What if your organisation utilised a standardised approach to business partnering that complemented your organisational culture?
Business partnering between business units would operate as high performing cross-functional units. Is this even possible? What would need to happen to make this happen?
A considered service delivery design, consistent stakeholder engagement and targeted development for business partners is integral. A high-performing business partner unit within an organisation often is the foundation for any transformative change. When two or more business units come together to achieve common goals and establish mutually beneficial working relationships, this generates greater values for customers and stakeholders. The old sum of the parts. For employees working collaboratively with other departments, sharing skills and resources can provide the best possible environment for their own development. This article focuses on the benefits of different departments working towards the same organisation goal across finance, HR, IT, Procurement, Operations and Sales. This collaborative and trusted approach to business partnering unleashes immense power.
It is not just that – there’s another side to this. Not only does collaborative business partnering allow teams to break the barrier of cross-functional inertia, but it also fosters leadership skills and sparks personal growth and connection. Just as careful financial management is crucial to running a business, consider partnering a strategic investment, too. One that not only helps promote problem-solving, but also fuels growth. Imagine rows of seeds sprouting into tall plants, creating a lush green field. That’s what happens when business units within the same organisation consciously focus on becoming active business partners – they help each other grow under the advice and guidance of experienced leaders, enhancing their relationship with each other and their customers.
For the team at Impactology, that green field is not just a dream. Our Business Partnering Impact Program helps amplify all that is good about successful business partnering, helping provide everything you need to turn those seeds of opportunity into a reality, offering key insight into how cross-functioning teams within organisations can successfully learn, grow and build better culture and productivity together.
Business partnering is a strategic skill, when guided by the advice of strong leaders, fosters collaboration between different business units, aiming to achieve shared objectives, including financial goals, drive growth, and enhance decision-making. This ‘collaborative strategy’ involves acting as a trusted advisor with your fellow business partners, providing valuable insights and aligning business goals across all organisational functions.
Redefining Business Partnering: Explore The Opportunities
Business partnering is about combining strengths across other disciplines and functional units to create something even stronger. It’s like forming an All-Star team—each member brings unique skills to the table, leading to achievements that would be hard to reach alone. This alliance is designed to tackle shared goals and facilitate growth, including financial and customer growth, in ways that would be challenging to achieve individually.
We recognise the power of successful business partnering and how it can change the course of any organisation. Our research over 4.5 years has revealed a comprehensive framework for businesses to establish successful cross-business business partnering, promoting a service delivery model that helps transform businesses, through the collective in-depth resources and expert guidance.
By understanding the heartbeat of successful business partnering, we can explore its role in driving success for organisations across various industries. Harvard Business Review wrote about developing cross-functioning team abilities and the benefits as far back as 2016, but even now, many businesses do not make this a talent priority.
The Inner-workings of Business Partnering
Business partnering involves a coordinated effort – it’s about working together with other units within organisations to succeed. It’s about bridging the gap between functional units, integrating operations, and facilitating stakeholder engagement to ensure increased value for customers. Here’s how it works:
Strategic Alignment
The first step in business partnering is aligning strategic objectives. When business units share a common vision and goal – project outcomes, finance, or leadership skills – they can coordinate their efforts more effectively. This integration of operations and processes is key. It’s like a group of people rowing a boat together—everyone has to pull in the same direction to make progress. So, when functional units agree on where they want to go, they’re better prepared to leverage the skills of their business partners. This entails the primary objective of having a clear understanding of their contributions and their effects on colleagues involved in product creation or service delivery, ultimately meeting customer needs.
Collaborative Decision-Making
Effective decision-making is vital in any engagement particularly when two different business units are collaborating. It’s not just about making decisions together; it’s about sharing resources, experiences, and efforts toward achieving a unified product or service that would meet the varied needs of customers. This could involve finance, strategic planning, IT, human resources or any other part of the business that requires joint decision-making efforts. Consider it like going on an adventure with someone—two heads are better than one when encountering an obstacle and when you’re on an adventure. Just as a single hour of brainstorming can create numerous innovative solutions, jointly addressing challenges can lead to learning from one another and achieving business objectives that might not have been feasible for one business unit alone. This experience provides an opportunity for deep insights and constructive conversations that foster understanding and teamwork.
