Business Partnering: Part 3 of 3
20 June 2011:
Reignite Business Performance for Competitive Edge – Business Partnering
Welcome to the final article in a series based on the recent Executive Briefing on business partnering hosted by CorporateLeaders in partnership with Raytheon Professional Services. After considering the challenges of cross-cultural collaboration and the attributes of collaborative leaders, we now explore the barriers to successful business partnering and how these can be overcome.
Overcoming barriers to business partnering
When business partnerships fail to deliver their promised benefits, the reasons are usually related to people’s behaviour. Business leaders may talk about the need for collaboration within and between different parts of the organisation but their own actions often send out very different signals to the workforce. As a result, employees retreat into their functional silos, and collaboration remains no more than an aspiration.
Breaking out of the silo
Strategies for breaking this unproductive cycle include rewarding employees for collaborative, rather than silo-based behaviour. In recent years, many large organisations have also tried to bring about change by embedding functional specialists within operational areas. In the human resources arena, for instance, they have appointed “HR business partners” to work closely with business managers. These roles typically sit within a segmented HR function, which also consists of shared service centres and centres of expertise that provide advice in specialist areas such as recruitment and reward.
This model is associated with Dave Ulrich, Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan, who in books such as Human Resource Champions: the Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results has urged HR professionals to collaborate with business managers. However, the extent to which they have managed to add value in this way depends on their understanding of the business and their ability to form relationships with people from outside their own function. That means establishing mutual trust, which, participants at the recent Executive Briefing heard, is the hallmark of successful business partnering.
External business partnering
It takes time and effort for those involved in business partnering to establish mutual trust, and when one of those individuals changes role or leaves the organisation, the process has to begin all over again. This can pose a particular challenge for intercompany partnerships. As one of the business leaders taking part in the Briefing said: “There’s not much succession management in big contracts and that’s often a problem. You need people lower down the functional tree who can take over when necessary, but not all organisations have considered that succession issue.”
The discussion highlighted other contractual issues that can derail business partnerships. In particular, contracts with suppliers and other external partners do not always provide what one participant described as enough “wriggle room” to allow the partnership to grow deeper and wider. “It depends on what you are contracting for, but it is possible to frame a flexible contract,” she said.
Paul Swinscoe, Director of Sales and Marketing, Europe, for Raytheon Professional Services, made a similar point when describing his company’s contract with the Pentagon to train every single soldier in the United States. This was framed as an overarching contract setting out the outputs both parties were looking to achieve. “The contract doesn’t say how we should train people because that changes over time,” Swinscoe explained.
According to several participants, however, there is often too much focus on contracts and not enough on relationships – on the way people are going to work together. The new British Standard, BS 11000, which provides a framework for establishing effective collaborative business relationships, could be helpful in this respect. As one participant pointed out: “It’s all about making sure that the whole business relationship works, and encapsulates a lot of the best practice that people have talked about at this event.”
Barriers to business partnering
- Lack of mutual trust, understanding and respect
- Absence of top level commitment and sponsorship
- Poor role modelling by business leaders
- Failure to identify shared goals and objectives
- Insufficient resources devoted to the partnership
- Confusion over roles and responsibilities
- Communication breakdowns
- Organisational processes that fail to encourage and reward collaborative behaviour
- Poorly framed contracts
