Building Industry Partners (BIP), the leading private equity firm in the building industry, has named Stuart Kliman a Partner and Head of BIP’s newly formed Center of Excellence (CoE) focused on human capital management. Kliman is a veteran strategic consulting firm leader and an expert in organizational change and individual capability building. Under Kliman’s direction, BIP’s CoE will bring relevant best practices, innovative thinking, and actionable advice to the firm’s portfolio companies, as well as initiate collaboration with like-minded industry leaders to drive progress across the U.S. building industry.
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“BIP is wholly committed to advancing our ‘people-first investing’ practices and utilizing the BIP Center of Excellence as a catalyst for long overdue prioritization of human capital management in the building industry,” said BIP Founder and Managing Partner, Matt Ogden. “We all know that people are our greatest asset. However, our collective ability to do things such as attract a larger and more diverse workforce, engage and develop that workforce, and align employee interests with those of the organization has lagged relative to other industries. We believe raising human capital management to a strategic pillar, instead of treating it as a cost center, is the foundation for long-term sustainability and progress in our industry. We’re on a mission to spread that belief as widely as possible and we’re thrilled to have Stu ― and his decades of leadership and expertise ― heading up this charge for BIP.”
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Kliman’s primary focus will be helping BIP’s portfolio companies and the industry-at-large create “people-first” cultures that reinforce the holistic well-being of employees and their families while at the same time deliver better business performance and bottom-line financial results. There are a number of human capital management practices that Kliman believes will be particularly impactful to the U.S. building industry, including:
1. Recruiting activities designed to grow the workforce in overall size and composition
2. Compensation models based on organizational performance
3. Job training, career advancement and mentoring and coaching opportunities
4. Ensuring day to day work activities are clearly connected to organizational purpose
5. Mental health support
6. Equity for all employees, not just owners/executive management
BIP believes that practices such as these combine to form a strong employee value proposition, a concept that is integral to Kliman’s and the CoE’s mission. Key attributes of a strong employee value proposition include financial security, career resilience, job satisfaction and engagement, growth/advancement, and overall well-being. At the same time, and perhaps less understood, a significant employee value proposition also benefits organizations by fostering an enterprise-wide culture of ownership and a growth-focused mindset. With collective interests that are better aligned, the organization is inherently poised to be more innovative and more productive, ultimately resulting in enhanced financial performance.
Prior to joining BIP, Kliman was a founder and partner for 25 years at Vantage Partners, a mid-sized consulting and training organization in Boston, MA. At Vantage, Kliman’s clients ranged from startups to Fortune 500 companies and represented a wide cross section of industries. In addition to helping steer Vantage’s strategic direction and sitting on its management committee, at various times Kliman oversaw several operational functions, including human resources and marketing, and directly drove revenue for the firm. Also while at Vantage, Kliman helped many clients successfully build Centers of Excellence to maximize their relationships with key external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and strategic partners. Kliman’s other areas of expertise include organizational design and transformation and human capital management.
Kliman’s long-standing interest in these areas began at the Harvard Negotiation Project, the think tank responsible for authoring Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, a seminal work on negotiation and collaboration. While there, he worked closely with two of the three co-authors of the book, among others, to translate those and other concepts into the workplace and the world at large. Their work focused specifically on the connection between individual/group/organizational alignment and collaboration and productivity, innovation, and effective strategic execution.
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