Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

The Lactation Consultant For the Love, Leave Me Alone!: How (Not) to Lead When Skill and Will Are High

Our third child came into the world just perfect, then he stopped breathing and turned blue when he tried to nurse. After two scary attempts at feeding, the pediatrician on call came in and told us he thought he had a tracheoesophageal fistula. In laymen’s terms, I came to understand this as a hole between the esophagus and the trachea causing fluid to pass between these two “tubes” when it isn’t supposed to. This would require surgery to correct, thus requiring a transfer to the NICU.

Scary to say the least, but after getting our new blessing to the NICU, they were able to get a small enough tube down him. This allowed them to suction a large amount of fluid out of his stomach. The fluid was the problem that kept him from eating, not a hole. We were relieved but had to stay in the NICU for a bit to get him off an IV and make sure he could eat and gain weight on his own.

That is when the lactation consultants descended on me. One had already come in right after he was born and was phoning me regularly to check to see if the pumping and feeding was going well and to assess I think, my commitment to nursing. They wanted to check in and watch at every feeding, make suggestions on how to do it, and then after we were released from the hospital they called and called and called to check-in.

I nursed my first two children with success. I had been there done that, knew the tricks of the trade and although nursing isn’t right or best for everyone, in our case it was right for me and the baby. I told each consultant that barring any major complications, I was committed to doing it until his first birthday.

I had a high level of skill through experience and a high level of will, or commitment to the task at hand.

But they kept calling. It about drove me crazy.

I know they meant well and most likely had derived some schedule that they thought was best to check in on new mothers. I bet their performance was also measured to a certain degree on their follow-through with these calls.

But I had high will and high skill. I needed to be left alone. If I wasn’t left alone, the risk is an erosion of the will or desire to do the exact opposite of what they want me to do.

The same is true in leading others who have a high level of skill and will in performing their job: Get out of their way is the leadership style you need to utilize.

Avoid the urge to help. Don’t call them, they will call you if they need you.

This came to the surface of my mind in resisting the urge to “help” someone who works with me on a presentation she was doing. I was excited about the opportunity for her to present in this particular forum as was she. We have similar personalities that drive similar levels of internal motivation on similar tasks. She likes to do what I like to do. We also both have experience presenting and are knowledgeable on the topic at hand. I wanted to “help” because I had a high level of skill and will with the assignment, but she did as well.

So I sat back or sat on my hands metaphorically, resisting the urge to direct her. She didn’t need direction. She did ask my thoughts on a couple of ideas for it but other than that, I just showed up the night she was speaking to watch.

And she totally rocked it. She did way better than I could have and way better than if I had tried to insert myself and my ideas into her preparation.

So the key to leading when someone knows what they are doing and has a high desire to do it with excellence is to get out of their way. Don’t call them, they will call you.

October 29, 2019
The Number One Thing that Leads to Team Success
The last three books about workplace effectiveness I’ve read have all discussed it. Two of our clients are having lots of trouble with it. It is what research shows us leads to team success more than any other factor. It is the concept of psychological safety.

According to Amy Edmondson, a lead researcher on the topic, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”

And according to research conducted by Google:

Following the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Code-named Project Aristotle – a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone) – the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”

Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found — it’s the underpinning of the other four.

The New York Times Article describing the Google study stated the following:

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’ Dubey said. ‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’

What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘good’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

What happens when psychological safety isn’t present in a team? At the very least, the best ideas aren’t generated, and the best results aren’t achieved. The whole is not greater than the parts.

At its worst, and we are seeing this firsthand right now, psychological safety can cause a culture of undermining and distrust so pervasive that people literally lie, steal, and engage in self-destructive behaviors at work.

Does your team and workplace have psychological safety?

To measure a team’s level of psychological safety, ask yourself and your team if you/they agree or disagree with these statements:
1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
After the findings at Google, they developed tools to help teams cultivate psychological safety. Check out these great resources here to help your team(s) cultivate the one characteristic that can breed the most success:

Psychological Safety Tools

How are you cultivating psychological safety at work?

Need more resources on this topic?:

Scholarly article by Edmondson on the concept

Edmondson’s TedTalk on the concept

Books I mentioned that talk about the importance of psychological safety:

The Trillion Dollar Coach

Brave New Work

No Hard Feelings
October 25, 2019
Leaders, Know the Skill and Will of Those You Lead
I’ve found myself talking about skill and will a lot lately. Whether it be in one-on-one leadership coaching sessions or in group training, the conversation is often directed towards customizing a leadership approach based on the needs of the person being “led”. Much of our basic leadership training modules focus on customization based on personality, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. A person’s level of skill in doing a job or task and a person’s will to do the job or task (which includes aspects of personality) are critical to success.

So what is skill and what is will?

Skill: A person’s ability to do a job or tasks well which comes from him/her having the knowledge, experience and/or raw talent needed to achieve the desired results.

