Trade Secrets: Making It As A HR Business Partner
The role of the business partner is more important than ever, now that there are more demands on HR to add value.
The main question is whether you as a senior HR professional want to accept the difficult challenge of working to achieve a specific business objective that is critical to business success OR simply remain in your comfortable administrative position far away from the hectic real life aspects of the business?
HR is now about focusing much more on the strategic side of the business and making a strategic contribution by coming up with strategies that clearly add value to bottom-line results.
Four Steps to Becoming a More effective HR Business Partner
Step 1 – Spend most of your time and effort understanding the company and/or division’s business-related matters, and how HR might facilitate them, rather than achieving incremental improvements in existing HR programs and services.
Step Two – Enhance your practical knowledge or acumen in the financial, operating and strategic aspects of the business.
First, data on business aspects should be compiled every year and placed into a reusable template, preferably at the end of the last year and just before the start of the new one.
When collecting this data, the HR professional must temporarily take off the HR hat and put on your business person’s hat.
Such data gives you, the HR Business Partner the added advantage of being able to interact with the executives solely on the business aspects as one business person to another in addition to any interactions on the HR related aspects of business.
Step Three – Understand the specific financial, operating and strategic business objectives for the company in the upcoming year that top management is committed to achieving.
Preferably, these business objectives should be identified and catalogued just before the start of the fiscal year to give the HR Business Partner the entire year to provide one or more innovative HR projects that will facilitate the successful achievement of the objective.
These annual business objectives represent a significant opportunity for HR to implement projects that are directly-related to the business, rather than one that is improving an existing program or service.
In Conclusion
Almost every Chief Human Resources Officer or HR Leader desires the same goal – a seat at the table as an equal business partner to the finance executives – but few achieve it.
How often have we heard that CEOs do not respect HR leaders because of their lack of business acumen concerning the company and/or division’s financial, operating and strategic matters?
To acquire such a seat, the HR Leader must earn that respect by directly participating with executives in the achievement of business objectives, while effectively and efficiently fulfilling their administrative duties.
To accomplish this, it might be time to join a HRBP mentorship program.