Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

AI and HR- A Series

How would your grandmother state your organizational values? Well, ChatGTP might give you some insights.

As I sat down with a client to help them form their values statements after the values mapping session I facilitated, we decided there were a few words that just weren’t right. They were close, but we needed a better word or two, so we stuck what we had into ChatGTP. After various takes on the language, including how your southern grandmother would say it-with of course, several “bless your hearts” thrown in from ChatGTP and some laughter from us- we landed on descriptors that resonated with the behaviors we were trying to articulate through shared language.

There is a lot of talk about what AI- Artificial Intelligence-is going to do to this world, or has already done. Jillian highlighted how it was a focus at the Annual ATD conference in her recent blog post. As she said, we are all relatively new to it and not very good at it, but think it deserves some attention.

Whereas many people want to make AI out to be the next major moral dilemma or our times, the way everyone is going to “cheat” in school and on the job, or what is going to take all our jobs away, I think taking more of a practical approach to what AI is and can do for business, specifically HR deserves some focus. So we are going to spend some time learning and then sharing that learning with you in a series of blog posts.

Over the next few weeks, we will be writing about how we and others are using AI to impact HR practices that will hopefully provide insights into how you might use it at work as well. We will talk about the tools being used, give you some thoughts on how it might make you a better practitioner and leader, and provide insights on what we see may be coming next.

AI may not be right for your organization just yet, but it may help you get a good laugh in or channel the language of your inner grandmother when you are trying to find just the right words for your next job description, proposal, or values statements. Or, you could try CanvaAI and let it illustrate your next blog post…. Which illustration do you like better?

June 18, 2024
Summer is Here – Do You Need a Vacation or a Rhythm?
Summer is in full swing. The days are long, the kids are out of school, and the office may not be quite as bustling as it usually is whether it’s the physical office space or your email inbox because people are taking vacation. Have you heard of slow productivity?

I myself just took a long vacation, kicking off the summer for two weeks at the beach, but working intermittently while there. It was a long spring, and for the first time our family was able to check out for more than the standard one week, once a year vacation and get away.

While there, I dove deeper into some of Cal Newport’s work around slow productivity. He postulates in his book Deep Work that there are four philosophies for deep work. The type of work you do, your natural disposition, and the season of life you are in all play into which one is best for you.

They are:
- The Monastic Approach- Eliminate all the shallow work you can to focus deeply on one thing
- The Bimodal Approach- Create clearly defined stretches for deep work and then back to regular routine for stretches of time
- The Rhythmic Approach- Daily deep work sessions that occur at consistent times each day
- The Journalist Approach- Fit in deep work when and where you can. To note, this approach is not for the novice of deep work!
Watch this cool video to get a good overview of these.

While I find something that is appealing in each one of these approaches, you, like me, may not be at a stage in life or working at a place or in a field where one or some of these are realistic.

Even though only one approach is called “rhythmic” all of them have some thought of a rhythm tied to them, and it takes some reflection on what rhythms work for you. And these may change overtime.

In looking at some of the research as well as my own experience, some thoughts on rhythms emerge to order to do deep work and do it well and consistently:

Daily Rhythms- To do your best work:
- Break every 50 min to an hour, get up and move around if you work with your mind, sit down and rest if you work with your hands
- Utilize time blocking techniques to complete tasks that take deep thought; batch work shallow work into a time block to get it done efficiently
- Honor the “trough” period of the day when your energy is lacking (most people’s is in the early afternoon) by scheduling shallow work or a break during this time
- For more great thoughts on daily rhythms and the research behind it, read When.
Weekly Rhythms– To do your best work:
- Take one hour to plan at the beginning of each week (or at the end of the previous week) to map out your “big rocks” for the week and schedule time to get deep work done
- I like to have one day a week that does not have any meetings or appointments scheduled to focus on deep work and catching up
- Get a Full Focus Planner to help you with the weekly rhythm and big rock setting
Monthly to Quarterly Rhythms- To do your best work:
- Reflect- What worked and what didn’t in the previous period? Celebrate what did.
- Refocus- Chart out goals for the upcoming period and block time for those that may require or need the bimodal approach for deep work if you are lucky enough to have the autonomy to deploy this approach.
- Again, use the Full Focus Planner to help with this. It operates on a quarterly model so it naturally helps you structure your thinking around reflecting and focusing.
Yearly Rhythms- To do your best work:
- Honor the seasons if your work has periods of intensity and down time and schedule accordingly; deploy the bimodal approach if you can.
- Our approach at HPC is every three years a sabbatical occurs for deep rest and deep reflection. This is a period of six to eight weeks of complete time off from work.
Overall, rhythms and slow productivity create the opportunity for reflection that helps foster deep and creative work. As the CEO of Airbnb Brian Chesky stated on Adam Grant’s podcast, if you don’t create rhythms, “you’re just on the treadmill and that gets boring and anxiety ridden fairly quickly.”