Will: A person’s desire to do a job and do it with excellence which comes as a result of personality and internal motivation. A person being on the right bus (organization) and on the right seat (job) on the bus also impacts a person’s will.

Simply put, skill is the fact that a person has what is needed to do the job well, a person’s will is that the person actually wants to do the job and do it well. Each dimension also breeds and fuels off each other. If you are good at something, you often like it, and if you like to do something you often get good at it.

So many things can go wrong when we mismatch our leadership to a person’s skill and will. This can occur when:
1. We don’t diagnosis someone’s level of skill and/or will correctly.
2. We are so afraid of “micromanaging” that we don’t correctly realize people need guidance at times based on their level of skill.
3. On the opposite extreme, we are so afraid something may go wrong that we do micro-managing, which leads to crushed will when someone who does have the skill needed to do a job is “over led.”
4. We know someone has a certain level of skill and will with one thing so we label them the same level of skill and will for everything. Skill and will can and are variable based on a variety of factors at any given time.
In order to avoid these mistakes, the first thing to do is to correctly diagnosis a person’s skill and will level based on the task or job at hand. You do this by:

1 Simply ask the person where they think their skill/will falls. Most people can give an honest assessment of these levels if you’ve built trust with them. I ask questions like: How do you feel about doing this on your own? Have you ever done this before? What problems do you think you will face or are you concerned about? Do you want to do this? Why or why not? Simply asking questions will help you know where people are.

2. Ask them to walk you through how they would do something/achieve an outcome. Can they articulate steps in achieving an outcome or provide specific examples of when and how they’ve done it or something similar before? If so, their skill level is most likely high. If someone talks in vague generalities about how to do something, they most likely won’t have the maximum level of competence needed to achieve the result. You can also assess their enthusiasm for the task and desire to do it through this exercise. (Note: This is a good interviewing tactic too when hiring to assess for skill and will.)

3. Observe them doing the task/job to assess where they are. Quite simply, if you watch someone do something you can tell if they can do it well or not. You can assess their confidence, skill, and enthusiasm through observation.

4. Debrief after they do something to assess their like for the activity and their desire to do it again. What did they learn and how will they grow to develop further skills based on what they learned? Do they want to do it again or are they bored by it? Oftentimes, when someone reaches a high level of skill, will can begin to diminish because a been there, done that attitude begins to set in. If the person can build on those skills by teaching others the skill(s) and or adding the next level of complexity to the task/job, you can continue to maintain will and interest.

Once you’ve diagnosed someone’s level of skill and will, it is then time to put these two pieces together to determine how you should best lead the person.

Giving examples of how to lead I find is the best way to illustrate what you can do right and what you can do terribly wrong. With that being said, we’ll devote the next few posts to scenarios based on all four combinations:
- low skill & high will
- high skill & high will
- high skill & low will
- low skill & low will
Stay tuned…..

Note: Many of the thoughts and ideas derived with skill and will come from the Situational Leadership approach developed by Hersey and Blanchard. This approach uses different terms than skill (competence) and will (commitment), but many of the thought processes are the same. I’d suggest reading The One Minute Manager if you are interested in learning more about this model and the practical application of it in the workplace.
October 15, 2019
Autonomy and Productivity… Better Together!

Tuesdays from 4:00- 5:00 pm. In the car. While our middle child is in gymnastics, I have found that this hour of concentrated time in a concentrated space leads to some productive homework time with my oldest. While his newborn brother snoozes in his car seat, we tackle third-grade homework. And there is a lot of it.

Take our list for Tuesday of this past week:

-A math worksheet due Wednesday

-At least 10 minutes of multiplication facts practice that has to be signed off on each day by a parent for a grade

-Practice for a vocabulary test on Thursday (this is our greatest challenge usually)

-Practice for a spelling test on Friday

-Reading for a READO (think BINGO) assignment that requires reading five books in five different genres and passing an AR test (80 or above) to “READO” for the grading period

Where do you start?

I used to dictate how this list played out. Sometimes I opted to start with the hardest thing to conquer on the list, or maybe the most time consuming or maybe depending on my mood, I’d choose the opposite route- easiest, longest, etc.

But, now, I’m letting the eight-year-old decide what he wants to start with, and it seems to help his motivation. His motivation seems to come from a lowered stress level given the little bit of control I give him over conquering the homework.

And he’s not alone. Giving people control, or autonomy, in the workplace, also impacts stress and performance. Take a listen to Your Brain at Work: How Do Humans Fit into the Future of Work? Guest of the podcast, Lynda Gratton, a professor at the London School of Business says this:

“A lot of places aren’t healthy and that seems to be a real focus right now. And actually one of the variables that seem to impact healthy workplaces is the level of autonomy that people have…..if people have control over when and where they work, that’s a really good thing.”

She relates the correlation of healthy workplaces and autonomy by a lowered stress level when autonomy is present. Dr. David Rock goes on in the podcast to cite two studies about the impact of autonomy. One in the workplace were allowing workers to make simple choices about their workspace led to increased productivity. And, interestingly enough, in a retirement home where simple choices about décor led to increased wellbeing as seen in a reduction of the death rate!

