This Is How We Succeed With Business Partnering

Last year the CFO of a large global consumer goods company had gathered 300 finance managers for a global Finance Conference to launch the strategy for the finance function. The CFO was very excited because she was also launching the new Business Partnering Handbook with detailed role charters, new behaviours, process descriptions, etc. Now was the time to finally succeed with business partnering and show her CXO peers that Finance can be a driver of value creation. 

It was a fantastic conference, and everyone was excited about things to come. They all left highly motivated to transform the finance function into more value-adding business partners. This was going to be successful. With this much energy and effort put into it - how could it go wrong? 

We caught up with the CFO a year later to see how things were going and the outcome might surprise you. What seemed like a surefire success hadn’t yielded (m)any tangible benefits. In the beginning, there was some buzz around the organization, but it quickly faded, and the efforts died out. Now everything was the same as before the conference and records showed that no one had visited the online business partnering handbook for the last six months!  

Does this sound familiar to you? 

The daily whirlwind trumps most change efforts 

So, what happened since it went all wrong despite the initial high energy and strong motivation to succeed?  

Most finance managers got hit with their daily business, deadlines, month-end, forecasting, management reporting, etc. They failed to create the capacity to focus on the change and soon fell back to old habits.

The CFO made a mistake that we’ve seen in many other organizations. Frustrated by the lack of progress with business partnering, she reasoned that it must be because people simply do not understand the concept.

She, therefore, invested heavily in advanced frameworks and scientific approaches making business partnering very elaborate, but also unnecessarily complex. Others have made the opposite mistake of giving too high-level guidance. Simply telling people to be proactive, start driving value creation, and becoming business partners won’t cut it either. 

She also made the mistake thinking that just because people were very excited and motivated at the launch of the initiative, they’ll automatically start working in the new ways when they come back to their day job. That would be underestimating what it takes to drive successful change. In fact, it’s the reverse thinking about how to be successful with business partnering. 

What’s the secret sauce to success? 

To succeed with business partnering you must do the opposite of what most have tried to do. We know this because we have experienced it in our own careers and worked with organizations that have been successful with business partnering.  

Instead of thinking it’s easy to do when there are detailed descriptions in place you must recognize that it’s difficult to be a good business partner. 

It’s however not hard to understand the concept of business partnering. In fact, we believe it’s a very simple concept to articulate, but takes years of practice to become good at it. Business partnering is quite simple. You build trusted relationships, solve your business stakeholders most pressing problems, and follow up on the effects of the decisions made.  

To create sustainable change in the way we work, we must articulate in simple terms what it is we want people to do differently. Then ask them to make small improvements at a time. That means trying different tools and models within business partnering one at a time to see what works. You must consider it a change journey where you practice, fail, and learn before you can succeed. Once you’ve accepted that fact, you’re ready to start improving! 

We also call this the microstep approach because creating sustainable change starts with changing the ingrained habits that guide our daily behaviour. We start by describing what new behaviour we would like our business partners to exhibit and as they continue to practice over time, they will form new habits and change their mindset towards how they do things. Over time as more and more business partners succeed with this approach it changes the culture of the finance function.

An example of a microstep could be the following: you want your business partners to become more customer-focused. In a training session, you share tools with them which they can use to better aid their customers or internal stakeholders such as a key account plan.

Then you ask them to book a meeting with their stakeholder(s) following the training to start talking to them about your new approach to helping them. You likely won’t make the first meeting a smashing success but you’ll learn from it and the next one will be better and so on.

As you keep trying this new approach it’ll over time become a natural way of engaging your stakeholders and habits and your mindset start changing.   

Over the coming months, we’ll describe in further details our approach to succeeding with business partnering in the article series “Business Partnering On A Formula”. We’ll share practical cases along the way too to give you confidence that you can succeed where others have succeeded too. We hope that this will serve as inspiration for your journey and if you cannot wait to read the full series then feel free to reach out to us today on [email protected] or message Anders directly. We’ll be happy to further share our thoughts on how you can be successful with business partnering too!

If you want to become a better business partner you should consider taking our online course "Business Partnering Explained - Value Creation Unlocked" to get a better handle on the role. It's accredited for 5.5 CPD hours.

You can read a lot more articles about FP&A, Business Partnering, and Finance Transformation below. It all start's with “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” where you set the ambition for your transformation. You should join the Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Your Journey To Successful Business Partnering Explained

How To Create Value Through Business Partnering

Everyone Can Adopt A Business Partnering Mindset (part of a six-article series about FP&A Business Partnering)

From Business Partner To Working Within The Business (part of an article series where I interview finance professionals about their careers in FP&A and Business Partnering)

Is Your Product Optimized For Value Creation? (part of a toolbox series where we look at what tools FP&A professionals should leverage to drive value creation)

How Business Partners Turn Analysis To Insight (part of case study series where I interview business partners about how they drive value creation using real cases)

The Future Of FP&A: Two Ways To Take The Reins

What Is The Accounting Profession Paradox?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How To Become A Finance Business Partner

Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner

Finance Business Partner Is A Bullshit Job

How Business Partners Keep A Plan On Track

Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more 8,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger on LinkedIn with 40.000+ followers.