Performance Management and HR
Unlike talent acquisition and L&D teams, performance management is usually less specialized. Talent acquisition and L&D both require deep functional expertise and represent significant operational lifts, which is why they're typically the first HR functions to be separated out as organizations grow.
In growing organizations, it's common to start with a single "people ops" person handling all HR facets. This is a role that often evolves from general operations, finance, or executive assistant responsibilities. Talent acquisition is usually the first function to hire for separately because the skillset and time investment required are so substantial. When I was a people operations manager at a startup, recruiting consumed more than half my time, not only because we'd just closed a funding round, but because effective recruiting demands dedicated focus.
L&D follows a similar pattern, where building and managing training programs quickly becomes a full-time role. Both functions require specialized skills and intentional execution, which is why we dedicate significant attention to them. The organization will suffer if these functions do not get dedicated focus.
The remaining HR functions tend to be more mechanical and reactive: payroll processing, compliance filings, immigration paperwork, and so forth. While these activities fall under "human resources," they're typically operational rather than strategic. The sort of rhythmic work that requires less active attention until organizational scale makes them too time-consuming to fold into other responsibilities.
Performance management is where I see an operational approach applied when a more strategic one is needed. In many organizations, performance management is an administrative process that is facilitated by HR on a pre-set cadence. This approach works well in the early days of a company. Survival of the business is how performance is measured. There isn't time to worry about the employee's long term development when the business needs to generate revenue to survive. Career development and impact of each employee is more tangible. Needs of the business outweigh any individual needs.
When I was recruiting at startups, I'd often get asked about career development opportunities by prospective hires. Rather than BS them about how robust our thinking was about career planning, I'd highlight how at a startup, the job you're doing is the career accelerant. You get thrown into many different situations, navigate ambiguity, and find ways to get things done. The so-called corporate ladder was yet to be built, and it was a luxury that couldn't be afforded until the business was in a stronger market position. This scared off some folks who wanted more certainty, while others embraced it and appreciated the candor. Honesty is a great filter.
It also helped that I had credibility, having lived it myself. When I joined the startup as a talent acquisition coordinator, there wasn't much time to talk about my personal development -- the job and the pace we needed to move at was the development opportunity. If the business did well and I executed my job well, growth would yield new opportunities -- which it did. I was brought on full time and started doing full-cycle recruiting. Later on, I'd get the opportunity to tackle a new problem that emerged, and my career in learning and development took off. These changes weren't outcomes from formal performance review conversations, but from identifying opportunities that emerged as the business grew and changed. I wasn't guaranteed growth based on tenure or a pre-set plan, but earned it through a combination of my efforts and business success. Although junior, I like to think I played some part in contributing to that.
Over time, this shifts. Employee performance conversations become less tied to day-to-day business survival, and more about long term talent and organizational development. Part of this shift has to do with incentives and opportunity. More mature companies are more bureaucratic, complex, and slow-moving. Individual impact lessens, but talent is still needed to ensure the machine continues humming. Roles become more specialized, as depth of expertise and ability to operate at scale becomes increasingly valuable over raw grit and execution capability.
Yet, many organizations treat this as operational overhead precisely when they need to start thinking about it as strategic infrastructure needed to scale the business. The types of employees you need to attract and the skills needed will also shift. More intentional focus on performance management is needed not only for the individual, but for the success of the business.
Enter the Human Resources Business Partner
The "Human Resources Business Partner", or HRBP, is a common role for the generalist HR person who provides human resources support to particular teams and functions. The function of the HRBP is broad and varies by organizational structure and skillset of the team they're working with.
The HRBP is a strategic role -- not an administrative one. They are also often aligned to a specific business unit or department so that they can build the requisite expertise in the line of business to be a value add to the team. When HR doesn't get the business, they become administrators. For HRBPs to add value, they need to possess deep knowledge of the business and teams they work with.
As a result, HRBPs generally take a broader view of the team that they work with to determine the best strategic direction to take their people strategy. This includes all facets of performance management, including succession planning, compensation, and facilitating the growth of their teams to support future business needs. They are the people strategists for the organization, ensuring that the business has people with the right knowledge and skills to do their jobs well.
As such, good HRBPs will play an important role in shaping L&D and talent acquisition strategies to ensure the organization is building the workforce not only for today, but for tomorrow.
Every organization will be different based on the people and their skillsets. While there are always general "truths" and standards about how roles and functions should work together, different businesses will have diverse mixes of people, meaning that how the work gets done and where decisions get made are different.
Let's look at baseball. Common wisdom in modern baseball is that pitchers are never really expected to take up a spot in the lineup, occupying a specialized role. This is true for the vast majority of pitchers, who early in their careers typically shift all of their effort on becoming excellent at pitching at the expense of other skillsets, like hitting and fielding. This creates an orthodoxy in baseball team construction, allowing strategy to be discussed in general terms based on these assumptions. A team may dedicate roughly half of their roster to pitchers and assume none of them will ever add any value outside of the core responsibility as pitchers.
However, sometimes you have special players. Shohei Ohtani is the most recent example of this. Ohtani is called a "two-way" player, meaning he can both pitch and hit at a high level. Put simply, he's an athletic freak. Because he performs at a high level in both roles, it creates a distorting effect on the rest of the team's roster construction. When your best pitcher is also your best hitter (and also arguably your greatest revenue generator!), you get a lot of flexibility to construct the team around him differently than if he only was excellent in one of his roles. For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers often use more starting pitchers on their roster and don't need to carry a dedicated designated hitter, because Ohtani can take on that role even when he's not on the mound. The extra starting pitcher also ensures Ohtani and his fellow starting pitchers get a bit of extra rest too, a luxury that other teams don't have in the current roster construction meta.
