Value Creation and Profitability
In this course, you will explore a variety of real-world examples and powerful frameworks to supercharge your strategy and profitability. You will analyze how your organization currently creates value and strategize how best to create new value for your targeted customers, beyond what rivals offer. You will then develop your organizational plan, identifying which resources and partners are essential for success, while also identifying which key resources you should own to help sustain long-run profitability. You will perform an in-depth competitive analysis of threats to the profitability of a firm, allowing you both to identify threats in your current market and assess the prospects for profitability in other markets which you might enter. You will develop tactics to mitigate each of these threats to profitability, while also recognizing the power and potential of working towards win-win situations with complementors.
Change, Disruption and Growth
In this course, you will acquire the tools you need to evaluate change, disruption, and uncertainty in your industry. You will implement key frameworks designed to help you strategize in changing and uncertain environments. The skills you hone in this course will prepare you to succeed in dynamic market environments and think clearly about the future. Strategies for change risk failing if the organization as a whole is not willing or prepared to implement them. To pave the way for truly successful implementation of the strategies you devise, you will identify and mitigate critical internal challenges and resistance to change, thereby enabling your organization to eliminate roadblocks to growth.
Understanding Financial Statements
Every organization’s finance function keeps detailed records of the daily transactions involved in the running the organization. Periodically, they create reports that allow management, stakeholders and regulating authorities to have insight into the financial health of the organization. As a manager, you need to understand both the metrics that are reported in income statement, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and how they relate to each other. You also need to understand how comparing numbers across your company, the industry, and from year to year, can help you assess the overall financial performance of the firm. The in-depth review of sample case studies in this course will provide you with the tools you need to examine your own property's reports. As you make budgeting and investment decisions, your knowledge of how vital financial markers indicate relative health in the organization will help drive initiatives to meet your company's financial goals.
Aligning HR Strategy with Organizational Strategy
A thorough understanding of your organization's value creation model and ability to develop competencies through processes, technology, and people are essential to ensuring that the HR organization is aligned vertically and horizontally to produce superior results. With this understanding, HR will be able to articulate how it can improve processes, people and customer outcomes, and financial results. This course develops the skills needed to assess how organizations create value and to align the HR function to execute the organization's strategy. Participants analyze the Balanced Scorecard approach as a means of vertically aligning the HR system with organizational objectives. They learn how to create a vertical-alignment strategy and use it to improve HR decision-making, people outcomes, processes, customer outcomes, and financial results. And they learn the skills required to plan and assess horizontal alignment of HR systems and practices. Finally, the course discusses best practices related to workforce partitioning, performance variability, value identification, and employee impact.
Strategic Talent Analytics
More than ever, HR leaders are expected to be proficient in the use of HR data and analytics. However, figuring out where to start with analytics, how to evaluate and critique HR data, and how to best communicate and translate results to the broader organization remain key challenges. This course focuses on building analytical acumen and taking a strategic view of talent analytics. Using a framework presented in this course, you will examine outcomes and drivers throughout an organization to assess strategic needs. As you complete activities throughout the course, you will also fine tune your evaluative, presentation, and communication skills using critical thinking coupled with analytical best practices.
Residential Session #1 - Strategic Human Resource Management
The primary goal of this course is to help HR professionals better understand their business strategy, and to explore the ways that the management of human capital can help the company achieve its strategic objectives. The course provides a review of business strategy and HR strategy as well as how to analyze linkages among the two. In addition, it examines metrics that can be used to evaluate the alignment and effectiveness of HR systems. Finally, the course provides students with the insights and tools they need to work successfully as human resource management consultants, both as HR managers operating within a firm to improve organizational effectiveness and as external consultants providing project support to an internal HR organization.
Residential Session #1 - Labor Relations Strategy and High-Performance Work Systems
This course is designed to introduce students to the development of a labor relations strategy at both national and workplace levels, with a particular focus on the restructuring of work. You will examine what an IR system is and how it functions, explore the basic considerations in developing labor relations strategy, and develop a framework to deal with typical IR issues, strikes, conflict resolution and re-structure.
Leading Strategic Change Initiatives
If you're in charge of developing and leading strategic organizational change, there are certain tools and concepts you must be familiar with. In this course, the emphasis is on cultivating your ability to assess the need for change. By determining why your organization or team needs change, you'll be able to better answer questions like: What should you change and how should the change be handled? You will explore the political and complex process of introducing change, which includes motivating others, dealing with resistance and the emotional elements of change, and finally, extending change over time and sustaining it. The course is designed to give you practice so you can initiate and carry out a change effort.
