Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

How to Train Leaders to Act with Courage

I remember when I got feedback one time after a leadership training session that the training needed to include more role-playing.

I hate role-playing.

Or at least participating in it, so I assumed everyone else hates the exercise of pretending too.

But besides hating it, I thought there were other learning methods that could emulate the same type of result that role-playing could, so I avoided it.

But when I think about trying to coach and teach people through critical leadership moments- those that require courage- role-playing, or at least practicing what needs to be done may be the best method of learning short of doing it and just seeing how it goes.

Practice or “preloading a response” as it is called in The Power of Moments, is particularly important in situations where courage is required. This is because people “often know what the right thing to do is. The hard part is acting on that judgment.”

Practice can lead to positive outcomes in particular with certain leadership situations like standing or speaking up for what is right, praising someone (most people think they do this enough that practice isn’t needed, but if you watch people in most organizations and leadership positions, it isn’t done nearly enough) and or reprimanding or terminating someone.

This practice of practicing creates a how to do it instead of a what to do guide.

I’m reminded of how important this may be in trying to help our seven year old become a leader.

He’s gotten into trouble this spring more frequently than usual. Part of this has come through our conscious decision to allow him more freedom. We are trying to resist the urge to be helicopter parents. Beyond our immediate watchful eyes, he’s made some bad choices and acted in a way that has led to consequences.

We typically handle this behavior by telling him he isn’t doing the right thing according to our family guiding principles: 1) Be kind 2) Be honest. We’ve found that most all kid infractions and for that matter, almost all human infractions, can be summed up in a violation of one or both of these things.

Then after this talk of explaining that he has done wrong, we punish him.

But in getting feedback for ourselves and from others, we hear, “He knows what’s right and wrong.”

He just doesn’t seem to know how to do it.

Especially when he seems to be influenced more than most by what other people think of him especially boys his age. And Lord knows the seven year old boy brain isn’t a fully developed thing.

So as my husband and I have talked about this, we’ve started to see how we might role play with him through situations he may find himself in where he is tempted to violate being kind and/or being honest.

Moments that require courage. Courage to go against the crowd.

So, for example, before he leaves our house to go play in the neighborhood or start his school day, we don’t remind him to be kind and honest, we walk through a situation where he might be challenged to do it.

For example:

“Pretend I just made fun of (insert name of someone in his class) by calling them fat. What would you do next?”

“Your teacher just told you to put down the iPad and start on your math assignment. What will you do next?”

“You knock on (Insert name of friend here) door and he isn’t home. What will you do next?”

Based on his responses we continue the role-play and what if dialogue.

The responses to these questions may sound like no brainers, but to him they often aren’t. Just like how to fire someone may be a no brainer to someone seasoned at doing so, but to someone who hasn’t ever done it, it’s not.

The scenarios are endless in his seven year old world and in the world of leadership, and there is no way for us to cover them all. But by bringing things up before they happen and allowing time for him to think through what he will do- “preloading a response” we hope he will be enabled to know how to act with courage and kindness and honesty, instead of having to deal with the consequences that come because he simply hasn’t practiced to make perfect.

How do you help leaders practice the hard stuff? The stuff in which courage is made?

April 3, 2018
How to Know When to Fire the Prima Donna

How do you know when to fire the prima donna? You know one when you see one. Before you can define exactly what a prima donna is, you can name one. In the flesh. And they have most likely made your work life hell at some point or another.

Prima Donna – noun: “a vain or undisciplined person who finds it difficult to work under direction or as a part of a team.”
Merriam-Webster

What do you do when faced with one? Or, how do you get leadership to realize there is one in your midst?

For a variety of positive reasons that have nothing to do with prima donnas, I love 360° assessment and feedback tools. If you need to spot and prove you’ve got one in your midst, a good 360° and a person’s response to their 360° feedback will help you nail one. (Any type of formal or informal feedback mechanism can work, but a 360° gives you quantifiable data.)

Here’s what you do and the signs you look for along the way:

1 Give a 360° assessment and/or encourage leadership/HR to administer them. Make sure it includes a self-assessment and a 360° (peers, subordinates, boss) view. If you need some ideas on good ones, email me. You can also read our case study for Total Employee Engagement with a client that used 360s successfully.

