Book Excerpts
Excerpts from “Surviving & Thriving in the HR World”
Send me an email and I will email you an excerpt from “Surviving & Thriving in the HR World”.
GETTING NOTICED
It doesn’t matter whether you are a benefits administrator, a payroll person, or a recruiter, you will not get anywhere in HR without getting noticed. To get noticed, you need a plan.
Just hoping you will get noticed and get promoted won’t do it!
The people who have the power to promote you doesn’t have time to troll around the company looking for an ideal candidate to move into that newly vacant HR management role. They don’t have time for you to go out and get some credentials such as a degree or a PHR or SPHR certification. They want someone ready to step in.
Is that you?
IMAGE IS EVERYTHING
Now you are building a solid reputation as someone who gets the job done. You work the hours it takes. You are getting noticed. Good for you!
While you are building that reputation, what else do you need to be doing?
You need to be building a visual image.
There are two parts to an image:
- The one you have already built and that’s the reputation for getting things done.
- The second part is the visual image. It’s as important as the first part.
Visual image is made up of three sub parts:
- What you say
- Your body language
- Your appearance
DEFENDING YOUR ROLE
Let’s talk about your role as an HR professional. When you assumed that new role, you were pretty excited about it. Your significant other, family and friends congratulated you on the promotion. So your natural assumption is that everyone else would be happy about it too, right?
Here’s a reality check for you. The fact is there will be some who won’t be happy about your promotion or your coming into the company to take a leadership role. A member of your new team may have wanted the job or thought that their best buddy should have gotten it. A supervisor in another department may think their protégé deserved it more. An engineer may have wanted it because she felt she needed to have HR experience listed on her credentials.
WALKING THE TALK
Now listen up for this part! This applies whether you are an experienced HR professional or in your first HR supervisory position.
The position you hold automatically comes with a certain amount of respect.
Pay attention to what I’m saying here. The position automatically comes with a certain amount of respect. You don’t. You may have been respected in your last position. That’s in the past now.
The fact is that you will now have to earn that respect all over again with a new team, whether they be subordinates, peers or superiors. They may have heard of you, but that does not mean they will respect you the minute you take over. Some may fear you because of the power (real or imagined) that you have.
MOTIVATION
If you sense a problem in your team, congratulations!
Now you are looking for a quick, simple solution to the problem. For a lot of HR professionals, they believe the problem is solved by hiring a consultant or buying the latest fad.
No, that is not the answer. You have to be a leader and find out what is really causing the problem.
I will absolutely guarantee you that you will find the source of your problem in one or more of the following ways:
- Poor management
- Poorly trained employees
- Poorly trained supervisors
- Dumb policies
I will say this again. If you recognize teamwork issues in your group, your answers are not in games, competitive sports or mountain climbing. Your solution to teamwork issues is to do something about the management practices or people that caused them in the first place.
Send me an email and I will email you an excerpt from “Surviving & Thriving in the HR World”.