Business Strategy for HR Leaders

The traditional operational role of human resources leaders has seen a dramatic shift in the last decade. More and more organisations have identified HR as a key business unit that has significant implications for achieving corporate objectives. Senior HR executives are expected to create substantial contributions to the strategic decision-making process. As a result, they must first develop credibility and then demonstrate the required capabilities by having a firm grasp of the key concepts, models and language of business and strategy.

Business Strategy for HR Leaders provides senior HR executives with intensive training in strategy, which will enable them to participate equally in the boardroom and contribute to the decision-making processes in their organisations. This programme focuses on empowering HR leaders with the key strategic concepts used by CEOs and corporate leaders – and demonstrates how they can use these to develop their own HR agenda to complement their organisation’s global strategic initiatives.

How you benefit

• Enhance leadership capability by acquiring the knowledge of strategic concepts that will enable a more proactive role in shaping strategy within the organisation.
• Develop the confidence to nurture key partnerships and to influence decisions on short-term productivity and long-term business strategic agendas.
• Develop an HR strategy to address the demands of change management and integration, and performance measurements in line with strategy implementation.

Aside from the expertise of our INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science and Programme Director Philip Parker, each session will also showcase the expertise and research of our guest faculty speakers to further support and augment the key learnings in the programme and analyse HR-specific challenges from different angles.

Content Overview

Your organisation’s most valuable resource is its human capital. A more cohesive integration of HR and business strategy will thus create competitive advantage by aligning training, corporate structure, recruitment and other HR functions with strategic needs.

A knowledgeable HR executive working in partnership with the executive team can play a vital role in aligning the organisation’s human resources with its vision and corporate strategy. Business Strategy for HR Leaders equips senior HR executives with the key concepts, models and language of strategy so that they can contribute to the strategy-development processes of their organisations.

The programme is structured around five essential stages for strategic decision-making.

Defining objectives

The first stage focuses on the importance of setting the business objectives. Senior HR professionals must understand the factors affecting the business landscape. This requires a careful assessment of the organisation’s strategic objectives as well as those of its competitors.

Auditing the starting point

This stage allows HR leaders to have a deeper appreciation of the different business concepts – such as supply and demand value chain, market-share, product positioning and portfolio management – and how these define the competitive advantage within the industry ecosystem.

Determining economic viability

HR leaders will be exposed to strategic initiative frameworks that will evaluate the customers, the competition and the company – and will also identify appropriate performance models.

Developing strategic options

This stage focuses on generating methods to extract market value by leveraging the existing resources of the organisation and identifying growth opportunities externally. This stage also helps senior HR professionals to lead the conversation on human capital risk assessment.

Allocating resources

People issues lie at the heart of successful strategy implementation, which is ultimately about deploying talent to satisfy key functions based on market demand. Discussion of this competency allows us to link our strategy discussions explicitly back to the key responsibilities of HR leaders. This stage also tackles budgeting, implementation and return on investment.