Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • Values Amidst the Storm

    Values Amidst the Storm

    “Culture guides the team in their everyday work. It’s the foundation on which people make decisions and take actions.”

    The Start-Up Playbook by Rajat Bhargava and Will Herman

     

    I took my first flight in over six months recently.  Headed to Orlando to speak at a conference, I booked a Delta flight connecting through Atlanta.  

    Before I left, my husband said, “Make sure you have your mask on the whole time during the flight.  Delta has been blacklisting people for life if they refuse the keep their mask on.”  

    As their CEO Ed Bastian said, “If you insist on not wearing a mask, then we insist you not fly Delta.” Delta don’t play.  

    And neither was I going to risk not being able to fly on my favorite airline over keeping a mask on while in the air.  

    It was evident throughout the experience that Delta wasn’t playing in every aspect of their flight experience safety.  Sanitizing wipes were handed out as you boarded. No more food and beverage service as usual- you get a plastic bag complete with a water bottle, napkin (a recycled one at that), cheese-its, and biscoff.  There’s another hand sanitizing wipe in that packet too.  The way they filter air through the cabins has changed as well as the way they clean and sanitize their planes.  It’s called the Delta CareStandard. 

    But why does Delta do all this when it costs more money to do it this way in an airline industry that is fraught with more woes than almost all other industries because of the pandemic? On my flights of less than 1 hour each, couldn’t they just skip the food and beverage service and sighting safety reasons and over multiple flights save themselves a ton of money?  They were close to losing $100 million A DAY in March and $27 million A DAY in June. 

    Well first of all, they are mandated to do some things, but in general, I think it is because Delta is governed by its Corporate Values.  

    These values are: 

    • Honesty
    • Integrity
    • Respect
    • Perseverance
    • Servant Leadership

    They intertwine with the mission of “The work of an airline is, at its core, about connecting people with communities, with experience, and with each other.  Making connections is Delta’s mission…” 

    Some things you see Delta doing show their commitment to their values because of the pandemic or what they’ve done pre-pandemic include:

    • Blocking middle seats through January (booking only 60% full), not to mention all the other Delta CareStandard actions.
    • Referring to their employees as, “Our family” 
    • Using the word “We” in much of their statements for example, “We- Delta’s employees, customers, and community partners…”

    Delta isn’t perfect, but what they continually do pre and post-pandemic is seeking to live their corporate values through their behaviors, decisions, and actions.  And sometimes our true values are best seen when things are at their very worst. It’s why they consistently earn top awards and have recently taken the number one spot on the list of the best airlines in 2020. 

    It’s why I’ll continue to fly Delta even if it costs a little bit more and even if I have to connect instead of flying direct.  And it is why Delta, even though it is in the midst of a massive storm, will come out better than before.  They are experiencing the opportunity of living out the value of perseverance here and now.

     

    How is your company living out its values amidst the storm? 

  • Career Change – Is it for you?

    Career Change – Is it for you?

    Have you been declared “non-essential” during the pandemic? Maybe you’re in a role that is or has been eliminated or just ready to try something new? Where do you begin?

    First, a career assessment is a great place to start. My Next Move is a free one that can be completed online or we can help you with an in-depth assessment that examines your personality and desired skills and abilities.

    Another great resource for making a career change is the internet. You can search for “in-demand” careers online. ONET is another great tool for researching careers along with salaries and provides career exploration tools.

    Regardless of what career you currently have, if you are itching to make a change, examine the following as you begin:

    What is missing from what I do now that I want to be able to do on a regular basis? What skills do I need to use on a regular basis to bring satisfaction?

    What is it that I do now that I want to continue to be able to do? What skills that I want to continue to use are transferrable to other careers?

    What type of environment do I enjoy working in?

    What careers match the skills and abilities I want to use and are also in line with my work values? MatchFIT provides a framework for you to learn and understand what your workplace cultural preferences are, how to interpret and apply these preferences to your job search, and how to highlight and build on them for your own personal and professional development.

    Research shows that better person-organization fit leads to employees who are more satisfied, engaged, successful, and achieve greater results for their organizations.

    Finally, why not do a trial run before jumping into a new career? Job shadowing is a great way to try out a new career (or two) before you make a change. Read 4 Tips for an Awesome Job Shadow or Informational Interview before your first one. 4 Great Benefits of Job Shadowing for Grown-Ups offers more benefits of job shadowing for career changers.

