The Future of HR: Giving HRBPs the Future-of-Work Makeover They Deserve [Rebroadcast]

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: At Work with The Ready
Hosts: Rodney Evans & Sam Spurlin
Episode: The Future of HR: Giving HRBPs the Future-of-Work Makeover They Deserve
Original Air Date: December 9, 2024

This episode dives deep into the evolving role of the HR Business Partner (HRBP), critiquing its current state, exploring its origins, and charting a new path forward as "HR Business Coach" within a more adaptive, mission-driven operating model. Drawing on their own and clients’ experience, Rodney and Sam discuss why the familiar model is unsustainable, the shifts needed to unlock HR’s potential, and emerging skills and mindsets for the future of HR. The discussion is practical, candid, and often witty, with memorable asides and plenty of lived insider perspective.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Sad State of the Traditional HR Business Partner Role

[05:43]

• HRBP as the "One-Stop-Shop" for HR Pain:
  Sam observes that HRBPs are "some of the most uniformly unhappy in their role people I had ever met," not because of the content, but overwhelming and often conflicting expectations. The role becomes a catchall for the "shitty parts of HR."
• No Real Authority, All the Blame:
  Rodney, having held the role, shares: “What that partner role often looks like is no actual like authority, but your ass is fully on the line for it going right.” ([06:39])
• Breadth Without Focus or Support:
  HRBPs are forced to become generalists in everything (compliance, comp, training, tax, tech, strategy) while constantly firefighting, rarely allowed to be truly strategic.

2. The Origins & Missteps of the HRBP Model

[08:22]

• Ulrich Model History:
  The HR business partner concept was inspired by IT provisioning—each business unit has an insider ‘account manager’ for HR, intended as a strategic relationship.
• Strategic in Theory But Sidelined in Practice:
  The ‘strategic partner’ dimension perpetually comes in second—or not at all—due to relentless operational demands and lack of real decision rights.

3. Reframing the Role: HR Business Partner → HR Business Coach

[11:01]

• From Patchwork to Strategic OS Evolution:
  The real future contribution of HR isn’t just serving urgent needs; it’s helping to evolve the very way the organization works (“the OS”), linking culture and strategy.
  • “You can't separate the cultural aspect of the business from, from the business itself.” ([09:41])
• Strategic Stewardship: Shepherding ‘Missions’
  In the new Level 3 (Hollywood Model), the HR Business Coach helps the business translate strategy into prioritized missions, then convenes, funds, staffs, and supports these cross-functional teams to deliver. ([12:15])

4. Critical Skills for the Future HR Business Coach

[14:15-19:51]

• Facilitation and Workflow Design:
  Facilitation is vital for convening diverse teams; literacy in workflow (how work moves, what the steps and dependencies are) is equally essential.
• Scalability and Repeatability:
  HR Business Coaches need to help teams adopt tools (like Kanban boards) and practices that are flexible and can be reapplied elsewhere.
  • “It's not reinventing the wheel every time you pull together a mission based team. There's actually a playbook there and there's like a muscle memory...” ([16:47])
• Support for Distributed Learning:
  As teams experience these new ways, “we can immediately apply that everywhere else. It's like it's not that hard to spin up a Kanban board. Once you know how to do it...”

5. Mindset Shift: From Service to Product

[23:03]

• Service Mindset:
  "Find a way to say yes"—always pleasing your (internal) clients but getting overwhelmed and stuck in low value work.
• Product Mindset:
  “We are in the business... of creating something that can handle those or answer those requests multiple times with only one output of effort on my side...” ([23:07], Sam).
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for HR:
  Build processes and policies that meet broad needs instead of appeasing every individual request (which leads to muddled, unusable results).
  • “Imagine if every single Slack user who submitted a feature request got it. Like Slack would be an unusable piece of technology.” ([24:15], Rodney)

6. Decision Rights: Reporting Lines & Autonomy

[31:25-34:17]

• Debate about where HR Business Coaches should report: to the business (tighter strategy linkage but risk of silos and lack of community), or to HR (better peer support, risks being out of the loop).
• Rodney and Sam both acknowledge neither is perfect. Rodney: “Both of them anchor to agendas that are not the mission.”
• Sam’s ‘third way’ idea: missions "exist outside of bureaucracy," with their own reporting lines directly to senior strategy bodies.

