768: Evolving from Business Partner to Value Creator, with JP Elliott
Episode
39 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Productivity, Relationships
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Four CEO Questions Framework: CEOs wake up thinking about strategic imperatives, operational efficiency, business model optimization, and sustainable growth—not HR processes. HR leaders must map every initiative to these four questions, framing programs in business language that demonstrates impact on revenue, margins, or competitive advantage rather than soft metrics like retention or engagement scores.
- ✓Execution Plus Model: HR leaders must deliver flawless execution on basics like payroll and hiring, then add two to three strategic initiatives that drive revenue, reduce costs, improve productivity, or transform culture. This requires deliberately allocating resources unevenly across business units, supporting leaders driving the most strategic value even if other stakeholders receive less attention from HR.
- ✓Leadership Development Reframing: Before designing any leadership program, answer the question "leadership for what?" by connecting development directly to business imperatives. A restaurant chain's leadership program should focus on capabilities needed for same-store sales growth or market expansion, not generic leadership competencies. Co-create programs with business leaders to ensure buy-in and business relevance.
- ✓Business Leader Identity Shift: Effective HR professionals identify as business leaders with HR expertise, not HR professionals with business knowledge. This requires building financial acumen around EBITDA, gross profit, and competitive advantage, plus understanding how the organization creates value. Borrowing frameworks from marketing, IT, supply chain, and product management expands HR's strategic toolkit beyond traditional people practices.
- ✓Talent Strategy for Competitive Advantage: Build talent pipelines and organizational capabilities that competitors cannot easily replicate. Netflix's culture playbook creates a talent moat by attracting specific people while repelling others. HR leaders should focus on critical roles that deliver differentiated value, ensuring leaders gain experiences needed to scale the business from current revenue to future growth targets.
What It Covers
JP Elliott explains how HR and support function leaders can transition from business partners to value creators by aligning initiatives with CEO priorities. He introduces the Execution Plus framework and four key questions every CEO asks, providing specific strategies for HR leaders to drive revenue, reduce costs, and build competitive advantage through talent strategies.
Key Questions Answered
- •Four CEO Questions Framework: CEOs wake up thinking about strategic imperatives, operational efficiency, business model optimization, and sustainable growth—not HR processes. HR leaders must map every initiative to these four questions, framing programs in business language that demonstrates impact on revenue, margins, or competitive advantage rather than soft metrics like retention or engagement scores.
- •Execution Plus Model: HR leaders must deliver flawless execution on basics like payroll and hiring, then add two to three strategic initiatives that drive revenue, reduce costs, improve productivity, or transform culture. This requires deliberately allocating resources unevenly across business units, supporting leaders driving the most strategic value even if other stakeholders receive less attention from HR.
- •Leadership Development Reframing: Before designing any leadership program, answer the question "leadership for what?" by connecting development directly to business imperatives. A restaurant chain's leadership program should focus on capabilities needed for same-store sales growth or market expansion, not generic leadership competencies. Co-create programs with business leaders to ensure buy-in and business relevance.
- •Business Leader Identity Shift: Effective HR professionals identify as business leaders with HR expertise, not HR professionals with business knowledge. This requires building financial acumen around EBITDA, gross profit, and competitive advantage, plus understanding how the organization creates value. Borrowing frameworks from marketing, IT, supply chain, and product management expands HR's strategic toolkit beyond traditional people practices.
- •Talent Strategy for Competitive Advantage: Build talent pipelines and organizational capabilities that competitors cannot easily replicate. Netflix's culture playbook creates a talent moat by attracting specific people while repelling others. HR leaders should focus on critical roles that deliver differentiated value, ensuring leaders gain experiences needed to scale the business from current revenue to future growth targets.
Notable Moment
Elliott recalls pitching a nine-month leadership development program to his CEO at Taco Bell early in his career. The CEO stopped him after the first slide and asked how the program would drive revenue and same-store sales growth. Elliott had no clear answer beyond soft benefits like retention, revealing his focus on HR features rather than business outcomes.
Episode Transcript
Leadership looks a little different if you head up a support role, human resources, IT, marketing, or finance. Often, we hear the term business partner used to describe what these leaders should be aiming for. In this episode, how to shift from simply a business partner to a value creator. This is coaching for leaders, episode 768. Produced by innovate learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is coaching for leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Regular conversation that I have with leaders, especially leaders who are in a bit more of a support role, perhaps they're an HR executive or an IT executive or a marketing executive, is being able to make the shift from business partner to value creator. How do I really show up and be a strategic partner for the organization in a way that goes way beyond execution and goes into thinking about the future? Today, a conversation on how to do that well, whether that's you or perhaps someone you're supporting, and I'm so pleased to welcome JP Elliott to the show. JP has decades of experience as a talent and HR executive at companies like Dick's Sporting Goods, McAfee, and Lenovo. He's seen the challenges HR professionals face in growing their careers and increasing their impact. He is the host of the Future of HR podcast and on a mission to help HR professionals increase their business impact and accelerate their careers. JP, a pleasure to see you again. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Dave. Excited to be here. I am so thankful for your work because so much of what you are doing is inviting leaders, especially leaders, as I mentioned in the intro, who are in more of a support role. And, of course, through your lens of HR of thinking about how to really make that shift from being the term that often is used as a business partner to someone who's really creating value for the organization. And you shared a story previously with me about a time that you were in front of the CEO of an organization and making a pitch for something and it didn't go the way you planned. And I was wondering if you could share that story with me. Yeah, I'm happy to. And I have a feeling there's a lot of HR leaders or even support function leaders, whether you might be an IT or marketing or even finance, who have walked into a CEO's office and been surprised by what they say to you. And the situation was I was actually, early in my career at Taco Bell, I started there, which was really part of PepsiCo and spun out from PepsiCo. A lot of people don't know that, so there's a really high bar for HR there. And we were working to put together a leadership development …
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