Transcript
A (0:00)
Leadership looks a little different if you head up a support role. Human resources, it, marketing or finance. Often we hear the term business partner used to describe what these leaders should be aiming for. In this episode, how to shift from simply a business partner to a value creator. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 768, produced by Innovate. Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. A regular conversation that I have with leaders, especially leaders who are in a bit more of a support role. Perhaps they're an HR executive or an IT executive or a marketing executive. Is being able to make the shift from business partner to value creator. How do I really show up and be a strategic partner for the organization in a way that goes way beyond execution and goes into thinking about the future? Today, a conversation on how to do that well, whether that's you or perhaps someone you're supporting. And I'm so pleased to welcome JP Elliott to the show. JP has decades of experience as a tech talent and HR executive at companies like Dick's Sporting Goods, McAfee and Lenovo. He's seen the challenges HR professionals face in growing their careers and increasing their impact. He is the host of the Future of HR podcast and on a mission to help HR professionals increase their business impact and accelerate their careers. Jp, a pleasure to see you again. Welcome to the show.
B (1:50)
Thanks, Dave. Excited to be here.
A (1:53)
I am so thankful for your work because so much of what you are doing is inviting leaders, especially leaders, as I mentioned in the intro, who are in more of a support role and of course through your lens of hr, of thinking about how to really make that shift from being the term that often is used as a business partner to someone who's really creating value for the organization. And you shared a story to previously with me about a time that you were in front of the CEO of an organization and making a pitch for something and it didn't go the way you planned. And I was wondering if you could share that story with me.
B (2:32)
Yeah, I'm happy to. And I have a feeling there's a lot of HR leaders or even support function leaders, whether you might be in IT or marketing or even finance, who have walked into a CEO's office and been surprised by what they say to you. And the situation was, I was actually early in my career at Taco Bell. I started there which was really part of PepsiCo and spun out from PepsiCo. A lot of people don't know that. So there's a really high bar for HR there. And we were working to put together a leadership development program that we thought were going to was have a big impact. I was pretty young in my career, so I was very excited to sit down with the CEO who, who was really, to be honest, a great CEO, very people focused. And so I came in, we had the slides, we had a great design. It was going to be nine months. There'd been coaching, some peer cohorts, assessments, all the good HR stuff. We were very excited by what was in there. And as we sat down, started going through the deck and talking about all the great things the program was really had in it. Almost the features of the program. I don't even got past maybe the first slide. He just stopped us and said, jp, how does this drive revenue? How will this help us get same source sales growth? Why would I invest in this if it's not going to help the business? And I honestly didn't have a great response because the response I started to give was, well, improve retention. It will help our leaders be better. But they were all soft answers and they weren't aligned to what really matters for C CEOs and business leaders who own the P and L. Right. He was thinking about different questions, different expectations, and had a higher standard for what that leadership development program had to deliver than what frankly the HR team had or I had in my at that phase of my career. So it was definitely a wake up call. And I definitely left saying, wow, I think I've got to go back to the drawing board. And I went back to my boss and you know, we kind of just afterwards said, hey, what happened and how can we do this different? And so that's really just stuck with me throughout my career.
