Stop Being an HR Order-Taker, Become a Trusted Advisor

By Beverly Crowell
Managing Partner, Designed Learning

As a Human Resource Business Partner (HRBP), you have expertise that is critical for the survival and growth of the organization. Unfortunately, many HRBPs find themselves being underutilized, overworked with transactional tasks, and being asked to “fix” things and people.

If you are an HRBP, do you find yourself frustrated when:

• Your leaders come to you at the last minute to implement something?
• You aren’t involved early enough in the process to influence decisions and share your ideas?
• Most of your day is spent putting out fires and not focusing on strategic issues?
• You have so much more expertise to offer the organization, but they don’t appreciate it or even ask for your expertise?
• You are asked to “handle” tough conversations, “problem” people, and fix them?

HRBPs want to have their expertise utilized and be treated as trusted advisors, but internal clients or key stakeholders don’t know how to utilize them or worse, they don’t want to utilize them in this way. The good news is that HRBPs can adjust their own approach and behavior to be better utilized.

Many times, with the best intentions, they have trained their leaders to treat them the way they do. In the spirit of customer satisfaction and “the customer is always right”, HRBPs end up agreeing to do what clients ask, even when it’s not the best thing for them or the organization. In fact, many leaders inside organizations don’t even know they can partner with their HR Business Partners in any other way.

What is this other way? HRBPs play a critical role in shaping the workforce and driving organizational success. With the increasing complexity of today’s business environment, they must possess not only a deep understanding of HR practices but also strong consulting skills to effectively address and resolve organizational challenges. It is learning to influence where they have no direct control.

Here are eight ways to stop being an order-taker for your clients and instead a trusted advisor where you work in collaboration to create solutions that work the first time.

Building Trust and Credibility

For HRBPs, establishing a solid foundation of trust is essential in gaining the confidence of both business leaders and employees. As such, they must be authentic, transparent, and reliable in their interactions. By adopting these principles, HRBPs can foster stronger relationships with their clients, leading to more open and honest communication. This, in turn, enables HRBPs to better understand the underlying issues within the organization and provide more effective solutions. As noted by Peter Block in Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, “Consulting isn’t just about offering expertise – it’s about building authentic relationships and fostering trust.”

Effective Contracting

Creating effective agreements, or contracting, is a crucial step in the partnering process with internal clients, as it sets the expectations and boundaries for the engagement. For HRBPs, mastering the art of contracting can help ensure that their consulting engagements are structured and goal oriented. This not only helps in managing client expectations but also provides a clear roadmap for achieving desired outcomes. By establishing clear agreements, HRBPs can enhance their ability to deliver impactful results.

Diagnosing Organizational Issues

A key aspect of partnering with internal clients is the ability to accurately diagnose organizational issues. For HRBPs, this diagnostic process is invaluable in uncovering the underlying factors contributing to workplace challenges. By being curious and using various methods of discovery, HRBPs can conduct thorough assessments that go beyond surface-level symptoms, enabling them to develop targeted interventions.

Providing Feedback and Recommendations

Providing constructive feedback and actionable recommendations is a critical component of the consulting process. HRBPs must be skilled in delivering feedback in a manner that is both respectful and impactful. This means effectively communicating their findings and proposed solutions by being clear and specific with a focus on positive outcomes. By leveraging these principles, HRBPs can present their recommendations in a way that resonates with clients and motivates them to act.

Managing Resistance

Resistance is a common challenge in consulting engagements, as clients may be hesitant to embrace change. For HRBPs, understanding the sources of resistance and addressing them proactively is crucial in ensuring the success of their initiatives. HRBPs should work to manage this resistance by building rapport, demonstrating empathy, and involving clients in the change process. By adopting these strategies instead of ignoring what’s causing the resistance, HRBPs can navigate it more effectively and create a collaborative environment for implementing solutions.

Implementing Solutions

The ultimate goal of consulting is to implement solutions that drive positive organizational outcomes. For HRBPs, this means following a consistent process or framework to help ensure that their solutions are executed effectively and achieve the desired results. By emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement, regularly assessing the impact of their interventions, HRBPs can enhance the sustainability and effectiveness of their solutions.

Developing Client Competence

To help create self-sufficient and high-performing organizations, HRBPs should work to develop their client competence. Rather than creating dependency, advocate for empowering clients to address their own challenges in the future. Provide clients with the tools, knowledge, and skills needed to sustain improvements over the long term. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and development, HRBPs can help build organizational resilience and capability. They can also help ensure solutions are more fully implemented and sustained.

