The Goals of Every People Manager

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From the course by University of Minnesota

Human Resources Management Capstone: HR for People Managers

81 ratings

University of Minnesota

Human Resources Management Capstone: HR for People Managers

81 ratings

Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Human Resource Management: HR for People Managers

This specialization provides a robust introduction to the key principles, policies, and practices of human resource management, with a focus on understanding managerial choices and constraints, acquiring and onboarding talent, managing employee performance, and rewarding employees. The capstone project provides learners with the opportunity to apply these key principles and practices to a real-world workplace (including a learner's own workplace if desired). Specifically, the capstone project will involve identifying the key human resources challenges for a workplace--including the most pressing motivational, selection, performance evaluation, and reward issues. And for each of these areas, learners will devise a multi-step action plan for addressing the challenges identified.

From the lesson

Milestone 1: Identifying the Internal and External Context

The first major milestone in the capstone project is identifying the internal and external needs, pressures, and constraints. In this module, you will be prompted to think about the major elements of the internal and external context and will create a draft description of these elements to share with other learners. You will also review others' work to provide guidance and to help reflect upon their own context.

External Influences on HR Strategies6:58

The Importance of Organizational Strategy for HR Strategy6:04

Why Worry about Why Employees Work?2:46

The Many Meanings of Work4:40

Work is Complex, So Managing is Complex9:42

The Goals of Every People Manager4:10

You Can't Always Do What You Want7:10

Meet the Instructors

John W. Budd
Professor and Director
Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies
Larry Bourgerie
Senior Lecturer
Carlson School of Management, Department of Work and Organizations
Amy Simon
Senior Lecturer
Department of Work and Organizations
Alan Benson
Assistant Professor
Carlson School of Management, Department of Work and Organizations

Welcome back.

We've spent the last two modules focused primarily on employees.

But what about you?

What are your goals as a people manager?

To think about this, let's go back to The People Manager Value Proposition, and

let's first focus on this part of the equation.

So who do you need to do here?

You need to think about what makes your organization make money.

Or if you're in a private sector or nonprofit organization,

what are the things that your organization is trying to accomplish.

How does it serve stakeholders, the public or some kind of clientele?

And then,

what does your work group need to do to accomplish these organizational goals?

Remember it's ultimately people in the organization,

your people in the organization who are going to determine whether

the organization is succesful or

not by being able to accomplish the things that it needs to accomplish.

And then you as a manager, you need to device a strategy for

deploying workers to accomplish the tasks that will ultimately determine whether or

not the organizational goals are met.

Going back to the People Manager Value Proposition, we have this right side of

the diagram, three very key tasks that any people manager has to do successfully.

And each of these will be the subject of a follow-up course to this initial

first course in our HRM specialization.

And these are tools that you can use to implement

the successes of your work group.

So in this part of the People Manager Value Proposition, what do you need to do?

You need to determine what HR professionals call KSAs, the knowledge,

skills, and abilities required of your team.

You need to go out and hire people that have these KSAs, and/or help develop

your staff to give them the KSAs that they need to be successful in your work group.

You need to set appropriate performance objectives for all of your employees.

Help them achieve these objectives.

Help them understand what objectives they're meeting, what objectives they're

falling short on, and how they can do better to meet these objectives.

And then you need to recognise and reward good performance.

But there's also things that you should not do when pursuing these goals.

You should not do everybody else's job.

You're probably good at everybody else's job.

That's why you've been promoted to a managerial level.

But it's no longer your job to do everybody else's job.

Let them do their job.

Don't be a micro-manager.

Don't assume that you know best.

You probably have very good ideas.

Share that with your team.

But don't cross the line and become a micro-manager.

Let other employees develop and

ultimately become as good as you are at those underlying tasks.

Now you might find the manager parts of your job stressful.

I know I find the manager parts of my job stressful, and I'd like to ignore them.

But that's a mistake for any manager to make.

You probably enjoy doing the marketing, or the IT, or

the engineering tasks of your job that you're so

good at, and that caused you to be promoted to level that you're at today.

But you're now a manager.

Don't ignore the manager parts of your job.

Also, don't take all the credit.

You're trying to build a strong cohesive team.

Spread the credit around and

make sure that people are doing things that deserve credit.

If you look around at your team and

nobody deserves any credit, look in the mirror and decide what's going wrong.

It's your job to help fix it.

And in doing all this, don't overlook the importance of humility, civility and

integrity.

Now remember, as you do all of these goals, you're not in a vacuum.

There's things out there, there's organizational norms.

There's organizational culture.

Maybe your employees are unionized,

that's another part of the environment you need to deal with.

There's laws, there's other types of things outside the organization as well.

So you have all these important goals.

And as you're pursuing these goals, don't pretend that you're in a vacuum.

Don't assume that you're in a vacuum.

There's lots of other factors in this environment.

You're part of a complex system, a number of constraints.

We're going to spend the rest of this module focusing on these constraints.

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