Two people on factory floor tablet

Walk into most companies and you will find two roles built to help the business perform better: L&D and the HR business partner. Both are full of smart, capable people. Neither one is built to own the result.

That is not a knock on the people doing the job. It is a design flaw, and it is starting to catch up with both functions faster than most HR teams expect. Here is why.

1. The HRBP has no scoreboard

Ask a simple question: what number is the HRBP actually on the hook for? Usually there is no clean answer. They sit with the business, advise the leader, run the hard conversations, help with the firefighting. All of it is useful. None of it comes with a scoreboard.

You can counsel a struggling business unit brilliantly for two years and never once be measured on whether it got better. Advice without a scoreboard is just an opinion with a nicer title, and businesses are starting to notice.

2. L&D’s numbers can rise while the business falls

L&D tracks completions, sends out a catalog, reports hours of training delivered. Every one of those numbers can climb while the business slides, and that is the tell. A function whose metrics cannot fail is not really driving anything. It is just insulated from consequence.

Put the two side by side and HR has a quiet crisis on its hands. The function that builds capability cannot fail, and the function that sits closest to the business does not own anything. Two roles, two open loops, and nobody carrying the result.

3. Sales enablement already proved there is a better way, and nobody copied it

Here is the part that should sting a little. Nobody has to theorize about the fix, because one part of the org already found it.

Sales enablement does not sit off on an island the way L&D does. It sits inside the revenue org, and its scoreboard is the rep’s scoreboard: win rate, ramp time, quota attainment. When the team wins, enablement wins. It cannot hide.

That one design choice, tying the capability builder to the unit’s own number, is why sales enablement produces results a CFO will actually defend. According to CSO Insights’ 5th Annual Sales Enablement Study, reps at companies with a formal enablement charter post meaningfully higher quota attainment than those without one, along with stronger win rates on forecast deals.

The lesson is not that sales is special. It is that the model works, and the rest of the organization has simply never copied it. Every store, plant, call center, engineering team, and region is still waiting for its own version of what sales got years ago.

The role that fixes this does not quite exist yet

Take what sales enablement proved and picture applying it everywhere: every business unit getting its own embedded capability builder, tied to that unit’s own number instead of a training log.

I have a name for that role. I call it workforce enablement, and it is built from the two broken halves above. From the HRBP, it takes proximity to the business. From L&D, it takes the actual ability to close skill gaps rather than just advise on them. Then it adds the one thing neither ever had: a real scoreboard.

That is the short version. The full argument covers how the role stays genuinely independent rather than turning into a yes-man for whichever leader it sits closest to, where it fits inside the rest of HR, and what its KPI looks like once you put a name on the business unit’s own number instead of a completion rate.

Read the full argument

Download the report to see how workforce enablement works, why it is one of four disciplines modern HR should be built around, and what changes the day a business unit’s own number finally has someone’s name attached to it.

Get the full article

Explore the thinking behind Workforce Enablement, including how it can connect capability to business performance and give organizations a clearer model for the future of HR.

Download
The HRBP won't survive the next decade

Related resources