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Microsoft

Strategic HR Leadership

Microsoft via Coursera

Overview

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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; using workforce insights responsibly can help HR leaders spot retention patterns earlier. This module teaches you to interpret aggregate attrition-risk signals, validate them with human judgment, and use predictive insights ethically 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
    • Many change efforts fall short when goals, stakeholder impacts, communication plans, and adoption supports are not clearly defined. 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.
  • Strategic HR Leadership Portfolio
    • The Strategic HR Leadership Portfolio module develops strategic HR leadership skills through a comprehensive portfolio project set in a technology division undergoing AI adoption and workforce change. Learners apply Microsoft leadership principles, analyze retention patterns responsibly to create data-driven retention strategies, and design a structured change management approach. The module also focuses on building a talent pipeline through succession planning and skills-gap analysis while aligning HR initiatives with organizational strategy and measurable outcomes.

Taught by

Microsoft

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