The HR Manager as a Business Partner: Connecting People Decisions with Organizational Performance

Article 13 described how HR functions are organized, including the three-part model of shared services, centres of expertise, and business partners. This article concentrates on the third part and the idea behind it.

"HR business partner" is used in at least three senses. It names a role in a framework Ulrich set out in 1997. It names a job in an organization chart, usually a generalist attached to a business unit. And it expresses an aspiration that HR should be judged, like finance or operations, by its contribution to results. These are different things. A company can create the job without anyone performing the role, and an HR manager with no such title can perform the role well. Much of the disappointment with business partnering, as later sections show, comes from treating the job title as if it delivered the role.

Dave Ulrich, then a professor at the University of Michigan, set out the model in Human Resource Champions (1997) and restated it in the Harvard Business Review the following year. The 1998 article opened with a question others had been asking: "Should we do away with HR?" Ulrich conceded that HR was "often ineffective, incompetent, and costly; in a phrase, it is value sapping," and that if it remained configured as it was in many companies he would answer "Yes—abolish the thing!" His alternative was to judge HR by outcomes: "HR should not be defined by what it does but by what it delivers" (Ulrich, 1998).

The model arranges HR work on two axes, a future or strategic focus against a day-to-day operational one, and a focus on processes against a focus on people. The four cells produce four roles (Ulrich, 1997, as reproduced in Caldwell, 2003, p. 987):

• Strategic partner (strategic, processes): aligning HR with business strategy so that strategy gets executed. Ulrich was explicit about the limits: "I'm not going to argue that HR should make strategy. Strategy is the responsibility of a company's executive team—of which HR is a member." The partner's work is to define the organization's architecture, audit it against what the strategy requires, and lead the discussion of what has to change.
• Administrative expert (operational, processes): running HR and wider work processes efficiently. HR professionals had to "shed their traditional image of rule-making policy police, while still making sure that all the required routine work in companies is done well." The shared-service organizations and centres of expertise of later HR structures first appear here, as examples of administrative redesign.
• Employee champion (operational, people): building commitment and capability by representing employees' concerns to senior management "and at the same time working to increase employee contribution." Ulrich added that "such advocacy cannot be invisible."
• Change agent (strategic, people): building the organization's capacity for change. "As change agents, HR professionals do not themselves execute change—but they make sure that it is carried out."

Three features of the original are easy to miss. First, the roles describe what HR as a whole must deliver, not four kinds of employee; Ulrich argued that HR professionals must be "both strategic and operational" (1997, p. 25, quoted in Caldwell, 2003). Second, administrative work was not presented as low-status. Ulrich's illustration was a CEO who held HR in low regard after it sent a job candidate an offer with the decimal point in the wrong place, and who gave HR "a seat at the strategy table" only after it delivered "flawless administrative service." Efficiency, in his words, "will build HR's credibility, which, in turn, will open the door" to partnership. Third, he placed responsibility for transforming HR with "the CEO and to every line manager," not with HR alone (Ulrich, 1998).

Ulrich revised the framework several times, and the revisions answer some of the criticisms in Section 6. In The HR Value Proposition (2005), he and Wayne Brockbank replaced the four roles with five: employee advocate, human capital developer, functional expert, strategic partner, and HR leader (de Bruyn and Roodt, 2009).

The mapping is this article's summary of the two versions.

Later work moved attention from roles to structure and competencies. Ulrich, Jon Younger, and Brockbank (2008) argued that "HR organization should be structurally aligned with the organization structure of the business" and described five organizational roles: service centres, corporate HR, centres of expertise, embedded HR, and operational HR. Embedded HR professionals, they noted, "go by many titles: relationship managers, HR business partners, or HR generalists." The seventh round of the HR Competency Study (2016), sponsored by Michigan's Ross School and The RBL Group, collected "over 32,000 worldwide surveys" on more than 4,000 HR professionals and named nine competencies, beginning with strategic positioner, credible activist, and paradox navigator (Ulrich, 2017). The study is large, but it is run partly by a consulting firm of which Ulrich is a partner, and its measures of both competence and performance are survey ratings.

By 2015 Ulrich was describing HR's outcomes as organizational capabilities, such as leadership, agility, and collaboration, which "represent what an organisation is known for and good at doing and vary depending on an organisation's strategy" (Ulrich, 2015). The direction of travel is consistent: from what HR people do, to what HR helps the organization become able to do.

