Business Partnering
Achieving true partnering takes work – but it’s the best way to deliver what the business needs.
Research from Gartner proves that effective Business Partnering in HR delivers increases of 22% in employee performance and 9% in profit growth. Those results are achieved by ‘strategically effective’ HRBPs who understand the context, needs and priorities of their organization.
Other support functions can deliver improved results too – e.g. Finance and IT – when they build productive and trusting relationships with their stakeholders and focus on business priorities.
What is business partnering?
Business partnering is more than a job title – it’s a role and an attitude, and a genuine curiosity and appetite for getting under the skin of what drives business success. Our development programs build skills and practical tools to create business acumen, alignment, and effective relationships.
Organisationally, making partnering work demands clear leadership from the top. We help you to build and communicate real clarity about how partnering will work and what it can deliver.
Successful business partnering elevates the function’s influence and credibility – and therefore its impact. Develop business partners who are respected and valued and fully involved in future planning and decision-making.
Business partnering operates at the interface between central functions and business teams – it ensures that resources, expertise and experience are deployed effectively to the front line. Without it, business results and profitability are compromised, and risk increases.
CEOs want HR, Finance and IT to be orchestrators of the business strategy and therefore they expect them to be contextually grounded. Business projects are built into the flow of learning, so that participants start with business priorities and learn how to align the people agenda, to pitch for investments and use numbers to prove the ROI of their activities.
Our Strategic Business Partnering program enables leaders of critical support services to build stature and influence so that they engage successfully at the strategic level and speak in the language of the business. Becoming a trusted partner and sounding board also depends upon deepening relationships with key stakeholders, and this is a vital parallel thread.
Watch our recent webinar ‘What is strategic business partnering – how do we ensure it delivers value’
HR, Finance, IT and other central functions have a critical role to play in driving results – but it’s easy to be seen as a cost centre rather than a value creator. Our business partnering programs build business acumen and contextual awareness, and also focus on key stakeholder relationships in order to make them more trusting and productive.
We build relevance into all our programs by using participants’ own challenges and key stakeholder relationships. This enables them to build practical solutions, tools and approaches that they can apply immediately. As a result, business partners can move from being transactional service providers to building credibility and influence – and thus deliver more towards business priorities.
See our HR Business Partnering Development Program. We also offer a 2-hour virtual workshop which we can run in-house.
We researched what drives great HR and business partnering, and worked out how to evaluate and develop that. Our unique Profiling System is practical and interactive, so that it leads to action as well as learning. It is built on our own secure platform and provides unique flexibility and scalability.
Our Seven Enablers, endorsed by Dave Ulrich, create a clear framework for individuals’ development plans, for 360 feedback, and also for lively comparisons in team workshops. They build real clarity about what’s most important, and how to achieve that – and build alignment and purpose that lead to improved results.
The Seven Enablers
Click on the Enablers to find out more
Organisations we’ve worked with
