Overview

AI, Data Science & Cloud Certificates from Google, IBM & Meta — 50% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera. 50% off Coursera Plus Annual for 10 days only — price increases June 17.

Unlock All Certificates

Lead with impact in this advanced course designed for HR professionals ready to elevate from execution to strategy. Through hands-on activities using realistic business scenarios, you'll learn to model Microsoft's leadership principles, make data-driven decisions using AI insights, guide teams through organizational change, and align HR initiatives with business strategy. This course is perfect for HR managers and aspiring leaders who want to earn a seat at the executive table. Starting with leadership foundations and progressing to strategic planning frameworks, you'll develop the skills needed to drive organizational success and demonstrate HR's measurable value.

Syllabus

Applying Microsoft Leadership Principles

Leadership principles that live in a slide deck don't change behavior. Practiced principles do. This module introduces Microsoft's leadership model (Create Clarity, Generate Energy, Deliver Success) and teaches you to apply these principles in your daily HR leadership, starting with the growth mindset that makes the rest possible.

Gathering and Acting on Leadership Feedback

Your perception of your leadership and your team's experience of it are rarely identical. This module teaches you to systematically gather feedback on your leadership effectiveness, revealing blind spots, validating strengths, and creating accountability for continuous growth.

Using AI Insights for Retention Decisions

Reacting to resignations is too late; predicting them is too powerful to ignore. This module teaches you to interpret AI-generated attrition risk predictions and the human judgment required to use predictive insights responsibly and effectively.

Reviewing and Refining Decision Frameworks

Good decisions sometimes fail; bad decisions sometimes succeed. Without review, you cannot tell which is which. This module teaches you to systematically evaluate decision outcomes and refine your frameworks based on evidence, not intuition.

Planning and Communicating Change

Seventy percent of change initiatives fail, usually not because the change was wrong, but because the change management was. This module introduces structured frameworks and teaches you to develop communication plans that build buy-in before resistance sets in.

Executing and Supporting Change

Plans are easy; people are hard. This module teaches you to execute change while navigating the human realities of resistance, fear, and skepticism, turning opponents into advocates through the Listen-Acknowledge-Inform-Involve approach.

Evaluating Change Effectiveness

Declaring a change "complete" is not the same as knowing it worked. This module teaches you to evaluate change outcomes through post-transition surveys, capturing lessons that make your next initiative more successful than your last.

Building Succession Plans

Every critical role without a successor is a crisis waiting to happen. This module teaches you to build succession plans that identify internal talent, assess readiness honestly, and develop the pipeline that protects organizational continuity.

Reviewing and Updating Succession Plans

A succession plan is only as good as its predictions, and predictions improve only through review. This module teaches you to calibrate your readiness assessments by comparing predictions to actual promotion outcomes, eliminating the biases that undermine succession planning.

Mapping Objectives to Strategic Pillars

HR work that doesn't connect to business strategy is HR work that doesn't get funded. This module teaches you to map team objectives to organizational strategic pillars using skills-gap analysis, demonstrating HR's value in the language executives understand.

Quarterly Strategic Reviews

Annual planning without quarterly check-ins is wishful thinking with a deadline. This module teaches you to conduct quarterly strategic reviews that assess progress, adjust tactics, and anticipate what's coming, ensuring your strategy stays relevant as reality evolves.