7. Recapping the Hollywood Model

[29:18]

• Temporary, cross-functional teams form to deliver on important missions, led/stewarded by an HR Business Coach role. Persistent ‘platform teams’ continue to run standard HR functions.
• Mission teams bring in the eventual maintainers of solutions early, to avoid 'throw it over the fence' implementation problems.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Rodney: “What that partner role often looks like is no actual like authority, but your ass is fully on the line for it going right.” ([06:39])

Sam: “Every HR BP I've ever talked to wants to be more strategic and they talk about wanting to be in those conversations earlier so that they can actually help steer things.” ([09:18])

Rodney: “You can't separate the cultural aspect of the business from, from the business itself.” ([09:41])

Sam: “We are in the business... of creating something that can handle those or answer those requests multiple times with only one output of effort on my side...” ([23:07])

Rodney: “Imagine if every single Slack user who submitted a feature request got it. Like Slack would be an unusable piece of technology.” ([24:15])

Rodney: “Find a way to say yes.” (on the service mindset in HR) ([24:15])

Sam: “If you are on a mission, you exist outside of the bureaucracy as we know it and you don't exist to anyone except the senior leadership team...” ([34:43])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00-01:18: Hosts frame why this episode is still urgent for HR today
• 05:43-09:18: The painful reality and history of the HRBP role
• 11:01-14:15: What needs to change—rethinking HR as organizational OS and ‘business coaching’
• 14:15-17:44: Skills for HR Business Coaches—facilitation & workflow
• 19:51-21:39: How new practices learned in ‘missions’ can scale across the org
• 23:03-26:31: The critical mindset shift: Service → Product (with the MVP example)
• 29:18-30:36: Explaining the “Hollywood Model” (mission-based, cross-functional teams)
• 31:25-35:49: Structural debates: Who do HR business coaches report to, and why it matters
• 36:46–37:27: Closing thanks and call for listener engagement

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Tone & Style

Highly conversational, candid, and sometimes irreverent. The hosts blend real-world frustrations (“all the shitty parts of HR”) with the optimism of future possibilities (“mission based teaming”), using warmth, banter, and humor (“Did I say a jargon? I’ve never once said a jargon in my entire life.”) to keep depth accessible. They trade stories, riff on metaphors (Hollywood, products, American Gladiator), and challenge each other's viewpoints.

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Final Takeaways

• The traditional HRBP role is overwhelmed, under-empowered, and fundamentally broken in many organizations.
• Evolving to an “HR Business Coach” within a mission-based teaming model (a la the Hollywood Model) is the future—focusing on strategic stewardship, facilitation, and workflow design.
• Success requires a shift away from “service” toward “product” thinking, prioritizing scalable solutions over endless bespoke work.
• Structure matters, but the right reporting relationships are less important than empowering these new HR roles to actually deliver on strategic missions.
• Most importantly: Transformation sticks when new ways of working are learned and scaled by doing—together in real, mission-driven teams.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, y'. All. This week we are rebroadcasting our episode about HR business partners and their role in the future of HR from last year's miniseries. But before we jump into that, we wanted to take a second to talk about why this episode is particularly pertinent and why we've chosen this of all of them to rerun right now.

[B]

We've been working with several companies this year on reimagining their HR departments and the role of the HR business partner keeps popping up. The struggles, the burnout, the potential, it's all still very real.

[A]

And the ideas that we shared in that app about evolving the business partner role into something more like a business coach and embracing mission based teaming, we have seen firsthand how transformational those moves really are in practice.

[B]

So if you listen to this episode when it first aired, take this opportunity to share it with someone you know in HR who needs to hear it.

[A]

Or if this is your first time, listen with fresh ears and think about your own HR team. What could be unlocked if your BPs were evolved into something more like business coaches, then, like, share the episode with somebody in your team and have a conversation about it. We heard a lot during the Future of HR miniseries about how HR teams were listening to it together and having discussions about what to apply and, you know, nothing could bring us more joy or be a better gift to us for the holidays. So do.

[B]

We'll see you back here in two weeks for a fresh new episode. But until then, let's roll that tape.

[A]

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to our miniseries, all about the Ready's future of hr. This is episode, episode five. I don't know. Anyway, it's me, Rodney Evans and my co host, Sam Sperlin.

[B]

Hello, Rodney. I'm here. I can count to five. I think this is five.

[A]

Is this five?

[B]

Unless we change it up, who knows? It doesn't matter.

