Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • “Mind on, Hands off”

    LESSONS ON LEADERSHIP FROM BOB WOODWARD

    I had the unique opportunity to hear Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate Scandal, speak in a private session to the Blackburn Institute at the University of Alabama.  Bob was asked the question, “What advice would you give to students about leadership?”

    Instead of giving points on leadership, or even discussing one of the seven Presidents he has interviewed,  he told the story of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post.  By describing the key points of one of their discussions about the Watergate story he emphasized these key points:

    • She was “mind on, hands off”.    Meaning she hand her mind on the details of the business but did not micromanage.   She turned people loose to do their jobs.
    • She knew what business she was in and had a statement of purpose to direct that business.   This gave her the ability to take risks and have patience to develop stories that drove her business.  She didn’t look at chasing the stock price or correcting issues with the quick fix, instead she focused on doing the business she was in, which she knew would lead to positive results.
    • She had a “never, don’t ever tell me never” mentality.  Which led to results like Pulitzer prizes and exposing hard truths.

    What story of a true leader can you tell?

  • Your Talents: What Are You Good At?

    Your Talents: What Are You Good At?

    The first step in finding your light is to know yourself. The three pieces of knowing yourself involve discovering your talents, passions and values. We’ll start first with identifying your talents. There are many ways to define and identify talents, but for the purpose of career exploration and development, I think they best way to identify your talents is to define them in the way that employers do. After all, the whole point of knowing yourself is so that you can be able to find a career that you enjoy doing so that your light can shine.

    KSAOs – Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other characteristics- are how most employers define what the need when they go to hire an employee.  Here’s a run down of what these four things actually are:

    Knowledge – “Degree to which employees have mastered a technical body of material directly involved in the performance of a job.”

    Example of knowledge that a high school student might have:

    English Language — Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.

    Skill – “The capacity to perform tasks requiring the use of tools, equipment and machinery.”

    Example of a skill that a high school student might have:

    Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.

    Ability – “The capacity to carry out physical and mental acts required by a job’s tasks where the involvement of tools, equipment and machinery is not the dominate factor.”

    Example of an ability a high school student might have:

    Memorization — The ability to remember information such as words, numbers, pictures, and procedures.

    Other – “Interests, values, temperaments, and personality attributes that suggest what an employee is likely to do rather than how well an employee can do at peak performance.”

    We’ll talk more about the “other” characteristics later when we explore work and life values as well as passions. But some examples of other characteristics employers would want could want and is developed in high school and throughout life would be conscientiousness.

    The neat thing about all of these KSAOs is that they are linked by importance and level to job titles through O*Net.   You can use this tool to explore a whole list of different KSAOS and then see which job titles come up most frequently for you.

    Here is a worksheet – Find Your Point– with a list of KSAOs (as well as other things we’ll be discussion in the weeks to come) Each KSAO listed links to O*Net.  Just click them! You can do here this here too with “English Language”, “Critical Thinking” and “Memorization”.

    Some simple questions to ask yourself to identify your talents:

    1. What types of things do people ask me to help them with?  Fixing their car, giving a speech, tutoring them in math or English or biology?  What are you the go to person for?
    2. Where are you picked first?  The baseball team, the drama club, the school newspaper, the organizer of the volunteer effort?

    Next week, I’ll describe how this actually works with a real student I have worked with.  Stay tuned!

    KSAO Definitions taken from: Job and Work Analysis, Brannick, Levine, and Morgeson

  • Stuck in the Middle

    4 TIPS FOR C LEVEL EXECUTIVES TO EMPOWER THE MIDDLE MANAGER

    I often think that being a “middle manager” may be the worst place to be in the organizational hierarchy.    I often have middle managers in my leadership classes who complain that they feel stuck in the role of go-betweener.  They feel as though the purpose they serve is to act as a buffer between employees and upper management without the authority to make key decisions that they feel are best for their people and the company.

    I recently saw this happening to a middle manager that told me, “I feel like I can’t do my job for fear of losing my job.” One individual was going around him to complain to the C level executive. Instead of the CEO asking the middle manager for his take on the situation, the CEO threw him under the bus and changed a decision that had already been made in order to please the complainer.  This middle manager was stuck in a place where he wasn’t empowered to make his own decisions about how to handle his unit of work for fear that his boss would change the decision.   Instead of thinking,  “What is best for this employee or my people?” he was stuck in the “What would my boss think?” mentality even when he knew his boss didn’t have all the facts.

    I offered this person up some advice for improving his situation, but today I’d rather address what C level leaders should do to empower middle managers and get them out of the “stuck” position:

    1. Set the vision and mission and give examples of how this should affect decision making for your middle managers.
    2. Regularly communicate with your middle managers. Do not create an environment where you are only talking to them when something goes wrong.
    3. If someone comes to you with a complaint about their manager, ask them if they have discussed the issue with their manager. Unless it is an issue related to harassment, direct that person back to their immediate manager to discuss and resolve.  Emphasize that their manager is the decision maker and that you are there to support him/her.
    4. If there are frequent issues of people coming around their manager to discuss issues with you, examine why this is happening and have a candid conversation with this manager. It may be that you are micromanaging decision making instead of empowering and teaching your middle managers to be leaders instead of the go-between.

    When have you had someone override a decision you made and how did it make you feel?  What was the result of the decision being changed?

  • The New Career Series: Your Light

    The New Career Series: Your Light

    As a child, I remember singing “This Little Light of Mine” in Vacation Bible School.  My favorite part was when we got to sing, “Hide it under a bushel, NO! I’m gonna let it shine!”  I think I, in part, loved this section of the song because we got to yell the word, “NO!”  when yelling was hardly ever allowed in church or at any other place for that matter.