2. Look at the results of how the person rates himself or herself compared to the aggregate of the way others rate them.

Sign one: Prima donnas have an inflated view of themselves. In other words, a prima donna will rate themselves as higher than their raters on almost all if not all dimensions of the assessment.

3. Look at the results of the aggregate average of the way others rated them compared to the sample/norm average.

Sign two: Prima donnas have lower aggregate ratings from their peers than the sample average. In other words, prima donna’s raters rate them an average of 2.6, let’s say on a dimension and the sample norm is 3.5 (on a five point scale). You see this across most if not all dimensions of the assessment.

4. Have a feedback session with the potential prima donna to explain and discuss the results. Up until the feedback point, you really don’t know if you have a prima donna based on sign 1 and 2. You may just have someone who is incompetent either in skill or will. But you have real trouble when….

Sign three: A prima donna doesn’t own their results.

Sign four: A prima donna places blame on everyone except themselves for the less than stellar results. It could be another person, a group of people, the organization, or heck, they could blame it on the weather, but they take ZERO ownership.

The Coup de Gras: A Prima Donna (or maybe we’ve crossed over into clinical narcissism by this point) expresses a level of PRIDE in their results. You may hear something like “Well this shows why I’ve been successful.” Or “This is what I’ve had to do to be successful.”

Once you get to Sign Three, you know you don’t have any choice but to fire the person. Because when behavior isn’t owned, you can’t do anything about it. The person has declared they are uncoachable. Sign Four and the Coup De Gras are just icing on the cake.

The prima donna will continue to reek their toxic nature to the organization and continue to be proud about it because you did nothing about it, even with the quantitative feedback on it.

Furthermore, those who rated them will also be punished because you did nothing with their feedback. You may even be showing them that to be successful, the prima donna is in fact right. It does take behavior like theirs to be successful. That’s when you know you’ve lost the game – empowering toxic behavior.

Do you have prima donnas in your midst? What do you do to diagnosis and deal with the challenges they bring?

March 27, 2018
#MeToo and the Onslaught of Sexual Harassment Training Requests
Long about mid-December when you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about the next case of pervasive sexual harassment in every facet of the working world, our phone and inbox started blowing up with requests for sexual harassment training and training resources.
Almost every HR leader was given direction from the C-Suite and/or self-directed to try to take the bull by the horns and “train” people on sexual harassment before they got hit with a claim in their workplace.

Whereas I think driving a culture through behavioral actions is the best way to keep sexual harassment or any other form of harassment at bay (and training is just one part of this equation), there are some rules of thumb for “good” sexual harassment (or any form of harassment) training.
1. Help people understand the laws behind sexual harassment to include the why and how of them. Note: Whereas you need to explain this so people can make sense of the precedent and legal ramifications, the more important issue is helping people understand and know when things are just plain wrong and inappropriate because they are wrong and inappropriate ways to treat people not because you might get sued.
2. Help people understand the two types of sexual harassment: quid pro quo (“this for that”) and hostile work environments. Most people have an easier time understanding and identifying quid pro quo, but most of the challenges today fall in the category of hostile work environments. Help people understand the factors that create a hostile work environment including actions that are unwanted, repeated, intimidating, hostile and offensive. This should also include a discussion about the reasonable person standard and intent. More on intent in a later post, but basically just because someone didn’t “intend” to be intimidating, hostile or offensive doesn’t mean they are not guilty of violating the law.
3. Help people know what should be done if they feel they have been or are being harassed or have witnessed harassment.
4. Help leaders know how behave if harassment is brought to their attention. This includes how to conduct an investigation.
5. Understand and implement company policies and procedures related to harassment (number 3 and 4 should be interwoven with this).
6. Apply learning with a case study in a small group format.
I have found that the case study portion of the training we do to be the most valuable. This is because most instances we deal with in the workplace aren’t Harvey Weinstein blatant. They are shades of gray, and it takes thoughtful discernment and investigation by people driven leaders to understand and then solve the problems. The case study gets people thinking and talking in a way that leads to better discernment and application of the principles learned.

