Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • Autonomy and Productivity… Better Together!

    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? 

     

    Like this post, you may also like: 

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  • 4 Reasons to Outsource

    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?

    4 Tips to Help You Delegate Learned from Grocery Delivery
    You Gotta Gitcha Some Help to Lead and Run Well
  • How to Make Personality Differences Work to Your Advantage

    How to Make Personality Differences Work to Your Advantage

    Hanging pictures on the wall.  Proofing documents.  Formatting presentations. Checking to make sure calculations in a spreadsheet is correct.

    I really dislike doing all of these types of tasks.  They all require, quite honestly, a sense of detail and accuracy and, of course, patience that doesn’t come naturally to me.  It’s not how I’m wired.

    My husband, on the other hand, finds satisfaction in hanging pictures on the wall, taking care to make sure they are level and perfectly spaced and aligned.  He likes to measure, just like he did with the table. And it makes me happy that he finds satisfaction in it, so I don’t have to be frustrated by it.

    Two people, I work with find satisfaction in proofing documents.  Another can format presentations in a way that makes the people who create PowerPoint templates look like amateurs. And a contractor we use regularly for compensation projects loves spreadsheets, formulas, and checking to make sure they are right.

    Personality differences in the workplace and at home are often a source of headache.  Our default is to see our differences as contradictory instead of complementary.  But they can actually lead to team and organization competitive advantage if the diversity of differences is harnessed.

    A person’s personality leads them to like certain tasks and activities and dislikes others because of the energy or stress that activity creates.  If you look at the map of the DiSC model of personality below, you can begin to see what types of activities people with certain profiles would like.

     

    For example, the contractor I work with on compensation projects is a C. She likes the analytical, detail-oriented, and systematic approach to the data analysis. I, on the other hand as an I, like the task of convincing a potential client that we are the best organization to conduct their compensation analysis, and I like speaking on topics, including compensation, to help inspire and persuade people to do things in an innovative way.  She and I make a great team for securing and conducting compensation related work.

    If you are interested in figuring out how to harness personality diversity in your workplace, I would look at it from a task or activity-based perspective.  Here’s how:

    1.     Get a big stack of sticky notes in a variety of colors. You’ll need as many colors as you have people on your team.

    2.     Give each person on your team a big stack of one color of sticky notes.  An assigned color indicates a person on your team.

    3.     Ask each person to write down everything they can think of that they do at work by individual tasks.  One task/activity equals one sticky note.

    4.     Ask them to code the task on each note with a + or a -.  + meaning they enjoying doing it a – meaning they do not.

    5.     Have everyone stick their sticky notes up on the wall.

    6.     Give everyone the chance to review the notes on the wall and allow them to pull off notes that have a – on them that would actually be a + for them.

    So for example, my sticky notes could all be blue and I write down “Run payroll” on one note and put a – sign by it.   I stick it on the wall.  A colleague of mine could look at that and say, “You know I think I would like to do that, or I do like to do that.” and they could take it off the wall.

     

    Once this takes place, have a discussion about what tasks people have taken off the wall that they would like to do. Does the person that put it up there really want to divest of that task?  Can you move things around? Some cross-training may be required.

    Are there certain colors that have changed hands so to speak? Are people in the wrong “jobs”?

    Think about moving beyond job descriptions to how people’s personality and interests can drive work assignments to lead to engagement.

    There will be things no one likes do to.  That’s just life and these things will still have to be done, but you might be surprised how much you can move things around. This can lead to people being more productive, and therefore your team more productive because you simply let personalities compliment each other instead of conflicting.

    It’s a different way of thinking about how to get work done, but it could be one that might just help to diminish some of your personality conflicts at work in a unique way.

    How do you ensure that personalities complement instead of conflict with each other at work?

  • The Table

    The Table

    I was so excited about my husband’s Christmas gift in 2018. We had just begun renovating our home which would include an outdoor living space. We discussed wanting a large table in this space to be able to have people over to eat and fellowship regularly.   

    I contacted a friend who owns a company that does custom woodworking and asked him to get a table created for us.  Nine feet long I told him, sassafras wood, bench seats.  The table wasn’t ready in time for Christmas nor was the space to put it, so I printed a picture of one similar and wrapped it up for my husband to open Christmas morning.  

    I was excited to see what I expected to be his excitement over the table.  But when he opened the box and figured out what it meant, he began to fire off a series of questions, mainly focused on how big the table was going to be.  I got no thank you, just an interrogation that was followed by him getting up and pulling out our renovation plans to measure the space we intended to put the table in.  

    “I don’t think it is going to fit.” He said.    

    “Do you want chairs to fit on the ends?” He asked me.  “Because I don’t think they will fit.” 

    We re–visited this discussion in some similar form no less than ten times over the course of the next week.  

    At first, I was hurt, but by the end of the first week of his worry over the table fitting, I was downright mad. And we had it out over the table more than once. What I thought would have been an exciting gift turned into something I wish I had never done.   

    A few weeks later I was facilitating some training for a client titled “Understanding Yourself and Others for Managers.”   

    This training focuses on building self-awareness and using that awareness to become aware of others and adapt leadership style and decisions based on the personality of the person(s) you are working with.  

