Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • Swinging for the Fence to Slow Productivity

    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. 

  • Open the Door. Literally.

    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? 

  • Effective Delegation: Closed Doors Lead to Open Ones

    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 a​ctivity 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? 

  • 4 Ways to Convert Values into Behaviors

    4 Ways to Convert Values into Behaviors

    Last week to kick off the new year, we discussed starting with a focus on creating or revisiting individual and/or organizational values.   Values are a great place to set an ideal, but how do you make that a reality?  

    As Brene Brown says about values: 

    One reason we roll our eyes when people start talking about values is that everyone talks a big values game but very few people actually practice one. It can be infuriating, and it’s not just individuals who fall short of the talk. In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold people accountable.

    Ten percent.

    If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.

    So how do we convert “professing” into behaving? Here are four ways: 

    1. Set Expectations Based on Values: Design your employee development and evaluation tools around your values and specify observable behaviors that are needed in order to meet and/or exceed expectations. If you are having trouble getting behaviors down or understanding how to put a behavior into language,  Brown’s reference list of behaviors may help you.  

    For example, one of our clients values is “Service” and one sub-component of that value where they have to rate a person’s performance in the evaluation is:  “The employee acts with empathy, kindness, patience, and honesty in all interactions and shows respect for those that he or she works with, including, but not limited to, co-workers, clients, vendors, and community representatives.” 

    Then, the person performing the evaluation has to input behavioral based information to support that rating such as, “Jane Doe exhibits our service value when she answers the phone at the front desk.  She answers the phone with a positive greeting and tone of ‘Good morning, this is Jane Doe.  Thank you for calling today! How may I direct your call or assist you this morning.’ She does this consistently regardless of mood or type of call or time of day.   She is also friendly and welcoming at the front desk when all employees come in as well, greeting each person when they enter and exit with personalized exchanges.”

    1. Give Feedback in Values Based Language: Whether you are giving feedback in formal evaluation or in an ongoing developmental way, good and bad behavior should always be framed by putting your values into language. 

    To continue with our example above, you’re Jane Doe’s supervisor and you hear one of these positive phone interactions. You could immediately respond with, “Jane, I appreciate you being empathetic, kind and patient with the person you just spoke to on the phone.  I could tell it was a difficult call, but you never lost patience or made the caller feel inferior.  Thank you.  You are demonstrating our value of Service and I appreciate it.” 

    1. Decide Based on Values: Values really begin to become operationalized when you use them as the basis of all decision making, big or small.  

    Continuing with our example, let’s say you are deciding if you should even have a person answer the phone or automate it either because of budget constraints or because it just doesn’t seem like the modern thing to do because no one else is doing it anymore.  

    Based on your value of service, you may ask yourself and others: Does making this cut diminish our ability to show service?  Does having a live person answering the phone differentiate us in the marketplace? Does and/or could it bring us a competitive advantage? If we get rid of it, what positive or negative outcomes could come of it based on all our values? 

    1. Ask Based on Values: As a leader, using values to help people make decisions and guide their development is a great way to do all three of these things. When someone comes to you with a problem or a decision to make, ask them, “How do you see this decision in light of our organizational values? What do our values lead you to think is the next right thing?” Help them learn to think in terms of values which will help them act on them. 

    How do you live your values? 

  • The Best Place to Begin a New Year

    The Best Place to Begin a New Year

    Resolutions, Goals, Plans, and Turning Over A New Leaf.  This is the stuff that New Years are made of.  For individuals and organizations, the new year is always a natural place to think big and aim high.  And there is nothing wrong with this. 

    As 2023 came to a close, a theme we saw over and over again was the challenge many people were having in leading well. They were aiming high, but totally missing the mark. They had lost the people they were leading as well as themselves in the process, chasing some ideal they couldn’t even name. 

    So many of the conversations and client engagements we found ourselves in were due to this struggle. As we examined it closer, we realized that the key and consistent challenge was that people had lost touch with who they were, what their organizations stood for and how to get back to these things. 

    They had lost sight of their values, if they had ever even named any, and it had taken them to a place of shooting at a bullseye that was meaningless and also miserable. 

    So, as 2024 opens and you’re aiming high, I’d encourage you to name or rename your values.  What I mean by the word “value” are not moral values in a universal right or wrong sense, but values in what leads to your competitive advantage as an organization or a human being.  What makes you unique, and therefore something of worth? 

    As you think about this, two resources I’d encourage you to explore are:

    1. Brene Brown’s work in Dare to Lead.  Read or listen to Part 2: “Living Into Our Values” and use her pdf list of values found on her website to help think through your core values.  I would highly encourage you to listen to her words in an audio book format before using the pdf to begin action. 
    1. Based on Dr. Henry Cloud’s work, found in Boundaries for Leaders on team trust and defining operating values, create and examine two past case studies of your organization or personal practices: one that went exceptionally well and one that went horribly wrong.  What consistencies do you see in the good and the bad?  You can use this tool we’ve created based on this work to help you develop your case studies.

    What we typically see is that the bad reflects the opposite of what creates uniqueness.  It is what you are most ashamed to be or do because it is so opposed to your values.  The exceptional is what makes you feel most alive and yourself when you are living into them- the value creates value. For organizations, it is what makes people want to “purchase” from you instead of a competitor. 

    As we begin a new year aiming high, let us first reflect on if it is where we want to aim to begin with. Once we’ve done so, we can steer our behaviors towards the right bullseye. 

    What are your values and how will you aim for them in 2024?