Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

Career Spotlight: Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel
Do you like organization and working with a team? Are you interested in customer and personal service? If so, then a career as a Front Line Leader of Administrative Personnel may be perfect for you.

On the other hand, if you don’t enjoy working with others, critical thinking, planning and administration, becoming a front line leader may not be a good fit for you.

Front line leaders of Administrative personnel directly supervise and coordinate the activities of clerical and administrative support workers.(ONET)

What do you need to be a Front Line Leader of Administrative Personnel?

Education:

Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel have varying educational backgrounds. While some have a high school diploma, others have a bachelor’s degree. Regardless of educational background, individuals in this role typically have some time of management training and business/administrative background.

If you are a high school student and would like to become a front line leader of administrative personnel, consider taking business education classes while in high school.

Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel may be a good career change option for individuals who are currently in clerical or administrative roles and are interested in a leadership position. If you are currently considering a change to a leadership role, check out Get a Leadership Professional Development Game for insight.

Skills:

Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel know about:
- Customer Service
- Administration and Management
- Critical Thinking
- Planning
- Coordination
Is the field growing?

ONET reports that careers for Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel are expected to increase by approximately 14% over the next 10 years.

What is the pay like?

What’s the Holland Code* for a Front Line Leader?

Interest code: ECS –Enterprising, Conventional, Social

Enterprising — Enterprising occupations frequently involve starting up and carrying out projects. These occupations can involve leading people and making many decisions. Sometimes they require risk taking and often deal with business.

Conventional — Conventional occupations frequently involve following set procedures and routines. These occupations can include working with data and details more than with ideas. Usually there is a clear line of authority to follow.

Social — Social occupations frequently involve working with, communicating with, and teaching people. These occupations often involve helping or providing service to others.

Source: http://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/43-1011.00

If you are interested in learning more about becoming a Front Line Leader of Administrative Personnel, go toONET. You should also check out collegegrad.com.

Would you want to be a Front Line Leader? Why or why not?

If you are interested in becoming a leader, regardless of the industry you are in, check out 10 Books Leaders need to be Reading.

*Holland Codes are a way to classify a person based on their skills and interests as well as jobs based on the nature of the work. If you have an interest in knowing what your Holland Code is in order to match yourself to careers to pursue, you can read more about our assessment process.
May 14, 2015
Get a Leadership Professional Development Game Plan
Leaders take control of their personal and professional development in order to continuously grow and maximize their contribution. As a leader do you have a professional development game plan? If you do, here are some good ideas to consider, and if not, here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Read- Commit to reading a sampling of the following:
- A book about leadership a month. For recommendations on books to start with, see our Top 10 Leadership book recommendations. Downloading the app Good Reads and selecting the “Business” category can help you select some good titles. Once you begin rating books you’ve read, it will recommend other titles for you.
- A great business publication once a month. FastCompany is my go-to for this, but others prefer something a little less edgy and more news oriented like The Economist or The Wall Street Journal
- An industry specific publication once a month. My go-to for HR related topics is Workforce Magazine (their online content is great too) and HR Magazine published by SHRM and for Career Development it is NCDA’sCareer Convergence that is online content once a month and Career Developments Magazine which is in print.
- Something outside your industry once a month (Oftentimes reading a great business publication will cover this. For example, I’ve been enjoying reading about the fashion and ecommerce industry in the last severalFastCompany
- Leadership blogs and blogs related to your industry. Subscribe to ones that are of interest to you and/or get a content mining and archiving app like Flipboard to find, organize and catalogue your info. Make sure you don’t miss out on the Leadership Carnival the first Monday of every month that features a compilation of posts from a variety of key leadership bloggers. Blogs I love in the HR/Career industry are Fistful of Talent,The HR Capitalist and UpStartHR
- Take your reading a step further and write about leadership. Set a goal to get something published once a year and then quarter. Where should you start to try to get published? Start with the publications you are currently reading.
2. Engage and Listen. To other experts in your field and those who are learning with you.
- Attend conferences to hear from the best and network with your colleagues. Record your insights and connections while you are there. You can also do this through webinars and podcasts.
- Find a thought leader in your field and schedule a time to meet with them regularly (at least quarterly) to discuss ideas, leadership challenges and insights in your field.
- Volunteer with an organization in which you are passionate about and learn from those around you and from your experience.
- Request a regular, standing time to meet with your boss (at least one a month) to discuss business challenges and opportunities and plans of action.
3. Practice and Apply. The reading and the engaging and listening really doesn’t matter if you don’t apply any of it to your work and life. As you read and listen, make notes of things you can apply on the job and set a game plan to do so. A goal setting worksheet may help with this. Take the time to discuss this with your boss in the regularly scheduled meeting you have hopefully established and ask for assignments that help you apply your knowledge, practice what you’re learning and that aid the business in pursuit of success.