In practice the model was absorbed less as four roles than as three boxes: shared services for transactions, centres of expertise for specialist design, and business partners for the line. Ulrich has disclaimed authorship of that structure: "Some have called it the 'Ulrich model', although I did not create it, but observed, researched and wrote about it" (Ulrich, 2015). He has also objected to its universal application: "Some have misinterpreted our work as advocating that HR should be organised through shared services in all business settings." His position is that "the HR department should mimic the structure of its business operations," so a single-business functional company, which he estimates still describes probably 20 percent of larger businesses, has no need of centres of expertise.

Adoption was in any case partial. A 2007 CIPD survey found that only 18 percent of respondents had implemented all three parts, while 47 percent had implemented one or two, business partners being the most common at 29 percent (CIPD 2007, reported in Armstrong, 2014). Respondents described business partners at risk of being "hung, drawn and quartered by all sides" and boundary disputes over where transactional work ended. Reviewing implementations, Reilly and colleagues (2007, quoted in Pritchard, 2010) found an emphasis on separating "thinking from doing," which oversimplified Ulrich's position.

The mechanism matters more than the history. When roles become boxes, the box labelled "partner" acquires the strategic role, administration is assigned to the box that is furthest from the line, and the employee-champion role belongs to no box at all. Each failure in the shared service centre then travels back to the person the line manager knows, who is the business partner.

The longest-running evidence comes from the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations, which asked senior HR leaders in large US companies every three years from 1995 how their functions spent their time.

Mean percentage of HR function time, as estimated by the senior HR leader responding in each US company. Source: Boudreau and Lawler (2012), Table 1. In 2001, for example, there were 150 usable responses (a 15.5 percent response rate) from companies averaging about 21,000 employees (Lawler and Mohrman, 2003).

After the third round, Edward Lawler and Susan Mohrman called the stability "surprising": "The expected increase in strategic business partnering simply is not reflected in these data." By 2010 the strategic share had risen by about five points, still a modest change given how much had been written about it, and John Boudreau and Lawler (2012) summarized the series this way: "for all the rhetoric, it appears that HR consistently spends about 25 percent of its time on strategic business partnership activities," about half on providing and developing HR services, and about a quarter on recordkeeping and auditing. They added a striking detail. In each round, HR leaders were also asked how their function had spent its time five to seven years earlier, and they recalled only 9 to 14 percent on strategic partnership, well below what their predecessors had reported at the time. The profession believed it had moved a long way; the contemporaneous data showed a much smaller shift.

Practitioner evidence points the same way. In a 2014 survey of business and HR users in 40 organizations with more than 10,000 employees each, more than 95 percent had undertaken some HR transformation, more than half of those had invested in what they called the Ulrich model, and 77 percent agreed that the model had had a positive impact on their HR services. Yet many said "their HR business partner roles are still 'too transactional' in nature and that they struggle to shed the administrative elements of their roles" (Boroughs, 2015). The survey was conducted by a consultancy that sells HR transformation work, which is reason to read its positive findings cautiously, and less reason to doubt its negative ones.

Katrina Pritchard's (2010) year-long ethnography of one UK HR department shows how this happens from the inside. Newly appointed strategic partners described their role as a "release" from generalist work, which other HR teams now had to absorb; one colleague observed, "You take away the transactional element and, all of a sudden, they are supposed to be strategic." The partners then drifted back into transactional work, justifying it as the route to trust: "if you don't know the little things, they'll never trust you with the bigger things."

Two cautions apply before reading this as simple failure. The time data are self-reports by one senior HR person per firm, mostly in large US companies. And although time spent on strategic partnering correlated with HR leaders' ratings of their own function's effectiveness, Boudreau and Lawler noted that "the causation may go both ways": a function already trusted is invited into strategy.

The gap also has more than one plausible explanation, and each implies a different remedy. If partners lack business knowledge, the answer is development. If weak service centres push work back to them, the answer lies in the operating model. If line managers do not want or cannot use strategic input, the problem lies in demand, and Boudreau and Lawler themselves allowed that "some organizations may be better served" by an HR function that gets the basics right. And if administrative reliability is the price of credibility, as Ulrich's decimal-point story and Pritchard's partners both suggest, then some of the "gap" is not a failure at all.

Academic criticism has focused less on the time data than on what the model leaves out. Raymond Caldwell (2003) combined a survey of 98 personnel and HR managers in major UK companies with interviews. Asked to rate their roles, 38 of the 98 said they had no main role, which he read as a sign of role conflict. He concluded that Ulrich's model "ends in prescriptive overreach by submerging issues of role conflict within a new rhetoric of professional identity." The same professional who partners with management on a restructuring is supposed to represent the employees it affects, and the model does not say what happens when those obligations collide.

