DS Cohen & Associates
It is a powerful question, and it has been asked at the hard moments of modern history. Florence Reece wrote it during the Harlan County coal strikes, on the back of a wall calendar, in a house the sheriff’s men had already searched once, and Pete Seeger carried it to the rest of us. It was never rhetorical. The answer cost people something.
I ask it now of two job titles: Chief Human Resources Officer and Human Resources Business Partner.
The argument
Most surveys report that a majority of employees do not trust HR. Every practitioner knew this before the surveys confirmed it. HR knows exactly how HR is seen.
The usual explanations come in threes. Employees misunderstand the role. HR has a communications problem. A handful of bad experiences poisoned the well.
All three are wrong. Employees have read the function accurately. They have concluded that HR sits on management’s side of the table, and that most of what HR builds costs them time and returns them nothing. To be fair, and I include myself in this, that has often been true.
Neither conclusion requires anyone in HR to act in bad faith. They follow from how the job was defined, and no amount of sincerity from the person in the chair overturns them.
That is the argument. The rest is evidence.
Whose partner
If your title is HR Business Partner, whose partner are you?
The phrase looks neutral. It is not. Read the grammar. It does not say Employment Relationship Partner. It says Business Partner, and the words settle the question of allegiance before anyone sits down.
Once that framing goes in, the founding question of the profession changes shape. It stops asking what constitutes a fair and sustainable relationship between this organisation and its people. It starts asking what the business needs from its people, and how we deliver it.
Those two questions sound alike. They are not. For decades the senior people leaders made the second argument, because the second argument survives a chief financial officer and the first one never has. And it worked. I made it too.
Whose side
Consider how pressure travels. Customers want it faster. Investors want the margin. The market wants it cheaper. Strategy responds, the people practice responds, and it arrives at the employee as headcount, targets, incentives and redesign. The employee becomes the adjustment mechanism for demands that began somewhere else entirely.
We call that alignment. Alignment is a beautifully neutral word, and it never tells you who is being aligned to whom. It takes ownership of nothing.
Then add the governance problem. The chief executive shapes the CHRO’s compensation, access, standing and continued employment. Employees shape none of it. Asking that person to hold both sides in balance is asking for balance inside an unequal relationship, and then calling it a character flaw when it tilts the only way it can.
What it costs them
Ask an employee what HR did for them this year. You will get a list. A rating with a distribution behind it that moved their pay. A survey whose results they never saw, or saw and then watched no one act upon. A restructuring delivered as an invitation to reapply for the job they already held.
Now ask the same employee whether any of it made their work more meaningful. The silence is the finding.
The processes are not stupid, and the people who built them are not lazy. I was one of them. Everyone in that chain serves a real customer. Consistency, defensibility, risk control, a decision that survives a tribunal. Those are legitimate needs of the enterprise. But most of it is built to protect the organisation from the employee, and then handed to the employee as service. People know the difference between being served and being processed. They know it almost at once, they are seldom wrong, and they never test it twice.
What a profession does
A general counsel does not stop being a business partner when she tells the chief executive that something is unlawful. An engineer does not stop supporting the enterprise when he refuses to sign an unsafe design.
Expertise creates an obligation, not merely a capability. The obligation is the standing to refuse, and to make the refusal count.
If the honest answer to what HR is required to protect, even when leadership would prefer otherwise, is nothing independent of business strategy, then it is not a profession that can defend an employee. It is a management technology with a very good annual conference.
So which side are they on
Not management’s. That answer has been quietly running for years, and it produced the trust numbers we complain about. Not the employees’ either. No one can represent employees while also owning compensation, performance management and restructuring.
The answer is the employment relationship itself. Defend the organisation when an employee’s demand is unreasonable. Defend the employee when leadership’s behaviour is unreasonable. Protect the enterprise from unsustainable practice, and protect people from the misuse of organisational power.
That is not neutrality. Professional judgment never is. It is courage. And courage cannot rest on whoever happens to hold the job. It has to be built into the structure. Independent access to the board. A protected route for voice. A record, so that when the argument is lost on behalf of a person, the loss is written down and becomes somebody’s problem on Monday morning.
Until that structure exists, the trust numbers will not move, and renaming the function will not move them. The test of a CHRO or an HRBP is not whether the chief executive calls them a great business partner. It is whether they remain a trusted one while saying the thing the chief executive does not want to hear.
Florence Reece already knew there was no neutral ground. You could not sit this one out. The question was never comfortable, and it was never meant to be.
Which side are you on?
David S. Cohen is the author of “Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workplace Driven by Values for Lasting Success,” amplifies each of the points of this article using a combination of research and anecdotal stories. The appendix contains sample behavioural interview questions. Selecting the Best is available on Amazon and other online book sellers.
