Director, HR Business Partner

Ford • Dearborn, MI

4d • $141,700 - $268,300 • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford Motor Company is hiring a Director, HR Business Partner for its Go to Market Enterprise Technology Team, a global salaried professional organization of 3,200 people. The role sets people strategy for the portfolio and partners with leaders to ensure the organization, talent, and culture support business plans. The Director frames ambiguous problems, determines which are worth addressing, coaches leaders on execution, and establishes standards and resources that enable delivery. The position reports to the Executive HR Director and runs the portfolio’s operating rhythm while maintaining analytical rigor across the HR Business Partners who support it, including those outside the Director’s reporting line.

The Director serves as a trusted advisor and member of client leadership teams, translating business plans into workforce and organizational strategies. The role addresses organization design and restructuring, workforce costs and productivity, culture and employee experience, talent and succession, and leadership effectiveness. It also develops HR professionals and builds consistent problem-solving capability across the HRBP community.

The position requires onsite presence at the primary location and travel to other facilities. Work is primarily seated, with occasional lifting of no more than 10 pounds. Working conditions involve low to moderate noise associated with standard office equipment. Onsite work of up to three days per week may be required for candidates within commuting distance of a Ford hub location.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Organizational Development, Business, or a related discipline, or commensurate work experience.
• 10–12 years of progressive Human Resources experience.
• 3–5 years in a leadership or portfolio-level role.
• Demonstrated experience in organization design, change leadership, and senior-leader coaching.
• Breadth across HR disciplines, business units, and client environments, including professional, technical, commercial, manufacturing, or represented populations.
• Depth in a structured problem-solving or business system methodology such as A3, PDCA, Hoshin, lean, or equivalent, including coaching others in its use.
• Demonstrated record of improving senior business decisions and owning the results.
• Experience developing HR professionals.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States; employment eligibility will be verified at hire.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Human Resources, Organizational Development, another related discipline, or commensurate work experience.
• SPHR or SHRM-SCP certification.
• Multi-client, multi-site, or global experience.

Responsibilities

• Set an annual people operating plan and multi-year capability roadmap aligned with the business plan, growth assumptions, and cost structure.
• Serve as a full member of client leadership teams and contribute to business strategy, investment, and headcount decisions.
• Translate business strategy into workforce requirements, including capability gaps, build/buy/borrow choices, location and cost strategy, span and layer targets, and sequencing.
• Partner with Finance on workforce cost and productivity, including position control and the people case behind productivity commitments.
• Support organizational optimization and efficiency targets and eliminate non-value-add work.
• Coach senior leaders and teams on effectiveness, decision quality, and their impact on culture.
• Improve business decision quality, take ownership of outcomes, and revisit decisions, including those that were wrong.
• Address conflicts between a leader’s preference and business needs, protect long-term organizational health, and escalate enterprise-level risks.
• Build an environment where constructive challenge is expected and remove conditions that suppress it.
• Set culture and employee experience standards, decision rights, and leader capabilities to prevent issues from becoming cases.
• Drive psychological safety and employee voice through team People Action Plans, understanding employee concerns, and managing the say-do ratio.
• Promote consistent outcomes across client groups and deliberate precedent-setting.
• Build leader capability for performance conversations and consistent policy application.
• Use metric trends and root-cause analysis to diagnose leadership issues and sponsor prevention.
• Partner with the People Matters COE and Legal on designated and high-risk matters to ensure fair, timely, and defensible outcomes.
• Frame people problems in measurable current-versus-target terms, prioritize those that matter, and stop work that does not advance the business.
• Run the portfolio’s operating rhythm and management system, review bowlers visually, escalate abnormalities, and close countermeasures.
• Maintain analytical rigor by requiring evidence-based root-cause analysis and countermeasures.
• Build A3, PDCA, and bowler fluency across the HRBP community and require their use.
• Sponsor improvements to people processes, removing waste and defects at source with process owners and COEs.
• Diagnose organizational effectiveness and lead redesign, verifying that intended outcomes are achieved.
• Lead organization design and restructuring end to end, including option design, cost and risk modeling, leader alignment, sequencing, communications, and stabilization.
• Engage HRBPs in effectiveness analysis before structure decisions and develop repeatable standard work and playbooks.
• Use span, layer, redundancy, and system-alignment analysis to design structures aligned with strategy.
• Lead work redesign for automation and AI, including plans for displaced or newly created capabilities, reskilling, and redeployment.
• Drive succession depth and readiness for critical roles and treat talent as an enterprise asset.
• Maintain calibration integrity, challenge potential assessments, and ensure decisions withstand enterprise scrutiny.
• Lead senior selection, including role definition, success profiles, assessments, and slate decisions, and drive always-on recruiting for critical roles.
• Sponsor development for critical and high-potential talent, measuring movement executed rather than plans documented.
• Drive performance rigor by accelerating top talent, addressing inconsistent performance, and mitigating identified single points of failure.
• Lead, develop, and hold HR Business Partners to standards, building capability across the community regardless of reporting line.
• Assess team members against the competency model and identify what they must demonstrate to operate at the next level of ambiguity and scope.
• Coach problem solving by challenging root-cause logic, requiring verification, and ensuring countermeasures include checks.
• Build business and financial acumen through exposure to operating reviews, financial cycles, and business decisions beyond the people agenda.
• Maintain role boundaries in the HR operating model and escalate COE or Shared Services breakdowns rather than absorbing them.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, and subsidized backup childcare.
• Family-building benefits, including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement and fertility treatments.
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases.
• Tuition assistance.
• Established and active employee resource groups.
• Paid time off for individual and team community service.
• Paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director