    It uses the DiSC Model to do this:  

    I had an epiphany during the training when talking about conflict at work created by personality differences, realizing that these differences had largely prompted our table dispute.  

    My husband is a DC and I am an iD (or a Di depending on the situation).  I was in my warm and fuzzy and also fast-paced box of getting the present- yay! Surprise! So fun!  Why would I stop and measure how big the table needed to be?  It needs to be big, nine feet sounds good! 

    My husband, on the other hand, had retreated into his C box of total questioning and skeptical with a healthy dose of cautious and reflective to go with it.  To exasperate this mindset, he had started in a role at work about a year prior that put him in a position of leading facility operations at his hospital, almost all of which is governed by strict compliance standards.  Meaning, most of his days were measuring and measuring twice. And documenting that measurement. He had brought this mindset and the importance of it home with him. This led him to process and agonize over and over again – this table isn’t going to fit.   

    And then, when we both got mad that we weren’t being understood, we both jumped into our full-blown D, aka- lion, box to duke it out over whose mindset was right.  And we know what happens when two lions fight.  There will be blood.  

    Sounds like something you’ve dealt with at home? At work? Yep, I thought so.  

    So what do we do?  

    1. Be self-aware of how you are wired and how that causes you to behave.  A good way to verbalize this is to utilize the DiSC model in identifying priorities:

    The priorities of different styles are the words around the circle.  My priority in the table giving situation (and most all situations) was enthusiasm and action, causing me to behave in a way that made me decide to “surprise” my husband and not pay attention to the details (aka- the size of the table) of the surprise. 

    2. Be aware of how others are wired and how that causes them to behave. With the table situation, I should realize that my husband’s main priority is most often accuracy, causing him to want to know the exact details of the gift and be involved in those details to ensure they are accurate.  

    3. Ask yourself, is the way I behave based on my personality consistent or different than the person I’m working with?  Obviously, in the table situation, our priorities are the complete opposite.  In the DiSC model, the styles that are opposite of each other on the circle either end up 1) combative or 2) complementary to one another. 

    4. Then, ask yourself, what conflicts could arise because we are the same or different? In this situation, our lack of awareness and attention to the priorities of each other led to combativeness.  My feelings were hurt because I got zero enthusiasm from him, and he was frustrated because he could not ensure accuracy.  

    5. Then, realize the Platinum Rule– The platinum rule states that we should treat others like they would want to be treated (contrary to the Golden Rule of treating people like you want to be treated).  We all have different needs and priorities as the DiSC model points out. If I’m giving a gift to someone I love, I should think first about their needs and priorities, not my own.  The same goes for leading with a servant leadership approach.  As much as I love a surprise, he does not.  Getting the table should have been handled differently. And the response to the table surprise could have been handled differently as well if only we had both been self-aware and aware of the needs of each other.  

    Whereas we laugh about the table debacle now (by the way, it fits quite nicely in the space, thank you very much!), it is an example of how we can let our differences get in the way when we approach any number of things lead to way bigger issues.  

     

    It also points to the fact that we can allow our differences to complement instead of contradicting each other, leading to better outcomes.  More on that in our next post…. 

  • 4 Actions for Simple, Quality Leadership

    4 Actions for Simple, Quality Leadership

    We welcomed our third child almost three weeks ago.  With five-plus years between this one and our now middle child, we got rid of almost every piece of baby gear we owned. We kept the car seat and base, but come to find out, car seats expire. Who knew? 

    It’s amazing how many seats, swings, monitors, plastic crap, etc. you can get for a baby. Most move, make noise, light up and can be quite expensive. We had a lot of this stuff for our first child. 

    So, as we went to decide what “gear” we had to have, we took a minimalist approach this time around.  We got: 1) car seat 2) stroller 3) sling and 4) borrowed a small seat and a boppy pillow from a friend.  None light up or move and our infant seems to be quite content. 

    Turns out, too, that the minimalist approach might be best too with leadership practices that lead to satisfied employees. Research out from Microsoft shows that four things lead to satisfied aka content employees: 

     

    1. Don’t make people work evenings and weekends (and you working evenings and weekends makes them think they should): 

     

    “One of their findings was that people who worked extremely long workweeks were not necessarily more effective than those who put in a more normal 40 to 50 hours. In particular, when managers put in lots of evening and weekend hours, their employees started matching the behavior and became less engaged in their jobs, according to surveys.”

     

    2. Have one-on-one meetings with your direct reports: 

     

    “Another finding was that one of the strongest predictors of success for middle managers was that they held frequent one-on-one meetings with the people who reported directly to them.”

     

    3. Build your network and relationships across departments: 

     

    “People who made lots of contacts across departments tended to have longer, better careers within the company. There was even an element of contagion, in that managers with broad networks passed their habits on to their employees.”

     

    4. Stop keeping people in meetings all the time: 

     

    “The issue was that their managers were clogging their schedules with overcrowded meetings, reducing available hours for tasks that rewarded more focused concentration — thinking deeply about trying to solve a problem.”

     

    Your leadership practices don’t have to be fancy.  Simply respect people’s time out of work, meet with them regularly, build relationships, and stop having so many meetings.  

    Which one of these things can you implement today to be a better leader?