner role. In his seminal book in 1997 he describes the new HR role, which can help deliver organisational excellence, in four ways:

1. Become a partner in strategy execution
   • Define organisational architecture (i.e., five essential organisational components: strategy, structure, rewards, processes and people);
   • Guide management through rigorous discussion on fit (e.g., the company culture fit against its strategic goals);
   • Lead in proposing, creating and debating best practice in culture change programmes or reward systems;
   • Take stock of own work and set clear priorities. HR professionals might have a dozen initiatives in their sights but they must have skills to be able to join forces with managers to systematically assess the impact and importance of each one initiative.
2. Become an expert in the way work is organised and executed — delivering efficiency to ensure that costs are reduced whilst quality is maintained.
3. Become an employee champion — representing employee concerns to senior management and at the same time working to increase employee contribution. HR also has an important role in holding a mirror up in front of senior executives.
4. Become a change agent — building organisation's capacity to embrace and capitalise on change. Using the change model 'who, why, what and how', introduce this to the management team and guide them through it.

Since 1997, Ulrich has used a range of terms to describe the role of HR business partner. In a 2001 book he co-authored with Dick Beatty, he argues that the HR role needs to shift from partner to player to meet strategic challenges. It goes on to explain that there are six ways in which HR players contribute to organisations: coach, architect, builder, facilitator, leader and conscience. Ulrich and Beatty state that by fulfilling these roles HR professionals can make a valued contribution to strategic decision making that builds winning organisations.

Coach

• Coaches executives to change their behaviour.
• Fully grasping and understanding organisation stakeholder scorecard is critical.
• Contracting skills are essential.
• Ability to build relationship of trust with business leader.
• Can give clear, direct, candid and useful feedback.

Organisational architect

• Must have a concept of what constitutes an effective reorganisation in line with the needs of the company, for example, the McKinsey model.

Builder

• Delivers the value proposition to the customer.
• Turns ideas into actions.
• In order to design and deliver he or she must be current in theory and the practice of HR.

Facilitator

• Facilitator role encompasses strategic change leadership.
• Understands importance of getting things done and making change happen.
• Facilitates teamwork. Engages teams to increase team effectiveness and helps teams learn from successes and failures.

Leader

• Exemplar on how to manage.
• Focuses on deliverables.
• Demonstrates capabilities set out in the leadership model.

Conscience

• Ensures organisation plays by the rules.
• HR plays referee role to honestly evaluate business practices.

More recently, a 2007 masterclass referred to the need for HR professionals to build competencies as:

• Credible activist — building relationships of trust so that an active stance can be taken to shape culture, drive change, influence direction.
• Cultural steward, talent manager/organisational designer and strategic change agent — which are areas HR BPs should know about and do to make a difference.
• Business ally and day-to-day tactician — competencies he sees as table stakes. They are necessary but are not sufficient without the above two areas.

Ulrich states that these three roles have a strong correlation with impact on business performance.

B Kenton and J Yarnall — The HR business partner (2005)

In their book on business partnering, the following characteristics were identified:

• Delivering to the business — understanding the bigger picture/business environment, systems thinking, being able to apply skills to a wide variety of business needs, providing expertise and support/facilitation, taking a longer term perspective.
• Working alongside managers in the business — collaborating, building strong relationships, involving others in finding solutions, building trust, contracting so that work undertaken is transparent, working at both content and process levels.
• Self-awareness and impact — focused on learning, questions things, credible, resilient, dynamic, energetic — someone who moves people forward.
• Creating and leading change — proactive and inventive, applies knowledge of change theory, influences others to engage them in the change process, creative, works well with ambiguity and complexity, path-finding.
• Maintaining a business focus — prioritising, utilises business data, challenges appropriately, seeks feedback for insight and learning, sets measures and defines clear deliverables at the start of any project.

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What this means in practice is that excellent business partners will engage with colleagues around strategic themes: sustaining high-performance during difficult economic times; integrating new businesses; driving efficiencies and cost management; creating higher levels of employee engagement; identifying new individual and organisational capabilities; shaping and creating a high-performance culture; helping management teams to perform and work together more effectively … and so on … that will drive revenue/customer satisfaction, control costs and build reputation. Indeed HR professionals, working as business partners, need to be able to ask and address whatever the key questions are that will help their organisation to deliver high-performance.