Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

Do Mentors Matter More than Bosses and Parents? How to Establish Mentor/Mentee Relationships
“Not having a mentor is just stupid,” said a young and successful sales professional in a meeting I attended a few weeks ago. She was giving the group advice on how to be successful in sales.

I couldn’t agree with her more. Not having a least one mentor (and seeking to be a mentor to someone else) is just about the dumbest mistake you can make in business.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful academic and professional mentor in college (he passed away a few years ago and I still miss his sound advice), and I continue to have a few professional and personal mentors. They may not even see themselves as my “mentors”- we haven’t been so specific as to have a DTR aka high school code for “Defining the Relationship”- but they are.

I’ve never thought about how important having a mentor is in all aspects of life until reading Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. Like most things, business books end up teaching me more about parenting than they do about business!

In his book, Grant states:

The paradox of encouraging children to develop strong values is that parents effectively limit their own influence. Parents can nurture the impulse to be original, but at some point, people need to find their own role models for originality in their chosen fields…. If we want to encourage originality, the best step we can take is to raise our children’s aspirations by introducing them to different kinds of role models.

But how do we establish mentoring relationships for our kids, and ourselves whether in business or in personal relationships that grow us as people and as professionals?

Sheryl Sandberg in her book, Lean In, emphasizes that asking someone to be your mentor isn’t the right approach; instead these relationships should grow naturally. I do think, however, you can set-up some framework to help these relationships grow organically:
1. Find or establish common connection groups. I’ve found that my interests in business start-ups, running, faith and talent development have led to meaningful mentoring relationships. Help yourself, your company and your children seek out or establish common interests groups and grow relationships through them.
2. Realize that mentoring doesn’t have to be the “old” mentoring the “young”. Often people call this “reverse mentoring”, but mentoring should be a relationship where one who has wisdom through expertise and experience can help another person. If strong relationships are established, often the role of mentor and mentee can be reversed at times during the course of the relationship depending on the circumstances and topics. For example, I may be able to be a mentor for someone younger than myself about how to start and grow a business, but that person may be more tech savvy than I am and can teach me a thing or two about establishing business scalability through the use of tech tools.
3. Understand that mentoring relationships may have more of an impact on outcomes than close familial and/or working relationships. If you’re the parent or the boss, you may be thinking that it is your job to be the mentor. However, as Grant’s research points out, you may be better off helping your child or employee establish a relationship outside the home or your workplace or department to help them grow and become more successful.
Diversity of ideas and thoughts can help people grow more than the familiar. Like I hear many parents that come to us for career advice for their kids say, “You don’t have a dog in this fight”. What they mean by this is since we aren’t so close to it, we can give more objective advice that people are more receptive to receiving and acting upon. The kind of wisdom that comes from a mentor is not the carrot or the stick approach on advice that often comes from our parent(s) and/or our boss.

What the best advice you’ve received from a mentor?
April 25, 2017
3 Tips for Successfully Onboarding New Hires
Onboarding has been on my brain nonstop the last couple of months. Between working with two clients heavily on their onboarding programs and onboarding a new employee to Horizon Point, I’m beginning to even dream about onboarding tactics!

Whether you are a company of three or a company of 30,000, onboarding can make or break employee engagement and retention even before day one.

Having an onboarding strategy that is executed well starts with a plan that includes:
1. Realizing onboarding starts before the start date. Several things need to take place before the person even begins on day one. This includes taking care of:
  - New hire paperwork beforehand. Make sure the first day isn’t spent filling out a W-4 and other boring material. Nothing kills first day excitement more than a stack of paperwork to sit and complete. Give this to the employee beforehand and have them come prepared with it the first day. Better yet, use an onboarding platform to do all of this electronically and have it integrated into your HRIS system seamlessly. Two programs I would recommend if you don’t have an HRIS system or need something that is good at the onboarding portion of this are Namely and Paylocity.
  - Sharing logistical information beforehand. Providing information about where to be when, where to park, and an agenda for at least the first day of work should be delivered to the new hire at least one week prior to their start date. If you onboard frequently, consider creating an FAQ for this step.
  - Equipment set-up. Make sure the new hire’s computer, phone, email address, and any office supplies needed are ordered, set-up and ready to use on day one. Don’t make the person handle it by himself or herself and or try to figure it out. That begins day one with frustration instead of ending in excitement like it should.
2. An emphasis on culture. One of the main reasons to get all of the pre-work done is because it does nothing to enhance your company culture for the new hire. Time during the first day and week should focus on instilling the company culture in new hires. Orientation should include:
  - Introductions and welcome from key leadership. This doesn’t mean your HR generalist.
  - Communication from company leadership about company values and priorities. We recommend doing this through videos and case studies instead of through a potentially boring and abstract presentation about them. Incorporate some type of activity to help the new hire internalize and practice the company’s values and purpose.
  - A tour of the facility and introductions to the team. We recommend a meal should be provided on the first day of the onboarding that allows for conversation and relationship building with other team members.
3. Establishing Expectations. At least 1-2 hours of the person’s first day should involve one-on-one time with their direct leader. This time should be spent in relationship building and establishing expectations. Ideas to include are the following:
  - Discussion on the cultural components that have already been discussed and how the leader sees these playing out in the person’s day-to-day activities.
  - Some type of activity around goal setting. Go over the person’s job description, how their performance will be measured (show them the form if you have an official appraisal) and discuss how this all relates to the person’s career aspirations. As Glassdoor’s Why Do Workers Quit report states: “We find that job title stagnation hurts employee retention. Every additional 10 months an employee stagnates in a role makes them 1 percent more likely to leave the company when they finally move on to their next position.” Don’t pretend that career development isn’t a part of a manager’s job. It begins on day one of a person’s tenure with your company and you should begin by discussing it sooner rather than later.
  - Establish regular one-on-one check-ins to continually review goals and expectations.
Onboarding should focus on capitalizing on a person’s excitement about their new role and direct that excitement towards actionable plans to achieve company results.

