Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

Take a Lunch Break
“You want me to pick you up a biscuit for breakfast?” One colleague asked another on his way into the office one morning.

“No, Mary Ila is coming today.”

“Gotcha.” he replied back.

The HR Manager I work with regularly was the one refusing the biscuit because she knew if I’m there for the day, I am going to take her (make her go) to lunch. This is such a given that now her collogues know when I’m there not to count on her to be there at lunch time. Her friend/co-worker with the biscuit didn’t need any further explanation as to why she didn’t want a big breakfast. Mary Ila here = a good lunch. He’s gotten in on the lunch breaks with us at least once before too.

The lunches started out, in her view I think, as me just trying to be nice. And of course, I am taking her to lunch to be nice, but also because I’ve got to eat too.

But she’s come to realize that I have bigger reasons for taking her to lunch. She needs to get OUT of the office for a bit. The lunches help us both recharge, have more casual, but still work-related conversations. I can visibly see her relax a little once we get in the car and we are headed to what is most often our favorite-Mexican- meal.

I had a purpose for the lunch breaks with her because intuitively I know she needs it. Little did I know that there is a lot of science to back up lunch (not breakfast- see she didn’t need that biscuit!) as the most important meal of the day.

In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink, Pink writes:

“For example, a 2016 study looked at more than eight hundred workers (mostly in information technology, education, and media from eleven different organizations, some of whom regularly took lunch breaks away from their desks and some of whom did not. The non-desk lunchers were better able to contend with workplace stress and showed less exhaustion and greater vigor not just during the remainder of the day but also one full year later.

‘Lunch breaks,’ the researchers say, ‘offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being’- particularly for employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs,’”

Pink goes on to describe two things that need to be present for lunch breaks to have this positive outcome:
1. Autonomy- Exercising how, when and whom you do it with.
2. Detachment- Being both psychologically and physically detached from the work place (and the phone, etc. that may connect you to it).
I do make her go to lunch and go with me, so I’m not sure how much autonomy I’ve given her in this. However, we do practice detachment.

I hope that the value she sees in the lunch breaks will help her be more autonomous in taking them. Also by engaging others in the practice of breaking for lunch, she can model the way to detach from the workplace and work activities at some point during the day to recharge and refocus.

Do you regularly take a lunch break? If not, what would help make you start? Call me- I’m always up for lunch if you need an accountability partner.
August 14, 2018
4 Ways to Increase Your Candidate Pool
My LinkedIn Daily Rundown feed started out today with “Jobs are cutting experience requirements….” Reporting that, “an extra 1 million jobs were opened up to candidates last year with “no experience necessary.’”

There is a lot of buzz about the hot job market now with the unemployment rate at a pre-recession low.

But what do you do to fill jobs in this economy?

As the Daily Rundown suggests you can:
- Lower requirements.Whether it be experience, education or skill requirements, lowering them can increase candidate pools. I often find that job descriptions have qualifications in them that really aren’t “required” to be successful in the role. Do a job analysis and figure out if you can and should lower your requirements. Some more food for thought on this can be found here.
In addition, we suggest:
- Eliminating requirements. Doing a job analysis may show you that you not only need to lower requirements, but eliminate them all together. One thing I’m finding more and more employers considering eliminating a totally clean criminal history. Opening yourself up to hiring ex-offenders may be a wise move. To learn more about the Second Chance Initiative targeted at helping employers and communities navigate through the advantages and also challenges of hiring ex-offenders, read more here.
Lowering and/or eliminating requirements may require more skills-based training for new hires, but if you focus on hiring for fit and diversity (will dimensions instead of skill dimensions), you may end up with better employees anyway.
- Raising your wages. More on that here.
- Sourcing better. Pursue passive candidates instead of posting and praying.Pick up the phone and call people, do a search for potential candidates on LinkedIn, send an email to your professional contacts. It isn’t rocket science. Attract interest by creating interest beyond your job posting on Indeed.
All of these efforts lead you to be able to fish out of a different pond than one(s) you’ve been fishing in. And sometimes the best catches can be found in the ponds that aren’t overfished.

