HR Spotlight: Insights from an HR Business Partner
If your organization is growing, it may be time to hire an HR business partner. And if you’ve only worked with a small HR team so far, you may be wondering: what on earth is an HR business partner?
An HR business partner (HRBP) is different from other internal roles like an HR manager, who oversees your HR department, or an HR generalist, who handles various personnel needs. HR business partners are team members that serve as consultants for leadership on all things people strategy. An HR business partner can play an important role in shaping the employee experience and supporting leaders through crucial decision-making moments.
To learn more, we sat down for a Q&A with one of our very own HRBPs at BambooHR, Monica Cummings. Read on for Monica’s insights into scaling HR for growing companies, building trust with leaders, and aligning business goals with the needs of the people who make it all possible.
Meet Monica Cummings, HR business partner at BambooHR!
Tell us about you! How did you get into HR, and how did your career path lead to your current role?
I met with my counselor at my university (USU, go Aggies!) when I was nearing graduation. Because my major, business administration, was super broad, I had been exposed to a lot of different specialties. My counselor let me know I had room for a minor depending on the final courses I took. Depending on what classes I picked, I could either minor in marketing or HR—and I chose HR!
Getting your foot in the door for an HR career is incredibly challenging. You’re new to the workforce, but you’re supposed to help with people-related challenges and opportunities that you haven’t had any experience with yet. Because of this, many people start in recruiting. I landed a recruiting internship at UPS and learned a lot in that role.
From there, I dabbled in more of an HR generalist role, then back into recruiting, and finally, I had the opportunity at BambooHR to grow into the business partner role just as we were defining the team for the very first time. It was exciting and challenging, and I’m so proud of our small and mighty team, looking back on these last couple of years.
Why is an HR business partner essential to modern HR?
As a company grows, it has to face the question of how to scale HR’s influence. And by this I don’t necessarily mean policies, compliance, and payroll, although you certainly need to scale those pieces as well. I’m talking about best practices when it comes to our people—retaining them, developing them, setting the right expectations for performance, giving clear and actionable feedback. It simply wouldn’t work to have an HR generalist for every single person in a 1,500 employee organization.
So how do we scale our influence? Through leaders! Because what every single employee does have is a people manager.
Being a leader can be a lonely role at times. There’s some black-and-white situations for sure, but there’s also a whole bunch of gray. When leaders make decisions, there can be tradeoffs on all sides, and doing the right thing involves determining what you’re optimizing for and considering downstream impacts far into the future.
An HR business partner comes alongside a leader during those gray-area moments, and by being embedded in the leadership team, we become a valuable sounding board and resource. We understand the business pressures and the goals ahead of the team, and we can marry that with the human element and the company values and mission.
What’s a typical day in the life of an HR business partner?
It’s a balance between ad hoc work, my client group’s people strategy initiatives, HR initiatives, and meetings—we attend leadership meetings with an executive’s leadership team, but we also have one-on-ones with leaders.
When I say client groups, I mean the divisions I’m paired with. I work mostly with the division executive and their direct reports. A division’s people strategy initiatives are defined annually and are considered key to driving the business strategy forward.
For example, if the marketing team is working on a new go-to-market motion, you might pair that with a people strategy initiative around change management.
For HR initiatives, the HR business partner often project-manages what we call the “rhythm of the business” processes for their division. For instance, I help my leadership teams navigate our biannual performance cycle and our biannual promotion cycle. I may also help with HR projects focused on bettering ourselves and our own processes.
Lastly, one-on-ones with leaders are crucial. These can encompass tactical quick hits but also leadership coaching. You help a leader think through their goals and be a partner to them in sharing observations and feedback, helping them unlock the answers they often already have within themselves.
What are the biggest challenges and wins for an HR business partner?
One challenge can be that you often aren’t the decision maker. Many people think HR is the approver on all things people, which simply isn’t the case. We consult and influence and guide, but it can be challenging at times to do that, and then a leader may still make a call you’d advise against. At that point, it’s time to agree to disagree and commit to making their decision the very best it can be going forward.
The biggest wins are when you see the impact of change in a leader. I find it incredibly rewarding when a leader and I develop trust, and they’re willing to loop me in on their challenges with the intention of wanting to be better. They recognize that I can be a safe place to help them practice those skills and improve.
What do you wish more people understood about your job?
I wish folks understood the gray area that’s often the world of people-related decisions. When people jump to conclusions about HR’s intentions and what goes on behind closed doors, it can bum me out. Often, there’s a lot that goes into doing the right thing that just can’t be shared openly—because keeping it confidential is part of doing the right thing.
Folks may think, “Oh, HR is an employee advocate” or “HR is only there for the company and the leaders.” In reality, the most successful HR professionals balance that three-legged stool.
If we focused solely on our people and ignored the business, imagine if then we made business decisions that compromised our ability to be profitable—then people are out of a job! That wouldn’t make any sense, right? At the same time, if we focused solely on the business and ignored the people, we’d be in a true pickle because people are what makes this all possible and fuels our ability to be successful.
What are the HR tools you can’t live without?
Data! I need data to do my job. An HRIS that collects and stores data accurately and in a way that allows you to quickly find insights is crucial. When it comes to influencing an executive leader, you often need to present compelling data to help shine a light on a path forward, and the data analysis is usually complex.
This requires tying together multiple data reports and angles to get a full picture, versus just using one data point that may ignore a lot of important context.
What do you predict is in the future for HR business partners?
It’s true that AI is evolving how we do our jobs in HR. I love using AI and probably use it several times a week at this point, if not daily. It makes me more efficient and therefore makes it possible to better scale my time and influence.
What career advice would you give to someone aspiring to be an HR business partner?
To get into an HR business partner role, breadth is important—exposure to the different aspects of HR and different specialties. But even more critical are those soft skills of curiosity (you have to want to understand the business and pick it up quickly), coaching, influence, and change management.
You can experiment with influence and coaching and exercise curiosity in whatever HR role you start in. You don’t need to wait to be in an HR business partner role to start to partner with the business and leadership in a way that aligns with your company’s vision, mission, and values.