How do you create rhythms in your life to do work and do it well?
June 11, 2024
Swinging for the Fence to Slow Productivity
We swung for the fences and came up short…
Yeah, you win some, you lose some, it ain’t always home runs
And that’s just the way life plays…
Morgan Wallen

A few years ago, I was facilitating a DiSC training session with one of my colleagues. We use a motivation checklist tied to the DiSC Personality Model to emphasize that different things motivate different people.

We always encourage people to ask a peer what they think motivates them. Based on the behaviors you observe in another person, “What do you think makes them tick?” is the question we ask. I asked my colleague during the session to comment on what she thought my top two are.

She immediately said, “Well one is, ‘Taking on new challenges.’”

It wasn’t one of the top two I had marked. Actually, in going through the checklist, it really wasn’t one I had even considered.

But as I reflected, I realized how off my self awareness might be. She was spot on. I’m always swinging for the fence. On top of that, I very rarely wait patiently for the next pitch. I take on as much as I can, always ready for the challenge of knocking it all out of the park.

Too Many Balls

Following my sabbatical almost three years ago where I said no to everything for almost eight weeks, I came out refreshed and ready to swing for the fence again. I slowly but surely started picking up balls. One at a time, we added client after client, one of which is sucking the ever living life out of me right now. I picked up volunteer board seat balls. Thinking that the flexibility my husband now had given his change in careers would allow him to help out with the softballs of three kids, I said yes to more. Yes to travel, both personal and professional, yes to training for a marathon. Yes to a 17 year old from Costa Rica living with us.

Not only is my disposition to always swing for the fence, I am also always juggling a lot of balls trying to hit them all out of the park. Balls I’m trying to help others hit out of the park. I realized on one random Tuesday in April, I had dealt with ten different people calling me in crisis- or perceived crisis- needing my help. None of them were family, all balls I had picked up doing apparently what I’m good at. As my husband has said, “I swear you have a sign on your forehead that reads, ‘Please spill your guts to me. I am here to help!’”

But then a curveball invariably gets thrown. And two softball sized ones- one professional and one personal- hit me like a ton of bricks this spring.

As I told my team, “I can juggle 18 balls at a time, but throw me 19 with a curve, and I want to drop them all. It makes me realize maybe 15 balls is where I should have stopped. I never should have picked up 16, 17, or 18 to begin with.

If I had never picked up those three, I could have handled the softballs, but by not stopping before it got to be too much, I seemed to be ill equipped to function given the big two.

I immediately went to, ok, sabbatical time again! I need eight weeks of nothing!

Grand Slams

For our second quarter planning meeting, you better believe “Sabbaticals” was on the agenda. Unlike last time, everyone saw it and everyone brought it up before it was even time to discuss it. Everyone on the team has been in the business of picking up lots of balls too. We love to play the game, leaning into our mission, but it can get exhausting.

At our yearly planning meeting three months prior, we had worked hard to see where everyone was with current projects and what people wanted to grow in and what people wanted to divest in. I had named these things for myself too, already knowing in January that there were some balls that I wanted and needed to throw out. But sometimes divesting in things takes time. And I am trying to exit on some of them gracefully. And I really wanted to equip my team to lead on some things they were capable of doing even better than I could, but there was inevitably some training involved in that.

We’d made plans for transitions. I communicated to boards I served on that I would not be serving another term- find a replacement! I’d be done with my bucket list marathon at the end of April. My so-stressful-I-can’t-sleep-at-night looming client issue would come to a peak at the same time and then be easier (or so I thought).

But by April, I was ready to say, “Forget gracefully!” Every ball I’ve got is being thrown to the curb!”

“And that’s just the way life plays….”

Right after this, I find myself heading to Oxford, Mississippi for a Morgan Wallen concert. You see, he is my daughter’s favorite musician. For Christmas, we had surprised her with tickets to his concert at Ole Miss in April. At the time, I wasn’t aware of how difficult the time between Christmas and April would be. The last ball I really wanted to have to juggle over that weekend was to be away from home again.

