What is your organizational foot print?

Erick Taft provided this post for today’s HR Carnival, but didn’t send me a link. I am going to post it here and link to the Carnival that way.  I hope you enjoy the post, and Erick, I hope you don’t mind me treating this as a guest post on HRH!

The other night, while my wife and I were talking about how each of our days had gone, I shared with her that a new member of the team, as part of his orientation, had attended a class I wrote three years ago. And, with all this recent talk of HR being dead, that class, a faded memory of work long-ago completed, got me thinking. Thinking about all of the people I’ve met and worked with, the friendships and professional relationships built, the volumes and volumes of stuff I’ve created, and projects worked on that are still around. Thinking about the times before then, back when I was an inexperienced manger on the front-lines, right out of college. Lots of years of good to great accomplishments and results, and even some mistakes.

Ok, so what? Why does this matter? It matters because, it’s about staying power. It’s about creating and adding value, addressing future needs before they happen while taking care of the business at hand, remaining flexible in the presence of black swans, being a driving force that gets things done. It’s about stomping out a footprint, an organizational footprint.

Think about it. What have you accomplished that has had staying power? Do people still talk about the work you did five years ago? Is the training class or whatever you designed way back when to address a specific need still doing its job? Do people you haven’t worked with in years, and who know you’ve moved on to do other things still seek you out? Do they brag about you to others? Yes? Well then, you’ve created staying power, a strong network, a personal brand, an organizational footprint. You are a go-to person.

Back to the HR being dead thing. When you are a go-to person, you are keeping HR very much alive. Because of you, it is far, far removed from being dead. You’re on top of your game, you know what is going on inside and outside of the organizations you work for (or with), you keep your knowledge, skills, and abilities relevant in a time of unrelenting change, and the quality of what you do speaks for itself. So, tell me, what does your footprint look like?

Related Posts:

• Being Strategic in a Non-Strategic World
• Sunday shoutout to the HR community
• Igniting the HR Carnival for Global Giving
• This is your brain on HR
• The Disney Trilogy: Confluence

Related posts:

1. Sunday shoutout to the HR community Thanks for your generosity! I have a couple of...
2. Boo! It’s blogging carnival of HR — hr bartender Human Resources Articles | blogging carnival of HR —...
3. Igniting the HR Carnival for Global Giving Upstart HR Rocks the HR Carnival From Drop Box...
4. Leadership and Organizational Agility Random thoughts on decision making The decision making process...
5. Sticks and Stones are your Organizational Bones Image via Wikipedia Organization and Culture Matter I started...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged as: Business, Carnival, HR Carnival, Human Resources, Knowledge, Management, Organization, Organizational Development