[A]

Yeah, we don't need sequence. We'll make funnies. Oh, my God. It's been a long day. Okay. Yeah. So we are today, on episode five or something like that, going to talk about the role of HR business partner, A role that I have held, a role that I have mixed feelings about and what it means to be an HR business partner. Or as we are reframing the role, an HR business coach in Level 3, aka the Hollywood Model, where we really start doing mission based teaming. So that's what today is going to be about. I've been having a lot of wild conversations about this lately that I'm pretty excited to bring into this one. But first, what are we going to do? Sam?

[B]

The first thing we're going to do is a check in round. Because that's how we do it. No, not how we do it, just how we do. Rodney. Here's the check in question for you today. I want you to project yourself into your past. You are a small child and you have just turned on the television and what are you hoping you're going to watch? What is that Nostalgia Bomb TV show for you as a small child?

[A]

Probably Mr. Rogers.

[B]

That's so wholesome. Specifically so wholesome. I love it.

[A]

No, wait, wait. But I'm pretty sure. But now I'm. Now I'm second guessing myself. There is a specific episode that I think was on Mr. Rogers where they go to the Crayola factory and see how crayons get made. Was that on Mr. Rogers?

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

It was so good. And like I just had a free while.

[B]

I don't know if it was Mr. Rogers or not, but I have definitely. I mean, how it's made, I'm all about that. But the crayon factory, like, that's exciting stuff. So many colors. Liquid wax becoming solid. It's very stimulating.

[A]

Yes. It's a real deep cut in my child. And probably once a year I'll think to myself, was that Sesame street? Or was that Mr. Rogers or was that the Electric Company? I need to go find that episode and I never do. So now we're just gonna talk about it on this podcast instead.

[B]

That sounds amazing.

[A]

It's really good.

[B]

Do you say crayon or do you say crayon?

[A]

Oh, now. Well, now I don't know what I say. Now that you've asked the question, I'm.

[B]

Like, oh, we can play it. We could do some editing.

[A]

Crayon, Crayon, Crayon.

[B]

Yeah, me too. Okay. Crayon. Crayon.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I was wondering if that was like a Midwest thing, which would explain it for me, but. Because I definitely don't say crayon.

[A]

No, I mean, you're not a psychopath.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

What's your childhood deep cut?

[B]

So I jotted down a couple of answers. Wishbone, maybe. Little dog doing adventures. Awesome. Lamb chop, sing along. You know, it was all about PBS lifestyle. We didn't have cable as a kid. But the main one that immediately jumped to mind, American Gladiator. You know what American Gladiator is?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I loved that shit.

[A]

Best with that show.

[B]

My memory is that I would come home from church and watch it, which Sunday late morning is a weird Time slot for a show like that. Maybe not. I don't know. It was basically like a real life video game. So to young Sam, he was all about that. It like pervaded my dreams to the point where I was convinced we had like the equipment for American Gladiator out in like this shed in our way back property. Because I've had so many dreams about being on those towers and hitting my competitors with the giant stick and. Yeah, exactly. American Gladiator.

[A]

That's so good, man. That really brings me back. Okay, here's where we need to begin. Let's talk about the HR business partner role. Sam, you know, HR business partners listeners. He's shaking his head at me. I can see him and you can't. He's like, don't do it. And I'm going to.

[B]

I need, I need, I need to interview you on this because you've actually held the role. I've only interacted with HR BPs. So my high level on every HR BP that I have met and that's probably hyperbolic, I'm sure it's not true for everyone, but they were almost across the board some of the most uniformly unhappy in their role people I had ever met. Not because of the content of the role, but the expectations that were being placed upon them. They all had this great desire to be doing certain pieces of work that they never had the time to do or the space to actually do. And they basically seemed like a one stop shop for all of the shitty parts of hr. That's just my experience so far working with, with HR bps.

[A]

Yeah, that's pretty much how it felt to be in the job was like that. And, and also it was like, you know, you're the partner to everybody so it's like you have your internal clients as an HR business partner, but then you're also the partner to all the centers of excellence and shared services and often external vendors. And what that partner role often looks like is no actual like authority, but your ass is fully on the line for it going right. So it's like the comp people don't report to me, but if somebody's bonus is wrong, they're not going to call the comp person. They're going to call me and yell at me and like I don't actually get to like choose the training vendor but if the client hates the training they're going to call me like that is the nature of that role. Is this like brokering middle person without usually budget or clarified decision rights and then also the Number of things I had to learn about like international tax law and then also about like changing EEOC regulations and then also about like facilitation and then also about the future of work and then also about strategy. But also you have to really know the business. So like if your client is DevOps, you better understand how technology, it's just, it is everything in that role and I feel like it feels really hard to do that role. Well in my experience, I can only.

