Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

3 Things Leaders & Runners Need to Do to Customize Towards Optimal Performance
Week 10 Mileage: 47 miles

Long Run Distance: 20 miles

Shalane Flanagan, who was the top American marathon finisher in Rio (6^th overall), almost didn’t make the Olympic team. The trials were in LA during a day of grueling heat, and after starting strong, things unraveled fast.

Having trouble with the digestion of her fluids, she started to get chills which indicates a problem with dehydration. Her drinks were too concentrated and she ended up having absorption problems. At mile 23, she described her experience on the Runner’s World Show Podcast,

“Amy like (her training partner), I’m really struggling…”

“My face was getting really, really red, and she (Amy) could tell I was starting to overheat. At that point I thought I may be missing out on my fourth Olympic team.”

After finishing in the 3^rd spot and qualifying, she underwent a sweat analysis that analyzed her particular genetics and sweat composition to see what type of fluids and nutrition she needed, customized for her, in order to run in Rio- also in hot, humid conditions- to optimize performance. She is a heavy sweater, sweating almost three times more than her training partner did during the same test. Amy and Shalane had different fuels in their bottles in Rio and hydrated differently because they perspire differently.

Just like Olympic runners need different things to optimize their performance, different people need different things to maximize their performance at work through the motivational techniques their leaders deploy. There are different strokes for different folks.

Some employees may be motivated by public praise whereas another might want to crawl under the table if you praise them in front of the team. Some may need an opportunity to think things through and plan things out in order to perform successfully, whereas others may maximize their performance through the adrenaline rush that comes from a fast and spur of the moment pace.

Do you know what type of fuel each of your team members need to optimize performance? If not, here are a few things you can consider for discerning key motivators:
1. Ask them what motivates them! Email us and we will send you a simple questionnaire that can help facilitate this discussion between you and your employees.
2. Assess them. There are several personality assessments out there that help us understand what motivates or drives people at the individual level and how that drive interacts with others to drive team performance. Email us and we can also set you up with one of these.
3. Watch and listen to them. Can you see when someone’s stress level is rising? What triggered it? Stress masquerades as demotivation. Too much of those triggers and you are going to burn someone out. In contrast, when do you notice someone is energized and excited? They probably need more of the environment, tasks or interactions that lead to that excitement to optimize motivation.
Ask, assess, watch and listen. This will help you customize your motivational elixir for optimal performance.
October 14, 2016
8 Steps to Go Out on Your Own as an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is a workforce development strategy we all need to focus on and consider more. Either at the individual or community level, entrepreneurship is a viable way to create wealth, develop professional satisfaction and, at the end of the day, help more people.

I find that more and more people are considering going out on their own for their next career strategy. In fact, many people are referring now to the “Free Agent Nation” or the “1099 economy” with over one-fifth of the population working on a 1099 instead of W-2. In addition, more and more companies and educational entities are focusing on how to become more entrepreneurial in their thinking, structures and curriculum. And on a personal level, what people seem to ask me about the most, outside of general HR questions, is how to go out on their own.

I offer this guide below that a colleague and I developed for a conference this summer to help any aspiring entrepreneur get started. In addition to this guide, I’ll be delving deeper into the ideas surrounding entrepreneurship for the next several posts. We’ll have some guest bloggers in this series as well as some things to mix it up a bit including video content.

Have you thought about starting your own business? If so, what do you want to do and how can we help you succeed in doing it? If you have taken the leap out on your own, what do you wish you knew before you did and/or what advice do you have for others in doing so?

Resources:

Starting a Business by Constance Jenkins Pritchard

Plan – Business Planning & Financial Statements Template Gallery

Build – Social Capital How-To: 5 Steps to Build the #1 Competency You Should be Developing

Grow – Get a Leadership Development Game Plan

Care – 6 Tips to Help You Unplug for Your Vacation

October 11, 2016
You Gotta Gitcha Some Help to Lead and Run Well

Week 9

Week 8 Mileage: 43 miles

Long Run Distance: 20 miles

I distinctly remember a friend crying after I told her I was leaving the job and company we both worked for and moving back home. I was in my mid-twenties, and an opportunity for my husband had landed us back in our hometown.   I’ll be honest, I was hesitant about moving back home then, thinking we probably needed to explore a little bit more of the world before returning to our roots.

