You know you’re overwhelmed! 2015 year-end reporting just ended, along with presentations that bring all of their accompanying stresses. And now you are getting up on top of your promontory to look at where your prospects are going, what your customers and stakeholders want and need and how to leverage on that huge and variable investment you continue to make in human assets.

Fun?

To be explicit about the Strategic Business Partner (SBP) concept, we believe the role must be developed around providing human capital, technology and organization change perspectives embedded into business leadership teams. In order to be effective, your external resources need to work in partnership with the other organizational leaders.

The SBP model is a way to ensure the human system implications and needed change strategies are part of business leadership decisions.

It involves both what was always intended as strategic work in HR and new work in strategic thinking, planning analytics, technology deployment, big data usage, organization design, culture change, human system alignment and change management. The specific context, characteristics, and demands of any industry or organization sector will ultimately drive this role.

In order to put more context around the Strategic Business Partner role, we need to start by working from the outside-in. We live in a hyper-turbulent world. Today we must adapt to numerous unprecedented challenges that change the very nature of what business we are in and how that business gets conducted.

The reality often includes doing business 24/7, globally across numerous cultural boundaries, with new compliance requirements and technologies being invented daily and shifting technology generations yearly; responding to new forms of competition locally and globally; learning to manage an ever-shifting set of demographics; and keeping pace with the speed of change in everything.

All of these realities have significant human capital implications, raising the value of strategic planning. For example, organizations (and their SBPs) increasingly need to plan for the use of social media in communications, technology in working virtually, cultural competence in conducting business and change management for aligning people and systems during continuous change.

When a company becomes so wedded to its own perspectives that it cannot make appropriate changes as events continue to unfold, a corporate mindset–a specific way of considering developments—has taken hold. When companies are so invested in their plans and assumptions that they are unable to make course corrections as circumstances change, there is a lack of healthy variety in the quality of their thinking, which leads to these dysfunctional perspectives, or mindsets, developing within the company.

The result is that the company develops blinders–a tunnel vision of sorts–that limit its peripheral vision and narrows what the company perceives as important.

Bright companies are able to shift gears and change focus in the face of new information or new opportunities. They aren’t wedded to past solutions. They invite rather than fear diverse ideas. They are imaginative and resourceful. Their thinking evolves over time. They demonstrate their confidence by staying open to new information. And ways to use their partner’s experience and experience to sharpen and shape new thinking.

We enhance your business intelligence capabilities. Bring us into your strategic conversations.

As a thought partner, we’ll give you new insights into trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level. Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation. 512-478-3848.