This course is for senior members of support functions – Finance, Human Resources (HR) and Information Technology (IT), as well as Quality, Communications, and Legal – who have taken the Systems-Level Thinking and Action course, The Key to Great Corporate Leadership.
In the systems-level cour.se, participants learned that optimizing sustainable organizational effectiveness and value creation requires support functions to provide line managers with a strategic framework designed for this purpose. Providing this framework is the essence of support functional leaders serving as strategic business partners.
The key to mastering the strategic business partner role is understanding and managing the relationship between function and practice. Anyone who manages a budget is a finance manager. Anyone who manages people is an HR manager. And anyone who manages data and information technology is an IT manager. The purpose of support functions is to equip line managers to achieve excellence at finance, HR, and IT practice in ways that optimize firm-level performance. In this context, the goal of strategic business partners is to collaborate with CEOs and boards as organizational architects rather than merely have a “seat at the table.”
The need for this course is steadily increasing due to ongoing pressure from institutional investors on corporate leaders to improve the quality of their strategic management practices and achieve the standard of “doing well by doing good.”
Course outcomes include:
- Optimized sustainable organizational effectiveness and value creation
- High-performance organizations where everyone has the same job: increase long-term shareholder and stakeholder value, aka “doing well by doing good”
- All projects, processes, and resources earning more than they cost and enabling a winning strategy
- Effective collaboration between the board and management in the strategic management of the firm
- Dignification of people’s work and lives, producing inspiration, motivation, and extraordinary effort
Learning Objectives
- Discover how to become a strategic asset and sustainable competitive advantage to the firm
- Discover how to be the driving force behind optimized organizational effectiveness and value creation
- Recognize how to enable line managers to practice excellence in all support functional disciplines
- Recognize how to enable corporate leaders to function as organizational architects
- Explore how to master human, financial, and data capital allocation and management
- Explore how to leverage quality as the foundation of value creation
- Explore how to drive well-planned change
- Explore how to produce the ability for corporate leaders to have high-quality and frequent communications with institutional investors, individual shareholders, and other stakeholders
- Recognize how to engage in action-based conversations producing extraordinary results
Prerequisites
No advanced preparation or prerequisites are required for this course.