But my friend’s tears told me otherwise. She wasn’t crying because she was sad to see me go. She was crying because she wished she had the opportunity to be closer to family. “When you have kids, you’ll be so thankful you have family and a support system close by,” she said between tears. You see, she had two little ones (about the ages mine are now) and her parents lived in Canada and her in-laws lived in South Carolina. She was over eight hours away from any immediate family.

I get her tears now.

And those tears came back to me this week. In soliciting some feedback from a current colleague, I got this response “How do you work full-time, spend valuable time with your family, remain active in church, volunteer AND train for a marathon?!” (I have this feedback in writing so I’m not adding the emphasis; this is how she put it.)

I felt guilty. And all I could say was, I have help. Lots of it.

My kids can walk across the alley or ride a bike down the road to sets of healthy, loving grandparents.   I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve actually had to hire a babysitter.   How do we run long runs with young kids? Grandparents is how.

My husband is like the saint of supportiveness.

I have this fabulous girl who does anything and everything for me and the business- running errands, spending the night to keep kids so me and my husband can run together early in the morning before anyone else wakes up, and simply doing things like taking out the trash when it needs to be done without being asked. (Yes, B, as you post this blog post for me today, just know that I noticed that you had taken out the trash the other day. Thank you.)

Someone else cleans my house. Someone else does the company bookkeeping, someone else does all of my social media posting and marketing strategy and someone else runs our career line of business like a champ.

I can seemingly do it all because I actually don’t do it all. I have a support system and the means with which to afford and pay for some of that support.

In thinking about this, I recall the criticism that Sheryl Sandberg (This one is one of my favorites: “Recline, Don’t ‘Lean In’ (Why I Hate Sheryl Sandberg)”) got from some after writing Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.

“Yea,” working moms said,  “you can lean in to your career because you can pay people to do everything else.” The resentment from others who didn’t and couldn’t live like she lives conjured up a big ole ball of hate for the woman who seemed to have it all. And then her husband died, and a large portion of the support she had through a loving marriage to lean in was gone in an instant.

And in reading this article about her loss, I realized that Sandberg may have actually been telling us to lean in to each other as much, if not more than, leaning in to our careers.

Dear leader, you may not have the opportunity to live close to family and you may not have the means with which to hire a maid or an assistant. I too often neglect to realize how unbelievably fortunate I am, although I am nowhere near the means of Sandberg, to have a list of luxuries in my life.   But, when I stop and think about it, one of the most powerful gifts we have as humans, and the one in which leaders should be able to seize above the rest, is opportunity to build relationships.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with trying to do it all, well then don’t. Find a support system that can help you achieve what you want to achieve. And, by all means, say no when that “all” isn’t, in fact, something that you even want.

I know most people’s access to support is different than my access, but if you’re struggling, start your own lean in circle. Outside of my family, those I run with and a small group of close girlfriends are this for me, and none of them cost a dime. Sandberg’s support in her lean in circle doesn’t either.

We all need someone to lean on, and maybe sometimes that starts by being the person in which someone else can lean.

Like this post? You may also like:

Want to be the next COO of Facebook? Surround yourself with great people.

Do We Really Want to Have it All?

October 7, 2016
3 Performance Management Lessons from Kindergarten

Our son started kindergarten last month. We are fortunate that he has a wonderful teacher at an outstanding school.

However, his behavior in kindergarten started out a little rocky. The teacher took a few weeks to teach them about what behavior was expected in class before she started notifying us as parents about their behavior at the end of each day using the color-coded system you see in this picture. After two days of yellow and then a day of orange came home, you better believe the Ward household was not a happy place. Consequences happened, but we’ve begun to see his behavior improve.

This system seems to be the method that most classrooms are using now, and I think it calls to my attention some key insights- both positive and negative- for performance management in the workplace.

1. Keep it simple. I’m still a little confused in this system as to what color is good, or best and what is bad. I stated in a workshop on performance management last week that while it makes intuitive sense to me that red is bad, why is pink the best? Isn’t that close to red on the color wheel? That doesn’t make sense to me. Then one lady in the audience raised her hand and said that at her kid’s school, red was the best. Really? Confusion abounds. Do we really need such complicated systems to monitor performance? In the workplace, I advocate for a three point scale. Does not meet expectations. Meets expectations. Exceeds expectations. Isn’t it really that simple?

