HR professionals have been striving to be strategic business partners for decades.

It is a worthy goal and can transform the way business leaders/clients utilize our expertise. However, it can seem like an impossible dream that we can’t achieve. It is too easy to fall back into our comfort zone of doing whatever they ask us to do, which can be very transactional. Why does this happen?
 

• It’s the culture
• It’s what they want.
• It’s easier
• It takes less time
• We like being helpful
• They are the customer, so we give them what they want
• The boss doesn’t want us to push back

There is a myriad of additional reasons that we can use and can be categorized into one of three categories of underlying concerns:
 

1. Relevance – We want to be seen as relevant to the business and our customers. They know what they want, so providing them with what they ask for helps my reputation of being relevant.
2. Competence – We have competencies that we bring to the organization. If we can provide quick solutions, we can show we are competent.
3. Self-esteem – Let’s face it. We want to be liked and accepted. We want to be seen as a team player and someone willing to do what is asked.

While these underlying concerns are real and must be dealt with, they get in the way of us doing our best work for business.

We can fall into the trap of believing that quick, transactional solutions are best for us and the business. The fact is the opposite is true. By just providing whatever the leaders ask of us, we fail to bring our expertise to the table. Many times, leaders come to us with symptoms, not the root cause. If we only solve symptoms, we will continue to have the same problems over and over again.

We need to have confidence that we can provide more than quick answers and immediate customer service. Leaders may be satisfied with our work in the short term, but in the long term, the business suffers. They begin to view us as a transactional “pair of hands”. What they and the organization need from HR Professionals is a collaborative relationship, where everyone’s expertise is fully utilized. This is the true meaning of strategic.

A collaborative relationship is achieved when there is a good balance between our expertise and the expertise of the leader. This will lead us to a more fully integrated and robust solution. When we act as a “pair of hands”, we are withholding our expertise from the organization. To move toward collaboration, we must be assertive with our clients. Assertiveness happens when I respect the rights of the leader and my own. We both have a right:
 

• To be heard
• To ask questions
• To challenge each other’s thinking
• To say no
• To provide alternative solutions
• To be respected

When we mutually respect these rights, we are being assertive.

So how do we get our expertise included in the process? We begin by fully understanding the situation, what the leader wants from us, and just as important, what we want from the leader. When we have our “customer service” hat on, we usually focus primarily on what the leader wants and leave our wants off the table.

To be more collaborative, we need to come to terms with our inner voice that is solely looking to protect our relevance, competency, and self-esteem. While these are all noble parts of being human, they don’t allow us to fully contribute our expertise to the organization. These underlying concerns can be very powerful. They are the root of our inner conversations when we doubt our ability to be useful.

Being assertive and asking for what we want from our leaders can be counter-cultural. The leaders want quick answers, and they want us to be helpful. Unfortunately, just being helpful doesn’t always serve the long-term needs of the organization. We need to be useful!

Being useful means:
 

• Slowing the process down enough to fully understand the root cause of the situation.
• Asking for what we want in addition to asking for what the leader wants.
• Collecting data about the organization and the people.
• Saying no when the data indicate we are not on the right path.
• Building trusting relationships with the leaders where they expect us to push back and challenge them.

It is fairly easy to understand what it takes to be a strategic business partner. It’s not complicated. However, acting as a strategic business partner is hard work. We must be intentional every day to resist giving the leaders what they want. Instead, provide what the organization needs. We should resist being driven by our needs for relevance, competence, and self-esteem and resist blaming the culture, the leaders, and our boss.

As HR professionals, our expertise is desperately needed by our organizations. We have so much more to offer than traditionally transactional solutions. We are more than the HR police. Being a strategic business partner has been a goal, even a dream, for decades. We know how to do it. We just need to have the courage to be useful, in the face of initial disapproval from others.

Author Bio

Jeff Evans is a Senior Partner at Designed Learning.

Error: No such template "/CustomCode/topleader/category"!