     

  • Stop Selling When Interviewing Candidates

    Stop Selling When Interviewing Candidates

    When I was a recruiter, interviews started off with a little overview of the organization.  I’d tell them a little bit about what it was like to work for our company and also cover information about how the interview and hiring process worked before launching into questions.  

    I often had the chance to sit with hiring managers interviewing candidates as well.   The difference in how the hiring manager handled the first part of the interview related to information about the company was always interesting.  Some said very little if anything about the organization or their department and/or team, while others gave a dissertation on it all.  Some bragged and bragged about how great it was to work at our company, others gave the good, the bad, and the ugly about what the work and the environment was like. 

    Turns out, there is a way to do this and a way not to if you want to hire the right candidates.   According to research by Jennifer Carson Mar and Dan Cable on the effects of selling on interviewers’ judgements,  it’s not so much on how the candidate portrays him or herself in the interview, it’s about how the interviewer portrays himself or herself and the organization. 

    Amy Cuddy describes the findings of the study well in her book Presence: 

    “The more the interviewers were focused on attracting candidates, that is the more they wanted to be liked, the less accurate they were at selecting candidates that would do well after being hired in terms of performance, good citizenship, and core values fit. 

    The takeaway is this.  Focus less on the impression you are making on others and more on the impression you are making on yourself. The later serves the former.” 

    So, if you want to hire people who will perform well, get along well, and share the values your organization espouses, stop selling, and be authentic. 

    I wonder if the implications of this study extend to other areas of HR?  When do we need to sell and when do we not? 

    When do you turn on your selling style and turn it off at work? 

     

    Like this post, you may also like: 

    3 Reasons to Make Realistic Job Previews a Part of Your Hiring Process

     

  • Birthing Babies & Businesses

    Birthing Babies & Businesses

    I seem to have a knack for birthing babies and businesses at the same time.  Blaming the hormones as a cause of a healthy dose of insanity, I launched my first business almost nine years ago when my now nine-year-old son was a newborn. 

    Our second child, a girl, came three years behind her brother. She was a well thought out and planned decision.  Her current personality actually reflects this truth. No businesses were birthed during her arrival but taking a leap to go beyond myself and out of the desire to integrate home and work in a way that was meaningful and purposeful for me, I hired my first employee when she was a newborn. 

    Fast-forward several years later, and my husband had convinced me we were done with babies.   We had two children, a boy and a girl, two thriving careers, a home, and a dog. What more could we need?  But, of course, my heart was telling me something, and after much prodding, my husband got on board as well.  I wrote about this decision in a blog post about Using Your Heart Not Your Head. 

    Our third child arrived almost to the minute of when our son started third grade and our daughter started kindergarten.  Not what I had planned. He was to stay in place until after I walked my ‘baby” who would no longer be the baby, into her first day of real school. 

    For the well planned out people we thought we were, this third child a boy, and the events so far of 2020, has proven to show us that sometimes planning is actually the worst thing you can do.  It impedes risks and can lead us to over rationalize, keeping us from making decisions and steps forward especially ones that come from the heart. 

    Of course, with this child being a boy, birthing a business had to come along with him. The new business was formally incorporated not a week after I found out I was pregnant with him, and we have spent much of 2020 albeit remotely, breathing life into the idea and goals of this new venture.  We would launch into a plan, then stop and change course more times than I can count in response to the ever-changing world and challenges around us. 

    Our new “baby”, MatchFIT, takes me down a different path than the first one.  This one requires even more risks than the first to be able to capitalize on the need to scale and scale quickly and to bring a team together at a faster pace than one every two to three years.  Just like the third child brings about more challenges than just the one. We are playing zone defense now, not man to man.  Of course, the business launch has hit a time when our product, a hiring tool, seems to be unnecessary when most businesses aren’t hiring.  

    Should we just quit? I’ve thought that more times than I can count. But our heart has told us to keep moving forward because we are passionate about our purpose. 

    Our need for moving forward sent us down a path of applying for Alabama Launchpad for seed funding. We made it to the finals last week and pitched our idea to the judges and then live through a social media streamed event.  It was a risk, and we lost.  