Helen Francis and Anne Keegan (2006), studying how HR practitioners talked about their work, found that business partnering dominated, and raised questions about its effect on "HRM's relationship with employees, employee well-being and the career paths of HR professionals." They called for "a more balanced HR agenda addressing human and economic concerns." The structural point follows: in the three-box structure, the employee champion role has no obvious home. Ulrich and Brockbank's 2005 revision, which made employee advocacy a named role, can be read as a partial response.

A different critique comes from the business side. Ram Charan (2014) opened his Harvard Business Review article with "It's time to say good-bye to the Department of Human Resources," and proposed dividing HR into an administrative unit reporting to the chief financial officer and a leadership and organization unit reporting to the chief executive. The proposal would formalize the separation of "thinking from doing" that the implementation research found troublesome, and it presumes that people-related administration and people strategy can be cleanly separated. Ulrich (2015) dismissed this line of argument as a "straw man of the business partner logic." Charan's diagnosis of executive disappointment still deserves attention, whatever one thinks of his remedy.

If the title does not deliver the role, what does? The research points to two capabilities and one habit.

Business acumen here means understanding how the unit creates value and where people constrain it, not reading a balance sheet for its own sake. Ulrich's (1998) strategic partner starts by mapping the organization's architecture, its culture, competences, rewards, governance, work processes, and leadership, and auditing each against the strategy. John Boudreau and Peter Ramstad (2005) sharpened the question with the idea of "pivotal talent pools where the quality and/or availability of human capital makes the biggest difference to strategic success." The test is not which jobs are most senior or best paid but where a given improvement in performance or availability would most change results. In a food plant moving to automated packaging, for example, a shortage of maintenance technicians who can keep the new lines running may matter more to output than a shortage of packers, although packers are far more numerous. The plant example is illustrative.

Data literacy includes knowing what data cannot show. A common business-partner proposal runs: our best units use practice X, so every unit should adopt it. Patrick Wright and colleagues (2005) measured HR practices in 45 business units of one food-service company and found that they correlated as strongly with past performance as with future performance; controlling for past or concurrent performance "virtually eliminates the correlation of HR with future performance." Units that were already doing well may have been able to afford the practices, so copying them elsewhere may not reproduce the results. Boudreau and Ramstad (2006) warned that as HR data become more abundant, analytical capability becomes more essential: without it, "HR and business leaders can fall victim to improper conclusions, or be misled by superficial patterns." Finance colleagues are trained to spot this kind of reasoning, and an HR partner who offers it loses credibility quickly.

A documented example. Thomas Rasmussen and Ulrich (2015) describe two analytics projects at Maersk Drilling that began from business questions rather than HR ones. One asked what explained differences in performance between the company's rigs, and examined leadership quality and crew competence alongside environmental and operational performance. The other tackled difficulty in filling specialist vacancies; specialists who had come through the company's own graduate programme turned out to perform better than their peers, which supported a decision to build that talent internally rather than recruit it (as summarized in Charlwood, Stuart and Trusson, 2017). The authors argue that analytics should be "outside-in," not run by a centre of expertise "distant from the business," which is where a business partner naturally sits. The case deserves the caution its reviewers apply to the genre: published cases are "samples of opportunity," often written by people with an interest in the approach, and "can appear as 'just so' stories." Ulrich is one of the case's authors.

The habit is to start from the business decision, not the HR programme. In practice that means asking which decision the analysis will change, comparing options with their costs and risks, piloting where possible so that comparison groups exist, and saying plainly how confident the evidence allows anyone to be, which is the standard finance colleagues are already held to.

HR's reputation as an obstacle is old, and Ulrich himself recorded it: "In most companies today, HR is sanctioned mainly to play policy police and regulatory watchdog" (1998). Keith Hammonds's Fast Company article "Why We Hate HR" (2005, p. 42) put it most sharply, describing HR "at worst" as "a dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change" (quoted in Paukert, Guay and Kim, 2021). Caldwell (2003) found that "the negative counter-images of the past still remain."

The evidence on how widely this view is held is thinner than the rhetoric. Paukert, Guay and Kim (2021) surveyed 106 business students and 135 recent graduates at a US university and found perceptions of HR that were "changing and quite positive," shaped mainly by personal experience. The sample is small, young, and drawn from one university, so it settles nothing, but it is a reminder that the best-known hostile accounts come from commentators and may not match what younger employees experience.

Part of the "no" is legitimate. In the Lawler and Mohrman data, auditing and controlling for compliance with law and union agreements took around 11 to 12 percent of HR time, and someone has to do it. Article 10's account of Wells Fargo showed what happens when HR sits so close to a business line that it cannot challenge it. A partner who never says no has stopped partnering and become an accomplice.