Third-grade homework isn’t life and death. For us though, it is often a source of stress. By allowing the person under stress a level of autonomy as to how the work gets done leads to better productivity and wellbeing.

It isn’t so much the order of how it gets done. The order in which he wants to get it done changes with his mood too. It’s the simple fact that he gets to choose the order that leads to better results.

Maybe next we will move on to allowing him control over where the work gets done. For now, though, the controlled environment of the car seems to work well.

Where do you allow for autonomy in how work gets done?

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October 1, 2019
4 Reasons to Outsource

I came across a post on a Facebook group a few weeks ago. The mom participant posted a question to the group asking how people simplified their lives. She has three young children, and I took her post to mean she wanted to spend more meaningful time with her kids but didn’t know which direction to take or have the ability to do as a working mom.

Most of the responses to her question came down to two types of responses 1) limit your kids (and your) extracurricular activities 2) outsource. People recommended outsourcing laundry, grocery shopping, ironing, and clothes shopping among other things. Get rid of spending time on the things that don’t add value and meaning the responses seemed to suggest.

In business, outsourcing is also an option that provides an opportunity to focus on meaningful things while at the same time often reducing costs. This New York Times article acknowledges this and also indicates that outsourcing human resource functions is on the rise. At Horizon Point most of the work we do, when it comes down to it is outsourcing human resource work.

So when and why should you outsource?

I would suggest that there are four key reasons or situations to outsource in business:

1. When things are non-essential or don’t create value. Just like the responses to the mom post, saying no to something is saying yes to something else. If you have the resources to hire someone to do your laundry you can spend that time on a Saturday at the park with your kids when you would normally be doing laundry. Or you could hire a nanny to take your kids to the park while you do laundry- which is more meaningful and value-added? Same with grocery delivery.

Likewise if you outsource, let’s say payroll as an HR function, you can focus more on employee engagement as a more value-added activity than processing payroll (Let me just caveat this by saying, both having clean laundry and payroll being right are essential, they just aren’t differentiators in life and in business- it’s gotta be done, but it’s really no fun to do it and it is a time suck.) Many of these things that don’t add value are also being are automated, which is similar to outsourcing for this reason.

2. When you don’t have the expertise. I’ve got a big hole in my den ceiling right now because apparently something is leaking from upstairs. I have no idea what is leaking, why, and how it is ending up in my den. I could try to fix it, but I would most likely create more of a mess and it would take countless hours for me to learn how to fix it. It is much more effective and efficient for me to hire someone that has expertise in this area to stop water from dripping out of my ceiling. In the same way, outsourcing things that you don’t have in-house resources for is a good reason to call in some experts. For example, you may need to outsource leadership training because you don’t have a person that is trained and experienced enough to do this. Often this makes sense for project-based work, not ongoing needs.

3. When you need someone that doesn’t have a dog in that fight. Another reason to bring in expertise is that you need an objective third party to facilitate whatever activity that needs to be done. We see this a lot in outsourcing 360 evaluations, engagement surveys, and anything where anonymity is needed to ensure the integrity and participation in the activity. Other types of activities where I see more people bringing in experts is for organizational design and development activities such as looking at how an organization is structured and making recommendations on how to improve it or in coaching someone to better performance. The main value the outsourcing brings in these cases is objectivity that obviously needs to be tempered with outsourcing to an expert that knows what he/she is doing.

4. When you are in transition. The mom who posted on the message board is in a phase in her life where many things require her undivided time and attention. She has lots of competing priorities and is trying to sort through managing them.

Likewise, businesses are often in this place. At Horizon Point, we have found living all of our company values (people first, passion, productivity, continuous learning and improvement, and give back) by helping companies that are in this type of growth transition. It usually presents itself as a company that has grown past 50 people, where the office manager or a similar role has been doing “HR” and the owners/leaders of the company realize this isn’t going to work long term. They need an expert to help them be successful at all things people -to give them a competitive advantage- but they don’t have one in house. They are like the mom with three young kids who still have two that can’t tie their shoes without help. Eventually, her kids will learn to tie their shoes and she won’t have to devote time to this every morning, but not without her teaching them to tie their shoes.

We come in and help the company identify internal (and on occasion, external) talent that can be the people leaders they need with some guided help and practice. They outsource their HR to us temporarily, but the key piece of this outsourcing is teaching someone else to be their HR leader. We are working ourselves out of the job and we want to, just like the mom tying the shoes is doing. She doesn’t want to tie her kids’ shoes forever.

We’ve worked through a few engagements like this at Horizon Point over the last four to five years, and there is nothing more rewarding that seeing a company continue to grow and thrive because you’ve helped them pick the right person to lead their HR function and helped them learn how to do it.

What do you find is best to outsource in life and in business?

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September 24, 2019