SHRM-CP / SHRM-SCP Certification Exam: Behavioral Competencies - Interpersonal Skills - Relationship Management

Interpersonal Cluster
The Interpersonal cluster represents 18.5 percent of both exams’ weighted scores. There are three competencies that fall within the Interpersonal cluster.
- Behavioral Competency 3—Relationship Management
- Behavioral Competency 4—Communication
- Behavioral Competency 5–Global and Cultural Effectiveness
This cluster covers the behaviors, attributes, and knowledge required for HR professionals to perform collaboratively and with interpersonal aspects of their roles.

Behavioral Competency 3—Relationship Management
HR’s most notable role has been, and continues to be, the “people” job; therefore, managing relationships is a core function for an HR professional. Those who are good at using their relationship skills will foster greater collaboration, understanding, and communication with stakeholders.

Five subcompetencies comprise the Relationship Management competency.

They are defined by SHRM11 as follows:
- Networking Effectively building a network of professional contacts both within and outside of the organization
- Relationship building Effectively building and maintaining relationships both within and outside of the organization
- Teamwork Participating as an effective team member that builds, promotes, and leads effective teams
- Conflict management Managing and resolving conflicts by identifying areas of common interest among the parties in conflict
- Negotiation Reaching mutually acceptable agreements with negotiating parties within and outside of the organization

Key Concepts
- Types of conflict (e.g., relationship, task, inter- and intra-organizational)
- Conflict-resolution styles (e.g., avoidance, competition, cooperation, conciliation)
- Conflict-resolution techniques (e.g., accommodate, avoid, collaborate)
- Negotiation, tactics, strategies, and styles (e.g., perspective taking, principled bargainer, auction, interest-based bargaining)

Definition
According to SHRM, “Relationship Management is defined as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to create and maintain a network of professional contacts within and outside of the organization, to build and maintain relationships, to work as an effective member of a team, and to manage conflict while supporting the organization.”12

Basic Proficiency Indicators
All HR professionals must be able to establish and maintain positive relationships with people both inside and outside the organization. HR touches all parts of the employer organization and reaches into a myriad of external groups. Each of those contacts requires positive relationships with the people there.

Establishing Credibility
Without credibility, the HR professional has little to offer. Seen as someone who can’t be relied on to offer accurate information and advice, the HR professional will find internal managers avoiding them. You must be the “go-to” expert on all matters involving human resources. That means when you don’t know an answer, say so and promise to do the necessary research and get back to your contact with accurate information. Do it in a timely way because help that is delayed often is not any help at all. Managers need information quickly so they can deal with the issues they have facing them. Remember, it takes only one incident where you give bad advice and your reputation is damaged. It will take a long time to get it back on the positive side.

Treating Stakeholders with Respect and Dignity
As an HR professional, you have many stakeholders. However, remember all organizational employees fall into that category. And all managers within the organization fall into that category. Don’t forget your boss. Your boss is a stakeholder, too. Some of these folks will be delightful to work with. Some of them will be difficult to work with. Each of them deserves your respect for the role they play and the person they are. Your job as an HR professional is to treat each individual with dignity. Even if there is someone who has committed a firing offense and you are helping the supervisor terminate them, being kind can go a long way toward decent treatment. Ask yourself each time, “How would I like to be treated?” Then do that. No one deserves to be belittled or shamed for any reason. Even if you have to call the police to deal with a serious behavior issue, you can still be an adult in your approach to that person who is causing the problem.

Building Engaging Relationships
Building relationships is a skill HR people must develop. Some people do it naturally, and others have to work at it. Here are some suggestions from an expert in communication.
 

Building Engaging Relationships
Proactive communication with your team can serve your business significantly. Done consistently, you’ll have access to one of the best, most authentic focus groups for your brand. You’ll be given qualified, firsthand perspective into your services and processes. You’ll also gain better knowledge of your staff and their strengths. Another bonus, your team will become more inspired and loyal knowing you care about their feedback.
The key is listening. Meet with your HR professionals one at a time. Go into this kind of communication without preconceived thoughts. Listen mindfully and don’t dominate the conversation. This is your time to collect insights and information. Remember that you are the final decision-maker, but now is your opportunity to gather data to help in creating strategies to improve your business. Don’t be defensive. Remember this person is on your team. When your meeting concludes, let your employee know how appreciative you are and then correct or add anything you think will benefit their knowledge of the business.

