University EMBA lessons

MIP-TONGJI University EMBA
HR & Organizational behaviors class

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting



Today I started my EMBA class at MIP-Tongji University in Shanghai.

The lessons are about HR & Organizational behaviors. The EMBA students are all Chinese entrepreneurs and top managers in the industries of Design, Urban planning, Engineering, Real Estate.

During this first 4 days we spoke about Engagement and Performance, HR Business Partnership, Staffing, Performance management, Learning, Succession planning & talent management, Compensation & benefit.

Here below the Syllabus:

Leaders in different industries, organizational levels and business growth stages may encounter similar but not identical challenges in terms of people and organization, but they will have the same objective: improving performance and engagement within their organization. Taking the perspective of organizational leaders, we are going to discuss the main organizational challenges and to provide approaches, knowledge, theory and best practices to improve the effectiveness of organizations and people.

The course is structured in 2 main parts:

1)      Human Resources Management

2)      Organizational behaviour

The “Human Resources Management” part focuses on the most important processes and approaches finalized to improve performance and engagement in the organization. Human Resources can be managed having a business partnership approach and playing several integrated roles: Strategist, Change agent, Employee Champion, in addition to the most traditional Administrative expert role. We will discuss about Leaders and HR function responsibilities on people and organization. Through examples and best practices, we see how the recruitment process can be optimized in order to bring the right talents in the organization. We focus on long term plans for talent identification and development in harmony with the company business strategy. Competencies, learning, performance management, compensation and benefit are the other HR aspects the course is focusing on. 

We study how to set up the structure and manage the development of an organization, manage effectively the change, leverage the corporate culture asset and communicate internally and externally having in mind an employer branding approach.

The “Organizational Behaviour part could be defined as the “study of people’s behaviour within organisations and relative dynamics”, in other words how people and teams influence and view the organisation, in order to reach their objectives, as a group or as an individual, and therefore achieve the success of the organisation.

Lessons focus on individuals, team and organization, they show how to manage group dynamics and each person’s personal contribution, in the most positive way.

We see the value and challenges of individual diversity, and aspects linked to self- awareness and management, personality, emotional intelligence, career anchors and values, stress management, cognitive styles and cultural diversity.

We therefore cover topics related to the team: group dynamics, stages in team development, the roles in a team, the potential dysfunctions of a team and how to overcome them.

During the course there is also a session focused on Coaching theory and practice for leaders. Coaching is a very powerful approach that is more and more used by leaders and external coaches to develop talents or people who have to improve their performance in the organization. Coaching can be used to address behavioural change, lack of performance, career management, cross-cultural or communication challenges. Coaching is a perfect topic to close our course: it is both an HR practice and a managerial skill for  organizational behaviours improvement .

Some of the materials and examples discussed in class focus on situations specific to China and organization operating in “knowledge intensive” service industries; others represent global best practices and knowledge and thought not directly linked to your current environment can provide ideas and approaches that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your organization.