BRM Job Description
Business relationship managers (BRMs) are “blended executives” who possess a diverse, highly prized set of skills and experiences. As such, good BRMs are hard to find, so companies in search of BRM professionals should know exactly what skills and training they need BRM candidates to bring to the table.
This BRM job description will help CIOs, CEOs, and their HR and talent acquisition partners produce a definitive profile of an executive who will fulfill the promise of business relationship management.
“Great leaders create great leaders in everyone around them. BRMs are great leaders.”
-Aaron Barnes, CEO and co-founder, BRM Institute
The BRM Job Description
Summary
The BRM is a senior-level, strategic business partner who shares ownership for both business strategy and business value results. The BRM owns executive-level relationships and serves as a single point of focus, working to converge functions such as IT, HR, finance, etc., and one or more lines of business or value streams. This is achieved by stimulating, surfacing, and shaping demand for capabilities and assets, in addition to ensuring that the potential business value from those capabilities and assets is captured, optimized, and recognized.
Through effective relationship management capabilities as defined by BRM Institute, the BRM contributes to the business partner leadership team by actively partnering with business peers to determine strategic direction. BRMs work to identify ways in which the BRM function can support and advance business objectives.
Additionally, BRMs shape business demand into supply by 1) partnering with appropriate resources to facilitate the creation of idea documents, business cases, and value plans; 2) ensuring value optimization and communication; and 3) enabling continuous improvement in all areas and people around them.
An individual fulfilling the BRM role should have the competencies required to advance the BRM capability, which is everything it takes, both visible and behind the scenes, to nurture relationships, creating a limitless supply of energy necessary to evolve culture, build partnerships, drive value, and satisfy purpose.
Ideal candidates for the BRM role will innately be self-actualized, relationship-centered, playful, fearless, and purposeful. Successful BRMs evolve culture, build partnerships, and drive value to satisfy and elevate an organization’s purpose by:
- Partnering with leaders both inside and outside the organization to collaborate and ensure meaningful results from strategic initiatives.
- Optimizing organizational factors to amplify fit-for-purpose impact.
- Proactively sensing and anticipating changes affecting strategy in the environmental landscape.
- Driving and ensuring results across the organization based on the triple bottom line of people, purpose, and planet.
- Living up to the business relationship manager code of ethics daily.
Key Responsibilities
Evolve Culture
- Advance the BRM capability beyond just the role and function, sharing ownership with the full BRM community of practice for continual improvement.
- Champion a culture of shared ownership and constant organizational evolution.
- Elevate the importance of language across the organization as a crucial element to effective communication.
- Create leaders throughout the organization (e.g., leadership-as-a-practice)
- Coach organization leaders to articulate their vision and requirements to drive the organizational value (e.g., people, purpose, and planet).
Build Partnerships
- Own the strategic relationship between the BRM function and partners to stimulate, surface, and shape demand.
- Develop deep domain knowledge of each partner’s organizational functions.
- Build cross-functional relationships for the convergence of value.
- Establish value management as a strategic organizational capability.
- Educate partners on the BRM mindset (e.g., powerful communications, approaches, roles, and capabilities).
- Establish a communication methodology for effective and efficient organizational communication.
- Partner with individuals, teams, and organizations to drive value and meaningful results.
Drive Value
- Continually improve the value framework to drive organizational awareness and education.
- Partner with leaders to identify opportunities to evaluate, sequence, and shape initiatives for strategic value.
- Focus on value over solutions. Emphasize value when developing ideas, evaluating risk, and evolving needs.
- Innovate using knowledge and awareness of industry trends to identify new opportunities.
- Elaborate on the strategic plans for partners to communicate their strategic capabilities.
- Monitor initiative progress to ensure expectations are aligned with results and, ultimately, value.
- Ensure that allies in strategic purpose are knowledgeable about objectives.
- Engage as a project/program major partner including evaluating development efforts and progress against strategic plans and value creation objectives.
- Collaborate with leaders across the organization and share ownership of maturing the BRM’s function.
- Communicate partner value by quantifying impacts and clearly articulating value realized.
Satisfy Purpose
- Advocate as a champion of change for each partner’s strategic plans.
- Facilitate goal-setting by communicating a shared purpose, specifically including shared value, beliefs, and behaviors.
- Validate the organizational purpose supporting the desired results. This can be achieved through business case development, financial awareness, managing expectations, the identification of opportunities to grow value, or a combination of these.
- Understand how purpose drives organizational decisions.
- Encourage leaders to understand the organization’s impact on society, the planet, and its longevity and purpose in the world.
- Align each initiative to the organizational strategy to validate expected results.
- Strategize with partners to develop future roadmaps and explore new opportunities, converging organization-wide strategic direction into one set of objectives.
Knowledge and Skill Requirements
What You Should Have
- Business Relationship Management Professional (BRMP®)
- Certified Business Relationship Manager (CBRM®) with Certificates of Experience preferred
- Master of Business Relationship Management (MBRM®) preferred
- 10+ years of relevant functional experience
- 5+ years of experience championing organizational change, e.g., leading initiatives, products, services, or interactions
What Skills You’ll Need
Evolve Culture
- Ability to fluctuate between the four mindsets of an explorer, investor, cultivator, and connector
- Exceptional ability to lead now-to-new change using positive and collaborative methods
- Effective leadership-as-practice skills
Build Partnerships
- Strong communication skills in writing, speaking, and presenting
- Ability to listen, build rapport, and develop credibility as a strategic partner
- Exude energy, focus, assertiveness, and diplomacy
- Master of relationship building and team collaboration
- Know when to push an agenda and when to let a situation quietly develop, rest, or advance
- Skilled and experienced at conflict negotiation and problem solving
- Ability to set expectations with partners and achieve alignment and agreement
- Ability to break down silos both inside and outside an organization
- Ability to shift opinions using influence over positional power
- Experience dealing with difficult customers
- Ability to share ownership and drive results as a team
- Strong humility, listening, creativity, and negotiation skills
Drive Value
- Ability to focus on purpose, value, and results, rather than solutions
- Ability to connect strategy to execution
- Experience assessing and articulating risk tolerances
- Ability to identify gaps and areas that require improvements
Satisfy Purpose
- Strategic thinking
- Domain expertise in function and terminology
- Innate ability to identify the root cause of issues or problems
- Ability to creatively deliver something of value, rather than focusing simply on internal products (outside-in focus)