What is your best advice for a successful onboarding?
April 11, 2017
Diversity and Inclusion in My Eyes and in the Eyes of My Children

Ask any HR professional and they will tell you that “diversity and inclusion” as we like to call it is trending in our world.   In fact, Deloitte’s 2017 Human Capital Trends Report points to this rule of work by emphasizing that,
“Leading organizations now see diversity and inclusion as a comprehensive strategy woven into every aspect of the talent life cycle to enhance employee engagement, improve brand, and drive performance. The era of diversity as a ‘check the box’ initiative owned by HR is over.”

The issue is so big, its no longer just HR’s job.

But as business professionals, we can read and hear about diversity and inclusion and the best practices out there until we are blue the face.   And we can talk about it ad nauseam seeking ways to implement tactics to eliminate bias and select and retain diverse talent pools. In fact, I spent no less than 30 minutes yesterday on the phone with a client examining the idiosyncrasies that relate to diversity and inclusion in formulating strong hiring processes and practices, and the purpose of our call was on their employee handbook!

But, as distant past and not-so-distant-past personal experiences remind me, you’ve got to look inward and be honest to tackle the topic effectively.

My first personal observation comes from giving a presentation over five years ago on “Recruiting and Retaining the Best”. In the presentation, I displayed a slide with a picture of pretty and sweet country singer side by side with a tough rapper.   The country singer happened to be a white female, the rapper happened to be a black male.   I displayed the slide to point to the fact that you need to know your work culture and then select people who fit in with your culture.

I didn’t mean to imply that one of the singers was better than the other, just that one might be best for one environment, and one might be better for another. But apparently to my audience, I conveyed that you needed to screen the black rapper with the tattoos out. Hire the pretty white girl I must have implied, because that same day I got a call from the person putting on the workshop who told me that a person in the audience (who happened to be a black male) was offended.

Given that the person who called me happened to be a black female and actually knows me, she assured me that she told him I in no way was a bigot and did not mean to imply anything racially motivated. I thanked her, but obviously the offense I caused still sticks with me five years later. Can I ever get diversity and inclusion right as a practitioner if, potentially, I have unconscious biases that play out in my speaking especially when someone else saw it as conscious and deliberate?

Fast forward to last weekend. We are all in the car as a family and the topic comes up as to why our almost three year old has so many princess dolls. (I’ll blame it on grandparents, as I do her endless collection of purses as well.) Our six year old then chimes in naming the princesses she has. “She’s got Elsa and Belle and Ariel and Cinderella” then he stops for a second and says, “Mom, why doesn’t Paige have any darker princesses?”

What is a mom to say? I think I responded with something along the lines of, “A darker princess would be nice to get, racking my brain trying to come up with a “darker” one.   I said, “How about the one from The Princess and the Frog?” I didn’t even know the “darker” one’s name. Before my kids could respond, they were on to talking about something else.

But I was still stuck on my obvious need to do some reflection on my worldview and how I tout myself as an open-minded and inclusive person. Who am I to give anyone advice on how to create a diverse and inclusive workplace? Our toy shelf isn’t even diverse.

In fact, culturally our stores aren’t diverse and our movies aren’t diverse. There seems to be only one “darker” princess present in a slew of mostly white blonds, just like the pretty country singer in my presentation slide. No wonder we struggle with diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

But as I walk through Target a few days later, I tell my son to go pick out a birthday present for his sister. He runs towards the toy section excited to take a detour from the bottled water and toilet paper we were there to buy.

