Managing Human Capital

The Managing Human Capital course has been specifically designed to teach practical skills for the future general manager (not just the human resource practitioner) who seeks to manage both other people and her or his own career with optimal effectiveness. We will explore, at a more advanced level than was possible in LEAD, those people-related issues and challenges that any good general manager should understand to be effective.

The term human capital implies that people have the capacity to drive organizational performance. The basic premise of this course is that how one manages others can be the source of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations and for individual leaders within them. Any and all students who believe they will need to effectively manage other people to produce superior business results (revenues, profits, growth) while also creating a unique place to work (such that superior business results are sustainable) should take this course.

Educational Objectives

The objective of Managing Human Capital can be captured in a simple question: How can I create places where talented people will gather, produce, develop, and thrive? 

While the question is simple in concept, it is remarkably difficult to execute. Future graduates of HBS, like the population at large, will have more and more choices about how to work and how to manage work, especially given advances in “big data,” AI, and other workplace technologies. They, and their companies--from the great global enterprises of the 21st century to the smallest entrepreneurial venture--will struggle with common questions and concerns about the people who work in their organizations, such as:

• Module 1 (Hiring): What kind of people do I need, and how do I hire them?
• Module 2 (Socialization): How do I effectively on-board them, setting them up for success?
• Module 3 (Performance Management): How do I keep them fully engaged and productive?
• Module 4 (Compensation and Rewards): How do I make sure they are properly incented to do what the organization needs them to do?
• Module 5 (Coaching Effective Managers and Talent Development): How do I develop them over time, so they are prepared to take on bigger roles down the road? How do I let go of those who are not contributing?
• Module 6 (Structure): How do I architect my group, team, division, or organization to make the management of human capital easier, not harder?
• Module 7 (Reimagining the Management of Human Capital): How do I use “Future of Work” trends to my benefit and to my organization's advantage? How can I be ready for the way human capital will be managed when I come back for my 10th or 20th MBA reunion--and what experiments should I conduct in my teams and organizations in the interim to stay on the leading edge (without accidentally reinventing the wheel and rediscovering things we already knew)?

In each module, we will intentionally discuss cases that frame both traditional and bleeding-edge “Future of Work” approaches to each human capital challenge. The ‘answer’ will often lie somewhere in-between the extremes, but will-with regularity-come back to a set of guiding criteria that connect how human capital is managed with the goal of organizational performance.

In each module, and indeed within almost every session, we will explore these topics through three lenses: managing others, being managed by others, and managing our own human capital.