Here are some tips to get started:
- Meetings with each employee should be held on a regular basis such as quarterly or monthly.
- Dedicate a specific time for these discussions and ink them in on your schedule. It could be 3 hours one afternoon each week or just one meeting per week. The goal is to schedule meetings that you can attend week after week and not have to reschedule.
- Be prepared. Most likely your employee has thought a lot about this meeting. They’ll be more engaged in this and future conversations if you’re taking this meeting seriously.
- Ask purposeful questions so at the end of your meeting you’ve learned something. (In other words, what is the one thing that we do that customers appreciate? What new technology do you think our clients would respond to?)
- Keep to your allotted time so you establish structure and consistency. If meetings tend to always go long, it could lead to burnout.
- If possible, schedule the next meeting right away so your team knows these conversations are now part of the business culture.
- Ask staff to save any follow-up comments or notes for the next meeting, unless urgent. This will keep you both organized and avoid pop-in meetings that could lead to burnout.
- Realize you’re building a new process, and it will take time. Don’t push yourself to meet with everyone or act on suggestions right away. It’s better to be consistent with meetings and actions to effect change that truly improves your business.
This same process can work with your customers/clients and even vendors.

Sally Field
Welcometotheshop.com
Facebook: TheMarketingShopBayArea
Instagram: the_marketing_shop

Demonstrating Approachability
How do you feel when you walk up to someone and they don’t recognize you? Perhaps they continue their current conversation or, worse, actually turn away from you. It hurts when people don’t acknowledge you. Others feel the same when we treat them in those ways. While it isn’t always easy, particularly with people who are known to be difficult to work with, it is important for HR people to treat others with professionalism. Being discourteous is a sure way to become known as someone who cannot be approached easily.

Ensuring Alignment with HR Strategy
Without doubt, HR strategy will embrace employees, managers, suppliers, customers, and perhaps even stockholders. Each of these groups is important to the successful achievement of the company goals. Strategy is the way those goals will be accomplished. And people are always going to be the force that implements the strategy. There is a direct link to strategic completion of goals with the relationships that can cause that to happen. HR professionals touch each of the stakeholder groups along the way. It is therefore critical that HR professionals be conscious of how they impact their relationships and thus the impact they have on strategic implementation of action plans.

Providing Customer Service
Customers in the corporate sense are those people external to the organization who buy our products or services. They are the clients of governments and nonprofits who receive services. Customers and how we provide for them are the reasons that our organizations exist. Without customers we wouldn’t have need for an HR organization.
For HR, our customers are our organizational employees and managers. We provide the products (e.g., insurance programs, career pathing) and services (e.g., complaint investigations, onboarding) that our customers rely on. How we service these people will determine their view of the HR group, not to mention the individuals within that group. If HR is always telling people, “You can’t do that,” it won’t be long before the phones in the HR department stop ringing. People don’t like hearing, “You can’t do that.” They much prefer hearing, “Let’s see what we can do.” Then explore with the employee and/or supervisor what is possible and what isn’t. Your employee will leave with a more positive feeling having received an explanation of the reasons behind each option or prohibition. You will have provided good customer service, even if the employee didn’t get exactly what was requested.

Promoting Successful Relationships
These are some basic methods for promoting successful relationships:
- Help employees understand organizational goals and strategies for achieving them.
- Give each employee an understanding about how they personally can contribute to achieving those goals.
- Acknowledge positive accomplishments when they are extraordinary.
- Showcase employee achievements in organizational publications, including the employer web site.
- Say “thank you” when people do the right thing.
- Compliment the boss for achievements of people in the group.

Managing Internal and External Relationships
Internal relationships take the form of employee and management encounters. Often HR is serving these people in some way. Managing those relationships can be best accomplished by offering a positive experience, even if the message HR is required to deliver is not one people want to hear. How it is delivered, its tone, and its level of kindness will go a long way to preserving the relationships.
External relationships exist with shareholders, regulators, enforcement agencies, media contacts, and even membership in community service clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lyons. Knowing what information can be shared and responding when appropriate will establish positive relationships with each of these groups. There is an expectation that HR professionals are “the face of the corporation” whenever someone is dealing with you in an official capacity. Even if you are on a community baseball team, you carry the flag of your employer organization. People see you as the official representative of that employer. You are an agent in that regard. You carry a large burden when that happens. You must be ready to carry it with pride and professionalism.