[B]

Imagine, I mean the part of me that likes to be a bit of a generalist and is curious about lots of things is like, oh yeah, that sounds cool, you get to learn lots of things. The part about getting yelled at by everybody in every direction sounds less, less fun. But I can't imagine that's like the role was designed from scratch necessarily to be that. So like has it evolved in that way over time or has the HR BP role always been this bit of a catch all or just a really difficult place to be?

[A]

Interesting that you ask. Dave Ulrich was the sort of pioneer of this idea around the HR business partner. And my understanding is that the inspiration for the Ulrich model came initially from technology provisioning. And it was this idea that having an internal contact to get you what you needed from the technology organization was very useful and that HR should do the same thing and there should be a relationship holder for the business who can get the business what they need. But the complexity of what the business might need for every single facet of humanity in the organization is too much, I would say. And the part of it that was supposed to be strategic, this was always the narrative was like the business partner is a strategic role that's at the table with the business always came second to right. Everything else it's like, yeah, when are.

[B]

You going to my experience. Yeah, I mean every HR BP I've ever talked to wants to be more strategic and they talk about wanting to be in those conversations earlier so that they can actually help steer things. And I just don't get the sense that they're either. And again this could just be the client context. They were like really respected in those conversations or even necessarily invited to them.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's really tricky and we're going to talk about what the big shifts are to move from sort of everything that's not great about the HR business partner role into what we're calling the HR business coach role, which might sound like lipstick on a pig, but we do have a lot of thoughts and practice around how it could shift. Is this idea that you can't separate the cultural aspect of the business from, from the business itself. So what happened a lot with HR business partners in my experience and from what I've seen in the world is like, okay, we're in a strategy meeting as a leadership team and my internal client is the cfo. His leadership team is talking about what the finance organization needs to deliver this year. And the nod to me as the HR business partner is like, and that means we'll need to hire this many finance people or that means we'll need to like lay this many people off to hit our goal target or whatever. And it's not about, okay, what is the OS that we would need to deliver this strategy. HR holds the keys to a bunch of the operating system, including incentives and training and membership and structure and all of this stuff. So like all of these things are integrated. That's not how it goes, but that's how it needs to go in the future.

[B]

Well, it's almost like HR is very connected to almost every part of the os. And if you transfer hr, then maybe you will, you know, transform your whole organization.

[A]

Just maybe, just maybe, just maybe. So that's one of the big shifts is like getting more into the mindset of how these HR roles are evolving the OS so that the strategy comes through. And in this case we want strategy to translate into the missions required to deliver the strategy so that the HR business coach is helping to shepherd those missions to conclusion. Rather than strategy being something that lives, let's just say in a PowerPoint deck on someone's desktop that people look at once a year. And that's one significant shift is sort of how the role envisions itself as a strategic partner. Even understanding that right now there are not that many instances where the role has the time to be that strategic partner.

[B]

Sure. Well, and in most of these cases we're not talking about an organization that is what we would call level three anyway. So what is it about that level three mission based team, part of the maturity model that requires this evolution of the HR BP in the first place?

[A]

Yes, great question, Sam. Here's what it looks like. I'm an HR business coach. I am sitting in my businesses strategy leadership conversations. I am helping them to identify a priority that needs to be run after that needs involves or includes the HR or people function in some important way. And my role as this new business coach is to help prioritize that mission, fund that mission, staff that mission and run that mission. And when I say fund, I mean like make sure that the resource is available to go get it. So if, in using my prior example, if what the CFO determines is that there is an area where turnover is incredibly high and it's costing the finance organization a huge amount of money and it's time to really dig into what's going on there, try something new, et cetera, et cetera. And we don't know yet whether it's a recruiting problem, a comp problem, a management problem, a structure problem, a skill problem, whatever. As the business coach, I'm thinking to myself, okay, what is the mission here that I can start to convene and organize around and get the right roles involved to go after. Now it's not just up to the HR business coach to do this alone, but there has to be someone who is sort of the keeper of the team and who is someone kind of.

[B]

Like a steward sort of role.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like a steward role in our lingo. In our lingo that no one else uses. But maybe now people will start to. There has to be someone who is sitting in that cross functional team, who is the holder of the mission. And even as other roles come in and out based on what the work is that's necessary, the business coach is there facilitating the team, introducing the new ways of working, helping to charter and recharter doing the moves that are needed to accomplish the mission in a new way.

