Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • 3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    With the great resignation still continuing and baby boomers, who many feel delayed retiring, now retired or retiring in large numbers due to the pandemic, succession planning has never been more important. 

    But as we’ve seen through many of our clients (and ourselves!), the need to get something done and getting it done are two different things.  When it comes to succession planning, I think the key challenge is not knowing where to start and the steps to take once started.  Overall, you need to:

    1. Know your current talent state.  This involves several sub-steps of determining: 

    a. What’s your talent funnel? This means mapping how people progress through the organizational hierarchy, determining the number of people needed at each level of hierarchy, realizing how turnover affects each level, and getting a good picture of the number of people needed to fill key vacancies. 

    b. What are your performance standards? This should be mapped out through your mission, vision, and values as an organization and connected to the KSAOS of each position. 

    c. And how do you measure them? A performance evaluation tool should be used, and in the case of succession planning especially, a way to measure performance potential should be deployed. 

    d. How is each person performing towards your company’s performance standards? Your measurement tools give you the way to determine how people are performing towards standards.  In this step, it’s critical that leaders deploying the tools should be trained on how to use them effectively and given the bandwidth to execute this process effectively. 

    e. And what do they want out of your career? Understanding what individuals want and expect out of their career progression is imperative to this process.  If you don’t know what people want, you may plan for progression that ends up being sabotaged because it doesn’t meet people’s needs or expectations.  For more on this, read about our Leaders as Career Agents Process (Taylor is also speaking about this at the Birmingham SHRM meeting in May if you want to learn more!)

    2. Know what you need to fill talent gaps both in terms of the number of people as well as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOS) needed for each position vacancy.  This should consider not only what is needed to fill key vacancies in the current state, but also what will be needed to facilitate organizational growth.  It also includes an accounting of what training and development are needed to equip people to fill the gaps.  

    3. Execute a talent management and development system and plan to meet the needs found in your gaps.  Again, to execute effectively it is essential that leaders deploying the process are 1) trained to deploy it and 2) are given the bandwidth and support to deploy it well.  In addition, it is critical that there be a calibration process done through collaboration to work across department lines to facilitate effective succession planning. 

    Want to learn more about this process through a real-life case study?  Mary Ila is speaking at ALSHRM 2022 today (May 3, 2022) about this, but you can also catch her at Florida SHRM speaking on the topic in August 2022. 

    How do you successfully execute succession planning for your organization? 

  • Design Thinking as a Leadership Practice

    Design Thinking as a Leadership Practice

    In an ever-changing world, it’s more important than ever for leaders to have the tools to be able to navigate change and innovate. It’s also important for leaders to have opportunities to spur creative thinking in a world that is cluttered with a lot of noise and distractions. Most importantly, though, leaders need support in connecting with people and building empathy.   

    When frameworks are provided to help spur innovation and build valuable people skills, we find that leaders are better equipped to move forward.  It seems counterintuitive to use a process to try to break away from routine thinking and/or to build relationships, yet the design thinking process helps to spark creativity in order for organizations to adapt and grow. The process begins with building empathy and because of this, we believe it is a valuable tool for anyone wanting to create better workplaces.  

    There are multiple trainings, models, and tools out there if you want to apply design thinking in your organization.

     

    Our favorite Stanford’s d School’s tools.  In particular,  we like this resource because it has all the tools you need to conduct a design thinking boot camp for any type of organization or group:

    (archival resource) Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg — Stanford d.school

     

    Other good sources of training and resources can be found through Harvard and MIT: 

    Design Thinking Course | HBS Online

    MIT Sloan Design Thinking | Online Certificate Program

     

    A good (although dated) video to watch that captures the design thinking process can be found here: 

    ABC Nightline – IDEO Shopping Cart – YouTube

     

    How do you spur innovation and creativity in your workplace? 

  • 6 Steps for Choosing Leadership Training Content and 7 Recommended Frameworks

    6 Steps for Choosing Leadership Training Content and 7 Recommended Frameworks

    We’ve had the opportunity to begin training a group of leaders for a client using a global curriculum the client developed.  As facilitators, we have the opportunity to take the quality content developed and structure learning in a way that allows the participants to apply the content to impact their behavior at work. Hopefully, this will lead them to invoke positive influence on those they lead and interact with. 

    Any good training frames learning around well-researched models or theories.  And there are a lot of models and theories out there! How you sort through them all and determine what to use can sometimes be difficult. 

