Human Resources Diagnosis - Essay Example

21 July 2008 Human Resources Diagnosis The interview with Director of Human Resources Department in Richland Community College (Richland) vividly portrays effective HR practices and methods used by the department and its leader, Bill. The current state of practices shows that managerial and leadership tasks increase in complexity, and thus in difficulty. In Richland Community College, task complexity defines requisite conceptual complexity and mandates that conceptual complexity increase systematically as managers and leaders move higher in their organizations.

A manager's and leader's capacity to continue developing becomes an extraordinarily important issue for all organizations concerned with executive development and succession. Richland Community College, like other complex systems, takes in resources and operate on them to produce some kind of output. They therefore depend on a continuing flow of resources for their existence and thus find themselves in an endless competition with other organizations that need the same resources. The main practices introduced by the College and its leader, Bill, are change management and motivation, positive climate (achieved by equal treatment of all employees) and self-evaluation.

Richland Community College is a non-profit organization thus it has to compete more effectively in order to get a larger portion of available resources, which means that those that compete less effectively get fewer resources. Organizations act much like other systems that have intelligence. They have goals and long-term strategies for achieving them. By the same token, they also have strategies for how they are going to compete with other organizations to obtain the resources they need. The midlevel sets the conditions, procedures, and standards for the production level and allocates resources so as to promote production efficiency and effectiveness.

And it, as is true for the operations layer, may also have several levels of "real" management. The topmost layer is the strategic apex. It consists of the strategic management of the organization as a whole, which may consist of several or many divisions. The strategic apex establishes corporate vision, sets strategic objectives, and determines broad. The practices introduced by Bill show that he is an effective manager who values employees skills and knowledge and has a strategic vision. As a leader, Bill sets broad directions for the total organization and creates strategic business units that, in sum, produces movement of the total system in those desired directions.

He also makes the decision to spin off, sell, or close down business units that are unprofitable or are no longer on the main path envisioned. The practices work to establish a corporate culture that will support the goals of the organization. They also work proactively to influence strategic constituencies in the external environment, both to create support for the total organization's objectives and to strengthen the organization's competitiveness. These leaders are expected to be proactive in ensuring the continuing availability of needed resources; for this, they must create effective social networks in addition to the conventional business connections.

The problems at this level are more complex and may be "wicked" as well. Incumbents must frame them in ways that facilitate their eventual solution. Leadership at this level is more complex, indirect, and persuasive than at any other level. Control over resources needed by others creates resources dependency, and thus some degree of control over the decision options that managers can exercise in the dependent organization. If available decision options can be viewed as a resource, then this is also a competition.

There consequently is a drive to gain some measure of control over the resources that a competitor needs, thereby gaining power to control that competitor's options, and there is a drive to reduce one's own resources dependency, thereby reducing the power of others to control one's own options. Organization theorists have long recognized three organizational layers and their functions. Large-scale organizations like the College typically have a foundation layer, dedicated to operations of one sort or another.

In the divisional form, the production of manufactured goods occurs in this layer, which may itself have several additional sub-layers of "real" supervision.The effectiveness of the practices is that they help the Director to position its organization as a true leader in education and ensure adequate supply of staff and resources. At this level, the factors that influence competitive advantage are considerably more extensive and complex to manage. The practices allow to balance the competing demands of strategic constituencies.

To some extent, these demands may truly be mutually exclusive; for example, the demands of a production general manager for resources needed to outsource acquisition of a new production technology-legitimately needed to remain competitive-in the near term may make it impossible to provide resources to the R&D manager for inhouse development of that same technology. Such a decision requires the capacity to assess the relative utility of immediate enhancement of capability against that of longer-term enhancement, which might also create substantial enhancement of R&D capability as a second-order effect.

They deal with broader problems, within a wider context, and must be able to see indirect (second-and third-order) effects that may extend over substantial time periods.The main challenges involve the need to change and restructure the organization. By adjusting these priorities, employees can and do influence the direction of the organization over much longer time frames. All employees must also be much more concerned about competitive advantage. The problems that they face are less defined than those at the production level, and their boundary-spanning activities involve a more diverse group of stakeholders.

They are responsible for developing business strategies and product lines, and for establishing priorities that determine the resources allocated to the various departments in the organization. The interview unveils that the organizational level requires that leaders begin to coordinate multiple differentiated subunits and manage less directly. At this stratum, leaders are typically responsible for a major subdivision of functions within the larger organization-production, sales, or research and development.

They are responsible for formulating operational practices and procedures for lower levels that reflect business objectives and policies decided at higher levels. They are also responsible for allocating resources to subordinate elements according to priorities that are calculated to implement these business objectives and policies. Employees can be considered not only leaders in their own right but also, in large organizations, crucially important translators who understand objectives and policies in their larger competitive context and formulate the more explicitly tangible and concrete objectives and plans necessary for those conducting operations.

The translation process requires conversion of abstractions, the tools of higher echelons, into concrete mandates, the tools of the lower echelons, and thus requires the capacity to manipulate these abstractions analytically. The resources allocation process also requires analytic skills.