HUMAN RESOURCE COMPETENCIES: RESPONDING TO INCREASED EXPECTATIONS
By Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich is Professor of Business Ad-ministration at the University of Michigan where he is on the core faculty of the Michigan Executive Program, Co-Director of Michigan’s Human Resource Executive Program, and Advanced Human Resource Executive Program. No one doubts that the bar has been raised on human resources. The HR profession began by HR professionals focusing on terms and conditions of work so that employees would feel fairly treated. Today, the business world faces enormous change, and HR professionals must do more than manage employee terms and conditions. As the bar has been raised on HR, some lament that HR professionals cannot meet these higher expecta-tions and should be discounted or downsized and its functions automated or outsourced. We believe that instead of denigrating HR, we should upgrade HR pro-fessionals and HR departments to meet the challenges that confront contemporary organization. To respond to the raised bar, we propose how HR professionals can respond to increased challenges. We begin with a brief synopsis of the business context that raises new expectations of HR, then we report the results of our research on over 10,000 respondents around the world that defines what HR professionals must know and do to deliver value. The business context required to succeed has raised the bar on HR professionals. HR professionals who would have succeeded 30, 20, even 10 years ago would not be as likely to succeed today. HR profes-sionals are expected to play new roles, and to be able to play those roles, they need new competencies. As a result of the Human Resource Competency Study we have a greater understanding of the competencies needed by HR professionals and agendas needed by HR departments to impact business performance. He has published over 90 articles and book chapters. His books include: Organizational Capability: Compe-ting from the Inside/Out (with Dale Lake) (published by Wiley), The Boundaryless Organisation: Breaking the Chains of Organization Structure (with Ron Ashkenas, Steve Kerr, Todd Jick) (Jossey Bass), Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results (Harvard Business Press), Tomor-row’s (HR) Management (with Gerry Lake and Mike Losey) (Wiley), Learning Capability: Generating * Ge-neralizing Ideas with Impact (with Arthur Yeung, Mary Ann Von Glinow, Steve Nason) (Oxford), Results Based Leadership: How Leaders Build the Business and Im-prove the Bottom Line (with Norm Smallwood and Jack Zenger) (Harvard Business Press), HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance (with Brian Becker and Mark Huselid) (Harvard Business Press).