    The keys, we believe, are to do a few things: 

    1. Create your content around key organizational values or outcomes you are trying to achieve.
    2. Choose well-researched models that follow the scientific method.
    3. Use models/theories that help convey the values/outcomes you are trying to achieve.
    4. Less is more! Don’t overload people with theory! 
    5. Encourage synergy across models and frameworks. How does one model connect with another, and more importantly, how do all the models connect with the overall training purpose? 
    6. Engage participants in applying their learning during the training as well as post-training on the job. 

    Here are some models that we rely on frequently based on these above recommendations. Some of these we will cover in more detail in the coming weeks!

    For innovating:

    For leading effectively:

    For navigating team development and success:

    What leadership models and frameworks guide the way you lead?

  • Is Your Recruiting Strategy to Screen People In or Out?

    Is Your Recruiting Strategy to Screen People In or Out?

    I was taught how to recruit, well really screen people for jobs, before I even graduated college.  Working for a large insurance company as a summer intern between my junior and senior year, I was given a glimpse into the world of corporate recruiting.  It really wasn’t recruiting.

    Everyone on this corporate “recruiting” team was welcoming to me and they divided the selection process up amongst the “recruiters” to show me how it was done. 

    I was taught that the process of selection, “recruiting” as they called it, was screening people out, not in.  

    Yes, we needed to make a hire (or as was the case in customer service and claims classes LOTS of hires at once), so we needed someone in, but the mindset taught in the process was to weed people out.  

    The weeding came in the form of pre-screening questions. If you answered “no” to any one of them, you were automatically out.  The system kicked you out before I even saw you.  Most of these questions related things like required education and experience.  For which I now question why they were “required.” 

    The weeding came in me and my fellow “recruiters” screening people out based on their resumes. For any number of logical and sometimes illogical reasons. 

    The weeding came in interviewing people and, again, tossing them out for a number of logical and illogical reasons. 

    And sometimes, if the pool of candidates was particularly good and we needed another mechanism to weed, we’d toss in some kind of assessment.  Well, actually all those classes we were “recruiting” for in customer service and claims had an assessment before I even saw you too.  Don’t waste my time or yours with an interview if you can’t pass our “test”. 

    The mindset instilled in me was to get people out until you land on the one that is the least bad and hire them!

    It has taken me 15+ years to realize that the method I was taught, which always seemed to not sit quite right with me, but for which I couldn’t put my finger on as to why was because it doesn’t lead you to the best hire. 

    This revelation, or AHA! moment, came to me as I was listening to a podcast by the Neuroleadership Institute on growth mindset.  

    The Co-Founder and CEO of the NIL, David Rock, asks Priya Priyadarshini, General Manager, Employee Career and Development at Microsoft what they do differently now that they have adopted a growth mindset.  She responds:

    The first thing that really just immediately comes to my mind is our Chief HR officer, our Chief People Officer, Kathleen Hogan, who had done a post a couple of years ago. And we really sat down as an HR leadership team to talk about who are the people who we are hiring? If we are truly going to double down on diversity and inclusion and bring people from all walks of life, all sorts of experience, truly being the global company we are, do we screen in people? Or do we screen out people at the get-go? When we are meeting with people, like, I is my brain always thinking about what are the things that will help me quickly eliminate this talent? Versus what should I truly deeply watch for that will help me think about the potential of what this talent is going to bring to the table? How they are going to add to the cultural fabric of Microsoft? 

    So this concept of addition versus elimination has been really, really powerful. And it’s easier said than done. But it really requires a growth mindset on the part of the candidate, first of all, to apply to Microsoft, and how we make that attractive and compelling for them. The hiring manager, the GTA, the global talent acquisition processes, how we reach and our outreach, and all of that. And that’s been really powerful. 

    And a very small example of that would be, today, my team runs a global apprenticeship program, which is a 16-week program called Microsoft Leap. And it’s really that. We are inviting people to take that leap with us. And we have people from all walks of life, returning moms who used to work in a completely different industry. And for them, it’s about how do people have to confront their own fixed mindsets? I don’t have a computer science degree. Microsoft! My gosh! It’s a software company. It’s a tech company. Do I even belong? And so that whole notion in itself requires so much around growth mindset for all parties involved. So that’s just one.

    So, how do we shift the paradigm to screening people in because it gets us the best talent? 

    1. Realize what paradigm you are operating in now.  Are you screening in or out?  Map what steps in your process lead your brain to think “in” or “out”.  Awareness is the first step. 
    2. Adjust thinking to cultivate changed “priorities, systems, and habits” (NIL has a lot of resources on this to develop a growth mindset).  Some  examples: 

    Changed priority:  We have been focusing on time to fill in hiring as a key metric, now we are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (pick any number of metrics here) as our priority. 