    As my husband said, we literally lost to sh*t, as the winner was a compost company.  The people running the venture we lost to were far from sh*t, though.  They seemed to be genuinely nice guys with a passion and heart for their business idea.  It was almost impossible not to be happy for them. 

    At the heart of this business and its start-up are the core values of innovation and creativity. We help organizations and job seekers also define their core values and find opportunities and relationships that allow for workplace engagement to take shape. 

    I find myself engaging in the best of myself when I live out innovation and creativity, even though it forces more risk-taking, especially because it requires more risk-taking.  And with risk-taking also comes the risk of embarrassment –  of literally losing to sh*t, live and publicly. 

    Just like the decision to have our third child, applying for Launchpad and pursuing a business venture amidst a global pandemic and global unrest seems to be a huge risk. 

    But what often seems counterintuitive from the outside looking in is usually an active process that is occurring from the inside out. One that is a step out in faith. One governed by living out the values that make us and businesses unique and allow us each to thrive. 

    More often than not, these steps out in faith lead to more joy than each of us can possibly contain.  The joy our third son brings to our lives is contagious, and the joy I felt despite the loss via Launchpad, in innovating and creating in a collaborative way with my business partner and the team at MatchFIT is full of joy in the journey. 

    I told the team we’d lick our wounds of loss over the weekend and then rise this week having learned and grown, thankful for the experience and exposure Alabama Launchpad has given us.  But most especially, for the opportunity to live out our workplace values in the process, and to be a business that helps others discover workplace relationships that do the same. 

     

    Do your organization and your life decisions allow you to live out your values?

  • 3 Ways to Go Upstream

    3 Ways to Go Upstream

    “What the world needs now is a quieter breed of hero, one actively fighting for a world in which rescues are no longer required. How many problems in our lives and society are we tolerating simply because we have forgotten we can fix them?” Dan Heath- Upstream

    I just finished one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time.  But what made the book great was that it took the thought-provoking a step further and provided some keen insights and tools about acting on the information.   Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, by Dan Heath is worth the read. 

    As the subtitle implies, the premise of the book is that we spend so much time and resources on downstream issues.  It provokes a focus on the upstream to fix things before they happen.  How can we stop firefighting and be proactive? And how far upstream can we go? 

    The three key takeaways in the book to focus upstream are: 

    1. “Be impatient for action but patient for outcomes.”  Quoting Maureen Bisognano,  Heath says, “Change won’t come without action.”  And it also won’t come without patient diligence. 

    2. “Macro starts with micro.”  The key takeaway here is that you can’t fix big problems without getting close to them. “You can’t help a thousand people, or a million until you understand how to help one.”  You have to name the person(s) and the problem by getting “proximate”. 

    3. “Favor scoreboards over pills.” “The problem comes when the obsession with testing becomes a hindrance to scale and learning.”  You’ve got to be able to pivot once your impatient actions and microfocus tell you that a different direction is needed to get the outcomes and macro picture desired.   Ask yourself, “How can we make progress this week?” “Take ownership of the problem and start slogging forward.” 

    The downstream problem I deal with the most in the work we do is workplace disengagement. Gallup estimates that the cost of disengagement in the U.S. is $450-550 billion per year.  The cost comes in many forms, such as turnover and loss of productivity, but this figure only quantifies the cost to business. It does not quantify the cost to individuals experiencing a misalignment in their job and/or organizational choices.  

    Can you name someone (getting proximate) that has suffered the negative effects of hating what they do and where they do it?  You may be able to name yourself.   And if you can name someone or yourself, you know what negative effects come by working for the wrong organization because of workplace misalignment. 

    We are working now through impatient action and scorecards, not pills to help tackle the disengagement problem with MatchFIT.  In seeking to help individuals and organizations find the right fit, we are workplace matchmakers.   We start upstream at the beginning of the hiring process, and our goal is to make the workplace better through meaningful employment relationships. 

    We will be pitching our idea on Thursday, June 11th via the Alabama Launchpad competition. You can join us on Alabama Launchpad and EDPA’s (the host of the program) website and social channels to learn more about the details of our upstream effort.  The event starts at 6:00 pm and we are scheduled to pitch at 6:40 pm.

    What problem are you trying to tackle upstream?