How do you increase your candidate pools to make better hires?
August 7, 2018
Explain Your Why. Don’t Assume Why.

After a particularly long doctor’s appointment with our seven-year-old, the topic of his prescription (he has epilepsy and takes a medicine to control his seizures) came up.

The nurse practitioner came back in to say she had sent it to the pharmacy electronically.

My husband said, “We need it written in 500mL increments.”

She looked at him like who do you think you are, trying to tell me how to write a prescription.

I looked at my husband and tried to telepathically tell him, “Explain to her why you are making that request.” I may or may not have also thought “You idiot” too, but that’s beside the point.

You see, I knew why he was making this request. His request had good intentions, not meant to serve his ego, but to serve others. We get his medicine from the community pharmacy where my husband works. He’s in administration at the hospital. The medicine comes to the pharmacy in 250mL bottles. The way our son’s prescription was written last time required bottles to be split which is a real pain for the pharmacy staff. The dosage is so close to 500mL for a three-month supply (450mL I think) that, in his mind, it was easy and made logical sense to write the prescription at 500mL. It would save everyone time.

The nurse knew none of this.

But once he started to explain that really all he was trying to do was make life easier for the people he works with, her face relaxed and she simply said, “Sure, we can do that.”

If we had explained our why before we made the request, things would have been easier. It was fortunate that we could explain our way out of what looked like an ego trip.

On the flip side of this, the nurse only knew what she knew as well, and that was our request. Her defensive response was totally natural. It is what most of us do. Our brain goes into defense mode when we don’t have all the inputs we need to understand a situation.

However, what often derails us is making assumptions about people’s motives (i.e. my husband was on a power or control trip) when we don’t have the full context for communication or behaviors towards us. We don’t naturally respond by seeing people in a positive light as our first reaction (i.e. my husband is trying to help someone else out) when we don’t have all the information needed to understand a situation.

So the next time you make a request of someone, explain to them why you are making that request. If you are the recipient of a request without all the details, don’t assume the worst of the person or the situation. Ask clarifying questions to gain mutual understanding.

How do you explain the why and not assume the why?

July 31, 2018
The next activity you need to do with your leaders: What needs to start, stop or stay?
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” Max DePree

Feedback is a critical to any successful performance management and development process. With trends in feedback moving leaders towards less formal mechanisms of feedback and away from a formal performance appraisal, we still need to be thinking about how to define the current state of someone’s behavior and performance in order to direct what we want to see.

And sometimes we can formalize things and still make them feel “casual”. A way to do this is to have a 1. Start 2. Stop 3. Stay session.

To do this:

1. Get your team together.

2. Give everyone a sheet of flip chart paper and different colored markers.

3. Ask them to write their name on the top of their sheet.

4. Get each participant to create three columns labeled START, STOP, STAY.

5. Get everyone to hang their flip chart piece on the wall.

6. Ask everyone to walk around the room indicating one behavior or action in each column on everyone’s paper. Let participants know that if an item is already on the wall that they want to write down, to go ahead and write it down again. Note: This requires that everyone in the room know and interact with each other enough to have valid input. If this isn’t the case, you may want to consider splitting the group up or telling people if they don’t know someone well enough to skip them.

7. Get everyone to take their notepad down and review it. Prompt people to review in a way that:
- Identifies patterns or trends. Are people saying the same things?
- Checks
- for self-awareness. Are they surprised, not surprised, upset, or glad to see what they are seeing?
- Leads them to see if there are any clarifying questions they’d like to ask about their feedback. For example, (see a chart for me below done in a group training with a client) one person wrote I needed to start “090” them. I didn’t know what this meant. Turns out it means to go back to the basics, or the remedial course (not the 100 level course) with them. This was such good feedback because it validated some of the puzzled looks I was getting at times in training when I assumed people knew what I was talking about but they didn’t. I was thinking their looks meant they disagreed with me, but it meant they didn’t understand.
8. Wrap up the exercise by asking each participant to commit to start, stop or staying on one thing on their list that they think will help them the most and get them to share what they are committing to with another person in the group for accountability.

