Need a sense check?


One of my favourite bits about my job is being a ‘sense check’ (maybe I should change my job title to ‘Chief Sense Checker’?). One of the things which is often ‘missing’ when you move from an employed role to being a self-employed HR consultant is colleagues. 

Sometimes people underestimate how often they just ‘run things by’ someone else when they are employed in a team, whether it’s a tricky legal problem requiring interpretation of a piece of case law, an opinion on the most effective approach to a particular problem, or just asking someone to read through a letter to check nothing has been missed.

I spend a lot of time doing all of those things for our consultants, and actually I really enjoy it. They definitely get plenty of the ‘weird and wonderful’, probably more than when they were working in bigger organisations with established HR departments and solid policies and procedures (although of course established HR and lots of procedures doesn’t eliminate the weird and wonderful either!). It means I get to hear all about their interesting cases, and see the difference they are making for their clients with the advice they give.

There’s a lot of pressure that comes with having ultimate and complete responsibility for getting everything right all the time, and much of that comes from not having people to run things by. Clients are looking to you for guidance and for accurate advice, and expecting you to steer them to the best outcome in whatever situation they find themselves in.

I like to think that the ability to run things past me for a ‘sense check’ gives our consultants confidence in their advice, gives them ideas they may not have thought of, or identifies potential challenges with their proposed approach that may not have occurred to them.

 

If you want to find out more about working as a partner with face2faceHR, do get in touch.