Corporate Functions Need Strong Business Partnering Skills

As I consult with leaders of corporate or enabling business functions, there continue to be a few recurring themes -- "we want and need a seat and a voice at the table and for our operational peers to see us as strong business partners and not just a pair of hands." The other thing I consistently hear from CIO's, CHRO's and CFO's is that their leaders need to see themselves as "business" leaders who happen to also have deep specialization in IT, HR or Finance.

This is the age-old question of generalist or specialist. The answer depends on what's going on in your organization. For example you might decide to build broad internal expertise around functional domains and outsource or insource the highly specialized areas (leadership programs, instructional design, payroll and benefits administration, contract/legal reviews, annual report creation, etc.).

As a person who has spent most of my career as a specialist, I'm hired specifically for my subject-matter expertise. The clients that I work with count on my ability to quickly understand their unique challenges and apply highly specialized practices and processes to help them achieve their goals. Those interactions helped me realize that I was learning as much as I was teaching. I set a goal to ensure that I learned at least two new facts about their specific area of the business. I scheduled "ride-alongs" or shadow days so that I could get a sense of what the leaders typical day involved and ask questions.

My point is that functional specialists have to be first in line with a desire to broaden their skills. We must see each interaction with our business partners as an opportunity to learn and build business acumen. As you do, you'll find that your seat at the table becomes "Reserved".

I can see clearly now that the money is gone!

As organizations continue to face massive challenges, more budget cuts and layoffs are inevitable. The WSJ reported today that Liz Claiborne CEO William McComb is flying commercial these days to cut costs. The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) reported on a Watson Wyatt study that U.S compensation committees are continuing to adjust CEO pay plans. And a recent survey from Expertus reveals that roughly 48% of learning executives expect to see decreases rather than increases to their budgets in 2009.

As I've talked and interviewed with colleagues and journalists over the past few weeks, I've given them the typical learning executive mantra that now more than ever "training must be aligned to the business objectives". And almost 100% of the time their retort is "well shouldn't it have been that way all along?". I chuckle now even thinking about their logical but naive question. Of course the obvious answer is "YES!" So what have we been doing? Well not unlike Wall Street, Main Street, GE, Ford, Chrysler, the U.S Government and a host of others, we ignored our better judgment in some cases and thought that it would always be springtime. The sky would always be blue. Flowers would always be in bloom and everything that we touch would prosper and grow. But for those who've been living in a cave, Winter has officially arrived.

As we've seen recently, corporations can be somewhat short-sighted in their pursuit of market share, profit and competitive advantage. This doesn't exclude the training function. During the times of plenty, we implemented programs that had some intrinsic quality of goodness and our gut told us that the organization would realize some benefits from it but we couldn't quite articulate or better yet credibly correlate those benefits to desired business outcomes. Well, those days are over. With limited budgets and resources, learning executives and their teams must now take a step back and assess their portfolio of learning assets and make tough decisions on what stays, what goes and what can be repackaged and repurposed. There needs to be a clear and credible "line of sight" between the programs we deliver and the desired business outcomes. While training cannot claim 100% of the credit for positive results, we certainly aren't in any position to give away any credit that rightly belongs to us. For more information on isolating the effects of training programs, Jack and Patti Phillips of the ROI Institute have done some outstanding work.

So as we settle into winter, can we expect a bailout for corporate training fuctions? Um, probably not. While training departments certainly shouldn't hold their breath waiting for a bailout from the C-Suite, I'm hopeful that we will come out of this better focused and positioned to drive positive performance for decades to come.

I sat down and discussed this topic with journalist Scott Wescott a few weeks ago. Check out his recent article for HR Executive Online.