Category: Beyond Leadership

Beyond Leadership is Horizon Point’s line of resources for managers of people. Managing ourselves is a distinct set of behaviors from managers the work of others, and we are here to help. Read stories in this category if you are ready to take the next step into people leadership (or if you’re looking for articles to send someone else…).

  • Are Your Company Policies Holding You Back?

    Are Your Company Policies Holding You Back?

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my almost 20-year career in HR it’s that the world of HR is ever-changing. And while sometimes we all sit back and take a big sigh and think “not again”, it’s a good thing. Change allows us to grow and adapt. But are there policies that we are holding on to because we’ve always done it that way or everyone else is doing it that way? 

    In this time of the “Great Resignation”, I find myself thinking about what could be changed to make the biggest impact. Not only in the short-term to get people in the seats, but to keep them there for the long haul. 

    Throw out the 40-hour workweek: Henry Ford implemented the 40-hour workweek to give employees a work-life balance that they didn’t have in the 1920s. There were no regulations on working hours, but Ford took a chance, a risk, and did what he knew was right for his employees. One hundred years later, we’re still pushing a 40-hour workweek, even though it’s estimated that the U.S. Labor production has increased by over 300% since 1950. Iceland conducted a study to test out a shortened work week and the results were so powerful that 90% of the workers in Iceland no longer work 40 hours per week. Shorter workweeks have led to happier employees and in many cases an increase in productivity. Other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, are following suit. 

    While reducing the workweek may not be an option for all organizations, what are some options you could explore? Maybe flexible work schedules, shared shifts, or compressed workweeks. 

    Rethink your background checks: A recent study by RAND Corporation shows that by age 35, 64% of unemployed men have a criminal history. This figure doesn’t even account for unemployed women who struggle to find work due to a criminal history. And many of those who struggle to rebuild their lives and find gainful employment don’t have violent histories, they have drug histories. In recent months we’ve been talking the “great resignation” to death, trying to figure out how to keep employees, how to recruit new hires, and what we need to do differently. But rethinking our background check requirements hasn’t been a part of that conversation. Why does your organization conduct background checks? What are your guidelines for what gets past and what gets passed on? Yes, there are industries that have bona fide background requirements, I understand that. But if you’re not one of those industries, does your background check policy really make sense for your organization? Is it helping you or hindering you? Imagine the potential talent you could tap into by making changes to that requirement or doing away with it completely. 

    Rethink your benefits program: Why do we create benefits packages that are “one-size-fits-all”? A recent study conducted by Lighthouse Research & Advisory shows that employment priorities are different by age group, with the #1 priority for younger employees being work-life balance, while older employees are focused on finances. How can we as employers create a benefits program that meets all of their needs and wants? Imagine a plan that would allow younger employees to elect extra PTO while older employees could elect a cash incentive. Could creating an al a carte benefit program be the wave of the future? Where employers offer a benefit stipend and employees could pick and choose how they want to use that stipend, and their options include conventional benefits such as health and dental coverage and unconventional benefits such as gym memberships and extra paid leave, or even just a payout? 

    These are just a couple of examples of rethinking your company policies using a growth mindset. I challenge you to take a look at your policies, read your Employee Handbook, and ask yourself why your company policies are what they are. Start with your workweek, background, and drug testing policies, benefits, paid leave, and go from there. If the answer you come up with is “we’ve always done it that way” or “it’s similar to what other companies are doing” then you’re focused on a fixed mindset. Ask yourself if there’s a different option that would work better for your organization.

  • Training and Developing Growth Mindset

    Training and Developing Growth Mindset

    Two weeks ago, Taylor kicked off our new series on Growth Mindset: what is it?! Today we’re exploring a growth mindset in training & development. 

    The Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) defines growth mindset as


    …the belief that your skills and abilities can be improved, and that ongoing development is the goal of the work you do. However, creating a growth mindset culture isn’t just about having optimistic employees, but creating a space where employees strive to learn, enjoy being challenged, and feel encouraged to develop new skills.

    Let’s look at a case study of NLI’s work with Microsoft. 

    A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started a revolution from a revelation: the success of the company was dependent upon a culture of continuous learning and a workforce of “learn-it-alls” instead of “know-it-alls”. 

    Training and development became the forefront of the Priorities, Habits, and Systems of the company. 

    NLI’s growth mindset work follows a structure of Priorities → Habits → Systems. In the case of Microsoft, executive leadership adopted a growth mindset as a major priority to be supported through habitual training and learning activities and embedded into organizational systems like performance management and pulse surveys.  

    Microsoft created “interactive online modules with rich storytelling and multimedia” for their employees to learn independently and on-demand about the why, what, and how of growth mindset. Managers were given conversation guides to help drive and facilitate meaningful discussion about growth mindset within departments and teams. When team members exhibited growth mindset habits, they were recognized and positively reinforced.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Graphic: NLI Growth Mindset Case Study Collection

    Training is often thought of as sitting in a room (physical or virtual), facing forward, listening to a facilitator read words from slides. Training doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look and feel like that. 

