Like hands-on stuff but too senior?

It’s a constant conundrum in many areas of work. As you get more senior and more experienced, and better at what you do, you get promoted. As a result of promotion/promotions, you then find yourself in a position where you are actually not doing a lot of the stuff you enjoy, because you are too busy managing other people doing it, or doing different, longer-term, more strategic things.

One of the problems with this can be that people get promoted out of their skill set. People who are really good at something won’t necessarily be good at managing other people doing it. Managing staff and leadership generally require a whole different set of skills and attributes. This can be eased with training and support of course, although sometimes it’s just a case of a person being in the wrong role.

That side of the coin is something HR professionals will be very used to dealing with and advising on, from the point of view of the employer in terms of improving management skills and advising on good recruitment and promotion decisions.

But what about the other side? Frequently high performing members of staff are happy to be promoted, and have the skills to perform in their new roles well, but find themselves missing the key aspects of their earlier career, the hands-on stuff. As an HR professional, if you really enjoy advising managers on the day-to-day effective management of their staff, helping them through immediate problems as well as coming up with long-term strategies for good people management; if you enjoy participating in the nitty-gritty, disciplinaries and grievances as well as managing the more complex employee relations issues, you may find a traditional promotion track in-house in HR doesn’t offer that.

We find that in becoming self-employed and offering HR support and advice to small business owners you get the best of both worlds. You can have hands on involvement in day-to-day HR while also providing long term strategic advice to your client. And the bonus is, you don’t have staff to manage yourself!

If you’re interested in talking to us about becoming a partner with face2faceHR, do get in touch.