Information Exchange
One key aspect of business partnering is open and efficient communication. This enables stakeholders from relevant business units to benefit from each other’s knowledge and resources to make informed decisions, leading to better decision-making and enhancing overall business outcomes, including product enhancement. For example, have you ever seen The ABC TV series The Cook and the Chef with Maggie Beer and Simon Bryant, two chefs exchanging secret recipes for the perfect dish: sharing this expertise enhances everyone’s ability to create successful outcomes.
Input from different business unit leaders and managers in the research and design phase is a more powerful value proposition, that single discipline thinking. By sharing ideas, resources, and a wealth of insights, they can achieve more than they could have independently. Consider examples like the development of cutting-edge software or groundbreaking tech gadgets.
The strength of business partnering lies in its ability to bring various strengths together toward a common goal. This dynamic collaboration, fuelled by open and frequent conversations between stakeholders, helps leverage the combined expertise of different hands and minds working together towards shared success. This effective integration often results in a superior product that provides enhanced value to customers.
Let’s uncover the benefits of adopting a business partnering approach.
Advantages of Adopting A Holistic Approach To Business Partnering
In assessing the advantages of business partnering, there are many benefits for organisations committed to collaboration, engagement, and growth. Let’s explore some key advantages – like product innovation, superior customer relations, and operational efficiency – and understand how they play a crucial role in shaping positive change for businesses:
Enhanced Innovation
When employees from different parts of the business come together and pool their expertise, something magical happens—they create a breeding ground for innovation. This combined effort often results in products that fulfil the needs of consumers, thereby increasing customer engagement, satisfaction and enhancing the overall customer experience. As each business partner brings their unique strengths and insights to the table, several ideas flow more freely, and creativity thrives. This collective brainpower elevates the quality of work and enables organisations to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving marketplace, taking full advantage of their combined skills.
Imagine two puzzle pieces fitting perfectly together: that’s the heart of business partnering when it comes to fostering a culture of innovation, a concept we aim to unravel in this article. By sharing knowledge, harnessing complementary skill sets, and combining resources, companies can embark on transformative journeys, pioneering breakthrough solutions that wouldn’t have been possible alone. Questions may arise, but this collaborative synergy often leads to unexpected revelations and game-changing inventions; a job that propels organisations towards newfound success.
Access to New Markets
Expanding into new markets is a strategic move that fuels business growth, allows stakeholders to extend their reach, and fosters resilience during economic fluctuations. Taking advantage of the opportunities these new markets offer, companies gain access to new customer segments and untapped markets through collaboration between business department heads and their teams. This presents an invaluable opportunity to diversify their client base and cater to a wider audience.
Risk Mitigation
In today’s unpredictable and dynamic business environment, risk mitigation is paramount for ensuring partnership stability and resilience.
Consider a scenario where two business units with distinct areas of expertise join forces—their combined capabilities form an interlaced shield that protects both from adverse impacts to meet important business objectives. The risk of negative events, like foreseeing market fluctuations or technological disruptions, is reduced when the insights and experience from multiple disciplines come together. The shared responsibility lightens individual job responsibilities and allows business partners to navigate complexities with agility—ultimately reinforcing their ability to weather storms and emerge stronger amidst adversities.
Consider how many times in organisations we see budget blowouts, lack of focus and motivation or poor outcomes and delivery from cross-functioning teams who are working in silos. By understanding the benefits of business partnering, business unit leaders can plan and engage with each of them more effectively, mitigating unforeseen issues and giving them an advantage when problems occur further down the track.
Steps Towards Successful Business Partnering
Establishing clear and realistic objectives is the cornerstone of any successful business partnering relationship and applies to specialised business units that should be working as cross-functioning units within a large organisation. This aspect of partnership setup requires the need to involve key members of the team. All core people are part of the decision-making process, from unit managers to team members, ensuring that everyone’s focus aligns with the agreed service delivery objectives. Defining the purpose, goals, and expected outcomes right from the outset is crucial for members of the cross-functioning teams to be able to achieve a transformational impact. This clarity ensures alignment and understanding between all unit leading business partners, line managers, and their teams, minimising potential misinterpretations, providing answers to most questions consistently and ultimately leading to success. By setting these objectives early on, you create a roadmap that aligns with your business model and guides decision-making processes in the workplace. This fosters a collaborative environment where everyone’s efforts are directed towards achieving common goals and adding business value. This effective approach considers data thoroughly, presenting a clear picture of the situation in the working world.
