The HRBP Role Is Broken: Here's How to Fix It
episode
“HR Heretics” | How CPOs, CHROs, Founders, and Boards Build High Performing Companies
22 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the premise of the episode and who is the guest?
For today's Essential Heretics 101 feature, we talk with disruptive HR founder Lucy Adams on why designing policies around your worst employees destroys performance and reimagining the business partner role. Hey everyone, welcome back to another HR Heretics show today. I am so excited to welcome Lucy Adams. Lucy joins us right outside of London. What's your town's name again?
It's a place called Stockbridge. So imagine those Jane Austen films, you know? It's like that.
I love that. So th Lucy, you've been doing this for geez, almost thirty years, I'd say plus or minus, looking at your background.
That makes me feel a lot.
Yeah, it's great. Roles all over the place, HR leader roles at different industries and sectors. And for the last eleven years, you've been running disruptive HR. Which is a term that we're gonna pull apart today to kind of think about how you think about that word, what it means, what you're seeing out in the market, what you've learned for our audience. And HR roles you've had before this, I have to call it out, is BBC, which I love. You were HR leader at BBC out in London.
It's just an amazing place, you know. I mean I grew up anyone who grew up in Britain in the kind of, you know, seventies and eighties, it was the backdrop to your life, right? So to get the opportunity to go and work at this place that I had loved all my life. was incredible. And it was incredible, but it's one of those jobs you absolutely love and never want to do again. You're in the public spotlight, you're in the media. And in HR we're not kind of used to that, you know? I mean I remember my kind of onboarding I had to meet with the head of PR and communications and he's like, Right, you know, tell me straight away, have you got a cocaine habit? I'm like, what? I was like, no. And have you got an industrial size shredder?
Because the press are going to go through your bins.
I'd love to start with disruptive HR. Um, tell us about how maybe the years leading up to you thinking you want to do this and why and why you chose that.
Word. I'm kind of long in the tooth, HR director, down that role for most of my professional career and um and I kind of always had slight reservations that the stuff we were doing wasn't really working or wasn't really having the impact. I remember at the BBC going along and talking to them about the fact that it was the news division and I was like, great guys, you know, we've simplified the performance management process. We're only going to rate people out of three rather than five and you can do it all on one page. And I was thinking, they're going to love this. And they're like, Why do you keep coming along and depressing us? And it was really during my time at the BBC where we were going through significant change, you know, whether it be digital or you know, changing workplace expectations, etc.
And there was I still doing HR like I'd done in the nineteen nineties. So by the time my kind of stint at the BBC was coming to an end. Myself and my co founder, Cara Moram, we went for a very long lunch in Covent Garden. And we're like, look, can we take our shared frustrations? and do something with this, you know, get off our backsides and actually come up with ways in which HR could be fit for a disrupted world. So that's where disruptive HR comes from. And and that's what we've been doing for the last ten, eleven years. I think so much of what HR does is because we don't trust managers to manage. We speak to thousands of HR people every year. And if you ask them kind of what's their number one issue, it's
we have poor managers with poor capability. But their response to that is very much around, well, let's design a process that makes them do certain things. Unfortunately, a lot of the processes that we make them do don't actually generate The things we want, they don't improve performance and motivation, they don't actually help with talent and mobility. And I think increasingly HR people are struggling with how to respond to the calls that come from leadership.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the premise of the episode and who is the guest?
0:03–4:59
2
Why does designing HR policies around the worst employees damage trust?
4:59–9:55
3
How does the sponsor Metaview’s AI platform help modern recruiting?
9:55–10:39
4
What is the opportunity cost of a low‑trust HR environment?
10:39–14:08
5
Why is the HR Business Partner role considered broken and how can it be fixed?
14:08–17:49
6
What are HR leaders saying about DEI, AI, and merit in today’s workplace?
17:49–20:05
7
What practical steps can HR take to rebuild trust and improve performance?
20:05–21:52
8
How can listeners apply these insights and where can they find more resources?
21:52–22:06
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from “HR Heretics” | How CPOs, CHROs, Founders, and Boards Build High Performing Companies
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