BUSI 750 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread and Two Replies

BUSI 750 Managing Human Resources, Discussion Board Forum 1 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the credit union and the classmates are composites standing in for the course's own; the books and the published research are real; the week, points and readings follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 750, which places the forum's detailed requirements inside the course itself.

Every quarter, the training team at the credit union where I lead branch operations sends the executive committee a one-page report. It shows the hours employees spent in training, the share who finished required compliance modules and the average satisfaction score from course evaluations. Last quarter, 640 employees logged 9,200 hours, compliance completion reached 98 percent and the evaluation average was 4.6 out of 5. By those measures the department is excellent. Yet our three-year plan calls for doubling commercial lending, and nothing in the report says whether anyone is better prepared to underwrite a business loan than a year ago. That gap is the clearest sign that our development function is administrative rather than strategic.

Mello (2015) distinguishes HR that maintains the organization's systems from HR that is built into the formation and execution of strategy. Garavan (2007) offers a more specific model for development. He describes strategic HRD as multi-level, shaped by the organization's external and internal context, delivered in partnership with stakeholders, and judged by whether those stakeholders are satisfied with its contribution. Three markers from his model are easy to test. The first is alignment: development priorities follow from strategic goals. Our catalog was built course by course over a decade and has no lending curriculum beyond consumer loans. The second is shared ownership: line managers diagnose needs and reinforce learning on the job. Our branch managers approve training time but are never asked what their people need to learn. The third is evaluation against results. We measure reactions and attendance, the levels Kirkpatrick placed at the bottom of his hierarchy, and never measure behavior or business outcomes.

Why should this matter beyond efficiency? Wright and McMahan (1992) set out the resource-based argument that people can give a firm an advantage that lasts when their skills are valuable, rare and hard for competitors to copy. Commercial lending judgment in our market fits that description; it rests on local knowledge of small firms that a national bank cannot replicate quickly. An administrative training function cannot build that kind of advantage, because it never asks which capabilities the strategy needs. A strategic one would start with the lending plan, identify the credit analysis and relationship skills it requires and design development backward from them.

The week's theological readings press a deeper question. Keller and Alsdorf (2012) describe work as cultivation, taking the raw material of creation and arranging it so that it serves others and flourishes. Applied to people, cultivation implies that an organization develops its employees as a gardener tends plants, with attention to what each can become rather than only what the rules require. Hardy (1990) traces how Western thought long ranked contemplative work above manual and commercial labor before the Reformers insisted that ordinary occupations could be callings. If that is true, then a teller who wants to become a commercial lender is not only a pipeline candidate but a person whose growth matters in its own right. A compliance-centered training report treats people as risks to be certified, while a cultivating one would ask whether they are becoming more capable.

My proposal to our executive committee will be modest: begin with one strategic program, a commercial credit academy for twelve high-potential staff, co-designed with lending managers and evaluated by loan quality and portfolio growth after eighteen months. If it works, it can become the model for the rest of the catalog.

Reply to Dana

Dana, your description of the hospital's annual mandatory education module shows that compliance training can be both necessary and administrative at the same time. I agree that regulators require it and that skipping it is not an option. I would push one step further, though. You noted that falls on your unit have not declined in three years despite 100 percent completion of the fall-prevention module. Salas et al. (2012) argue that training works when it is designed around the behaviors that matter on the job, practiced with feedback and supported after the course by supervisors. A strategic version of your program might keep the required module but add a short, unit-based practice session in which nurses rehearse the bed-alarm and rounding steps on real equipment, with charge nurses observing during the following month. Would your quality department be willing to track the fall rate on the pilot units against the others?

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, your argument that your software firm's mentoring program is its most strategic development practice is persuasive, especially your point that senior engineers pass on knowledge about the code base that no course could teach. That fits Wright and McMahan (1992), since tacit knowledge of your own systems is exactly the hard-to-copy resource they describe. Your thread asserts, though, that mentoring reduces turnover, and I wonder how you know. Engineers who are assigned mentors may differ from those who are not in tenure, team or performance rating. Could your HR team compare first-year departures for new hires who received a mentor with those who joined teams where none was available, adjusting for role and start date? If the difference holds, you would have the kind of evidence Garavan (2007) says strategic HRD needs to earn the confidence of senior leaders. Keller and Alsdorf (2012) would add that mentoring is service in its own right, so the program may be worth keeping even if the turnover effect is smaller than hoped.

References

Garavan, T. N. (2007). A strategic perspective on human resource development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 9(1), 11-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422306294492

Hardy, L. (1990). The fabric of this world: Inquiries into calling, career choice, and the design of human work. Eerdmans.

Keller, T., & Alsdorf, K. L. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God's work. Dutton.

Mello, J. A. (2015). Strategic human resource management (4th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Salas, E., Tannenbaum, S. I., Kraiger, K., & Smith-Jentsch, K. A. (2012). The science of training and development in organizations: What matters in practice. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(2), 74-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612436661

Wright, P. M., & McMahan, G. C. (1992). Theoretical perspectives for strategic human resource management. Journal of Management, 18(2), 295-320. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639201800205