Any in-house communicator knows how difficult it is to join a company and to have to do all the ‘building up of your contacts list’ from scratch.
I don’t mean personal contacts or hard earned ones. I just mean your basic, day-to-day contacts – for example the leading industry publications and the name of their editor, the main commercial partners etc. These should not belong to the employee but rather to the company and they should be passed on from member of staff to member of staff as people move on and new people join.
Communicators are notoriously difficult when it comes to their contact lists – as if every single name in there is a prized secret. Let me tell you something: It’s not. By all means keep the ones you had difficulty finding and definitely keep the ones that you have a more personal type contact with. But it’s only good manners to leave a contact list for the next person so that they can navigate the landscape more easily. You never know when you’re gonna find them in front of you in the future.
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I have been absent from blogging for a while as I am moving from my current job to a new one (hooray for me!) and I am preparing some helpful material for the next person. Most people are shocked that I am also leaving a contact list. Is this right?
Having been burned by similar situations, we introduced a common directory for vendors/contacts.
We assecced that a dedicated CRM was too much, so we did a little research and decided to use Highrise: http://www.highrisehq.com/“target=”_blank”>http://http://www.highrisehq.com/
All employees who are dealing with external contacts in our organization are now instructed (and expected as part of their duties) to maintain their lists in that system (it could be actually any system, as long as the access is controlled by the organization and not by the individual). Most companies that I know are asking their employees to keep data like that in a CRM.
Hey koyan. Not a bad idea. However I wouldn't like to see also a sort of – you go but we keep all your contacts and you can't have a copy – type of situation. I think that the generic contacts should be with the company. We all know though that there are other 'difficult' contacts that people earn or bring in to a company. How many times have you heard of people going into a project, using all their contacts to take it off the ground and then they are waved bye bye summarily?
I think you are right! Contact lists certainly belong to the company in which one is employed, and secondly to the person that built them. A copy must be allowed, since a contact list can only be useful if one can truly enhance a personal relationship with the contact person.
Yes, I think we are hitting the right note here. Copies should stay with both parties – provided there is trust between them, which I find is something that the workplace often lacks.