Navigating Power Relationships
Leaders at every level need to be able to execute on their ideas. In virtually every case, this means that leaders need to be able to persuade others to join in this execution. In order to do so, understanding how to create and utilize power in an organization is critical. In this course, students will focus on their personal relationship with power as well as how power works in their organization and social network.
Getting Results Through Talent Management
Organizations today face a multitude of challenges when it comes to effectively managing their talent. In mature markets, demographic trends are forcing companies to accelerate their efforts to build a pipeline of future leaders. In emerging markets, companies must develop talent strategies that are both nimble and effective at engaging and retaining key human capital. To achieve these goals, companies need an integrated, systematic approach to attracting, developing, engaging, and retaining critical talent. Cornell University faculty offer a learning experience that challenges students to dig deeper into understanding their organization's key talent management challenges and uncovers solutions that can be used to overcome these challenges. This course adopts a systems view of talent management in order to demonstrate that various talent practices and processes need to be aligned to create effective solutions. It also examines current trends and cutting-edge thinking in the talent management field.
Using Design Thinking in Human Resources
This course brings the time proven benefits of design thinking to the field of employment. You will identify factors affecting the workplace and the personal experience of employees. You will then use a six-step approach to analyze employee issues and develop appropriate solutions. The goal is to enhance employees' workplace experience and improve the ability of an organization to attract and retain a productive workforce.
Human Resources Leadership
Effective HR leadership goes beyond managing all the tasks and responsibilities carried out by the HR function. It also requires the critical soft skills needed from any leader—courage, judgment, influence, political agility, effective communication—all of these applied to the unique position that HR occupies in an organization. This course will teach you to assess competencies for great HR leaders. You'll learn how to provide value to leaders at all levels by supporting and advising them as they execute their strategy. Discover new effective coaching techniques and learn how to become a leader in the unique position that the HR function occupies.
Agile Project Management Approaches
In traditional project management, we tend to make assumptions: the customer knows precisely what they want, or the team's workflow and tasks will go according to plan and in sequence. Practically speaking, this is rarely the case. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what they need until they see an early iteration of your team's work and can provide feedback. Because of this, work is usually done incrementally. We must build flexibility, even agility, into the model in order to succeed.
Coaching Skills for Leaders
Coaching is about building relationships—and it's essential in order for your organization to move forward together to achieve better results. Being an effective coach requires skills that can be practiced and mastered, including listening, building credibility and trust, and showing empathy. In this course, Cornell University's Dr. Samuel Bacharach, will help you distinguish between coaching and traditional supervision. You will identify the five functions of coaching and the rules for having coaching conversations. Finally, you will examine some of the classic coaching mistakes that people often make and identify how you can avoid repeating those mistakes yourself.
Strategic Engagement
Employee engagement can be broadly defined as employees consistently acting in the best interests of the organization. Linked to critical outcomes including absenteeism, turnover, customer satisfaction, operational performance, and financial performance, employee engagement is a vital driver of an organization’s bottom-line performance. This course focuses not only on why employee engagement is important and valuable, but also on how to foster and measure employee engagement and link it to key organizational metrics and outcomes. It examines the business case to pursue employee engagement as a strategic initiative and evolve beyond the transactional approach of traditional employee relations to a strategic approach focusing on relationship-oriented and emotional measurements of employee commitment. It also develops the competencies necessary to build employee engagement in your organization, the risks involved, and the implications for the HR professional in adopting this approach.
Designing Effective Teams
We've all experienced more or less effective teams and may be aware of the avalanche of suggestions to improve them. But how can you consistently run teams effectively when you are overwhelmed by the number of possible actions to take? This course will focus your attention on the fundamental challenges of teams and give you the tools to ensure that the simple but critical things are done right.
In addition to optimizing the team from within, you will lean that how a team is structured from the start greatly impacts its performance. In other words, if a team is not built correctly, there's a limit on how much you as a leader can optimize its effectiveness. This course will give you the levers to build teams correctly from the start.
A series of tools and activities will help you understand the fundamental challenges of every team. Then you'll learn a set of simple but comprehensive actions organized in checklists that will allow you to both design and run any team for maximum performance.