I find some people are really hesitant to do this in a group setting. They think it won’t go over well because either 1. People won’t be honest or 2. People will get their feelings hurt and get upset. Both of which can make the exercise counterproductive.

However, I’ve actually found the opposite to be the case. Facilitating this with clients has been one of the most positive efforts in performance development I have witnessed. It leads to great dialogue and changed behaviors. Try it. If it bombs, you can blame me.

If you want a safer route, you can start by doing it one-on-one. Ask people first for them to make a list of things you need to start, stop and stay. Then reciprocate by providing them and list and talking one-on-one about it.

What are your go-to methods for getting and giving great feedback?
July 24, 2018
Women in Business Need Male Mentors

My first professional mentor was a man. In college, I helped him with his research and he helped me grow as a human being in too many ways to count. It was no big deal for us to have one-on-one discussions in his office with the door closed. I never thought anything of it. I suspect he didn’t either. Nor were my parents concerned. They are as grateful to him for the positive influence he had on me as I am.

This mentor often spoke truth with directness to the situations I was dealing with that I found myself getting too emotional about. He also commended me when I acted in ways that showed I was capable and confident. Characteristics a woman is often chided for. This was invaluable.

My best boss was a man. He gave me the freedom to run with my ideas and got out of my way when I did so.   It was not uncommon for us to travel in the car to places for work related events, just the two of us. I never thought anything of it. I doubt he, his wife, or my husband did either.

This boss didn’t make me feel like an idiot when I cried in his office to him about something, that in hindsight, was stupid. Nor did he get condescending when we joked and left a positive pregnancy test on his desk as an April Fool’s joke. Pregnant I was not then, but a month later I was. Oops. He was also so proud when both my kids were born and gave me more flexibility than most after the first was born and I was also trying to finish my Masters thesis. He also spoke truth to my emotion and taught me to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. He praised me for behavior that is also often uncommon for a woman to demonstrate.

I’m often at lunch one-on-one with men.   They are typically clients or perspective clients. I think nothing of asking a man to lunch. I don’t think anything of asking anyone to lunch, male or female. Mealtime is natural way to build dialogue and relationships.

But the last time I was in a restaurant with a male client (in my hometown) an acquaintance-friend I know saw me sitting there with him. She looked away. When I saw her later on, she asked me who he was and why I was there with him.   It was obvious she thought it was weird. She seemed to disapprove. I was confused.

But in this #metoo world we are living in, if people find it strange for a female to be at lunch with a male that is anyone other than her spouse or possibly father, how can we expect it to be okay for both women and men to feel comfortable in one-on-one situations that often help to build strong business relationships, healthy dialogue and positive results?

At #SHRM18, Sheryl Sandberg spoke about, among other things, the need for women to have male mentors.   She related this to helping women model behaviors, more often demonstrated in males, that help women achieve business success. I know my male mentors and colleagues have helped me with this (not to mention my dad and my husband, both of whom have probably had more of an influence on this than my professional male relationships.)

Sheryl didn’t give a lot of advice on how to make men mentoring women totally acceptable despite the #metoo challenges.

The one direct thing she said to men fearful of establishing these relationships was, “If you don’t feel comfortable having dinner with a woman, don’t have dinner with a man. Group meals for everyone.”

I struggle with this though. The value I gained from the men in my life who have shaped me almost always came in the form of one-on-one, direct feedback. This just doesn’t take place in a group settings.

So, like Sheryl, while I don’t have a lot of direct advice to give on how to help this situation, maybe this quote I just came across by Bob Goff can speak the greatest truth:

I have two lunch meetings on my calendar for this week. Both are with men.   I won’t be afraid, and I pray that for all the great men out there, the world and the media won’t harden or scare you to the point that you are uncomfortable alone with a woman that you can help become the business person and woman she needs to be.

July 10, 2018