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3 Ways to Get to the Table
By Ron | July 22, 2008
In my book coming out shortly entitled, “The Way Book,” I outline ways for Human Resource Professionals to get to that “table” we want to sit at so much. It took me 30 years to get to that table as an equal, if not important influence and now I want to share my recipe with the HR community.
The “table” we are talking about, of course, is a real table and a mythical table. The real tables are located in all of the conference rooms in the organization (not just the executive conference room). The mythical table is the table of respect, trust and acceptance from our internal clients including all of the line managers and employees.
I ask the question of the HR Pro - Are you “The Way” or are you “In the Way?” When I first was hired out of college as a Production Control Planner by a major company, my manager told me that I had to check in at the Personnel Department which was just part of the company bureacracy and that they just looked at HR as an necessary evil - in other words, HR was “in the way.”
Later on when I transferred into Human Resources, I spent the rest of my career trying to turn around this perception of HR.
To become The Way instead of being in the way (as our internal clients sometimes perceive us), here are 3 of the 15 ways that helped me become a respected, mainstream contributor:
1. Know the business, the products and/or services, the organization, the politics, the vision and the culture. This is a big ticket item. When I say know it - I mean to know it in depth. We as Human Resource people need to walk and talk like business men and women. When I could converse about the business at the executive staff meeting and make sound recommendations typically outside the HR realm, I got acceptance as one of the players. I would get comments like, “You’re not like those other HR types; you understand what is really going on…”
2. Don’t quote laws and policies or use Human Resource lingo. Sometimes in order to ”get them to do what we need them to do,” we quote EEO legislation, labor law or our own Personnel Policy #203. This not only erodes our own personal power, but we lose our internal client’s respect and trust. We need to demonstrate real world reasons for hiring that person or whatever. A good business reason is what is best.
3. Do the HR job right. I know that this is obvious, but as Tom Peters once said, “We tend to overlook the obvious.” When my internal clients started treating me like their personal headhunter and their management consultant, I knew I was doing the HR job right. I was their friend, their confidant, their right hand person when it came to managing their department. I had arrived.
Topics: HR, Management |