Total Rewards Compensation
This course equips HR professionals with the tools and insights they need to apply a total-rewards view to compensation that aligns with their organization's strategic goals and operational realities. This includes the Compensation Calculator, created by the Dean of the ILR School, Kevin Hallock, offering a method of job comparison that incorporates the total rewards view.
Residential Session #2 – Managing and Developing Talent
This course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive view of how the HR system can be used to manage and develop talent. Consideration is given to both theories and practical applications involved in effectively managing and developing human capital. Topics covered include employment branding, diversity and inclusion, employee engagement and retention, identifying and developing high potential talent, executive compensation, and executive assessment and coaching. Emphasis is placed on exploring these issues from both strategic and tactical levels to increase organizational effectiveness.
Residential Session #2 – Organizational Behavior: Managing Change
This course addresses key issues for general management and organizational change efforts including: creating effective formal structures; managing organizational culture; and dealing with common problems of intergroup interaction. Its primary aims are to help students better understand aspects of organizations that are important drivers of individual and group behavior, and develop their ability to diagnose and manage common problems. In the first part, we consider the trade-offs associated with different structural configurations, and the relationship between formal structure and organizational culture. We discuss strategies managers can use to influence culture, and when different strategies are most likely to be effective. In the second part, we examine factors that affect how well subunits function, including sources of intergroup conflict, common biases in group decisions, and arrangements that affect individual and group-level creativity.
Strategic Decision Making
The ability to make effective and timely decisions is an essential skill for successful executives. Mastery of this skill influences all aspects of day-to-day operations as well as strategic planning. In this course, you will hone your decision-making skills by following a methodology based on tested actions and sound organizational approaches. You will leave this course better equipped to confidently tackle any decision large or small, and you'll do so in a way that creates the optimal conditions for success.
Negotiation Skills
Being able to negotiate is a practical, everyday skill that is critical for anyone working within an organization. The good news is it's a skill you can practice and master. Negotiation skills are ones you can use in any context and, once you master the behaviors of effective negotiation, you will use all the time. In this course, you will develop an awareness that every conversation is a negotiation, and you will identify the critical components of effective negotiation.
Diversity and Inclusion in Practice
The management of diversity and inclusion has evolved from "counting the numbers" to "making the numbers count." Organizations that no longer look at inclusion as having a good mix of diverse people, but as a way to fully engage employees, partners and customers have an opportunity to compete globally. Diversity and inclusion must be embedded in an organizational culture to make a positive impact on performance.
This course differentiates diversity from inclusion and how organizations often miss the real opportunity. Students assess three levels of inclusion and identify evidence that can be used for each level to assess presence and effectiveness. HR executives and leaders share their perspective on diversity and inclusion and how they made the shift to inclusion at organizational, managerial and work group levels.
Diversity and Cross-Cultural Teams
Virtual teams are often also multicultural teams, which brings opportunities but also challenges that can easily derail teams. You will identify those opportunities and challenges and explore structural strategies for managing cultural issues. You will also examine recommended best practices for improving a team's cultural intelligence. A heightened cultural understanding will give team members and leaders the opportunity to fully capitalize on your team's opportunities.
Residential Session #3 – HR Leadership
Effective HR leadership goes beyond managing all the tasks and responsibilities carried out by the HR function. It also requires the critical soft skills needed from any leader—courage, judgment, influence, political agility, effective communication—all of these applied to the unique position that HR occupies in an organization. This course will teach you to assess competencies for great HR leaders. You'll learn how to provide value to leaders at all levels by supporting and advising them as they execute their strategy. Discover new effective coaching techniques and learn how to become a leader in the unique position that the HR function occupies.
Residential Session #3 – Global and Comparative Employment Relations
This course provides an understanding of global and cross-national variation in employment relations institutional features, how these features are changing or transforming as a result of globalization and economic integration, and these changes inform the development of global labor relations strategies for corporations. The course will also focus on evolving new forms of global private voluntary regulation that have become an important element of the global HR function. Finally, the course will provide students with an in-depth political, historical, and economic analysis of China and India and examine associated implications for employment relations.
Residential Session #3 – Negotiations
This course provides an understanding of basic principles of negotiation theory and their application to the practice of negotiating. Students will learn the different sub-processes involved in negotiations, apply principles of game theory to negotiations, examine the roles of power and tactics in negotiations, and learn interest-based approaches to negotiating. Finally, the course will examine cross-cultural issues in negotiations.