Championing Organizational Effectiveness
Being a cheerleader for effectiveness in your organization is another role you must play as an HR professional. When you see things that aren’t working because of organizational structure or “red tape,” it is incumbent upon you to intervene and suggest change. That can be a bit tricky when people have a sense of “owning” the portion of the organization that isn’t working well. Working with your HR boss to identify means for influencing improvements is often a good way to approach the situation. This is another area where spotlighting success is a great way to get other people to agree to do something similar in the future when similar problems exist.

Serving as an Advocate
Employees need an advocate sometimes. When there are policy issues that need attention and large groups of employees are providing feedback that the current policy is inadequate or no longer applicable to the times, HR is responsible for consolidating those employee views and presenting them to senior management. When a discrimination complaint is filed and investigation suggests the manager is at fault, HR is the entity that will usually be responsible for providing the feedback and advocating for a remedy on behalf of the employee. Sure, there is always a need to act as an advocate for what is right. But there are also circumstances that call for an advocate when people just need to be heard. Potentially unsafe working conditions that have yet to be recognized by management can be a reason for HR’s involvement. One employee working alone may not be as effective as when HR becomes an advocate for employees in general to deal with the problem.

Fostering Team Building
HR sometimes provides team building training and facilitation programs. And sometimes HR researches and recommends outside vendors for such programs. Every day, HR can support team building by recognizing team accomplishments. Offering rewards for team accomplishments can be effective, and providing acknowledgment and thanks for those accomplishments can be equally effective. An important HR role in fostering team building is in guiding supervisors on effective behaviors for high-performing teams, helping them create internal team cultures that include high trust, common vision, team unity, and accountability.

Building a Network of Contacts
Effective HR professionals will have a notebook full (or cell phone contact list full) of contacts who can help with the wide range of HR problems that can come up from day to day. Who do you call when you need a contact for employee assistance programs, workers’ compensation reimbursement problems, or addiction rehabilitation programs? Who can help you set up an employee relocation program or provide in-home medical care following a difficult surgery? Each day another issue will come up, and you will be faced with having to do some research to determine what contact will help you solve your problem with or for the employee. Over time, all those vetted contacts will combine to represent a large database of references when you need to use them again.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals
Beyond the basic proficiency indicators are found behaviors that senior HR professionals are challenged to master.

Designing Metrics
Senior HR managers are usually involved in establishing the measurements that will indicate how they and their department are doing in their job of serving employees. Whether it’s computing turnover rates or revenue to expense ratios, there are some critical aspects of HR management that should be measured. Those measurements provide feedback to the HR department but also offer reassurance to the senior executive team that HR is accomplishing its key goals as it has said it would. Designing those measurements (metrics) is a way for HR to demonstrate it is willing to be accountable for its own accomplishments. All other portions of the employer organization are measured in some ways, so, too, should the HR department.

Networking
Developing a professional network outside the organization is as important as maintaining healthy relationships with managers and employees inside the company. Other senior HR professionals at other industry organizations can help suggest solutions to problems you are having that they have already solved. As cultural norms evolve, other HR professionals can provide sounding boards for policy questions and benefit program adjustments. Maintaining a professional network of HR friends is more and more important as time goes on. Not everyone can solve all of the problems. Relying on help from other professionals is an effective way to leverage your time and resources.

Championing Customer Service
While it is a basic HR behavior to champion organizational effectiveness, it is an advanced behavior to champion customer service. Sometimes it is necessary to fight for employee treatment when budget dollars must be allocated. Adding a new paid day off to the offering will expand budget expense by a certain amount. What will be the offsetting benefit to the corporation for making that extra offering? Identifying the business needs is first. Then comes the presentation and response to executive questions about your recommendations. Serving your customers is an important role for you as an HR professional.

Negotiating with Stakeholders
It is not only employees we deal with. You will interact frequently with vendors of insurance programs, with union representatives, with state and federal enforcement agencies, and at executive HR levels with the board of directors. All are stakeholders in how an organization is run. From time to time, you will have a need to negotiate with each one. For example, changing working condition provisions in a union contract can be calculated to have a dollar impact on the budget. Settling discrimination complaints and workers’ compensation cases with outside agencies will also have budget impact. Establishing a new policy sometimes requires approval of the board of directors. Persuading them to adopt the new policy is often also an exercise in convincing them to accept the budget impact it will cause.
If you are in an organization that bills its HR costs back to internal client departments, there will be negotiations to support and justify those billings. You will be called upon to discuss your department’s performance on a regular basis.

