I’m a fully qualified HR professional with six years’ experience, but I don’t feel relevant in my office. I am part of a male-dominated team and I’m only 5ft 3in, so you could say I need to develop gravitas – at present I’m not really heard when I speak. Would mentoring help me be more confident managing my team?
You can’t do a lot about your height, and as someone who’s 5ft 10in it would probably sound flippant for me to suggest platform heels. In fact, Oxford University research earlier this year found there was a scientific basis for ‘short man syndrome’ and that it affected women too, leading to people feeling inferior or incapable. Diminutive men tend to over-compensate; women often shrink into themselves, which seems to be what you’re describing.
Of course, your physical stature or gender doesn’t have any bearing on your ability to do your job, and it doesn’t sound like anyone is questioning how you operate. But if you’re walking into a room worrying that you won’t get your point across, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it’s this underlying confidence issue you really need to address, not the hard-to-define notion of ‘gravitas’ (the whole overlap between maintaining your femininity while becoming more assertive is a matter for another day).
Will mentoring help? Possibly, but it would be more valuable to employ the services of a dedicated communications coach who can help you be more impactful in the messages you send out. A good coach will look at everything from how you speak to your mannerisms, dress and posture, relating it all back to how your behaviours and presentational style affect those around you.
You can get quicker (and cheaper) feedback by talking to a trusted colleague, finding out how they perceive you and relating it back to specific situations in the office. Either way, this is a problem that stems from how you think about things, not who you are, and by tackling such questions of mindset you can become a whole new person at work.
No reward for my additional hours
I work in the L&D function for a major company. We are being asked to deliver training with little or no prep time, and the problem is getting worse. Last year, I ended up being owed more than 90 hours in overtime but was told it was my own decision to put the time in and I wouldn’t be compensated. Without our extra effort, our L&D simply wouldn’t take place. Surely this isn’t fair?
Of course it’s not, and a lot of people reading your predicament will be thinking ‘welcome to my world’. Workloads are going up all the time, and hours are following suit. The Working Time Directive exists to prevent the sort of situation you’re in, and either you or a colleague could certainly raise the matter with someone senior and demand a fairer deal.
Before you go racing to the statute books, however, I would advocate thinking about whether you are working as smartly as you could. Many L&D professionals are highly delivery-focused, and can end up trapped in a reactive cycle of course design and implementation. Carry on long enough and eventually, people or processes will break.
Have you stepped back and thought about what you are trying to deliver? Which of your courses have the greatest impact on the business and which are just ticking boxes? Have you found out whether your style and content is right for the business’s needs? Have you got a training plan, and does it encompass a broad range of channels, including e-learning? Is what you’re doing joined up with HR, particularly HR business partners, and are you generally talking enough to the rest of the business?
There will always be training that’s mandatory – compliance training falls under that category, and I’d argue leadership and management courses ought to as well. Beyond that, however, you need a genuine understanding of what you’re doing and why. From there, you can start to think about new ways of working that make your role more project-focused and strategic. That might include using experts within the business to design and deliver some courses rather than channelling everything through your department.
If the rest of the business has a culture of unpaid overtime – as many service-based organisations do – it can be hard to argue your particular function deserves to be compensated for its extra effort. By taking a positive but assertive approach to reorganising the way you work, you may be able to solve this problem without confrontation.