How HR Can Drive the Business Forward, Not Just Support It

Lee Cage Jr. shares what eighteen years in Army HR and a career in enterprise transformation taught him about where the function actually creates value.

The Strategic HR Business Partner Starts With the P&L, Not the People Plan

There is a version of this conversation that happens in almost every company, usually at a bar and usually without HR in the room. The CEO says some variation of: they are going to bring me workshops, and none of those workshops make me money. It is unfair, it is reductive, and it is also the actual perception a strategic HR business partner has to overcome before anything else they say gets heard.

Lee Cage Jr., Director of Enterprise Transformation, Strategy & Technology at BDO USA, does not spend much energy arguing that the perception is wrong. He spends it on the one variable that changes the outcome.

"If you don't understand what the business does, how can you be an HR leader or thought leader within it?" - Lee Cage Jr.

It sounds obvious until you run it as a live test. Ask an HR leader to name the company's KPIs. Not headcount, not retention, not engagement scores. The numbers the CEO is personally judged on. The answer sorts people immediately, because a leader who can name them stops proposing programs and starts proposing ways to move a number. That is the entire distance between overhead and partner, and it has nothing to do with credentials.

Lee came to the function sideways. He wanted to be a cultural anthropologist, and his mother reasonably asked what the salary looked like. He went into HR instead, and then spent his career studying the same thing he always wanted to study: how people build tribes at work, how influence actually moves through an organization, and why it is so often the executive assistant running the CEO's calendar, rather than anyone with a big title, who is quietly steering the bus.

The 1 FTE Trap: Why Enterprises Miss the Talent They Need

The most useful thing in the episode is a structural failure Lee names without much ceremony, and it is one most organizations do not know they have.

Somewhere there is a person who is genuinely excellent at the exact thing you need. They do not want it forty hours a week. They want ten or fifteen, using the part of their brain they enjoy, and then they want to go live their life. They would outperform the full-time hire you are about to make for that scope. You will never meet them, because the requisition only comes in one size.

"Because we typically see things only as one FTE, we sometimes miss the opportunity for those 0.25 or that 50%." - Lee Cage Jr.

This is worth sitting with, because it is a buyer saying it. Not a vendor, not a marketplace with something to sell. An enterprise transformation leader looking at his own function and identifying the budgeting convention as the thing hiding the best available talent.

He pushes it further. In an at-will state, he argues, the distinction people cling to is thinner than it looks.

"Everybody is an independent contractor. You may have a full-time job, but your full-time job in Tennessee is an at-will state." - Lee Cage Jr.

He is not being cynical. He is pointing at the gap between how we describe employment and how it mechanically works, then asking why we keep designing the talent strategy around the description.

This is the problem Human Cloud was built to remove. When the only way to buy capability is to convert it into permanent headcount, the shape of the budget quietly decides what talent you are allowed to consider, and the answer is almost never the best one available. We aggregate flexible workforce solutions across more than 1,000 platforms and automate the discovery, compliance, and orchestration underneath, so a business team can go get an outcome without first translating it into a job description. Lee is describing the constraint from inside the enterprise. We are building the way out of it.

Lock and Shift Is Not Enterprise Transformation

Lee has taken nonprofits, healthcare systems, and large automotive organizations through transformation programs, and he has a blunt test for whether one was real.

"If your business processes are still the same and it still takes an act of Congress to get something done in your organization, that's not transformation." - Lee Cage Jr.

Moving an unchanged process onto a more expensive system is a purchase, not a transformation. The tell is whether the friction survived the migration.

The second failure he sees is more uncomfortable, because it is about how leaders regard their own people. Organizations consistently underestimate the competency and reasonableness of their staff, then design for that imagined incompetence. His counterexample is the self-checkout machine. Nobody was trained on it. Nobody read a quick reference guide. You walk up, you work it out, and if you move too fast or too slow the machine flags you and someone comes over to help.

That is a functioning business process. A reasonable person, seeing it a reasonable number of times, can run it without supervision, and the system catches the exceptions. Design for the staff you actually employ rather than the one your training deck imagines, and most of the change management budget stops being necessary.

Cutting Juniors to Fund AI Is a Deferred Leadership Crisis

On AI and layoffs, Lee's objection is arithmetic rather than sentiment.

"If we keep laying off all of these junior, or what I like to call new to school, new to work people, we will have very limited competent leaders in the future." - Lee Cage Jr.

Senior people are not spawned. They are juniors who accumulated a decade of reps, mistakes, and context. Remove the intake for a few years and the savings are real but the liability is larger, because a leadership shortage cannot be solved later at any price.

His framing for what to do instead is a flight crew. Every organization needs a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight attendant, which is his term for change management, ground crew, and the systems people. The mix of human and machine is a staffing design question, not a replacement question, and the organizations getting it right are treating artificial and human intelligence as things that have to integrate rather than compete.

He is also clear that none of this is weather. Humans built the AI. Whatever it is doing to the org chart is a series of choices somebody made, and different choices remain available.

The Bottom Line

Becoming a strategic HR business partner is not a branding exercise or a seat you get granted. It starts with knowing the numbers the business is judged on, and it shows up in whether you can get the organization the capability it needs in the shape it actually needs it.

The companies that will win the next decade are the ones that stop treating full-time headcount as the only unit of talent. The 0.25 person who has done this exact thing four times is frequently the better answer, and the only thing standing between most enterprises and that person is a budgeting convention nobody has revisited since the industrial revolution named the function personnel.

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About Lee Cage Jr.

Lee Cage Jr. is Director of Enterprise Transformation, Strategy & Technology at BDO USA and an eighteen-year Army HR leader. He holds degrees from Lipscomb University and Emory, is beginning a PhD in leadership and strategic innovation, and hosts the Fifteen Minutes With podcast.

Listen to the full episode: Human Cloud Podcast on Spotify

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This article was adapted from the Human Cloud Podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.