One example of HRD and management alignment emerged while conducting
interviews during the benchmarking mentioned previously. One participating
Fortune 500 company in the energy business sector has committed
long-term investments in HRD initiatives. Their employee demographics indicated
that significant management turnover was imminent, thus there was a
need to systematically prepare the next generation of managers. Previously, HRD
efforts were viewed as successful when they were isolated in their efforts. Management
paid little attention to the efforts of corporate HRD, and there was
infrequent direct interaction by HRD with operations or top executives. Yet the
impending demographic issue made the need for interdependency all the more
important. As one operations manager stated, “For the first time in my 25-year
history, our management team needed something very specific from our HRD
group—with high criticality in terms of our [management team’s] success—but
when it came to directly addressing our management team’s needs, we were
inexperienced partners” (as quoted in Egan, 2010, p. 117).