[B]

Yeah, that's awesome. I guess. What's the overlap in skills between a typical HR VP and a HR business coach as we're conceptualizing it here? I don't imagine it's like 100% like some of the stuff I heard you just describe in there, maybe particularly around the facilitation, might be kind of some net new skills. But how, how are we thinking about that?

[A]

Yeah, well, I think it depends on the business partner. Here's what I'm learning from talking to a lot of people is it's like it's wild out there. Different everywhere, big variety, big wide spectrum, wide spectrum of current skills held within that role. And a lot of it just depends on the maturity of the org that they work in and what's required of them. So I spoke with someone on Friday. She's probably listening to this right now. I believe that she knows I'm obsessed with her and she is effectively doing this. She is doing the HR business coach role. She is doing it in collaboration with the internal clients that she looks after. She is doing it without any direct support from the HR leadership team that she reports into. And it's working really well. It's working really well.

[B]

She's doing it on hard mode and it's working. It doesn't always have to be hard mode.

[A]

Doesn't have to be hard mode.

[B]

But if you can do it on hard mode, you can do it on regular mode too.

[A]

Exactly. And the pieces that I would say would help her besides, you know, probably some authority in sport are like, what she is not doing at the moment because it's not the gig is like she's not necessarily introducing new ways of working. She's sort of doing the structural part of dynamic teaming, but not a lot of the hot dog that we talked about in episode one.

[B]

So like pulling together the roles and the kind of the nature of the mission and getting the people in the room. But then once you know, people are in the room, things happen or don't.

[A]

It's probably more business as usual to the ways of working. And I don't know that it's being done in a way that is super repeatable. Like I think probably every new mission she's in the middle of it, traffic conducting and like, I think a lot of that is just because of how smart and forward thinking she is and how much the business responds well to it. My point here is ideally for someone like that and for lots of business partners acting as business coaches everywhere, we are more in easy mode. We are able to learn habits that are helpful outside of that mission based team and we are able to have more scalability and repeatability because like we write some stuff down and we have some defaults that we're working with.

[B]

Totally, totally. It's not reinventing the wheel every time you pull together a mission based team. There's actually a playbook there and there's like a muscle memory that an organization build. Like, oh, we just, we're spinning up an mbt. Great. Like we know what that is, we know what the moves are. Yeah, that doesn't take a bunch of extra cognitive cycles to like figure that out. We can save those for like the hard mission stuff that we actually have to do.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. So I think that there is a lot of overlap with how a lot of HRBPs work and almost none with how other HRBPs work. But I think that a couple of the like main skills that we talked about with Meg that are going to show up really early in HR business glitching are facilitation skills and workflow. You know, I mean, I just think you have to be pretty sharp on workflow to start to parse out what the roles are that we need and yeah, how we're going to organize around the work and clarify the work, et cetera.

[B]

When you say workflow, what are the types of things specifically that are that you mean by that word?

[A]

So like I keep talking to Chros, that's all I do now. And every one of them has on their agenda to like rethink performance management this year. And it's like, why? Because it sucks and it's so complicated. It makes people's performance worse and everybody hates it and it's really expensive and waste time, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, like, to do that effectively as a cross functional mission, one must have some understanding of like, how do you map an existing workflow, how do you understand the steps and dependencies, how do you create design principles and then create a workflow that you can see whether it is enacting those principles and not, et cetera, et cetera, just coming together and being like, how can we make it better? Does not a new scalable program make? So I do think that that kind of literacy and facilitation are two like quick hits. But I also think contracting shows up really early. I mean, I think all of the skills that we talked to Meg about are right in there and I think different business partners have more and less of them already.

[B]

Yeah. The thing that I would add on the workflow stuff, I think you just kind of talked about the higher level idea of workflow or like meta workflow in an organization. But within an MBT there is workflow as well and there are workflow workflows that need some structure as well for the MBT to actually do its work. I'm talking like real world stuff, like a Kanban board that we come back to and we use asynchronously, that we are pulling work from a backlog and communicating as we are getting it done. That sort of workflow that really amps me up I think is actually really important for a team working really well together. And a really mature team may actually not need somebody to kind of hold that because we're holding it all together. We've worked together long enough and we know our tools and processes to kind of have that be a diffuse responsibility. But I would imagine early mbts where there are folks on the team who this is their first experience working in a new way, need someone kind of helping to show them the ropes. And some of these other new ways of working as well.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. I can't make a bed. We use Kanban boards.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah. It's a great point. And those are the kinds of things where when we learn how to plan work in this way, when we learn how to limit work in progress and to do sprints differently and to visualize work and to work transparently and to have action meetings and do retros, when we learn all of this stuff, we can learn it in a mission based team because that's where the work is being done and there's no point in trying to learn it out of the context of real work and. But we can immediately apply that everywhere else. It's like it's not that hard to spin up a Kanban board. Once you know how to do it, you can like just go back to your own team and do it. Which is one of the like low effort aspects of this thing. Scaling.

