Strategic HRM: Business wise thinking, a new skill 1/4

Strategic HRM is the ideal way to bring people and business together in a coherent and successful way.

Coherence of the business

A business consists of different management building blocks: the structure and culture, the people and resources, the results and the chains.
In a successful company, these management building blocks are interconnected and interact with each other.  

From the management perspective, you have to follow a certain order in the arrangement of the building blocks:

What you do in one domain has consequences for another domain.
For example: As an entrepreneur, you have decided to market a new product. If you want to be successful, you will have to provide the necessary resources: training your employees, possibly even attracting a new sales person, setting up a solid marketing plan, etc. Another example: you decide to set up sales teams, but you continue to reward your sales people on the basis of a commission on their individually realised turnover. This way of rewarding will work against the cooperation among your team members.

Consequences for strategic HR partner

As a strategic HR partner, you need to have management skills. In other words, you have to think and act business wise. You are obliged to analyse the business in function of the organizational strategy and on 3 levels: the organization, the teams, the individual.

You have to think about how the different aspects of the company influence each other. The HR practices you come up with should not conflict with each other. HR practices support the business, strengthen each other and you embed them as much as possible in the business processes. This means that you make people autonomous and self-reliant as much as possible.