Dear HR Business Partners…
Dear HR Business Partner,
I see you. I was you. I spent 15 years in your shoes…
Straddling the competing needs of two worlds: internal clients and the HR team.
Flexing influencer muscles to push clients toward operating in ways that were both business positive and People Positive, then urging HR to make processes more relevant to business realities.
Never acting on the ideas that could address tensions plaguing the company, because there was always (always) another fire to put out.
Then I left. I couldn’t live with the focus on short-term fixes over long-term solutions anymore.
Today, I understand how it could have been different — and I’m committed to helping guide my fellow HRBP-ers and their organizations toward a brighter, less burned-out future.
My HRBP Breakup
As an HRBP, I developed unique skills and knowledge — from an ability to integrate multiple perspectives in organizational change to understanding the role talent could play in achieving our goals. I hoped these skills would position me to evolve my organization. Instead, I Yo-Yoed from the latest crisis to the newest initiative, becoming increasingly deflated by the bootstrapping.
I didn’t have the authority or budget to say “No” to the things that kept me from saying “Yes” to what deserved my energy. Instead of being able to say, “No, I won’t jump into another Employee Relations investigation, because that team is underwater; how about I help design a different approach to manager onboarding that could prevent these incidents in the first place?” I often found myself in fire-fighting mode.
I didn’t know what it could look like for an HRBP to lead significant change in HR and across our system — and even when that vision began to emerge, I lacked the abilities to live it out.
I didn’t know how to gather and lead cross-functional teams; I didn’t know how to kick off small experiments in service of large-scale transformation; and I didn’t see a way to interrupt the deluge of requests from internal clients so I’d have time to figure these things out.
Today, 18 months after my HRBP break-up, I’m starting to see the light — and ready to ask: “What if things could change for good?”
I hoped my HRBP skills would position me to evolve my organization. Instead, I Yo-Yoed from the latest crisis to the newest initiative.
What if I didn’t have to help clients engineer shortcuts to comply with a company’s lackluster performance management process? What if instead I could convene a cross-functional team and build an approach that was free of friction, centralized enough to be coherent but customizable enough for diverse team contexts — and actually valuable for employees and the business?
What if my client teams didn’t have to build onboarding plans from scratch? What if instead of copying and pasting content, I could invite the right people to join a temporary team and develop team-agnostic onboarding principles and an automated solution to guide new hires without taxing frazzled managers?
What if I didn’t have to feel like Toby from The Office was my team’s mascot? Because to many, HR = the people committed to risk avoidance, not to learning. We’re seen as a parking brake, not a gas pedal; a profession for rubber-stampers, not visionaries. But… that’s BS.
If HRBPs had the authority, skills, and resources to unleash their talents, modeling and catalyzing new ways of working to solve tricky problems, these shared frustrations would more than just evaporate; HRBPs could steer their companies into the future of work. To enable that, we have to talk about the system enveloping HRBPs. Then, we need to change it.
The Problem Is the HR System, Not HR People
Transforming HR means transforming our organizations, because HR sits at the center of countless critical processes. Finding the right people to hire, supporting their learning and growth, creating a culture where they can thrive — HR’s on the hook for all of that. So if HR can stop dealing with never-ending to-dos and instead become a powerful strategic partner, everyone wins.
That’s what we believe at The Ready, a future-of-work consultancy committed to changing how the world works. We’ve partnered with hundreds of clients around the globe to help them work in more people-positive and complexity-conscious ways. And we’ve seen time and time again the pivotal role HR could play in helping them get there.
But HR’s under-resourced reality, its inability to shape and advance high-value business priorities, helps no one. We created our Future of HR maturity model specifically so HR can move toward a more adaptive state.
What I know now — and what our model aims to transform — is that my pain wasn’t my fault or my boss’s fault. It was structural. I internalized the frustrations of my role, wondering why I couldn’t crawl out from under the weight of the everyday. But the current HR operating system forces HRBPs into an untenable position. There’s no MacGyver-ing our way out of the rinse-and-repeat cycle of reactivity. Instead, we need a system-wide upgrade.
From Partner to Coach
HR should be a catalytic center, nurturing the change required to bring a business’s strategy to life.
And HRBPs, you could be in the action — harnessing your perspective and capabilities to help solve persistent problems and chase after novel opportunities. But jumping in means reimagining the HRBP role altogether; not by saying “Yes” to an in-name-only rebrand — but by saying “Yes” to new mindsets and moves actually designed to facilitate and support lasting change.
In our maturity model, HRBPs become HR Business Coaches. If we can equip HRBCs with evolutionary new skills while cutting away red tape, much more is possible.
HRBPs, this is where you need to be bold — where you need to muster the courage to disrupt the familiar (does obsessing over the urgent rather than the important ring any bells?) to make room for the novel and strategic. Because when that happens, we get to:
Stop marching to the business-as-usual beat and start tackling prioritized missions that position HR to help move the business forward.
Start here: Work with your HR partners and those in the business to identify the first missions you want to chase after. Pick a specific challenge; specify the nuts and bolts of the mission to solve that problem; curate a dynamic, cross-functional team; design an experiment; and get to testing.
Stop relying so heavily on relationship capital to get things done and start contracting with others to set clear accountabilities around the work HR must complete in partnership with the business: “Bottom-line, friends: Who gets to decide what we address, how we address it, and what resources are available to get there?”
Start here: Once you’ve prioritized a high-value mission, do some role chartering for everyone involved, so team members have clarity on who is doing what and who gets to decide what. Then, the team can move faster and in a more coherent direction.
And perhaps toughest of all in the HRBP fun-house of balancing internal client needs with the reality of the HR team:
Stop operating with a service mindset and start working with a product mindset. Keeping internal clients happy with excellent service feels good, but it usually pulls us away from spending energy on developing HR solutions that are scalable — and that can meet client needs more proactively.
Start here: Help internal clients identify their biggest HR-related pain points; enroll them in supporting you to prioritize tackling those and set the expectation that you’ll be shelving some usual services while you put real time into providing solutions for what most irritates them. Help the group agree to the “Not right now” items for a set period of time.
HRBPs, you also need to be bold; you need to muster the courage to disrupt the familiar to make room for the novel and strategic.
Feeling inspired? Terrific. Feeling overwhelmed? We get it. We want to help. Partnering with us on your HR transformation means we’re by your side, helping you identify missions, stand up teams, steer them toward success, and circulate valuable learnings back to the entire organization.
We’re talking about a big shake-up demanding boldness from both HRBPs and the entire HR function. But… can we afford not to change? I couldn’t. This reimagining takes our valuable skills and shuttles them toward a new purpose, one that enables us to simultaneously support internal clients and strengthen HR without feeling stuck between two worlds — and one that lets us do what brought us to this work in the first place.
The Ready is a future-of-work consultancy committed to changing how the world works — from business as usual to brave new work. We help organizations remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we live.
The Future of HR is designed to help HR and People teams level up their skills, tackle cross-functional challenges in new ways, and respond to inevitable unexpected curveballs with greater ease within a future-ready operating model. Connect with us here to learn more and say hi.
Ready to take a first step toward the Future of HR? Complete our capabilities self-assessment here.