[B]

Well that. Yeah, that's exactly. That's how. That's how transformation works.

[A]

Is it now we're in secret time. Secret corner.

[B]

We're in secret time. Well, let's say when I'm walking through the client's office, which I feel like I do less nowadays in this post Covid world, but I do miss it because one of my favorite things would be walking by a room and you know, I'm nosy. I'll kind of like stick my head and see like what are they talking about, what's on the projector. And I'll recognize nobody in the room. I'll have done no direct work with any of them. But I will hear words like safe to try or even over. And it makes my heart so happy because it's. That is somebody who was working with us in an mbt. The MBT wrapped. They went back to kind of their business as usual job. They took some of the tools, the practices, the nomenclature back to their work and it just spread because guess what? It fucking works. And things that work people like doing and that they do and nobody would be able to point to the ready or any other kind of reason that we are now just doing this. It just kind of permeated and like I am a okay with that.

[A]

Yeah, that's the best. Ugh, I miss those days. Someone invite me to your office. I want to come hang out. I want to be in a client office as.

[B]

As you. As you speak to me from your closet. I know me in my empty home office here right now.

[A]

I like remember conference rooms. Those were wild. Remember?

[B]

Well, do you remember? I mean not longing for conference rooms is a fucked up thing that I just realized that I'm doing right now.

[A]

Right. I Used to not have n things to say about fluorescent lit conference rooms and projectors. Now I'm like, oh man. Remember when I put on. We used to put on hard pants and go talk to people.

[B]

In real life I got real pants on, no socks. But I do have real pants on.

[A]

Which are. Pants are directly related to doing this work. Well, true. Okay. There are a couple of things that are important for us to talk about.

[B]

I mean, I thought we've been talking about important stuff, but no, everything else.

[A]

Was just leading to the good shit. Here's a big shift when we get into mission based teaming. Now we're making movies right now we are sprinting against the most important, most value creating most cross functional priorities of the business. And there is a big shift that the HR business coach needs to make here. And it is the most painful one that they will have to make. And that is from a service mindset to a product mindset.

[B]

Can I take a crack at what I think that that means?

[A]

I would love that.

[B]

Okay. Traditional HR BP role major metric of your success is how taken care of your client or clients feel. And that is a service mindset. You're here to serve. You know, may not know the answer, but you'll go figure it out. Like we'll, we'll do it here. You'll be fine. I've got you covered. A product mindset means that we are in the business not of kind of handling one off ad hoc requests in a high touch way, but creating something that can handle those or answer those requests multiple times with only one output of effort on my side, which could potentially feel like you are dropping the ball in a kind of of relationship way, but you are actually gaining a whole bunch in terms of scalability and being able to like free up time and attention to work on other stuff. How'd I do, Rodney? Give me a grade. Give it to me straight.

[A]

B plus, A minus, B plus.

[B]

You know what? High school Sam would take that. He'll take that.

[A]

Yeah. I think you absolutely nailed the service mindset part. I think I've told this story on this show before, but it bears repeating. I once facilitated an HR leadership teams off site and they told me proudly that their informal motto was find a way to say yes. And I was like, boo. But like, when do you do important stuff if you're just saying yes all day? You know what I mean? But that's the service mindset, right? That's like keep the clients happy. They're the ones who pay. That's the whole game. And as we shift to product mindset. Yes, to everything you're saying and the way that you would get an A is by adding these two pieces. One is if you think about the fact that anything being created by hr, hybrid work policy, performance management system, new training, whatever the things are that were my new hiring process, whatever the things are that we're making, every single person in the company is an end user of a lot of those things. And therefore as an end user, they all think they know what the process should look like. But imagine if every single Slack user who submitted a feature request got it. Like Slack would be an unusable piece of technology. So there's that part, right? It's understanding that every employee in the building has a view on what the hybrid work policy should be. And if you try to give them all their way, you'll end up with a vague piece of garbage that doesn't help anyone. And the role of having the product mindset is what is the minimum viable thing that works for everyone and how much of it can we leave to be customized decentrally? So we're not trying to design the most complicated process because we know that there are different unique requirements for users. We're not trying to integrate every single user's bonehead idea because that's how we get garbage. And, and we understand what an MVP is and what end user configuration is, and that is what we're aiming for. And it's not easy to do, but that's how we get out of service and into real value creation.