    Changed system: We are going to engage with marginalized and/or underrepresented populations and draw people into our applicant pools. Microsoft’s Microsoft Leap program described above is a good example. 

    Changed habit: I am going to teach my “recruiters” how to look at a resume and find potential transferable skills instead of binary criteria for screening purposes. Or maybe your changed habit is not to require or look at a resume at all! 

    3. As mentioned in the changed habit example, you’ve got to train and reinforce the skill through leading with patience, practice, and rewards for those that deploy the growth mindset in hiring, or in any other arena.  Some of these reinforcements come naturally once a growth mindset is continually practiced, but leaders need to model and instill it through their behavior as well.  Who knows if I’d still be a “recruiter” today if I was taught to screen people in instead of out?

     

    How do you cultivate a growth mindset in your hiring practices? 

     

     

     

  • 3 Keys to Meeting Thrive Needs

    3 Keys to Meeting Thrive Needs

    “Certain ideological systems and work environments are broken. In this age, it’s up to change makers, risk-takers, and the faithful to repair or start fresh when our contexts aren’t bearing fruit for the common good.” 

    Michaela O’Donnell, PhD in Make Work Matter

    It’s the end of January 2022 as I write this and I’ve already had about half a dozen requests since the beginning of the year to speak on or facilitate sessions related to workplace retention. Whether you want to frame it as the great resignation, the labor participation rate, COVID still wreaking havoc, or nobody wanting to work anymore, workplace engagement and therefore retention is at what many people feel is an all time low. Business leaders are scrambling, because it is impacting business outcomes.  

    In one of these recent sessions, one person began to rant about people “not being like they used to be.” I had gotten to the point where I had heard enough, and I asked him (in a way that I hope came across as polite) what he was doing at his company to adapt to this new reality.  He looked at me dumbfounded while the gentleman sitting next to him grinned and started to rattle off the ways in the last six months they’ve changed their people practices -really their whole paradigm around how to get work done- and how it’s working.  These two men who were sitting side by side are competitors in a way. In a historically traditional industry.  I know who’d I go to work for and who I’d buy a product from. The one who is adapting, the one who is innovating, instead of the one who is complaining. I bet their turnover rates compared to one another tell the same story. 

    When I went back to do a search on one of the three things that create a thriving workplace, doing a search for the words “autonomy”, “flexibility”, and “freedom” on our blog,  the first post I could find took me back almost ten years to 2012 right after I started Horizon Point in 2011. Apparently I have been talking about these things  for over ten years, advocating for us to think differently about what and where it means to work. 

    We’ve yet to find a better structure for organizing what people need to thrive in the workplace than what Daniel Pink outlines in Drive.  It’s 1) Autonomy 2) Mastery 3) Purpose. 

    So here is a collection of blog posts and thoughts, dating back 10 years, linked to these needs:

    1 . Autonomy: 

    Autonomy and Productivity Together Can Be Better

    How Innovative Companies Go About Rule Making

    The Name of the Game is Freedom: How Innovative Companies Motivate and Retain the Best

    Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    Punching the Time Clock May Not Be All It’s Cracked Up to Be

     

    2. Mastery:

    Mastery is being able to learn and continuously improve and get good, really good at something.  It requires several things to achieve, but we are finding more and more what is critically missing from people getting there (and finding purpose) is margins. Margin being the ability to have time to think, process information, and be able to apply creative thinking to solve problems, learn and grow and actually enjoy doing it. 

    Here are a couple of posts to help you think about margin:

    Take a Lunch Break

    6 Ways to Build Energy

    Also refer back to our Survive post on doing a time tracking exercise to also help examine margin and times of peak productivity that can help to lead to mastery. 

    And finally, mastery usually is built towards during periods of flow:

    5 Questions to Ask Yourself about Flow in the Workplace

     

    3. Purpose: The final pillar of building a workplace where people thrive is building purpose. We believe you do this by establishing company mission, vision, and values and hiring and retaining people that align with your organization’s values. Food for thought on this pillar can be found in these posts:

    What are Company Values and How Do You Create Them? 

    6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Values 

    7 Ways to Supercharge Employee Engagement 

    A Series of Posts on Mission Statements 

    What happens when we stack the pyramid in our favor? Innovation happens. And innovation is an absolute necessity in today’s VUCA world.  But we often limit innovation to products or processes and we don’t think about innovating people practices.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    That’s why we’ve launched Illuminate, to help you actually spend the time innovating your people practices.  Join us today- seats are limited. 

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