Linking Human Resources and Employee Management to Business Strategy

This two-day program demonstrates the relationship between business strategy – how businesses decide to compete – and the practices associated with managing employees. The overall goal of the program is to help firms understand how to create alignment between strategy and practices. While it clearly is the case that management practices should support the business strategy, it is less appreciated that management of people practices actually create the competencies that form the basis of effective strategy. Therefore, we should consider employee management practices broadly defined, including factors such as culture and individual competencies, when creating business strategy.

The pedagogical approach in this program involves case studies, illustrations, and working with the experiences of participants in their own companies. The end result is for the participants to understand the situation in their own companies and how to make progress with alignment issues. 

Key takeaways include:

1. Understanding what various business strategies require from employees and management practices
2. Seeing how choices of management practices create organizational competencies
3. Learning how alignment between practices/competencies and strategy sustains competitive advantages and how lack of alignment destroys competitiveness

The ideal audience would be high-potential managers who will be stepping into senior roles with responsibility for management practices; human resource executives interested in playing a strategic role in their organizations; executives involved in the strategy formation process who need to understand how competencies that drive competitiveness are created.