i take kindly to, but a couple of weeks ago someone i work with told me that her team had decided i was their 'unorthodox HR person' - i kinda liked the sound of it then and following friday, i like it even more!
you see, it's only been 3 months since i changed careers, albeit with the same organisation i've been working with for just over 5 years...i moved from finance to HR and yep, i guess even that is kinda unorthodox when you think about it!
guess in many ways i have felt a little 'different' my whole life - never really felt like i fitted in and i guess now i finally feel like i'm on the right track (and with that comes a whole stack of confidence to just BE myself)...
soooo friday was really a turning point for me. our team had a 'bonding session' which actually turned out to be better than i'd expected, and it's not like i was expecting it to be bad, but i wasn't expecting the level of 'sharing' that actually transpired...see i'm a very open (usually) and sharing (if i'm comfortable) sort of a girl and this has (in the past) gotten me into trouble...you know those times when you've revealed something to someone because you thought it was ok in the moment only to find that they don't share anything with you in return and you end up feeling exposed and vulnerable??
well friday wasn't like that at all - guess i felt as though being able to share a bit of who i am and how i got to where i am right now means that the team i work with will have more insight about me so that they can add that insight to what they already see, to form a more rounded view of me (and consequently, me of them)...given two of my greatest fears are being misunderstood and judged, i take what happened as a very positive outcome!
sooo one of the things asked of us on friday was to give some feedback of how our colleagues 'experienced' working with us - well this was some of the feedback i got:
one colleague suggested that i was someone he'd learned from, not just about the business and the company we work for, but about himself...that he appreciated that i challenged him and the support i gave him...he then went on to say (even though he was getting 'the look' from his boss) that despite how much he had liked the person who had supported them before me and despite me only having been in the role 3 months, he thought i was a great HR person and much better than who we'd had before...
another colleague said that more had gotten done in the time i was there than previously, that the business finally felt like they had an HR person who wasn't going to move on and who's only focus wasn't 'strategic things which had no benefit to them' (they've had 3 before me who haven't lasted more than about 5 months each) and that they had affectionately started calling me their 'unorthodox P & P person'...
guess i learned something on friday (with respect to work anyway): that being myself IS valued by people, and going about my new job in an unorthodox (read as 'not conventional in ideology, method, behaviour etc') way is having a positive impact on the team i am working with...
kinda supports my theory that diversity and the embracing of it (in a work sense at least) has almost nothing to do with gender, age, race or sexuality, but about DIFFERENCE, and realising that not only is there huge benefit in having difference in a team, but that there is massive downside in not...
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