HRM Assignment: Practitioner Roles Towards Skill Portfolio Development

Question

Task:The Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) is the national association representing human resource and people management professionals. AHRI have over 20,000 members throughout the world and provide education and training services in HR and people management and business skills. AHRI also organises world-class conferences which bring HR practitioners together and holds seminars and networking opportunities all over Australia. AHRI also sets standards through accreditation of HR qualifications at universities across Australia (including LaTrobe’s HR degree), conducts research into people management practices, and assists governments in the development of policy and legislation that affects people at work.

AHRI have released a ‘Model of Excellence’, which explains the capabilities and behaviours of an ‘excellent HR manager’. This model provides a conceptual basis for the accreditation of HR practitioners and training offered by AHRI and universities. The model identifies 7 capabilities that are essential for HR practitioners (see https://www.ahri.com.au/about-us/model-of-excellence). These capabilities are being:

• Business driven;
• A strategic architect;
• An expert practitioner;
• An ethical and credible activist;
• A workforce and workplace designer;
• A cultural and change leader; and
• A stakeholder mentor and coach.

In this assignment, you are to select three (3) of these capabilities and address the following (in your own words, with referencing as required):

• What does this capability entail?
• Why would it be important for a Human Resource Manager to have this capability?
• Assume you are applying for a graduate HR position, and demonstrating this capability is one of the key selection criteria. What evidence could you provide to demonstrate you possess this capability? Draw upon your own experiences, whether it be your work, university life, home life, volunteering or sporting experiences.

For further information on the AHRI Model of Excellence, see:
AHRI Model of Excellence
Human Resource Competency Study

Ulrich, D., Brockbank, W., Yeung, A. K. and Lake, D. G. (1995), Human resource competencies: An empirical assessment. Human Resource Management, 34: 473–495. doi:10.1002/hrm.3930340402

Please discuss each capability separately, under its own subheading. All reference material must be appropriately cited in the text of yourassignment. Include a separate reference section that includes the full citation information. Follow the style guidelines for the Academy ofManagement Journal. Note that Wikipedia and similar websites are NOT acceptable sources for this assignment. Your Report must be typed and have standard margins on all sides. Double-spacing is preferred.

Answer

1 Requirement of capabilities
HR practitioners of any organizations play an important role in promoting business and guide management team through the right management strategy that is helpful to manage organizational teams. However, HR practitioner must not lose their focus from building capabilities capacity for organisation. HR practitioners help business organisations to develop competitive advantages, which secure a unique position for the organisation within the industry or market. Therefore, understanding the business goals, strategies and demands are extremely significant for HR practitioners. In order to understand the business need HR practitioners must have at least three capabilities and those are Business-driven, an expert practitioner, and a cultural and changes leader.

HR practitioner with the capability of 'business-driven ' will entail additional profitability for the business while capability likes ' an expert practitioner ' will help to define organization goals, HR strategies, and business objectives. HR capabilities of ' a cultural and change leader' will entail organizational harmony in the cross-cultural environment.

2 Analysing the importance of mentioned capabilities for Human Resources Manager
The success of any organization depends on how effective the HR practitioners are in the organization. HR practitioners must have minimum three essential skills, which have been discussed in the previous section. It is equally important to understand why these capabilities are important for Human Resource Manager.

According to Ulrich Broc, kbank, Yeung & Lake (1995) Human Resource Managers plays the most significant role during strategy development of the organization. Further, in order to assure the fact that those organization strategies are adopted in the most appropriate manner, HR recruit new talent for the organization. Therefore, from the development of strategy until its execution in each step, the Human Resource managers have active participation.

Being business driven is one of the essential capabilities, which Human Resource Manager Must has. It suggests Human Resource manager should have a better understanding of the organization and its stakeholders need and are capable of maintaining the positive relationship between an organization and its stakeholders. A human resource manager is business driven; they will not concentrate on the need for the organizational strategy and demand of stakeholders. According to Bailey, Mankin, Kelliher & Garavan (2018) the basic difference between successful and unsuccessful organization is that, in a successful organization, Human Resource Managers are Business-driven while Human Resource Manager of an unsuccessful organization is only concentrated about their basic role of employee recruitment. Precisely, a business-driven capability of Human Resource Managers is important for support the existing business environment of any organization.

Any Human Resource Manager deals with a complex working environment within an organization and requires the skills of other experts to complete any task. Developing the capability of an expert practitioner helps Human Resource Manager to complete a work individually. Having the capabilities of an expert practitioner would allow Human Resource Manager to support employee who is dealing with the complex project. According to Brewster (2017) experts are meant to support employee during the complex task and ensure any team completes their task on time. Developing or defining organizational goal is also done by Human Resource Manager who is an expert practitioner.

Human Resource Managers support the organization by developing business management skills of employees through organizational training. Further, providing specialist support to employees is another significant part of the role played by HR. Therefore, developing the skill as an expert practitioner will help Human Resource Manager to assist the organizations to achieve their business goal.

In the age of globalization, Human Resource Managers are facing various challenges as they are dealing with more number of people with a different cultural background. Therefore, managing organizational harmony without affecting the production is quite a challenge for HR managers. Further, changing trends in management are adding more complexities to it. Therefore, the HR manager must be able to develop their capacity as a leader who can deal with organizational change and manage cross-cultural employees. This is important for HR managers who are willing to help their organization to sustain in a market with continuous growth.

3 Application of those capabilities in practical life
Employers always look for HR who is capable to assist with the business growth. Therefore, having some capabilities (already discussed in the previous section) which are more performance oriented always put an HR applicant on the priority list. I have tried to demonstrate in this section how I have developed these three capabilities during my work experience with my previous employer.

I started my career as an HR manager at a small start-up company. That company has an excellent product line with great scope in the market, however, some minor challenges like internal conflicts among employees, reluctances to bring changes were creating barriers for those growths. As soon as I joined the organization, I realized that the organization does not share a positive relationship with its internal and external stakeholders, which is causing major issues within an organization. Henceforth, the first strategy, which I have adopted, is to build a better relationship between the organization and stakeholders. During the development of new strategy, I ensured the engagement of representative from both, management and employees to ensure all remain aware of the organizational changes.

Development of my business strategy started with defining the organizational goal and objectives. According to Marchington, Wilkinson, Donnelly & Kynighou (2016) in order to achieve maximum result employees must know the goal and objectives of the organization. My basic idea was to keep the employee aligned with the organizational objectives. However, I need to ensure that I understand the need of the employees as well. In the organisation, there were employees from a different cultural background and certainly, in many cases, they do not agree with each other. Therefore, I had to develop some HR policies which are more result oriented and do not involve any particular cultural background. I need to ensure every time I assist the business organisation whenever any expert advice was needed. Since the size of that organisation was very small so developing my skill as an expert partitioner has helped me to perform better within the organisation. During this time, I realized how much it is important to develop certain behaviour and capabilities, which are essential to bring success to the organisation and success as an HR manager.

References
Bailey, C., Mankin, D., Kelliher, C., & Garavan, T. (2018). Strategic human resource management. Oxford University Press.

Brewster, C. (2017). The integration of human resource management and corporate strategy. In Policy and practice in European human resource management (pp. 22-35). Routledge.

Marchington, M., Wilkinson, A., Donnelly, R., & Kynighou, A. (2016). Human resource management at work. Kogan Page Publishers.

Ulrich, D., Brockbank, W., Yeung, A. K., & Lake, D. G. (1995). Human resource competencies: An empirical assessment. Human resource management, 34(4), 473-495.