What is your personal career and leadership development game plan?
May 12, 2015
The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal
I’m working with a client now where the one of the company’s core values is relationships. The value they place on relationships, with their employees and their customers, leads to a competitive advantage for the company. But I don’t think they do it because it creates a competitive advantage. They do it because it is just the right thing to do.

One thing I’ve learned from them is how this value actually plays out in the way that they recognize and reward employees.

As an outsider looking in they:
1. Get to know their people as people, not just as workers
2. Set clear expectations for everyone in the company
3. Reward people in a personal way when expectations are met. They are able to do this because they did step number one.
Because they reward people in a personal way, their employees are more loyal, work harder and continue to met and exceed the clear expectations that are set.

For example, they have a high performing engineer. The guy loves anything to do with planes and flying. He did a great job last year. His bonus was flying lessons (and in case you didn’t know, flying lessons are not cheap).

I have a book sitting on my shelf in my office that is titled 1501 Ways To Reward Employees by Bob Nelson. It is a good little book to get you thinking. It lists things like “provide a free makeover, give a full-day pass to a spa, give passes for bungee jumping, skydiving, hot-air balloon ride, whitewater rafting, provide lessons: golf, scuba, flying, rafting, tennis, horseback riding, cooking, painting…” and so on and so forth.

All these things are cool, but if you give someone who is scared of heights skydiving lessons, that isn’t rewarding, that is scary to them.   I’d love a pass to the spa, but would my husband? Nope. And if you gave him a pass to the spa thanking him for a job well done, I think his first thought would be, you don’t even know me at all do you? Taking the time to know people on a personal level communicates to them that they matter and you care.

If you are going to reward people, make sure what you are doing is actually rewarding. This means that giving the same reward to everyone company wide, is oftentimes not rewarding to most.   A ham at Christmas is nice, but do all your employees like ham?

And before you go saying, well money is rewarding to everyone, just give everyone money as bonus, stop and think about that for a minute. I just had a conversation with someone that is willing to take a pay cut for more flexibility at her job. Money isn’t rewarding to her, the flexibility is.   She will work harder for the boss that gives her more flexibility in getting her work done than she will the boss that pays her more.

How do you personalize your rewards? When you do, what results do you see?
May 7, 2015
10 Books Leaders Need to be Reading
Leaders are readers. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow as a leader is to read about leadership and take the knowledge gained from your reading and apply it.