The perception problem usually arises elsewhere: when legal requirements, company policies, and personal preferences are all presented with the same authority; when the control role becomes visible only at the moment it blocks something; and when refusals come without an alternative. A business partner who can say "the law requires this, the policy could be changed if you make the case, and this part is only my advice" gives the manager something to work with. One who answers every request with "policy doesn't allow it" confirms the stereotype.

Shedding administration assumes it can be separated from relations with employees and handed to a service centre. Bangladeshi labour law makes that harder, and recent amendments have added to the work. The legal facts below are real and dated; the company that follows is fictional.

Under the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006, every establishment ordinarily employing at least 50 workers must constitute a participation committee of employer and worker representatives, unless a trade union exists (section 205). Its functions include promoting mutual trust, ensuring the application of labour laws, and helping to "fulfill production target, increase productivity." Companies above a capital or asset threshold must also pay 5 percent of the previous year's net profit into workers' participation and welfare funds (sections 232 and 234). In April 2026 Parliament passed the Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, under which trade unions "can now be formed with the consent of a minimum of 20 workers," institutions must form complaint committees, and establishments with 100 or more workers must form a provident fund or join the national pension scheme (The Business Standard, 9 April 2026). Work that HR elsewhere might classify as "transactional" is here a statutory obligation, often with an elected employee counterpart. Reports of the 2026 amendments consulted for this article do not mention changes to sections 205, 232 or 234; check the gazetted text before relying on any provision.

What the exercise is designed to show. Each option sacrifices something. The more useful question is which role each response leaves unperformed, and who will notice. Option C does not avoid the trade-off; it uses an administrative failure as evidence in a strategic discussion, which is what Ulrich's model, read as a whole, asks of the partner.

For each situation, choose the role from Ulrich's 1997 model that should lead the HR response, then read the analysis. The situations are constructed for teaching.

Ulrich's original argument was more demanding than its popular version. It asked HR to deliver strategy execution, efficient administration, employee commitment, and capacity for change at the same time, and it made reliable administration the basis of strategic credibility. Organizations then turned the roles into boxes, gave the strategic role to a job title, and found, over fifteen years of survey data, that the share of time spent on strategic work rose only slowly.

The unresolved issue is the one Caldwell identified and the structure did not solve: who in HR represents employees when the business partner is part of the management team? The revisions after 2005 named the employee advocate role but did not say where it should sit or how its conflicts with partnership should be handled. In Bangladesh, where statutory committees give workers an institutional voice, that question arises every time a payroll error reaches the participation committee. An HR manager connects people decisions with organizational performance by making those conflicts visible to the people who decide, not by escaping administration.

Select one HR business partner role, or an equivalent generalist role, in an organization you can study closely. You may disguise the organization. Gather evidence from at least two of the following: a job description, a two-week log of how the role-holder spends time, interviews with the role-holder and at least two line managers they support, and relevant HR performance data.

Prepare a report of 2,500 to 3,000 words that:

1. describes the role as designed and as practised, distinguishing the job title from the roles in Ulrich's 1997 and 2005 frameworks;
2. estimates how the role-holder's time divides among Ulrich's roles, compares this with the Lawler and Mohrman and Boudreau and Lawler findings, and explains the main reasons for any gap;
3. assesses whether the organization's HR structure (shared services, centres of expertise, embedded HR) fits the structure of the business, following Ulrich, Younger and Brockbank (2008);
4. analyses one recent people decision the role-holder influenced, stating what evidence was used, what it could and could not show about cause and effect, and how the decision affected performance;
5. evaluates how the role handles conflict between partnering with management and representing employees, including any statutory obligations; and
6. recommends changes, with their costs, likely resistance, and the evidence that would show whether they worked.

Use at least five academic or professional sources, including at least three from this article's reference list. Every factual claim about the organization should be traceable to a document, log, or interview you could produce if asked. State any gaps in your evidence and how they limit your conclusions.