2. Communicate expectations upfront. The teacher has done a good job of showing the kids at the beginning of school what her classroom expectations are and responding with appropriate consequences and rewards given the color-coding system. She gave the kids time to get used to it before the wrath or praise of parents started. (Our little one tattles on himself, so we knew before we actually started getting the colors that things weren’t going so well…).

Do you communicate performance expectations upfront? Your onboarding process should include, day one, a discussion about the performance management system you have in place, the expectations you have for each employee, and an opportunity for those employees to ask questions to clarify those expectations. It will positively impact performance if they actually know what good performance looks like.

3. Give people opportunities to grow and an environment to thrive. I have been pleased to see that the teacher doesn’t seem to label the kids because one day was a bad (or great) day. Pink or red doesn’t define you for life. I think too often when it comes to performance, we assume that once we see bad performance, we are never going to see any good. However, when we understand what makes people tick, we can better adapt to what job responsibilities and environments give them the opportunities to grow and thrive.

Andrew casually mentioned at the beginning of this week that they were all sitting at new tables with new friends. Although I haven’t confirmed this with the teacher, I think that she, after a month with all them, has learned which kids influence each other positively and which ones seem to have a not so good effect. The little boy Andrew has become instant friends with in his class is not at his table anymore. I think they talk too much and end up getting each other in trouble, and the teacher knows this, so, I’m guessing, she modified their environment to help them succeed.

Keep it simple. Communicate expectations. Create an environment for growth. Does your performance management system and philosophy do these three things?

October 4, 2016
Leader, do you need a change of environment?
Long Run Distance: 18

People who are and strive to be leaders tend to take ownership of the situation, the actions, and the results that are derived from effort. We will take the blame, because we also want to take the credit. Rarely do you see a strong leader citing the environment as the problem, and if they do, you feel like they are playing the blame game. Buck up and own it you want to say!

But running in this heat has led me to question if sometimes we do as leaders need to pay more attention to our environment. When it is almost October and you are running 16 miles before 9 am and the temperature reaches 90 before you finish, you begin to question just how strong your performance can be in such suffocating conditions.

I’ve also had clients past and present on both in the leadership coaching and career coaching side of the house struggling with performance issues. And on some occasions, what would really help improve their performance is related directly to their satisfaction with work that has root in them simply being in the wrong place.

Taking some cues from running aliments in the heat, here’s how to know if you need to consider a change in environment in order to up your leadership game:
1. Are you chafing? Chafing occurs when there is a constant rubbing of clothing to skin or skin on skin. It leaves you raw. It is usually has something to do with the heat and the distance you are running. More heat, longer distance, more chafing. And it hurts.
Do you spend time at work and leave each day feeling raw? Is the constant friction causing pain with no remedy- short of a major Vaseline intervention- in sight? You may need to get out of the heat and find a better environment for you to thrive.
1. Are you hangry? Hangry is a play on words we runners (and mothers) use to describe the state of anger resulting from hunger. I’ve been hangry lately, which at first glance seems to be just about the up in mileage, but in considering it, I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that I’m constantly thirsty because running in the heat is totally depleting my fluid levels and making me loose more calories which makes me even hungrier and angrier because the hunger never seems to subside.
Is your environment causing you to be both angry and hungry? Are you hungry for more satisfaction in your work and angry that you aren’t getting it? Has the anger extended outside of work to where you are taking it out on family and friends? If so, time to consider a change in environment.
1. Have you bonked? In other words, is your performance in the pits? Eleven miles in on Saturday after running about a mile in a completely unshaded area and direct heat caused me to bonk. My pace slowed from about a 9:30-9:45 pace to, at the end, a 12-minute mile pace. I might as well have been walking. The distance contributed to this, but the heat made it ten times worse.
Have you hit a wall at work? Is there is no way in sight for your performance to improve given the distain you have for your environment? You may not have it in you to improve or you may not even want to. If so, its time for a change.

Our run this morning was a 50-degree Godsend. Eight miles didn’t feel like eight miles, or at least the type of eight milers we’ve been doing over the last month at 70+ temps when it is still dark outside. No chafing, no hangry (so far today) and no wall. Satisfaction through an environment change. Do you need one?
September 30, 2016