But she was ecstatic, and we weren’t going to miss it. After four hours in the rain listening to not one, not two, but three opening acts, he finally came on stage. A few songs in, he transitioned to my daughter’s favorite song, ‘98 Braves.

I felt the slow creep of the lyrics speaking to me:

We swung for the fences and came up short…
Yeah, you win some, you lose some, it ain’t always home runs
And that’s just the way life plays…

The personal issue got even more pronounced while I was gone. The client issue came to a head right after I got back, and it was shared with me that it would get even more intense over the summer and into the fall.

Again, the thought, just throw the balls away. All of them. Quit swinging.

Then, as I was unwinding the evening after my client engagement, I got a call from my husband. “He’s hit a grand slam! Cortez hit a grand slam!!” Drew was almost in tears. Our brown eyed boy who after seven years of baseball with us, had finally hit one over, and a grand slam at that! His mother was in tears, I was in tears.

Seasons of Life

It takes some time for me to moderate the pendulum swings in my life. I preach moderation, but I often don’t practice it. And when I’m swinging for the fence all the time with too many balls, I get to a breaking point. I want to quit.

But, as I reflected I realized, I think I’m entering a season in my life where I can begin to honor the seasons of the game.

As Emily Freeman says so aptly, “Just because things change doesn’t mean you chose wrong in the first place. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.”

I’ve realized I’m in the season now where I would rather see someone else hit home runs. I get more joy and satisfaction from the win a teammate gets than I do experiencing it for myself. Like the speaking gig they are invited to instead of me. Like the colleagues who are about to land a very big fish or two that could substantially change their income (we pay a commission on business anyone lands) at a season in life where income is being sucked out like a vacuum. Kids in college ain’t cheap. For someone else to serve in that board role and learn.

It used to be that if our brown eyed boy was going to make it to a game or a practice or anything for that matter, we were going to have to take him. After almost seven years, his mom takes him to most things now. She has stepped up to the plate and she is helping him knock it over the fence. It is a joy to see the evolution of their journey.

Most importantly, there is no greater joy than to see my kids well and excelling. Although Cortez isn’t our biological child, his successes and my three biological kids’ successes are more important to me than almost anything. Faith’s- our Costa Rica 17 year old- successes are important to me. The wonderful team I get to work with everyday at HPC are all so important to me. And when I say successes, hitting a real grand slam isn’t what I mean, although the hard work and commitment that goes into hitting them is.

I’m ready to throw the balls for others to hit, not hit them myself. And I’m ready to be happy with a single, especially if it knocks in another run. I’m not ready to stop stepping up to the plate or step up to the mound, I just need to modify my game plan.

And maybe you do too.

“When we want to give up, maybe what we need to do is open the door to doing things differently, not doing something different all together. “
Mary Ila Ward

“Slow Productivity”

For me, doing things differently is looking like a shift from choosing an all or nothing pace. A pace defined by what Cal Newport describes in his book titled the same as “Slow Productivity”. His key pillars include:
- Focus on fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Maybe I’ll take a sabbatical before 2024 is over, maybe I won’t (everyone else on the HPC team will be taking one in 2024-2025). I will be taking the summer to practice slow productivity, where I focus on the fewer balls that matter, namely, helping others succeed at the game, working at a pace that is more reasonable by saying no to the things that aren’t for me in this season, and by obsessing over the quality of relationships that are most important to me.

What Really Matters?

In that same DiSC training, where I realized my self-awareness was totally off the mark in the challenges I take on, I also realized maybe I wasn’t totally self-aware illiterate.

The second motivator my colleague picked for me was, “Helping other people succeed.” I had picked this one too.

I think my swinging for the fence can get in the way of me helping other people succeed sometimes. Especially people closest to me. It comes from a motivation to take on new challenges coupled with a desire to fix things. I’m looking forward to watching others hit it out of the park- by throwing the ball well, taking the bunt to advance the runner in front of me, or simply cheering from the stands- realizing that taking on challenging situations may just come in the form of helping others put in the work and patiently waiting seven years or more for the dividends to come.
May 7, 2024
Open the Door. Literally.

It is 5:34 in the morning, and I am opening my front door to welcome a 17-year-old from Costa Rica. She’s seen her parents and brother off at the airport to return home, but she is staying. She will be living with us for almost three months.