    Our team hosted an interactive workshop this week where participants sat around one large table with the facilitators, everyone facing inward and around at each other. Learning was facilitated through large group discussion, partner discussion, independent work, and even physical movement around the building and the block (we literally walked around the block during a break!). 

    Is your training stale? How can you shift the paradigm to a Growth Mindset in your training and development priorities, habits, and systems? 

     

  • What is Growth Mindset?

    What is Growth Mindset?

    We are kicking off a new series on growth mindset this week! Do you believe intelligence and talents are fixed? If so, hopefully, we can change your mind with insights from our series on growth mindset. 

    Seeing opportunities instead of obstacles, in a nutshell, that’s what having a growth mindset means. Those with a growth mindset focus on development; they are always learning and growing. 

    Resource: http://strategicdiscipline.positioningsystems.com/blog-0/mindset-fixed-or-growth

     

    Inc.com shared these 8 strategies to shift to a growth mindset:

    1. Create A New Compelling Belief
    2. View Failure in A Different Light
    3. Skyrocket Your Self-Awareness
    4. Become A Curious Learner
    5. Challenges Are Your New Best Friend
    6. Love Takes You to The Top
    7. Tenacity That Ignites
    8. Massively Inspired by Others

    #8 is my favorite! What’s yours? Check out the full article here: Shift to a Growth Mindset with These 8 Powerful Strategies.

    Be on the lookout for more blog posts coming soon related to growth mindset & how it relates to recruiting, training, compliance & career development!

  • 3 Keys to Meeting Thrive Needs

    3 Keys to Meeting Thrive Needs

    “Certain ideological systems and work environments are broken. In this age, it’s up to change makers, risk-takers, and the faithful to repair or start fresh when our contexts aren’t bearing fruit for the common good.” 

    Michaela O’Donnell, PhD in Make Work Matter

    It’s the end of January 2022 as I write this and I’ve already had about half a dozen requests since the beginning of the year to speak on or facilitate sessions related to workplace retention. Whether you want to frame it as the great resignation, the labor participation rate, COVID still wreaking havoc, or nobody wanting to work anymore, workplace engagement and therefore retention is at what many people feel is an all time low. Business leaders are scrambling, because it is impacting business outcomes.  

    In one of these recent sessions, one person began to rant about people “not being like they used to be.” I had gotten to the point where I had heard enough, and I asked him (in a way that I hope came across as polite) what he was doing at his company to adapt to this new reality.  He looked at me dumbfounded while the gentleman sitting next to him grinned and started to rattle off the ways in the last six months they’ve changed their people practices -really their whole paradigm around how to get work done- and how it’s working.  These two men who were sitting side by side are competitors in a way. In a historically traditional industry.  I know who’d I go to work for and who I’d buy a product from. The one who is adapting, the one who is innovating, instead of the one who is complaining. I bet their turnover rates compared to one another tell the same story. 

    When I went back to do a search on one of the three things that create a thriving workplace, doing a search for the words “autonomy”, “flexibility”, and “freedom” on our blog,  the first post I could find took me back almost ten years to 2012 right after I started Horizon Point in 2011. Apparently I have been talking about these things  for over ten years, advocating for us to think differently about what and where it means to work. 

    We’ve yet to find a better structure for organizing what people need to thrive in the workplace than what Daniel Pink outlines in Drive.  It’s 1) Autonomy 2) Mastery 3) Purpose. 

    So here is a collection of blog posts and thoughts, dating back 10 years, linked to these needs:

    1 . Autonomy: 

    Autonomy and Productivity Together Can Be Better

    How Innovative Companies Go About Rule Making

    The Name of the Game is Freedom: How Innovative Companies Motivate and Retain the Best

    Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    Punching the Time Clock May Not Be All It’s Cracked Up to Be

     

    2. Mastery:

    Mastery is being able to learn and continuously improve and get good, really good at something.  It requires several things to achieve, but we are finding more and more what is critically missing from people getting there (and finding purpose) is margins. Margin being the ability to have time to think, process information, and be able to apply creative thinking to solve problems, learn and grow and actually enjoy doing it. 

    Here are a couple of posts to help you think about margin:

    Take a Lunch Break

    6 Ways to Build Energy

    Also refer back to our Survive post on doing a time tracking exercise to also help examine margin and times of peak productivity that can help to lead to mastery. 

    And finally, mastery usually is built towards during periods of flow:

    5 Questions to Ask Yourself about Flow in the Workplace

     

    3. Purpose: The final pillar of building a workplace where people thrive is building purpose. We believe you do this by establishing company mission, vision, and values and hiring and retaining people that align with your organization’s values. Food for thought on this pillar can be found in these posts:

    What are Company Values and How Do You Create Them? 

