HR balancing act - business partner / employee advocate

You raise some good questions Karin and I’ll try to bring part of the answer. Back in 2005 (I think) I shared a stage at the Hay European Convention in Rome with Dave Ulrich, Tom McMullen and a couple of other people. A speaker failed to turn up and as speakers who were already in situ we agreed to improvise a sofa debate on innovation and the future of HR - a fun exercise, as you can imagine. During the exchanges Dave received your question about the “employee champion” role. He answered that he considered the HR value proposition to be a permanent work in progress, certainly not a normative statement of how HR should work. He clarified that the overall HR role was, in his view, to extract the maximum added value from the human element in the corporate equation via the different roles; that none of the boxes took absolute precedence, since the specific context of each company is different, and that permanent adaptation was necessary for any strategic approach to remain valid (my “context is king” hobby-horse). In other words employee champion is an approach with limits, and not an end in itself that supersedes the need for a company to survive by making a profit. Dave’s later books clearly show how his ideas evolved over the years as both his research at MIT and his consultancy work moved forward.
I think much of the same can be said of the CIPD’s mission statement - but I can’t claim to be a spokesman......

You raise some good questions Karin and I’ll try to bring part of the answer. Back in 2005 (I think) I shared a stage at the Hay European Convention in Rome with Dave Ulrich, Tom McMullen and a couple of other people. A speaker failed to turn up and as speakers who were already in situ we agreed to improvise a sofa debate on innovation and the future of HR - a fun exercise, as you can imagine. During the exchanges Dave received your question about the “employee champion” role. He answered that he considered the HR value proposition to be a permanent work in progress, certainly not a normative statement of how HR should work. He clarified that the overall HR role was, in his view, to extract the maximum added value from the human element in the corporate equation via the different roles; that none of the boxes took absolute precedence, since the specific context of each company is different, and that permanent adaptation was necessary for any strategic approach to remain valid (my “context is king” hobby-horse). In other words employee champion is an approach with limits, and not an end in itself that supersedes the need for a company to survive by making a profit. Dave’s later books clearly show how his ideas evolved over the years as both his research at MIT and his consultancy work moved forward.
I think much of the same can be said of the CIPD’s mission statement - but I can’t claim to be a spokesman......