HR should be a critical partner in any firm’s senior leadership. It requires a unique combination of talents, philosophy, and persistance to make that a reality.

There must be talent on both sides of the equation. The HR professional must have the general business capabilities to appreciate the business’ overall position and create a strategy for the HR function to support the business.

On the other side of the equation, the other functional leaders must have enough knowledge of the HR function to be able to integrate those issues into theior approach. HR can only have a seat at the table if their peers can truly understand the value of the function.

Philosophy also plays a part in HR being able to rise to “full partner” status in the firm. The senior leadership team must approach their responsibilities as a team and not as heads of individual departments. That approach shares the responsibility for each member’s success and opens the door for HR to take a shared role in running the business.

Finally, it takes a bit of persistance to make any change a reality and making HR a full partner is one of the most difficult. Line managers have a difficult time incorporating HR concerns into their day-to-day operations. It seems hard enough to run the business without also including HR concerns. It takes a personal, visible stance by senior leadership over a period of time to make the organization incorporate the needed chages. That takes persistence.

The proper mix of talent, philosophy,and persistence will determine whether HR “Booms or Busts” in any given situation. This is one case where the overall trend depends on success in individual situations.

thanks for this clarification. However, while the principle in court is “in dubio pro reo”, in management we do need results.
So, judging from your data, it doesn’t look too good for the business partner model:
1) Of those, who have formed an opinion, the vast majority say it failed.
2) Few widely used management models these days are wrong in principle. However, they have to be implementable with the quality and quantity of resources you can appropriately apply to the case.

However, there are also two points which may suggest to have another go with the model:
- It is still in it’s infancy and there are certainly lessons to learn to make implementation more effective in future. Particularly it will take time to attract business minded people into HR. If the model can achieve this, then it will be a success no matter what other shortcomings it may have.
- The BP model ideally leaves line managers with more of their core task: managing their people. Again, it’s not possible to have managing managers from one day to another, when in the past they were chief experts and happy to leave people management with HR. Of course, those managers would not be happy to have to do, what they don’t like. This issue needs a longer transition period as well, but again, it would be a huge step forward for manay organisations to have line managers taking people management tasks over from HR.

Just to set the record straight, Roffey Park’s Management Agenda 2008 published research showing that, of the managers who had HR business partners in their organisation, 46% said it was successful, 26% said it was ineffective whilst the remaining 27% either did not know or felt it was too early to tell. As a consequence, we would not want readers to assume that those who did not say it was successful were all suggesting the model was failing. In fact further analysis of the comments from those who perceived it as ineffective indicate that the current failings may be more due to poor implementation of the model rather than the fault of the model itself.

To pursue this vital question further, we have conducted research with a wide cross section of UK organisations to understand what makes the implementation of the HR business partner model more or less successful in practice. Results of this research will be published in January 2009.

I was interested to read your article and will keep in touch with the ongoing dialogue on this site exploring these important issues.

Personally, that’s long been my view. HR involved in talent management? That’s laughable, in practice. Although someone should be managing it… For me HR = payroll + related employee administration, and keep ‘em tightly locked in that little box!

Talent Management software? More snake oil peddled by the Toolheads.

This chap http://www.altitudeblog.com/?signup=true&s=10041& quotes a pundit as saying that one bad hire can cost a business IRO $1M. I can get down with that, too.

In summary, I’m on the BUST side (fnarr, fnarr!) For me, the closing question is more like: “Will there *ever* be a good time to be an HR “professional”? I’d be interested to hear your view.

I’ve been banging on about this for years but the bottom line is that internal HR professionals delivering talent managers cannot truly overcome the conflict of interest. Plus, even more importantly, real talent management is the domain of the career profession who can offer impartial and discipline-specific coaching in a way that constructively complements the HR profession’s well-defined toolkit.

As always, you write well, persuasively and eruditely. Thank you for sending this link.

My perception is that the current market conditions are polarising organisations. They are either trimming programmes and moving strategic HR off the agenda, sometimes brutally so; or moving to the other side and working harder than ever to attract, develop and retain the best people. I have no doubt that the former approach is short-term and cyclical; the latter is a minority interest but may prove a better way to breed survivors.

One thing that is becoming clear is that the skills, attitudes and capabilities required in these tough times are subtly different from those that have got leaders through boom time: and this is true for all areas of business, including HR. Moreover, many of today’s senior practitioners have no past experience of the current economic conditions – having still been students or in early career stages in the last UK recession of the early 1990s.

The question then becomes: how do we equip today’s HR practitioners, and business leaders in general, to be best able to deliver in present market conditions? Or, indeed, are organisations going to need to buy in this expertise in various forms such as interims or consultancy?

From my current company’s perspective, there is emphasis on saying-the-right-thing (pleasing the stakeholders & all that). To some degree, there are processes to manage people & their growth. But, the reality is that long term human capital development (HCD) just doesn’t happen – at least for the vast majority of staff.

There is no connection to strategic direction (business growth areas, etc) and no indication of human capital development to lock into the future. Coupled with an HR function that seems stuck in “personnel days” (=adds little value) and the business’ view of HR is further downgraded.

As a knowledge-leveraging company, I find this very worrying – this affects future staff hiring, current staff enagement & retention of core knowledge assets.

I have been in the mindset of “personal HCD” for many a year now, so I look after myself. Trouble is, many of my peers are as well & that(too)
cripples any attempt at corporate HCD. Come the upturn (late 2009, imho), there are many, many people who will have their bags packed & ready to go.

Some very interesting perspectives and like you, I tend to feel that better human capital management will be a key differentiator going forward. Its certainly not as explicit as bottom line performance but over years (as opposed to quarters) it will have a large bearing on things. The trick of course is the ‘how’ part!