If you are in need of free resources related to sexual harassment training, here are some good videos to watch:

Video 1

Video 2

Also helpful, from HR Magazine: How to Investigate Sexual Harassment Allegations.

How have you handled the need to educate people on sexual harassment in your workplace?
February 20, 2018
“There’s no bathroom for me here…” Finding Your Voice
I sat down to watch a movie a week or so ago with my husband. I average getting through about one full movie a year (apart from the Disney movies that are constantly playing at my house…. “Let it go, Let it go…. Oh, I digress….) so I’m ahead of schedule this year.
It was a movie I asked my husband to get, Hidden Figures, and after three months of it sitting in its Netflix case he told me it was time to watch it or he was simply going to send it back.

So we watched it. I thought I’d fall asleep in the middle of it, but talk about a powerful film. If you haven’t seen it, see it.

It’s the story of three brilliant black women working for NASA as the USA sought to get a person into space.

Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, is assigned to an important job and of course is the only African American female in the department. Her boss, played by Ken Costner realizes how smart she is and begins to rely heavily on her skills.

Subscribers click through to view

To be authentic, we have to find our voice. We can’t shy away from it. But, as we see from this scene, there are some important things to consider in finding and expressing our voice.
1. For our voice to have power, we can’t force in on people. Katherine didn’t come right out and complain immediately about the bathroom situation. She worked to handle it the best she could.
2. Sometimes our voice has to be solicited to be heard. And our voice is solicited when we demonstrate our competency and commitment. Katherine expressed her voice when her boss solicited it. Not before. Because she was solicited it was heard. I’m not saying this is at all right or fair. Everyone should have a voice, especially when injustices exist, but to be heard we need to consider these first two points.
3. Expressing our voice often allows us to address the big picture issues not just the current situation. This scene shows that Katherine not only addresses the specific issue of the bathroom, but she also addresses pay inequities and overall injustices and prejudices.
4. Expressing our voice in an authentic way causes other people to act. You don’t see it in this clip, but if you’ve seen the movie you know the boss played by Kevin Costner addresses the inequities Katherine exposes through her voice. He tears down the bathroom sign that doesn’t allow “coloreds” to use it. He doesn’t let it go, and he doesn’t address it through his voice. He addresses it through action.
5. Which shows us, often our voice is loudest through our actions not our words. As the saying goes, “actions speak louder than words.” Especially when you’re a leader like the boss in this film. He was setting an example and precedent to show others what acceptable (and unacceptable) behavior in the organization looks like.
When has the power of your voice led others to act?
February 6, 2018
Want Real Teamwork? Start With Vulnerability!
I was sitting in a multi-day training with a group of executive leaders. I had yet to put my finger on what was missing with this team, when a question was asked that made me realize, these people don’t know each other. Through this question, it became apparent that they aren’t “allowed” to put their guard down and be real. They don’t feel like they have permission to be vulnerable.
Some of these people had been working together for ten plus years and were hard pressed to name any of their colleagues hobbies much less their co-workers spouse and/or kids’ names.

And they were passing this mindset down the chain and throughout the company. The uber-professional guard they had up was creating issues with trust, teamwork, and ultimately business results.

To be an authentic leader requires a certain level of vulnerability. As Criss Jami said, “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”

It’s hard, though, to just come flat out and ask, “tell me how you are weak” especially with people in leadership roles. If you have a team lacking in vulnerability with each other, here are three suggestions (starting from easiest to most difficult to facilitate) to get people talking in a way that exposes vulnerability and allows strength to rise out of weakness:
1. Ask the group to answer a pre-prepared list of questions about themselves. Then have the group simply share their responses. These questions can be anything from, “Do you have pets? What kind and what are their names?” to “Where did you grow up?” to more probing and thought provoking questions like “What is the best advice you have ever received?” to “What do you want your legacy to be?”
2. Simply ask the group to share their response to what has been their greatest success in life so far and what has been their greatest failure. I would also suggest you ask for the greatest professional and personal success and failure so that people don’t limit their responses to only work related answers that the team may already know.
3. Ask the group to share their story. To do this, ask them to share the 5-7 defining moments of their life that have shaped who they are.
As Brene Brown said, “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

How do you help people step into the light by way of darkness?

Shine today.

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