I catch up with him, thinking this is going to take forever, but yet he comes straight back to meet me, and without a word, drops her present in the cart. The Princess and the Frog Princess, Tiana, is what he has chosen for his sister’s third birthday present.

These personal examples point to only one area of diversity, and that is of race. There are so many more areas of diversity I could discuss, in both specific and generic terms. I echo Deliotte’s report stating that, “Diversity is defined in a broader context, including contexts of ‘diversity of thought’, also addressing people with autism and other cognitive differences.” Too often we boil diversity and inclusion down to something far narrower than it should be.

And I could also wrap up this post with a list of ways to try to overcome unconscious bias or how to create a diversity and inclusion program at your place of work (and mine).

But maybe the first step in thinking about diversity and inclusion is to look in the mirror and be self-aware. We need to be honest about how the environments we have grown up in and quite possibly still work in, shape us to think and decide in ways that we may not even be aware of. And then and only then, once we are honest with ourselves and vocalize that honesty to others are we are aware enough to change our course.

I need my six year old to remind and help me learn that diversity and inclusion starts quite simply with being aware of when we’re off the mark and buying the right doll (or hiring/promoting the right person) to begin to fix it.

You may also like:

You can hire for fit AND diversity: How the most innovative companies hire

March 28, 2017
Chocolate Anyone? Symbols to Remind You to Be Grateful and Spread Gratefulness

“I’ll be right back,” the lady said to her colleague. “I’ve got to finish giving my chocolate bars away.”

The colleague nods. I’m sitting next to him at a conference breakfast, and I look at him with must have been a look like, “What? Chocolate bars? At breakfast?”

He smiles, and says, “You’ll have to ask her about them.” I could tell he was indirectly saying, it’s her story to tell, not mine. Yes, ask her about the chocolate I will.

I see her hand a chocolate bar to a server and give him a hug.

She finally comes and sits back down and smiles. I, of course say, “So you have to tell me about the chocolate bars.”

I’ve never seen anyone light up so much as she tells me about how her habit with chocolate bars comes from her very first client that manufactures them. Nancy, I learn is her name, and she explained to me that she had come out of a bad job situation in HR management. She said she had been battling breast cancer and her employer was absolutely awful in helping her through this, so she quit.

She interviewed for a position at the chocolate manufacturer, to which the hiring manager told her she was overqualified for the role and that she needed to start her own business in HR compensation consulting.

“I’ll hire your company then to work with us on some compensation issues we are having,” he told her. And he gave her a chocolate bar as she left.

The chocolate giving lady then went on to say that this was the beginning of a new life for her. She did start that business, and five years later, everywhere she goes she gives out chocolate bars to people to show gratitude and to challenge people to reach for their dreams.

She told me, “I didn’t even realize this was my dream until he challenged me to do this.” Grinning again she said, “Now it is only right for me to pass this along.”

So today, I challenge you to take a lesson from Nancy and figure out what your own chocolate bar is. Then, figure out a way to not to only share it with others, but more importantly, share it to constantly remind yourself of what and who you have to be thankful for and to pass that on.

Like this post, you may also like:

Love Lives Here a new book out by Maria Goff. Maria and her husband, Bob, who wrote Love Does, give out real keys to their own home as their chocolate bars. This is a way to show that love resides in their home and is therefore something to be shared.

Count Your Problems and Be Thankful

Leaders Start With Gratitude

March 21, 2017
Why? Again.

I’m back to being asked why again about 200 times a day. Thus is the life of a parent of a two, almost three, year old.

I do not have a conversation with my little girl EVER these days without the question of “Why?” coming out of her mouth. While she was stalling on bedtime the other night, I began to take a tally and we got to 16 Whys? before I finally shut her down. I couldn’t take it anymore!

But the irony of all of this is that I’m now reading Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. The key take away is:

“Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones that start with WHY.”

I’ve watched my mom live this quote when I hear her speak to groups about the work she does leading a hospice organization. She always tells a story about a real patient that addresses the heart before the head and answers WHY she, and the people she leads, do what they do.

I wonder if I was a Why? fanatic questioner as a two, going on three year old? Maybe my mom started by answering Why? for me before I even had to ask it.

So, think I’m going to try to switch my methods and cut my little one off at the path by answering her Why? before she even asks it. And maybe we will all get to bed a little earlier, or maybe I’ll have to wait out her development and continue to answer Why for now, even when I’ve already answered it. But I know from the example I’ve had, I’ll start with Why as both mine grow. Hopefully this will help them to become leaders.

Do you start with why?

March 7, 2017