Leadership

Help! I've Been Moved Away from Company Headquarters

By Ron Brown

Updated on: February 5, 2010 / 9:25 AM EST / MoneyWatch

Dear Ron, My company has done some restructuring and I'm now working in a satellite office away from the headquarters. I feel like I'm out of the flow of crucial information and relationships, and that this move will hurt my progress here. What can I do?
The first thing to do is to figure out how to keep your profile high even where you are. Look at the kinds of work that are being done at your remote office and what's within your job parameters that could be big or interesting enough to draw the attention of the folks at HQ. And when any important people at your company come out to visit, you want to be front-and-center in showing them what's going on there and in setting up meetings with and for them.

Similarly, whenever you're visiting headquarters, you want to make yourself very visible and deepen your relationships with the key people there. What you're trying to do is highlight the fact that you may be more valuable in the core rather than the periphery. One way to do this is to make some important people realize how much you can do for them by being there. This is also the time to increase the frequency of communications with others in the company-sending group emails, leaving voicemails, etc. You want to increase your presence in all forms in order to make sure key folks know what you're doing.

You also want to use your contacts to find out what projects are being developed that will be based at company headquarters and that you could sell your way onto. There may also be solutions to the company's challenges that you could propose handling and that would land you back at HQ. Even if you have to temporarily commute back and forth to your company's main office for a day or two a week or more, you want to get yourself onto a project that gets you back into the flow of things at the hub.

One of my clients was a senior manager at a media company who was moved to a remote office outside of New York. He steadily lobbied his managers to come back by showing them how much he was able to accomplish when he was at headquarters and making them aware of all the interfaces it was important for him to maintain with people there. Not only was he able to get back in a few months, once he did, the higher profile he'd worked to establish got him elevated to higher level work once he returned.

In lobbying to get back, keep in mind that it's critical that you not come across as simply trying to escape your situation. You want to identify and communicate substantive business reasons why you should be a part of something at company headquarters, rather than giving the impression that you just want to get away from a situation you dislike. So you should frame all your interests in terms of bringing value to the business instead of what's just good for you personally. Good luck.