Engaging line managers and business leaders on roles, all aspects play a pivotal role. This should outline roles, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and expected outcomes. This detailed business partner “servicing plan” safeguards against potential misunderstandings and conflicts that may arise in the future. Addressing foreseeable scenarios comprehensively in the agreement establishes a framework for navigating challenges and ensuring accountability among all parties involved. It’s all about understanding your role and its impact on your broader business model.
From laying the groundwork with clearly defined objectives to meticulously selecting the right people from each business unit, using real data and crafting a robust plan, these pivotal steps align with your business model for flourishing and effective cross-functioning teams.
Successful business partnering is built on trust and transparency, which is crucial for open, honest, and integral communication between parties. This open communication sets a solid foundation for fostering trust and mutual respect between business partners, making the role of line managers and leaders more apparent. Without trust, cross-functioning teams struggle to thrive; transparency ensures that both parties, including business leaders, know each other’s intentions and expectations, working effectively towards common goals.
Factors Contributing to Successful Business Partnering Relationships
Imagine two people trying to dance together without knowing the steps – it’s awkward, and they are likely to step on each other’s toes. Similarly, miscommunication and conflicts can easily arise and hinder progress without trust and transparency in a business partnering relationship between business units and their teams. This can be detrimental to the workplace environment and the overall business value, hampering the interpretation of key data within the organisation.
Being great business partners requires adapting and being flexible in response to changing market conditions, business dynamics, and evolving objectives. Flexibility is crucial for accommodating changes and uncertainties that may arise over time.
Flexibility and Adaptability
Being adaptable allows business partners to pivot as the market demands, ensuring that the partnership remains relevant and competitive. It also enables business partners to seize new opportunities as they emerge, providing an edge over those who may be rigid and resistant to change and adding business value in the process. Grasping these changes requires understanding and interpreting world events and data.
Business partnering teams should commit to continuously evaluating the effectiveness of their collaboration, identifying areas for improvement, acknowledging strengths, and addressing weaknesses. This ensures a sustainable and performance-oriented workplace for all involved. This ongoing evaluation process ensures that each business unit remains aligned with its objectives and stays responsive to changing circumstances.
Continuous Evaluation and Improvement
Think of successful high performing business partnering teams as mighty ships sailing across the seas. They navigate the world, driven by effective communication, trust, and shared objectives, ever mindful of the underpinning weather “data” that guides their journey. They continuously monitor their course using navigational tools (evaluation), embrace strong winds (adaptability), and keep their communication open with the crew on board (trust and transparency) to ensure they reach their destination successfully.
Ultimately, by embracing these key factors—trust and transparency, flexibility and adaptability, continuous evaluation and improvement—business partners can lay the groundwork for a robust, enduring, fruitful alliance that benefits all parties involved.
Case Study: Business Partnering in Action
Current Situation
In a mid-sized corporation, the finance, procurement, and HR teams operated in silos, each focusing solely on their respective functions. Lack of communication led to inefficiencies, delays in project execution, and misunderstandings in resource allocation. There was a noticeable disconnect in understanding each other’s priorities and challenges.
Approach and Key Learnings
Recognising the need for collaboration, the leadership team engage Impactology to run the Business Partnering Impact Program, and following the program, the teams initiated regular cross-departmental meetings to foster communication and understanding. Through open dialogue, the teams identified common pain points and shared goals. They realised that by aligning their efforts, they could streamline processes, optimise resource utilisation, and improve overall organisational performance. Key learnings included the importance of active listening, empathy, and transparency in building trust among teams.
Outcome
The collaborative efforts yielded significant results. The Finance team gained insights into Procurement needs, enabling them to budget more accurately and negotiate better contracts. Procurement, in turn, benefited from HR’s expertise in talent management, facilitating smoother recruitment processes and ensuring optimal staffing levels for projects. HR leveraged finance data to implement cost-effective employee development programs. Together, the cross-functional business partnering teams achieved operational efficiencies, cost savings, and enhanced employee satisfaction. Moreover, the trust and respect built among the teams laid a strong foundation for future collaborations, driving sustained success and innovation across the organisation.
If you want to explore how effective business partnering can amplify your business partnering, check out: impactology.com.au
