Ballentine Partners

Brie Elliott

Empathy and strong business judgment. These are the two fundamentals that define Brie Elliott's approach to HR leadership. As Principal and Head of HR at Ballentine Partners, Elliott works to build an environment where people feel supported and respected, while also being clear about the firm’s expectations.

"You have to understand what people need and what the organization is trying to accomplish. As an HR leader, your job is to connect those dots, to bring those two pieces together," says Elliott.

Elliott has spent more than two decades in HR, including more than a decade at Ballentine Partners. When she joined in 2012, Elliott’s role was primarily focused on building the HR, facilities and administrative infrastructure needed to support the firm’s growth. As the organization expanded, her role evolved into a broader leadership position spanning business strategy, leadership development, culture and organizational decision-making. Over that time, she has helped shape the people practices, leadership structures and culture needed to support the firm’s growth while preserving what makes Ballentine Partners distinctive.

Making People Part of Every Decision

Being part of strategic planning lets Elliott bring people into decisions about the firm's future. She asks what the partnership wants to preserve as it grows, along with questions that might otherwise go unasked. Who gets visibility or a stretch assignment? Whose voice is heard, and whose is missing? Do employees still have access to leadership? She examines whether processes unintentionally create barriers. In a collaborative business, she sees different experiences, expertise and ways of thinking as key to stronger client outcomes.

“You have to understand what people need and what the organization is trying to accomplish. As an HR leader, your job is to connect those dots, to bring those two pieces together.”

Fairness becomes more nuanced when individual circumstances are involved. Someone dealing with illness or family responsibilities may need additional support. Ballentine Partners keeps its policies broad enough to allow flexibility, and Elliott works with managers to understand what can reasonably be offered while considering the employee’s needs, consistency across the organization and any compliance implications. That makes trust essential. When managers involve Elliott early, they can consider those implications together and find an approach that supports the individual while remaining fair and sustainable for the organization.

Her HR leadership also extends beyond Ballentine Partners itself. Elliott often advises the firm’s clients — including families, family businesses and family offices — on hiring, compensation and benefits, succession planning, organizational structure and sensitive employment matters. The work can become intensely personal when professional relationships overlap with family dynamics, confidentiality and trust. She brings structure and objectivity, sometimes simply by seeking to ask the right questions. That exposure to different organizational models sharpens the perspective she brings back to her own firm. That broader perspective has increasingly positioned Elliott not simply as the firm’s HR leader, but as a business leader who brings a people lens to decisions across the organization.

Preparing People for a Changing Workplace

One of the workforce shifts Elliott is actively helping Ballentine Partners prepare for is AI. Through her Chief HR Officer program at Wharton, where she explored human-centered AI, Elliott became increasingly focused on what the technology could mean for people, jobs and organizations. She is looking at how jobs and skills may change, what employees will need to learn and how expectations may evolve. These are not just department specific discussions, they now involve HR, IT and compliance at Ballentine Partners.

Elliott sees AI taking some of the less efficient, repetitive, and administrative work off people’s plates, leaving more time for judgment, relationships and problem-solving. She is also thinking about younger professionals. If technology takes over some of the work that traditionally built technical skills for entry-level employees, organizations will need other ways to help people build those skills while developing the judgment and trust that become more important later in their careers.

For Elliott, AI is part of a bigger question about how much change people can absorb. Employees still have their regular jobs to do while learning new tools and adjusting to new expectations. Leaders need to think about the pace of change, how they communicate it and whether people can take on more without burning out.

The pace of change also makes it difficult to know what comes next. Elliott learns from peers, business leaders and industry experts, watches what is happening in the market and stays open to changing course. She encourages other HR professionals to understand the business, stay curious and be comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet.” In a workplace that is changing quickly, Elliott believes the role of HR isn’t to have every answer. It’s to stay close enough to the business and its people to ask the right questions, anticipate what’s coming and help the organization navigate change thoughtfully.