The Unpleasant Truth About Career Advancement in Human Resources
Over the years, I’ve concluded that if you are an HR professional and want to get ahead, then you must engage in relentless, continuous, uninterrupted, constant self-promotion in order to keep your HR career moving forward.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in an entry level HR position doing grunt work or in an Executive VP HR role setting the people strategy for entire organization reporting to the CEO….the unpleasant truth is the same…you must promote!.
My rule is to never let a day pass without doing something to promote what I’m doing, no matter how busy I am and how back-logged I am with work. This commitment to daily promotion keeps me from slipping into a stop-start-stop pattern that destroys momentum.
When the staffing specialist in HR becomes a marketer of his or her staffing services, the compensation manager in HR becomes a marketer of his team’s comp services, the labor relations VP become a marketer of his union contract negotiations expertise, each of them take a quantum leap up in income potential.
Most HR folks view themselves of “doers” of what they do, with the tasks of influencing folks to do it as a necessary evil. However, those that “market” themselves are much more valuable and highly paid than doers.
I know this is very, very tough for HR doers to accept. And you certainly have to balance this, otherwise you will be seen as a glory-seeking opportunist and will alienate everyone on your team.
However, you must market yourself.
When you go to any of the national conventions for HR people — whether it is the Society of Human Resource Management or OD Network events –at least 80% of everybody’s conversation is about the doing, not the marketing; in the cocktail receptions, HR people tell each other what they do…”I head up college recruiting, I’m a labor attorney.” In the conferences and breakout sessions, they endless rehash HR techniques. If one asks another what do you do, the answerer will define himself by his area of expertise. This is not unusual. If you ask most HR people what they do, they’ll define themselves as a doer of a thing rather than as a marketer of a thing.
From the very start, when asked the question, when I worked as an Organization Development (OD) specialist, I would explain that I was in the organization change and transformation business. To me, the specific organization change projects I was working on were immaterial. Being in this business — i.e. marketing those OD services to others within my organization (and outside my organization) was what I was all about.
This attitude or view or definition of who you are has a tremendous influence on how you allocate your time or energy. The doers of things do ONLY those things, and get around to marketing themselves if there’s “time left over.” And often, they will say they’re no good at marketing or self-promotion. Or that they don’t like it or want to do it. These folks are naive.
They will forever box themselves in as a “worker bee” versus a “queen bee” and forever work harder than smarter.
That’s the truth!