    6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Values 

    7 Ways to Supercharge Employee Engagement 

    A Series of Posts on Mission Statements 

    What happens when we stack the pyramid in our favor? Innovation happens. And innovation is an absolute necessity in today’s VUCA world.  But we often limit innovation to products or processes and we don’t think about innovating people practices.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    That’s why we’ve launched Illuminate, to help you actually spend the time innovating your people practices.  Join us today- seats are limited. 

  • Building the Bridge Between Survive and Thrive in the Workplace

    Building the Bridge Between Survive and Thrive in the Workplace

    Oftentimes getting from one place to another requires a bridge to cross. A connection point between two things that seem unconnected or so far apart they can’t be reached by conventional means is necessary. 

    These “bridges” are often grounded in both sides of what they are trying to connect. They are meaningless and useless if they don’t have two sides for anchoring.  

    So is true of meeting survival needs and getting to “thrive” needs in the workplace. Relational needs are the bridge. Relational needs have roots and support in both survive and thrive and they provide a way between the two.  Meeting relational needs is the bridge. They also may be the linchpin. 

    In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown seeks to map and define the language of feelings and emotions before being able to build meaningful connections. In her section on “Places We Go When We Search For Connection” she seeks to define belonging and connection and contrast it with disconnection and loneliness. 

    In this section, Brown drives home the point that relational needs (belonging and connection) are both about surviving and thriving. She states, “from an evolutionary perspective, connection was about survival, today, it’s what gives purpose and meaning in our lives. Research shows that ‘people who have strong connections with others are happier, healthier, and better able to cope with the stresses of everyday life.’”  

    In contrast, disconnection can “‘actually share the same neural pathways with feelings of physical pain.’ Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain.”  (For more on this and the connection to building inclusive workplaces, tune into this Neuroleadership Podcast.)

    We need connection – pun intended – to build the bridge to meet our survival needs that are evolutionary and adaptive, as well as to help us meet our full potential and thrive-to produce meaningful, creative, and purpose-driven work.. 

    So what do we do to meet relational needs and build bridges in the workplace?:

    1. Focus on communication. Communication is an essential part of relationships.  I found it fascinating in our 2021 book of the year, Do Nothing, how author Celeste Headlee emphasizes our need to communicate with voice as a key to meeting relational needs and thriving in the workplace (and in other places) in contrast to communicating through writing. Communicating with voice she postulates, instead of texting or emailing, helps to meet the evolutionary and neurological needs tied to relatedness. Our brains haven’t evolved enough for communication primarily through text, email, and other chat features to meet the lower order survival needs formed through relatedness. We need to be heard and we need to hear others to be successful in meeting relationship needs. She, among other authors, also points to how social media “communication” has largely reduced our ability to meet our relational needs and has fostered a culture of more disconnection and loneliness and the undesirable outcomes (as listed in Atlas of the Heart as “less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping”) these states produce. 

    So, in the workplace we need to: 

    a. Puts guardrails around communication almost exclusively done through means that don’t give people literal voice. COVID has made this harder. A simple guardrail would be “cameras on” during a virtual meeting. A larger area of focus would be training leaders on what modes of communication are appropriate given what needs to be communicated and teaching people how to not “hide” behind email and text messaging when difficult conversations are needed. Read Do Nothing  for more practical insights on this. 

    b. Build workspaces that foster communication in person. This doesn’t mean the open office environment, but it does mean common spaces where people can interact formally and informally throughout the work day as people return to the office post pandemic. This could be common break areas for meals and common meetings areas conducive to formal meetings and also informal chats that pop up doing the workday. (Note: Don’t take this to mean we are advocating for a 100% return to the office all day, everyday post COVID.  Research shows that most people want a hybrid arrangement and the research also supports the critical piece autonomy and flexibility play in meeting thrive needs. More on this in next week’s post.) 

    2. Focus on building psychological safety. In  Atlas of the Heart and her other works, Brown repeatedly emphasizes how important belonging is. She says that “true belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.” The best way to foster this type of belonging that leads to meeting both survive and thrive needs is to build a psychologically safe environment.   Here is some more information from us on psychological safety and some tools for building a psychologically safe workplace from Google. 

    When we produce a psychologically safe environment we get over the bridge to the thrive side, thus increasing positive workplace outcomes and diminishing negative ones as found in the research by Amy Edmondson.

    In summation, work by William Patrick cited in  Atlas of the Heart emphasizes our need not for individualism (which we seem to value so much, particularly in western cultures) but from our “collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together.” Our workplaces can’t thrive without these things either. 

    Interested in learning more about how to apply these principles in the workplace? Sign up for our  Illuminate workshop.