Selling

Remember the quote, "All the world's a stage and we are all merely players"? I think this is attributed to Shakespeare. Good actors sell their characters and bring the audience into their world. All of us sell in our work. We are looking for others to buy in, whether it is getting the boss to give us a good review to get more money or getting others to go along with our ideas. Human Resources involves many sales functions that are obvious, benefits enrollment, recruiting, on-boarding, and promoting. The less obvious ones are called Employee Relations and Change Management. Managing upset employees to get them to understand and move forward past the issue, can be problematic and requires many "sales calls" to resolve some concerns. Now we are the keepers of change management. Helping overworked managers and resistant employees to come along with the latest plan. The difference for us is that the outlying folks get dragged along for the ride providing a consistent dissenting voice to the effort. These daily interactions and processes hardly seem like selling. I have personally said that I would stink at sales, but I do it everyday without thinking about it. The worst part is that you must continue to sell to all levels of the business all of the time. There is not really a process where they want you to give honest feedback. Multiple recent attempts have only met with negative reactions and angering results. Sitting across from a coworker Friday I finally figured it out. My job is to make a pile of crap look like a pile of leaves so everyone wants to jump in. And I mean EVERYONE!