While few of us can claim to be the Shohei Ohtani of the corporate world, you can imagine how the skillsets of the founders and early team shapes how the team gets built out over time. The team construction and hiring strategy will change based on that. For example, a technical founder likely will take longer to hire senior engineering leadership compared with a founder with a marketing or sales background.
This is all a long-winded way of hedging what I am going to write about next. Every organization is unique and it'd take more personalized consultation to solve specific needs. The skills of the team you have will shape the way you need to think about organizational construction the same way a baseball team needs to think about roster construction. Beyond understanding who you have and how to maximize their potential, you need to understand your gaps and how to prioritize filling them to create well-rounded team that can win.
The goal in speaking to how to build out this team (and honestly, any team) will really be contingent on everyone's skillset.
With all that said, let's talk about team building.
Building out the the team
Earlier we discussed the operational components of HR. My view is that we want to unburden the strategic parts of the team from the operational ones. While an early HR hire may be tasked with some of these, over time, we want to offload that work as much as possible. We want our HRBPs to get as much familiarity with their business as possible and working diligently to forecast the future needs of the business to help shape the organization's overall talent strategy. To do this, you may need to hire a dedicated operations person or shift responsibilities to finance and legal teams instead.
An early HRBP likely will look across the entire organization to build and facilitate the performance management process. This early hire should focus on building infrastructure and culture around this before the company gets too big. It is much easier to embed good practices around these topics in the early stages. Not only will this help set up the company for the long term, but it also becomes a differentiator between your company and peers. This helps give your growing company with a lesser-known brand a leg up against the competition. The best performers want to work in companies that value performance seriously, and laying this foundation early helps improve the team and cascade culture around this over time.
The first HRBP will thus be split between developing organizational wide processes and consulting leaders across departments on a surface level to understand their needs. Most critically, the first hire needs to focus on what is universally needed across the entire organization. This is a seed that must be planted early and embodied by the highest rungs of leadership. This is an opportunity to reinforce values through action, which will then spread through the organization as it scales.
More tactically, the first HRBP should be a builder focused on setting up the infrastructure needed for good performance management: regular review processes, mechanisms for one on one conversations, and working with leadership to bring demonstrate values through how the organization focuses on talent development broadly.
As teams grow in complexity and needs shift from immediate survival to longer term growth and planning, more support is needed. For HRBPs, support is typically required across two dimensions: 1) operational and administrative support and 2) department-specific strategy.
I like to look like an HRBP team as an internal client services team. Each department or function across the organization having its own dedicated HRBP lead who is the primary, "customer-facing" person. They are responsible for the overarching talent strategy for the teams they partner with. This includes headcount planning, establishing clear roles and responsibilities at different levels of maturity, consulting on thorny people issues, as well as providing facilitating performance management processes for this group. They advocate for people related budget, help translate business needs into competencies for L&D and job requirements for talent acquisition. They represent their business internally to support operational requests like payroll and benefits enrollment. The goal is to have someone who deeply knows both the business as well as the internal mechanisms that keep their people happy. The goal is to ensure the business is well-supported and can focus as much of their time and energy on doing their jobs well versus navigating internal departments. It is a delicate balance of doing what is best for the business to thrive and enabling the people driving the business to do their best work as well.
Beyond department specific strategy and consultation, you'd likely need to bring on some operational, coordinator-type roles to facilitate some of the more administrative parts of the role. Pending size and scale, you can probably keep a three-to-one ratio of HRBPs to support, but this will depend on the departments and their needs and what level you organize this at. For example, a sales department may need more dedicated support due to its size and different functions, while a product organization may be more nimble and not need as much dedicated support. It really does depend on the organization and their size, as well as the specialty and volume of people in each department.
Having dedicated support helps build stronger relationships and knowledge, while also fitting with our long term alignment models in L&D and talent acquisition organizations.
So in a mature organization, you will likely have an HRBP leader with "client leads" for each of the key departments, as well as dedicated operational support at (roughly) a three to one ratio.
The right job title?
Is "Human Resources Business Partner" the right title for this role? It's debatable. While roles like "Talent Strategist" on the surface may feel like the right titles, these roles tend to focus more on the talent that the organization hasn't acquired yet, fitting more into the recruitment and talent acquisition bucket vs. managing existing talent. As such, "Talent Management Partner" is another title that may also be synonymous with the HRBP. "Talent Development Partner", "People Development Partner" or "Organizational Development Partner" could also fit here, too.
However, each signals something a bit different. While "people development" may signal more focus on individuals, "organizational development" may imply a more macro view. It's nuanced. The size of the organization The "right" title for you will be contingent on your industry and also how you want to brand your HR teams. Is it a HR team? Is it a people team? Is it a talent team?
Regardless of title, the core duties are focused on performance management, succession planning, and ensuring the business has the talent it needs to deliver against its goals.
Is the HRBP the right person to direct the rest of the team?
The role of the HRBP and its focus on the overarching people strategy raises a key question. Which function is best suited to be the department leader? Assuming your HR department is comprised of the roles we've discussed so far, there is good reason to debate which role or background is best suited to lead the department. Most organizations won't have C-level leaders for talent acquisition, L&D, and performance management. They'll likely have one leader for all of these functions. The background of this leader really will depend on the stage of the organization and what matters most. Your organization will need different leadership pending the focus of the team. For example, smaller startups may have leaders with more talent acquisition focus in the top seat given that most of the team's talent hasn't been hired yet. More mature organizations may want someone with more of an HRBP background in the top seat. Organizations going through turnarounds or facing a radical transformation may want to have someone with more of an L&D background in the top seat.
The right leader will be whomever is needed based on where the organization is. That said, a strong C-level HR person needs to have enough experience across domains to be effective.
Next, we'll talk more about the systems we want this role to build.