Get By with a Little Help from Your Peers

03/05/07

Schmoozing is valuable in most professions, but especially so in HR. A peer network can help you do your job better in a variety of ways—making your job more secure and your company more profitable in the process. Such a network can enable you to:

Exchange job leads for outplaced employees.

Identify cost-effective sources of new hires.

Find help complying with new laws and regulations and understanding the quirks and prejudices of officials who enforce them.

Figure out how to implement HR practices and programs that are new to your company, such as job sharing, flextime, telecommuting, or employee suggestion systems.

Trade information about safety and health issues, insurance concerns, and effective training methods (but not about pay scales!)

Get Started
The Chamber of Commerce and your newspaper’s Community Calendar should list information about professional HR groups in your area. (Tip: SHRM’s Web site, www.shrm.org, lists local chapters.) Attend the next meeting prepared to pay your dues, mix and mingle, and grip and grin. You can make yourself especially popular by serving on committees and volunteering to work on special events. That will raise your profile and bring you into the orbit of established HR movers and shakers.

In addition, become a regular at restaurants or lounges where like-minded peers meet for breakfast, lunch, or an after-work attitude adjustment. This adds a social dimension to your business relationship.

Build Strong Bridges
Successful networkers are concerned with their colleagues’ needs and expectations as well as their own. Some basic ways to ensure your acceptance:

Don’t be a know-it-all. Resist the urge to dominate conversations with tales of your management prowess or assume that your methods are the only ones that work. Be a diplomat, not a dictator. Prefacing comments with “Have you considered . . .” or “You might try this” gets a better reception than “Let me tell you something,” or “Take my advice…”

Be sure to be grateful. Do you feel good when someone thanks you for your efforts? Of course. Make it a habit to do likewise. Expressing gratitude to peers who helped you out makes them more prone to do so again. Everyone likes to feel appreciated.

Give credit where it’s due. This is just as important as being grateful. Broadcast the names of fellow networkers who helped you solve a problem or exploit an opportunity. Failing to acknowledge them (or worse yet, stealing credit for their ideas) is a fast way to make enemies.

Be selective. Make special efforts to connect with counterparts in government agencies, academic institutions, and non-competing companies. They’ll tend to speak more openly, because you’re not a competitive threat. Being selective also means cultivating rapport with free-thinking network members who challenge their own views and techniques as well as yours.

Respect your elders. Pick the brains of seasoned HR managers who’ve guided their companies through recessions, coped with mass layoffs, and adjusted to some of the sweeping legislative and social changes during the past three decades. You won’t find their “been there, done that” perspective in any textbook, and listening to them won’t cost you a dime.