Stop Being Helpful and Start Being Useful

Perhaps the biggest challenge for any HRBP is to stop seeing support of their clients under the mental model of the “customer is always right.” Certainly, there are times when being helpful is exactly what is needed. More often than not, however, what they need is for HRBPs to show up as more than a “pair of hands.” Instead, use these expert consulting techniques to co-create solutions with the people you serve. Even if clients don’t know it yet, they prefer a partner over someone who simply tells them how to fix things. It’s more than helpful, it’s useful.

---

Published originally in the February 2025 CHRO Excellence: HR Strategy & Implementation and HCM Sales, Marketing & Alliance Excellence magazines.

For more information on how Designed Learning can help you master these eight strategies, check out our Flawless Consulting® program or call 1.248.701.5928 for more information.

By Peter Block

Transformation occurs first in the mind. It is then triggered in an infinite number of ways. What each entails is a shift in narrative. A shift in the story we choose to live into. Each entails a movement away from our historical way of naming our being in the world. Then discovering and choosing new words that name the future we aspire to. It is the moment when we decide to choose a future distinct from the past. 

What anchors each form of transformation is a brief way of speaking of the aspiration. A phrase or a sentence that captures something essential. It is a marker that is always available.  

Some markers are for a city or a country: 

One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
We, the people. . . .
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  

These markers appear in history, they appear on statues and on buildings. There are also markers that each of us holds within. 

My daughter, Jennifer, became attracted to tattoos. As they expanded over her body, I asked her what the tattoos meant to her. She said each one represented a transformation in her life. Together they were an art form that documented her path of what was occurring with her, what meant most to her, what she wanted to name and remember.  

So it is with the phrases and sayings each of us was touched by and retains. They are tattoos of the mind rather than the skin, markers of transformation, not just improvement and steps forward. They are an art form in their own way, to capture the nuance of consciousness and meaning. 

These tattoos come in the form of one-liners or short quotes. In sharing them we are reminded of who we are, who we aspire to be, and how we find our commonality. They are not just what I may post on my mirror, or screen or wall, but statements, in the sharing, that bring us together. When we make our shift in story public and visible we generously make known to others what becomes a piece of a communal transformation we are living into and, in the sharing, what reduces our isolation. 

Here are two that I am unable to erase. 

I am warning you that if you argue with me, I will take your side. 
Peter Koestenbaum

This warning awakened me to the idea that certain conversations don’t take us anywhere. Opinions, points of view, evidence-based being are real, interesting but to argue about them becomes a contest, even if expressed with kindness and enjoyment. They are interesting but reinforce the illusion that being right is more important than being connected or surprised. Of course, we are interested in each other’s view of the world, but arguing, debating, persuading is very different from curiosity.

This tattoo––If you argue with me, I will take your side––affirms that certainty keeps us apart. I can strongly believe in something and can also recognize that this does not mean it is right. It is also liberating, in that I can express a point of view knowing that I do not have to defend it.

All transformation is linguistic.  
Werner Erhardt

This statement was a shock to my system. It made a distinction between words that create a world and words that are just talk. I had believed that the stories I tell about myself, my history, this moment actually stand for something. I was missing the insight that they are fictions I have created, conclusions I have drawn, that were useful for a moment but keep me frozen from an alternative future. They express the idea that who I am can be explained by where I have been. As if my past is the cause of my present. 

This tattoo is a symbol giving shape to the insight that healing occurs when we re-remember our past in a more forgiving way. This is the core function of all the ways we choose to shift our way of being.

We give still importance to people telling their story. It is useful for being seen and valued, but the third time we tell our story, and act as if it is true, it becomes an obstacle to living into a future of our own creation. When transformation is known to be a matter of language, claiming our freedom takes the form of naming an alternative story, chosen in this moment, independent of what is occurring in the world, or not burdened by a change being required from those around us.     

A personal example: My historical story was that I am a loner. A gypsy. A permanent observer of life and the world around me. There came a moment in a workshop I was running in Cincinnati, where I lived. At that moment in the event, all in the room were asked “what courage is required of you now?”  

Damon, a friend in our small group, looked at me––gypsy, facilitator of the session––and said, “Well, Peter, what courage is required of you now?” I chose to answer. “I am afraid of going public with all the ideas I easily express in communities other than my own. I am afraid my skin is too thin to live with the consequences of my actions.” At that moment, in answering that question, I chose to no longer hold onto the story of myself as a permanent outsider but take on the one where I am a participant and citizen of where I lived. This took years to take shape, but the transformation began with those words. A story reconstructed in a conversation.     

Is the idea that all transformation is linguistic true? Perhaps not. But it is uncomfortably useful. It leads us into questions and conversations, that in the act of answering and engaging, we become agents in the world we inhabit. Which may be the point of it all.