     

                Now as a career and leadership coach, I find that I love this part of the song because shouting a resounding “NO!” to hiding your “light” under a bushel is really what clients are seeking to do.    Equipping them with the self-discovery and exploration tools to find just what their light is and find a stand in which to put in on for all the world to see and benefit from is what we do.

     

                Unfortunately, there are lots of bushels in our way.   Some of the most common ones seen are the pursuit of career solely for the sake of money without a thought to what will bring about joy and fulfillment in one’s life.  Sometimes it is listening to all the voices around us, however well intentioned, telling us that this is the right path to pursue.   We don’t take the time to think about what we would enjoy, where we could make a difference, so we let our parents or a teacher or a coach make that decision for us.  We don’t self-reflect, so others decide for us or we end up in a place where we didn’t want to be because no thought was put into which place is best.  Or we choose a college because all our friends are going there or its our parents’ alma mater and we end up not thinking about how that particular institution is going to lead to a degree that helps us set about doing the work we want to do or if a college degree is even needed to do what we endeavor to pursue.

     

                This series is written to help you as a student walk down the self-discovery path to find a career, college and major that is right for you so you can let your light shine.   It frames your discovery off the talents, passions, and values you have on your horizon in order to make well-informed career and college decisions.   The purpose is of this is not to point you to just one right path, but show you how to focus the overlap of your talents, passions, and values into the place that allows them to come together to where your brightest light can shine.

     

                However, this series’ purpose is not to just make you have the warm and fuzzy feeling and false security of pursuing something solely for the purpose of happiness.  I’ll explain how everyone’s horizon is a marketplace for skills and talents and how to discern if the sun is rising or setting on some of the options that your horizon points toward.   After all, 80% of 2009 college graduates return home to live with mom and dad because they did not have a job or job that paid enough for them to live on their own.   We don’t want this to be you (and neither do your parents!).  College is too expensive today not have a game plan for maximizing its benefits before entering.

     

                Finally, this series will outline tools to help you reach the optimal point on your horizon. From how to set goals, develop a career portfolio, find internships, job shadowing opportunities and or mentors, and practice to make perfect, you’ll be left with a leg up for college and career.

                Why is this important?

                In the movie Coach Carter, Samuel L. Jackson plays a basketball coach attempting to turn a misfit bunch of players into a winning team.  Some players are not making their grades, which is a cardinal rule not be broken by the coach that puts first things first and focuses on accountability.  The coach chains the gym closed until the players commit to making their grades.

    There are parents and teachers who disagree with this form of discipline and their disapproval all comes to a head in a school board meeting.  Coach Carter declares he will quit if his method of discipline is not supported.   By a vote of the school board, his methods aren’t supported and Coach Carter walks away from his job.

    When he goes to get the chains from the gym doors, he realizes the players are there, not with balls in hand but sitting at desks in the gym studying.  When he walks in, one player stands up and says,

     

                “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous- Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We were born to manifest God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

     

                We all have a light of greatness.  Sometimes it takes a disciplinarian coach, a loving parent, or a diligent teacher to point us towards our horizon and pinpoint our light. But, ultimately, it is each individuals’’ responsibility to understand themselves, understand the job market, and cultivate tools for success in order to shine.  We hope this series can be part of the equation that helps you sketch your horizon and unlock that light within yourself.

     

    Because unlocking your light doesn’t just matter to you, it matters to us all.

  • Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    I attended a seminar last week discussing ways to improve productivity and communication in the workplace. One thing that stood out to me in the presentation was the emphasis the presenter placed on eliminating stressors so that people could be innovative and creative. He placed a value on innovation and creativity as the only differentiating factors in creating a sustainable advantage.

    What if standard or traditional work arrangements are creating workplace stressors and reducing innovation and creativity?

    This leads me to consider a tie to a book I mentioned last week,  The Elephant and the Flea  and its emphasis on employing free agents. Charles Handy writes,

    “Meantime, more and more people are going to become aware that their knowledge which drives innovation and creativity has marketable value. They will be reluctant to sell it for a time-based contract, a wage or a salary.  They will want to charge a fee or a royalty, a percentage of the profits.  The difference is that a salary is paid for time spent, whereas a fee is money paid for work produced, irrespective of the time spent on it.” (italics mine.)

    The beauty of this model is that you not only get results, but you get people who are less stressed because they are in control of their own situation, which allows them to be creative and innovative and produce better results.  It also may cost you less.  Many who charge a fee for work produced don’t come with the added cost of a benefit package.

    Or consider the FutureWork Institute described in the book Now You See It. Describing the founder of the institutes philosophy, the author Cathy Davidson writes,

    “The workplace of the future had to start taking into account the life desires, not just the work ambitions, of workers.  She was convinced that the best, most creative workers in the future might not be workaholics with the eighty-hour workweeks, but people who had figured out what way they love to work and how they work best.”

     

    My two year old snoring is eliminating my stress and fostering my creativity…

    As I sit hear writing this post on a Saturday at home, my two year old is asleep in my lap.  Although it took a little maneuvering to get him situated so that I can type,  I can’t help but think that creativity does come when we are in control of when and how work gets done. But maybe that’s the point… blurring the lines of work and life so much that you don’t realize to consider it work, which fosters creativity and innovation.  What could eliminate stress and make writing more enjoyable than two year old contently asleep in your lap?

    What way do you love to work and how do you work best?

     

    Like this post? You may also like this one as well.