We first met her when she was a sweet seven-year-old who spoke better English than I will ever speak Spanish. Over the course of ten years, we’ve grown to love her family and the prison ministry work they do in Costa Rica. On our trip to Costa Rica last summer to visit, she mentioned she was interested in studying psychology, and I told her she was welcome to come stay with us and see some of our work at HPC before starting college in the Fall.

When I share with others our plans to have her live with us, I typically get one of two very different responses. One: “That’s great!” or Two: “Why would you do that?” The gut response most likely speaks to the person’s level of openness to experience or some other personality trait. And I appreciate the candidness.

And if I’m honest, I feel both of these responses all at once as I literally open the door to my home-This is going to be great! Right along with, What the heck are we doing? All before the sun even comes up.

I think she feels the same things too. All at once.

And I think such is the way of opening the door to anything worth doing. Worth learning from. Opening the door takes effort. There will be good and bad. Mistakes and joys. Excitement and exhaustion. All at once.

As we chose “Open the Door” as our 2024 theme at Horizon Point, we were trying to point to just this. The duality of so many things. Each one of us will spend the next month writing a blog about what this theme means personally. But I think we all agree opening the door is the way to let light in. And we are all about some light at HPC. It is who we are and who we strive to be.

So today for me, opening the door literally means opening the door. No metaphor, no hypothetical gesture. Plan action.

And what a pretty morning it was, as the sky opened to light a few minutes after the door was opened.

Who or what do you need to open the door to today?

February 27, 2024
Effective Delegation: Closed Doors Lead to Open Ones
As we begin our series on the theme for the year, “Open the Door”, we realized it was important to also consider that in order to open doors, you also need to know how to close them. The first step in effective delegation is to identify where closing a door for one person or organization is opening one for another.

As we sat around a table brainstorming our 2024 theme at our annual company retreat, we realized we were all in somewhat of a state of transition and so were many of our clients.

We often work with people, organizations, and communities that are in a place of “what gotcha there, won’t getcha here,” and we help them make the necessary steps to move to the next level of success. Whether it is coaching a middle manager to make the transition to an executive, working on organizational processes and culture to transition a company from a small one to a larger one, or helping a community understand things like wage rates and labor participation and how that is impacting their workforce landscape, we are often walking alongside people in the middle of a paradigm shift. And oftentimes we have to remind them, you are going to have to say no to something to say yes to something else. This is where growth lives.

And so are we as a business and as individual team members- working to embrace growth by opening some doors and closing others. Each of us are masters and some things, novices at others, energized by some tasks and drained by others. Seasons come and seasons go, and as a team we sat at the retreat and realized some specific plans needed to be put in place in order to do so.

Delegation has to be intentional for everyone involved in order for it to work successfully, so we embarked on an exercise where we worked to get intentional with our transitions and delegation plans. If you or your organization is in a season of transition, here are steps to think through closing doors and opening others:
1. List all of your service offerings up on the wall (literally).
2. Have everyone identify the areas they feel fully skilled at doing, the areas where they want to grow, and the areas of work they would like to divest in doing.
3. Discuss things you aren’t offering that need to be offered and how you will go defining and executing them. For example, we’ve realized that we have been called upon to do one thing for clients that then turns fully into another. We are calling this something along the lines of “Talent Development/Workforce Strategy” and we are taking the first half of this year to be able to fully articulate what this means and market it.
4. Identify a team leader for each line of business. This is ideally someone who is both fully skilled at the area and also energized by doing it and teaching it to others or is drained by doing it and wants to offload it but is interested in teaching it to others.
5. Give the team leader the full reign to execute the line of business and equip others to get it done. Identify a timeline for doing so. Is it going to take three months, a year, etc. to allow enough time for the person(s) to open the door to the task so another person(s) can close the door to it?
6. Capture the plan in a document or spreadsheet where you will remember who is doing what and can track progress.
7. Use the document you created to check back in regularly on the transition of the skills from one door open to one door closed.
When we did this activity on our retreat, we identified a lot of opportunities for us all to learn from one another. We identified ways to energize ourselves around work and transition things where people were fatigued or bored by certain types of work. This doesn’t mean that we all don’t have to continue to do “laundry” as we call it- stuff no one really wants to do- to keep the business running and our clients happy, but it does mean that we are being intentional about opening doors and closing them, all for the sake of both individual and organizational growth.

How do you know when to delegate? Do you have a process for doing so with intention? What are you looking forward to closing the door on in order to grow?
February 20, 2024