[B]

So to what extent then are we expecting HR business coaches to have an opinion or a point of view? So sometimes in software you talk about having opinionated software in that yes, it's like an MVP maybe. But also we have made some decisions because we think these are the best. Like this is the way to do the thing, even though you may disagree with us. So do you have a thought about kind of where we should fall on that continuum?

[A]

I'm curious your take. My take is they already do have an opinion.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think you almost can't build products without having opinions in the sense of like, we have to make decisions about A or B and there are trade offs for both. I think the better you are at your job, your content area, your expertise, the better. Or just maybe the starker lines in the sand you can draw around different design features for things. So I think what you originally said is probably the safest thing, like let's create the MVP that gets the main functionality figured out and Then let people decentralize at the edge. And I think I would be very curious to see what kind of the next evolution of that would be where you have like true experts have built the product and they have baked in opinions that they stand behind and will they think will actually improve things. I mean, I think we're trying to do more of that at the ready, actually. You know, have an opinion, have a point of view, have a prescription, be open obviously to being wrong. But I think sometimes that's better than coming in completely blank slate and saying we're going to build this, you know, 100% together.

[A]

I agree. And just to go on a small tangent, I think the pairing in mbts, but also in a lot of organizations that we see and also, you know, we're doing this a lot at the ready right now is this idea that the partnership between product and SME is really valuable. And having SMEs make products isn't great. And having products created without any real deep expertise that is required to create opinion is also not great. And the healthy tension between both of those roles, seeing they know best, is what creates greatness in a lot of scenarios. And I think an MBT is no different.

[B]

So we've been talking all about this transition from HRBP to HR Business Coach and I think it would be helpful if we just kind of reset ourselves in this level three of the maturity model, which we've been calling the Hollywood Model, just to make sure. I think, you know, it's useful to hear this more than once. And we talked about it a lot in episode one. If you want to go back and re listen to episode one, I'd be all about that. It's very good. You'll get a refresher on it. But let's do another quick sort of 30 second elevator pitch as to what the Hollywood Model is as we kind of wrap up this episode.

[A]

Okay, so the Hollywood Model is the idea that we come together to make movies or what we call missions. And what that requires is organizing around the work dynamically, teaming to bring roles in and out, having one stable role called the HR Business coach role that holds how the work is getting done, how the mission is being chased. And separate from that we have these persistent platform teams that are the things that don't go away, should be continually iterated and evolved, but also should be held separate from the more seasonal priorities that we organize missions around. That is the TLDR of the Hollywood Model. Studio doesn't go away just because the movie gets made and involved in those mission based teams is very importantly the roles that will be required to maintain the missions. So what we want to get out of when we're doing this cross functional work is I have a really neato idea that employee relations is eventually going to have to execute. Let's not invite them into the creation of this really neat idea. Let's just make it and hope that they want it later. We're not doing that. Our mission based teams include in some capacity a nod toward the maintenance of that mission when it's over because they have to have a home to go live in. That is all.

[B]

All right, thanks for that. The recap is helpful. It's helpful to me too because as I mentioned before, I wasn't super involved in the creation of the maturity model, although it is comprised of lots of concepts that I am extremely familiar with as the ready and I'm curious, is there something to talk about here in terms of the new structure that this level three brings to an organization in terms of kind of where the HR BP reports to or who they report to? I'm actually usually kind of loathe to talk about who's reporting to who because we very quickly kind of revert back to this like typical hierarchical org chart where we're all about like who's dotted line to who and who's single. Like that's not super helpful. But I'm wondering, is there a shift going on here in level three that's worth talking about?