Designing a Customer Service Culture
When HR workers arrive at work each day knowing that they will be expected to provide great customer service, that will be what happens most of the time. It is necessary to create a sense that providing outstanding customer service is “just the way we do things around here.” When your HR department believes that, and behaves collectively to deliver that, your internal clients will be happy, and your boss will be happy.
Forbes published a list of key customer service action plan items for those who have yet to develop your own program.13
- Articulate your central philosophy in a few meaningful words. “The needs of our patients come first.”
- Distill a list of your core values. Identify how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated at all times.
- Reinforce your commitment to these values constantly. Do this daily or weekly, not annually.
- Make it visual. Put your values on all e-mails, stationary, vehicles, and in-customer packages.
- Make your philosophy the focus of orientation. Make sure your employee orientation messages are reinforced by actual work experiences.
- Train, hire, support, and if necessary discipline to enforce what’s important. Be sure the messages are consistent.

Creating Conflict-Resolution Strategies
Put two people together in a working environment, and eventually there will be some level of conflict. Put many people together, and those conflicts will happen frequently. According to SHRM,conflict and tracks the metrics and costs of conflict-resolution efforts. Many HR professionals receive conflict-resolution training, often as part of their professional development, and many are accustomed to conducting such training or enlisting outside training resources for supervisors and managers.
“HR professionals often become involved in settling workplace conflicts, particularly if the employees and their supervisors cannot achieve a resolution. If HR cannot resolve a conflict, an outside specialist may be needed to work out a settlement.”

Overseeing HR Decision-Making Processes
The entire HR department must be capable of making decisions that are consistent with legal requirements and also company policy. Documentation of those decisions is essential if the employer will be able to defend its actions at some later time. Then, it is necessary to train managers and supervisors to make good decisions and properly document them. Managers and supervisors hate documentation. It takes time that they don’t believe they have. And some just hate writing anything. HR is accountable for overcoming those impediments and assuring that the proper standards are met.

Developing Strategic Relationships
Remember, relationships both inside and outside the organization can be strategic. That means they can help you meet your corporate goals. The senior HR professional is responsible for developing relationships that can contribute to those strategies. Think in terms of the insurance program representatives for health care and long-term disability care. How about life insurance, employee assistance contractors, relocation moving companies, and HRIS software vendors? Each of these is an important relationship that senior HR managers must develop and maintain.

Fostering Intra-organizational Culture
Encouraging understanding other of cultures is something HR can facilitate for others in the organization. International interests are obviously going to require such action and support. But within the employee group, there are more and more cultural backgrounds added to our populations. Embracing and supporting the integration of those cultures into your employee body is an important role for senior HR managers. Working with employee affinity groups can help achieve that goal. Those might include women engineers, Hispanic managers, or Black technical professionals just as examples. Hosting meetings of employees who come from outside the United States can help make people feel more comfortable in their new surroundings. Helping them understand how to contribute their cultural features to problem-solving at the company will go a long way to expanding the warm welcome you want them to feel.

Designing Strategic Opportunities
HR should have a prominent attachment to each of the corporate strategic action items. Even if HR is not specifically mentioned, the link to HR must be identified by the senior HR executive. HR must then develop its own strategic plan for supporting those links. Just how that will happen is the process of designing strategic opportunities. You must be creative and invent ways that you can support your customers in other departments. You must identify ways to actively support their strategic goals by connecting them back to the HR functions. Those actions on your part will prove to your colleagues in other departments that you stand ready to support them as a business partner and that you will help them succeed in their goals.

Proactively Developing Relationships
It does no good to sit on the sidelines and wait for someone to come to your office with a request for help. You have to actively extend yourself to your customers. Offer to attend their departmental staff meetings so you can help people understand the new policies or benefit programs. Help them understand how the new health care laws or income taxes will impact them. Providing information to employees will help your client managers maintain a calm work environment for their employees. Upset only grows through lack of factual input. You can help alleviate such upset by extending your offer to participate personally.
Proactively developing external relationships is also important. Getting to know your vendors and learning about the way they do business can help you analyze how you use them now and in the future. The objective in all relationships is to be well enough acquainted so that when necessary you can pick up the phone and discuss whatever business problem you face.

Summary
You now know about the behavioral competency of Relationship Management. You learned that establishing and maintaining relationships is critical to the HR mission and purpose in an organization. Supporting stakeholders in reaching the strategic goals of the organization can make those achievements less painful and more rewarding.