Effective managers need a good relationship with HR. But HR may be the hardest staff organization to have a good relationship with, because their incentives are often misaligned with everyday managers. Even if you have an "HR Business Partner," they work for someone else, and probably support other managers. This isn't inherently bad, but a smart manager knows to work with them, while understanding the challenges.We've all heard the term Human Resources Business Partner, Or HR Business Partner, or even HRBP. This is really just marketing, to make HR more approachable and managers more receptive to working with them. It's also misleading in two ways: it implies they're you're equal when they're not, and it implies that their goals are aligned with yours, when they're often not.Full disclosure, Manager Tools has a bit of a checkered relationship with HR. In our first years - this cast was recorded in our 20th year - we often said, "We hate HR." That's because of some of the topics covered in this guidance. But we realized pretty soon that some of our listeners took our comments to mean that they should hate HR. We should have expected that, and we didn't. We regretted that stance enough that when we put out guidance about mistakes we had made, on our 10th or 15th anniversary, we included it there.We now no longer say, "We hate HR," because truly we don't, and we don't want you to either. We now say, "We hate bad HR," because of course we don't like any part of an organization that doesn't do its job well. But we also say, "There are plenty of GREAT HR folks out there, and we want you to help them be great."This guidance will help you craft a better relationship with your HR organization.