People - HR Strategy (Strategic Planning & Management) Flashcards
Which organization is least likely to succeed in its strategic planning and management?
Answer:
An organization that shares strategic plans with top management only to preserve its competitive edge
Explained: The only poor strategic planning practice here is to communicate strategic plans within just a small leadership group. The organization will benefit from having all employees understand how their work relates to and supports the strategy.
What indicates that an organization is using strategic planning and management?
Answer: The organization’s structure, resources, and policies are aligned to meet agreed-upon goals.
Explained: Strategic planning and management are distinguished by the way assets, structure, and policies are focused and integrated to achieve goals. The mere existence and communication of the mission and the vision does not mean that an organization is using strategic planning and management. The organization’s core competencies may be distributed across multiple functions; they will probably not be the same in each function. A cross-functional team pointed toward problem resolution does not distinguish an organization as having a strategic plan that is well managed.
How should an HR leader best address the perception of HR as a cost center?
Answer: By ensuring that HR services are aligned to the organizational strategy
Explained: The best response to this perception is to demonstrate the strategic value of HR services such as recruiting and onboarding.
Why the other answers are not correct: Increasing efficiency and decreasing costs will not change the organization’s financial structure. Charging for HR services is a management decision.
Strategic management refers to the actions that leaders take to move their organizations toward strategic goals and creating value for stakeholders.
Which is considered a benefit of strategic management?
Answer: Allowing for consistent decision making
Explained: When managers are mindful of the organization’s strategic goals, management decisions throughout the organization will be more consistent, with each manager assessing his or her alternatives against the same set of goals and objectives.
Why the other answers are wrong: Systems thinking and a focus on core competencies are critical in strategic planning—in determining what the organization will work toward and how its parts will work together. Strategic management encourages less waste, but this does not mean the organization will use fewer resources.
During which stage of strategic planning do managers develop action plans and assign staff members to projects?
Answer: Implementation
During the strategy implementation phase of strategic planning, the plan is put into action. Managers develop action plans and allocate resources toward achieving organizational objectives.
A small publishing firm believes that it is too small to benefit from strategic planning. Which short-term benefit is the best choice for HR to use in influencing leaders to begin the strategic planning process?
Answer: Allocating resources more effectively
Explained: The strongest reason for senior management to engage in the strategic planning process is a more focused allocation of resources and potentially increased profitability. Strategy does not necessarily result in increased engagement or corporate social responsibility.
For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, an HR organization has had an unusual degree of turnover in its leadership in the past three years. What challenge is the function most likely to encounter in fulfilling its strategic plan?
Answer: Inconsistent decision making
Explained: Of the possible answers, inconsistent decision making is the most likely, since each new leader may interpret priorities differently.
Other answers that are not correct: The change in leadership may deter the improvement of core competencies but should not cause staff to become less competent. The HR team will not be able to use trust in their leader to help overcome resistance, but the level of resistance depends on many other factors. The staff’s ethical behavior has also been shaped by many factors other than leadership, many of those factors personal. There is no reason to expect a sudden shift in this behavior across the entire staff.
Corporate leadership has requested that HR develop an employee engagement strategy for a newly acquired division, and HR follows the model for strategic planning. Which phase in strategic planning will focus on gathering information to create this strategy?
Answer: Formulation
Explained: The first phase in the strategic planning process is strategy formulation, which is followed by strategy development. The other choices are the third and fourth phases in strategic planning.
Process
Formulation
Development
Implementation
Evaluation
An organization is struggling to create and implement a strategic management plan. While multiple divisions have been involved in the creation of the plan from the start, factionalism has lead to infighting over how major portions of the plan will benefit certain divisions. What should HR ensure is being done during the planning process to correct this situation and ensure that the plan is successfully created and implemented?
Answer: Ensure that the efforts of all divisions are properly aligned.
Explained: It is crucial that everyone is aligned in their efforts and works to ensure that departmental goals are aligned with the overarching organizational goal. Divisions should not be concerned about securing specific benefits for themselves during the strategic planning process. Instead they should ensure that their divisional goals fall in line with the strategic plan and help the organization move toward its goal.
For the first time in its history, a small, privately held consulting company decides to create and implement a strategic plan. During the process, the team disagrees over whether the organization should add a new division responsible for providing HR services, in addition to its core accounting services, to its clients. Which action should the leadership take to resolve this disagreement?
Answer: Conduct internal and external research to assess needs.
Explained: Strategic planning often cannot be completed in one session. New ideas that are proposed, particularly those that require a substantial commitment of resources, require more research. In this case, more external and internal research is required. Benchmarking may eventually be used to ensure that the company’s services are competitive, but this will follow internal and external research.
Which HR action is predictive of successful strategic outcomes in an organization?
Answer: Focusing on the organization’s core competencies in each business unit to evaluate and employ change as needed
Explained: Organizations that are successful at strategy master the skills of alignment of effort across all business units, controlling drift by evaluating and correcting course when necessary. In addition, strategic organizations are aware and focused on their core competencies to ensure that the efforts support areas of strength.
Which is the best example of a core competency that an organization could focus on when creating a strategic plan?
Answer: Expansive organizational knowledge of cutting-edge software development tools
Explained: When looking at strategic planning, a core competency is a unique advantage that an organization possesses that is difficult for competitors to imitate. The best example of this is expansive organizational knowledge of cutting-edge software development tools, which could be leveraged in many different ways and is difficult and time-consuming to build from scratch if it is not already present in an organization.