[A]

So I'm glad you brought it up. I have conflicting views on this, to be honest, and I think we'll see how it plays out in our client organizations. There's certainly a lot of trend research that points to HR business partners reporting into the business to keep the tight linking between the business's strategy and how the people function enables it. And then there is the design challenge of that, which is, you know, then you have a bunch of people doing different roles in effectively different silos. How are you sharing information? How are you creating any kind of consistency? How are those people developing without being on a team of people like them holding the same role? Obviously if y' all go that way in moving from the brokerage or like sort of the Dave Ulrich model to level three or the Hollywood model and you decide to have the HR business coach report into the business, then you really should consider doing something to also bring HR business coaches together, whether through a community of practice or a chapter or something like that. And or if you decide that the HR business coaches should still be reporting into HR leadership, then it is like quite important that their role description, time allocation, incentives, et cetera, are quite aligned to them stewarding these missions and not getting sort of jammed up by what's coming down from HR leadership as a new priority. If for example, they are already stewarding two or three missions that have been prioritized and chosen by the business and staffed cross functionally.

[B]

I was just, just about to ask, kind of in the spirit of opinionated software, opinionated Org design, do you lean, you know, slightly one way or the other?

[A]

I go back and forth. Here's how we originally envisioned this is that HR business coaches should sit with and report to the business because that is where the strategy exists. And platform teams should report into HR leadership because those are the persistent ongoing functions and roles required in missions will often be in and out of the platform teams. So there's connective tissue there. Because for example, if there is a mission around changing performance management, you're going to have members of the platform team who are from the training function or the employee relations function, or the HR operations function or HR technology function coming in and out of those mission based teams. So I think you're creating the connective tissue that way. And I think that what HR leadership should be focused on incrementally improving is the persistent functions and letting the business steward the missions.

[B]

That's cool.

[A]

I don't know. What do you mean?

[B]

Here's my hot take missions, roles in missions. And I guess one caveat here is that I've done a lot of work with, with organizations where the roles that are in missions are fully allocated, fully dedicated to that mission for a period of time which when you can get that, it's, that's the dream, right?

[A]

It's great.

[B]

I think that if you are on a mission, you exist outside of the bureaucracy as we know it and you don't exist to anyone except the senior leadership team or whatever, the highest level team that cares about this mission. And that's who you quote, unquote, report into which I'm waving my hands a lot around like performance management, all the like bullshit you have to do when you are in an organization. But I think if we're going to have this entity that we call a mission based team, which we are essentially blessing to like not have to follow the rules as currently written, then why just stop there and why get all wrapped around like who is reporting to who in these various teams and try to just have the team as it's a unit itself, report to the most senior group of Whoever. I don't know. That's some of the real consultant bullshit, but I think I would play with it.

[A]

And look, that's the most third way answer there is because, like, I just talked myself in and out of both of the other reporting structures because I think both of them are deeply imperfect. Both of them anchor to agendas that are not the mission.

[B]

Yeah. And let me just say, you are the queen of the third way. So the fact that I could just third way you is like, I'm gon. I'm going to be riding this high for the rest of the week. I am. That's amazing.

[A]

Nailed it.

[B]

Retire happy. Yeah.

[A]

This is why we need fresh perspectives.

[B]

That's right. This is why you should podcast in really hot rooms with no fans. Because by the time you hit about minute 50 or so, the real good shit starts to come out.

[A]

Yeah, just third way in. Wilding out. I love it.

[B]

Well, I think that's a good spot to wrap for this week. Rodney, what the hell are we doing next week?

[A]

I don't know, Sam. We have been deep into theory and jargon for the last.

[B]

I've never. I have never once said a jargon in my entire life.

[A]

I mean, how would we know? It's just the language. It's just who we are.

[B]

That's incredibly true. That's incredibly true. When you're swimming, like, what is water? You know?

[A]

I know. What is air?

[B]

Water.

[A]

At this point, I'm just breathing. Yeah, I'm breathing and saying words. But. But it might be time for a change of pace next week. So you get the week off. Sam. What?

[B]

See you later.

[A]

And we're gonna have a special guest next week. I am not gonna tell you who it is, but I promise that it's gonna be amazing. And in the meantime, please keep sharing this episode with your CHROs, your CPOs. Everyone is calling it people and culture now, so call it your chief people and culture office officer, your HRBPs, your mom. I don't care. Just share it. You all are doing a great job of this. We are really appreciative of it. Thank you so much. That's it.

[B]

Beautiful. Thanks as always to Taylor Marvin for making us sound awesome. This miniseries is produced by the Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. You can get in touch with us by emailing fohrady.com Send us all your burning HR questions for an ask us anything in a few weeks. The thornier, the better. And as for you HR leaders listening right now. Let's change ourselves.