From HR business partner to value creator in support functions

Executive overview

Support function leaders — HR, IT, marketing, finance — are often praised for execution but rarely credited with strategic impact. The gap between being a "business partner" and a true value creator lies in understanding how the organisation creates competitive advantage, not just how to run HR processes well. JP Elliott, a veteran HR executive, frames this shift around four questions every CEO is already asking, and argues that HR leaders who learn to answer them in business terms earn the credibility to do far more of the people work they care about. The practical entry point is "Execution Plus": nail the basics, then identify two to three initiatives that directly move revenue, cut costs, lift productivity, or transform culture.

The core insight: support function leaders who speak the CEO's language — competitive advantage, P&L, sustainable growth — unlock the resources and influence to do the people work that actually matters.

The wake-up call: pitching to a CEO without a business case

• Early in his career at Taco Bell (then part of PepsiCo), Elliott presented a nine-month leadership development programme — coaching, peer cohorts, assessments — and the CEO stopped him after the first slide.
• The CEO's question: "How does this drive revenue? How will this help same-store sales growth?"
• Elliott's instinctive answers — better retention, stronger leaders — were soft and not tied to any P&L metric.
• The experience revealed a fundamental mismatch: HR was designing programmes around features, not outcomes that matter to a business leader who owns the P&L.
• The fix was not to abandon leadership development; it was to reframe it around the business need — e.g., building the right district managers to support store growth.

Thinking like a CEO: four questions that drive strategy

• Are we focused on the right strategic imperatives? CEOs ask whether goals, markets, and priorities are correctly set for what is coming next, not just what is happening now.
• Are we operating efficiently and effectively? This means maximising value, reducing complexity, and serving customers well — not just staying on budget.
• Are we optimising our business model for competitive advantage? Building a sustainable "moat" — capabilities competitors cannot easily copy, such as Microsoft's ecosystem approach across Xbox and enterprise software.
• Do we have a plan for sustainable, profitable growth? This is the question CEOs think about most: skating to where the puck is going, and having the leadership pipeline to get there.
• HR leaders who understand these four questions can map every major initiative to at least one of them — and should be willing to deprioritise work that maps to none.

Identity shift: business leader first, HR expert second

• Saying "I'm a business person who happens to do HR" is easy; building genuine financial acumen around EBITDA, margin, and gross profit is the harder, necessary step.
• Business acumen allows HR to anticipate what the organisation will need from a talent and capability perspective before the CEO has to ask.
• Elliott notes that this identity shift often takes years; it became fully clear to him only after leaving HR for consulting and seeing organisational transformation from the outside.
• HR has a structural advantage: it sits across all functions and can borrow frameworks from marketing, supply chain, lean manufacturing, and product management.
• Non-traditional backgrounds — MBAs, consulting, IT — are increasingly valuable in HR because they bring outside perspective on how organisations actually compete.

Co-creation over execution: how strategic HR really works

• The single biggest cultural shift is moving from "HR initiatives" to "business initiatives that HR helps design and drive."
• Co-creation with business leaders starts with one question: what does success look like — not in process metrics, but in business outcomes?
• "Culture improvement" is too vague; the co-creation conversation forces specificity: what does good culture look like behaviourally, and what does it deliver financially?
• When a business leader needs to cut costs without cutting headcount, HR's role is to help redesign work — that is the unlock that earns strategic credibility.
• Curiosity is the engine: the HR leaders who make this shift are the ones who consistently sit down with business leaders and ask what they are struggling with right now.

Execution Plus: the practical model for standing out

• All support functions must execute the basics flawlessly — payroll, compliance, hiring, performance cycles — but nobody awards credit for it, just as finance gets no parade for closing the books.
• The "plus" is two to three high-visibility initiatives tied to revenue growth, cost reduction, productivity improvement, or culture transformation aligned to the CEO's four questions.
• If no current HR initiative clearly maps to one of those four outcomes, that is a gap worth investigating immediately.
• Resource allocation is the hard part: investing heavily in a high-value initiative for one business leader may mean a lower service level for another — and that trade-off needs to be made explicitly and explained clearly.
• When the model works, different leaders will describe HR differently: one says "they're transactional," another says "they're genuinely strategic." That gap is intentional and healthy.

Building talent strategy around the CEO's growth agenda

• Succession planning and leadership pipeline work are most powerful when framed around the growth question: if the organisation needs to double in size, do the right people have the right experiences to lead that expansion?
• "Leadership development for what?" — the "what" must be answered from a business perspective before any programme design begins.
• Talent strategies can themselves become a competitive moat: Netflix's culture playbook, for example, acts as a magnet for certain candidates and explicitly repels others, reinforcing its business model.
• HR leaders cannot usually define business model strategy themselves, but they can build the culture, innovation mindset, and learning environment that allows the organisation to exploit its competitive advantage.
• Forward-looking talent work includes tracking competitor acquisitions, monitoring capability gaps in the market, and understanding which emerging skill sets the business will need in three to five years.

The both/and mindset: people focus and business focus together

• HR leaders who worry that business acumen will crowd out their care for people have it backwards: earning business credibility is what funds and protects the people work.
• CEOs are already balancing shareholders, customers, employees, and social impact simultaneously; HR leaders who understand that full picture become genuinely useful advisers, not just service providers.
• The leaders with the most impact are those who are equally comfortable reading a P&L and having a difficult conversation about team culture — both skills reinforced by practice.
• Elliott's own background — entrepreneur father with an economics PhD, counsellor mother — reflects the combination: analytical rigour and human insight together, not in competition.
• The field of HR is at an inflection point: AI is removing transactional work, raising the bar for the strategic contribution HR must make, and creating the best professional moment in the field's history.