When asked about the best leadership books out there, here are the ones I recommend.
1. Great leaders lead themselves first. You can’t lead others if you can’t leader yourself through strong personal habits. The best personal leadership book I have found is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
2. Leaders are influencers. For a timeless classic on influence, read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
3. Leaders are Empathetic. Read what I believe to be the best fiction ever written. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Even if you read it as a student, it’s a good one to re-read, with a particular focus on the leadership lessons to apply. Also check out The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People by Kevin Leman
4. A leader customizes his/her style based on whom he/she is leading. To understand situational leadership in order to customize, read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard.
5. Leaders understand how to run an organization. For insights on what makes an organization successful, read Good to Great by Jim Collins. For the entrepreneurial leader wanting to understand how to run a great start-up and/or scale and grow one, read Scale by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel and EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey.
6. Leaders know the most important decisions they make are people decisions. To know how to hire the best, read Who?: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
7. Leaders know that once they answer the Who question they need to be able to explain the Why to them. To understand the importance of Why, read Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.
8. Although answering Why? takes you a long way in motivating others, for more insights on motivation and building people and teams, read The Leadership Challenge byJames Kouzes and Barry Posner and Boundaries for Leaders by Henry Cloud.
9. Leaders learn from the success and failures of others. Pick up a biography or memoir of a leader. Some good ones are: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and the biographies of different presidents and visionaries by David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose.
10. Leaders have some good reference books to turn to when they need tools or templates to help them succeed. Keep a copy of the The Successful Manager’s Handbook on your desk for this purpose.
Which leadership books have had the most impact on you?

Like this post? You may also like:

Horizon Point Book Review 2014

Horizon Point Book Review 2013

Harvard Business Review: 11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read
May 5, 2015
Give Back Story—Just Give it a Whirl!

Sometimes we discover our talents and our passions when we least expect them, and that is often when we are using them to meet a need. It often takes someone else to recognize the talent and passion within us. Ginny Pylant, discovered her talents for the visual arts, when she needed a large piece of art for the living room of her home and a friend saw what she had done.

“Having just moved in and done a lot of updating to a new home our budget was not conducive to the hefty price tag that went along with the piece of art I wanted for the room,” says Ginny.

“After some deliberating I decided to give it a whirl and paint my own. It turned out ok so I hung it in the room. A few weeks later a good friend of mine, who also works at an art gallery, came over and asked if she could take it and try to sell it. I figured it couldn’t hurt anything so I gave it to her…..guess what…..it sold.”

Little did she know, she wasn’t only meeting a need to fill the space on her wall, she was also seizing an opportunity to meet a deeper need within herself.

“Of course, simultaneously the Lord was working on me as well. I was so blind to it at first but in retrospect it was probably the fastest prayer He had ever answered. Being a stay-at-home mom was something I had always dreamed of but didn’t come without a price. I no longer had an income or a sense of productivity. Don’t get me wrong, my babies are my absolute greatest accomplishment in life but there are days when my resume would read; wiped hineys, folded clothes and kept children from starving. God knew I needed more and all this time I had no idea it was within me, I just needed the outlet,” says Ginny.

Art became Ginny’s productive outlet. Today, Ginny is commissioned to create pieces for individuals. But Ginny’s mindset of productivity goes beyond just getting things done. “Productivity means making someone else happy. That is my favorite part of being an artist, seeing the finished product in someone’s home and knowing they look at it and it brings back memories or just makes them happy.”

Her “Horizon Point” painting, a rendering of a photograph of the sun coming up over the Tennessee River at our family’s cabin, captures this sentiment. Ginny was able to capture for us the purpose behind the name of our company, which is the peace that comes from knowing you are in the right place on your horizon.

With this, it is obvious that Ginny’s art is also filled with passion. She says, “Passion can be in something as mundane as everyday chores or painting a cotton field for the daughter of a cotton farmer whose father just passed away. It sounds crazy but if I am excited and passionate about the piece I am working on I always love the end result more than I do the ones that I do begrudgingly because of time constraint.”

Ginny has also found reward being able to donate her art. “It is a way that I can give to different organizations in our community. Turns out art can support schools, hospitals, non-profits etc. and by giving to our community I have found support and business,” she says. Her art is typically one of the first pieces to go in any auction for the community.

What talents and passions have you yet to recognize in yourself? What talents and passions do you see in others that they have yet to see in themselves? Challenge yourself and others to “just give it a whirl.” When you do, it will more often than not lead to a sense of productivity, passion and a chance to give back.

You can find Ginny and her art at:

ginnypylantart.com

ginnypylantart@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/ginnypylantart/info?tab=page_info

instagram: ginny_pylant_art

April 28, 2015