Sep 13, 20213 min
Updated: Jan 4
Do you find yourself frustrated when:
Your leaders come to you at the last minute to implement something?
You aren’t involved early enough in the process to influence decisions and share your
ideas?
Most of your day is spent putting out fires and not focusing on strategic issues?
You have so much more expertise to offer the organization, but they don’t appreciate it or even ask for your expertise?
You are asked to “handle” tough conversations, “problem” people, and fix them?
We want to have our expertise utilized and be treated as trusted advisors, but our clients don’t know how to utilize us or worse, they don’t want to work with us collaboratively.
The good news is that we can adjust our own approach and behaviour to be better utilized. Many times, despite our best intentions, we have trained our leaders to treat us the way they do. In the spirit of customer satisfaction and “the customer is always right” mentality, we end up agreeing to do what they ask, even when it’s not the best thing for them or the organization. If we attempt to push back or disagree, we are afraid they get upset with us and even go to our boss to complain. Many of our leaders don’t know they can utilize us any other way than “fixing” things and implementing their ideas.
There is a better way. We have the power and opportunity to change the conversations we are having with operational leaders and our own leadership.
We can work in three distinct roles with our leaders and clients:
Examples of this role are:
a. Talk to my employee for me.
b. Jerry isn’t working well with his team, go help him out.
c. Can you handle this situation for me like before?
a. My team needs training on conflict management.
b. Go hire this type of person or go hire this person.
c. I don’t have time to check my benefits portal, can’t you just find out for me?
a. I’m beginning to look at how my org structure isn’t working for us.
Will you come work with me to analyze what we need to do and
how we can get a better org design?
b. My team is struggling with this new program. Will you come meet
with us to better understand what it is and how we can make it
work?
c. We just completed our engagement survey and I'm concerned
about the results. Would you work with us to help us understand
how best to address it?
Article by Jeff Evans, Designed Learning®.
It's a good training for HR profession. It helps HR to become a real business partner through various approaches: contracting, discovery and feedback. The more important: it helps HR to think and act as a professional consultant with their unique and powerful perspectives.
Madelaine Zhang, HR Director, Whirlpool
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