Assessment rubric (100 marks)

1. Boroughs, A. (2015). The future is 'centres of expertise': What impact has 18 years of the Ulrich model had on the HR operating model and what does it tell us about the future? In CIPD, Changing HR operating models: A collection of thought pieces (pp. 8–11). Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/thought-leadership-2/changing-operating-models_tcm18-10976.pdf
2. Boudreau, J. W., & Lawler, E. E., III. (2012). How HR spends its time: It is time for a change (CEO Publication G 12-04 (611)). Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California. https://www.drjohnboudreau.com/wps/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/G12-04611.pdf
3. Boudreau, J. W., & Ramstad, P. M. (2005). Talentship, talent segmentation, and sustainability: A new HR decision science paradigm for a new strategy definition. Human Resource Management, 44(2), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20054
4. Caldwell, R. (2003). The changing roles of personnel managers: Old ambiguities, new uncertainties. Journal of Management Studies, 40(4), 983–1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00367
5. Francis, H., & Keegan, A. (2006). The changing face of HRM: In search of balance. Human Resource Management Journal, 16(3), 231–249. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-8583.2006.00016.x
6. Lawler, E. E., III, & Mohrman, S. A. (2003). HR as a strategic partner: What does it take to make it happen? Human Resource Planning, 26(3), 15–29. Working-paper version consulted: CEO Publication G 03-2 (430), Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California.
7. Pritchard, K. (2010). Becoming an HR strategic partner: Tales of transition. Human Resource Management Journal, 20(2), 175–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-8583.2009.00107.x
8. Ulrich, D. (1998). A new mandate for human resources. Harvard Business Review, 76(1), 124–134. https://hbr.org/1998/01/a-new-mandate-for-human-resources
9. Ulrich, D., Younger, J., & Brockbank, W. (2008). The twenty-first-century HR organization. Human Resource Management, 47(4), 829–850. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20247
10. Wright, P. M., Gardner, T. M., Moynihan, L. M., & Allen, M. R. (2005). The relationship between HR practices and firm performance: Examining causal order. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 409–446. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00487.x

Further sources cited

• Armstrong, M. (2014). Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice (13th ed.). Kogan Page. (Source for the CIPD 2007 survey figures.)
• Boudreau, J. W., & Ramstad, P. M. (2006). Talentship and HR measurement and analysis: From ROI to strategic organizational change. Human Resource Planning, 29(1), 25–33.
• Charlwood, A., Stuart, M., & Trusson, C. (2017). Human capital metrics and analytics: Assessing the evidence of the value and impact of people data (Technical report). Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/2017-pdfs/2017-human-capital-metrics-and-analytics-assessing-evidence-7501.pdf
• Charan, R. (2014). It's time to split HR. Harvard Business Review, 92(7/8), 33–34. https://hbr.org/2014/07/its-time-to-split-hr
• de Bruyn, L., & Roodt, G. (2009). Applying the criteria of Ulrich and Brockbank for the assessment of the role of human resources as a strategic business partner in a mining company. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 7(1), Art. #200. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajhrm.v7i1.200
• Paukert, S. M., Guay, R. P., & Kim, Y. J. (2021). Perceptions of HR: An analysis of millennial and postmillennial insights. Organization Management Journal, 18(1), 36–51. https://doi.org/10.1108/OMJ-01-2020-0861
• Rasmussen, T., & Ulrich, D. (2015). Learning from practice: How HR analytics avoids being a management fad. Organizational Dynamics, 44(3), 236–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2015.05.008
• Ulrich, D. (1997). Human resource champions: The next agenda for adding value and delivering results. Harvard Business School Press.
• Ulrich, D. (2015). Reflecting on the past and looking to the future: The importance of business structure. In CIPD, Changing HR operating models: A collection of thought pieces (pp. 23–26). Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/thought-leadership-2/changing-operating-models_tcm18-10976.pdf
• Ulrich, D. (2017, March 21). The 2017 HR competency study & what it means for you. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-hr-competency-study-what-means-you-dave-ulrich
• Ulrich, D., & Brockbank, W. (2005). The HR value proposition. Harvard Business School Press.

Bangladesh and policy sources

• Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006 (Act No. XLII of 2006, as amended), sections 205, 232 and 234. http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/act-952.html
• "Parliament passes labour bill; layoff compensation, trade union rights among key reforms." The Business Standard, 9 April 2026. https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/parliament-passes-labour-bill-layoff-compensation-trade-union-rights-among-key-reforms

Ulrich (1997) was not available in full text; its axes and roles are cited as reproduced in Caldwell (2003), and its deliverables are paraphrased. CIPD (2007) and Reilly et al. (2007) are cited as reported in Armstrong (2014) and Pritchard (2010) respectively; Hammonds (2005) is quoted as reproduced in Paukert, Guay and Kim (2021). The Rupsha Valley Foods case, the role-diagnostic situations, the decision options and commentary, and the comparison table of the 1997 and 2005 roles are original teaching material for this series.

Next in The Human Capital MBA series: Article 15 closes Module 03, Human Resource Management Foundations.