Are great leaders born with an innate ability to inspire, or are they shaped through experience and education? While the debate continues, one thing is clear: even natural leaders require guidance and development to reach their full potential.
In today’s dynamic business environment, there is a growing demand for leaders who can identify, nurture and elevate talent within organizations. Aspiring professionals interested in leadership development can stand out in the job market by earning an online Master of Business Administration (MBA) with a Concentration in Human Resource Management from Arkansas State University (A-State). The program provides a strong foundation in business strategy, along with the tools and frameworks needed to develop future leaders and drive organizational success.
Understanding Strategic Management in Business
Human resource (HR) professionals play a critical role in hiring and developing a company’s top personnel. Their work is critical to driving organizational success across teams and departments through managers and directors and across the company through business strategists.
To successfully hire and develop these leaders, HR professionals must be able to successfully communicate with businesspeople at all levels of an organization. They must then determine whether or not a given person has leadership potential based on the company’s larger business strategy. This can be a difficult task since a company’s strategy can vary greatly depending on the context — a concept Harvard Business School calls the four Ps of strategy:
- Perspective: Communicates an organization’s larger mission and purpose, inspires pride in employees and incentivizes them to excel.
- Patterns of action: Describes a business’s ability to identify information about changes in the competitive landscape so it can adapt and stay relevant.
- Position: Describes how a company compares to competitors, including its value proposition and differentiators.
- Plans: The specific goals and measures that a business communicates to its employees.
There is a lot more to leadership development than simply hiring employees and assigning tasks. By providing in-depth education on business strategy and fundamentals, a robust MBA program like the one offered by A-State is invaluable for professionals interested in grooming future leaders.
Long-term Benefits of MBA-driven Strategic Thinking
MBA programs prepare graduates for strategic leadership positions by teaching them how to think, as opposed to what to think. Â The business world is ever-evolving and has no road map, so leaders must be able to adapt to change quickly while helping their organization successfully navigate change. This requires key strategic planning skills such as:
- Adopting a high-level perspective: Stepping back from day-to-day details to identify emerging industry trends, to uncover strategic opportunities and avoid getting lost in short-sighted tactics.
- Applying proven frameworks: Utilizing established models to guide decision-making, minimize risk and build on strategies that have stood the test of time.
- Planning for pivots: Replacing rigid plans with agile playbooks that allow the company to pivot quickly, maintain momentum and stay ahead in a fast-moving environment.
Developing strategic planning skills can help prepare graduates for a wide range of careers in areas such as brand management, HR, marketing and business analysis. These skills are also highly transferable across industries, which provides a layer of career security should there be a need to pivot later.
Become a Specialized Leader with an MBA in HR Management from A-State
A-State graduates deepen their understanding of strategic management development at both the micro and macro levels through the online MBA with a Concentration in Human Resource Management program. At the micro level, students learn how to motivate individual employees and guide them toward success. At the macro level they learn how to develop a high-performing workforce that drives organizational success.
In A-State’s Strategic Management course, students explore how to craft and implement effective strategies that align a company’s goals with its external environment. Working in teams, they develop and present strategic plans for organizations in a wide range of sectors including public, private, for-profit and nonprofit entities. In the Management Development Strategies course, students gain an in-depth understanding of essential human resource functions with a focus on designing organizational structures and implementing techniques for developing talent in today’s dynamic business landscape.
By combining strategic business acumen with specialized human resource expertise, graduates of A-State’s online MBA program are uniquely positioned to become the transformational leaders that organizations are seeking in today’s competitive marketplace. This powerful combination of skills not only opens doors to senior leadership roles across multiple industries but also provides the strategic foundation necessary to drive meaningful organizational change and build high-performing teams that deliver sustainable business results.
Learn more about A-State‘s online MBA with a Concentration in Human Resource Management program.