Horizon Point Consulting

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…).

  • Leaders, Know the Skill and Will of Those You Lead

    Leaders, Know the Skill and Will of Those You Lead

    I’ve found myself talking about skill and will a lot lately.  Whether it be in one-on-one leadership coaching sessions or in group training, the conversation is often directed towards customizing a leadership approach based on the needs of the person being “led”.  Much of our basic leadership training modules focus on customization based on personality, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. A person’s level of skill in doing a job or task and a person’s will to do the job or task (which includes aspects of personality) are critical to success. 

    So what is skill and what is will? 

    Skill: A person’s ability to do a job or tasks well which comes from him/her having the knowledge, experience and/or raw talent needed to achieve the desired results. 

    Will: A person’s desire to do a job and do it with excellence which comes as a result of personality and internal motivation.  A person being on the right bus (organization) and on the right seat (job) on the bus also impacts a person’s will. 

    Simply put, skill is the fact that a person has what is needed to do the job well, a person’s will is that the person actually wants to do the job and do it well.  Each dimension also breeds and fuels off each other. If you are good at something, you often like it, and if you like to do something you often get good at it. 

    So many things can go wrong when we mismatch our leadership to a person’s skill and will.  This can occur when: 

    1. We don’t diagnosis someone’s level of skill and/or will correctly.
    2. We are so afraid of “micromanaging” that we don’t correctly realize people need guidance at times based on their level of skill.
    3. On the opposite extreme, we are so afraid something may go wrong that we do micro-managing, which leads to crushed will when someone who does have the skill needed to  do a job is “over led.”
    4. We know someone has a certain level of skill and will with one thing so we label them the same level of skill and will for everything.  Skill and will can and are variable based on a variety of factors at any given time. 

    In order to avoid these mistakes, the first thing to do is to correctly diagnosis a person’s skill and will level based on the task or job at hand.  You do this by: 

    1 Simply ask the person where they think their skill/will falls. Most people can give an honest assessment of these levels if you’ve built trust with them.   I ask questions like: How do you feel about doing this on your own? Have you ever done this before?  What problems do you think you will face or are you concerned about? Do you want to do this? Why or why not? Simply asking questions will help you know where people are.  

    2. Ask them to walk you through how they would do something/achieve an outcome. Can they articulate steps in achieving an outcome or provide specific examples of when and how they’ve done it or something similar before? If so, their skill level is most likely high. If someone talks in vague generalities about how to do something, they most likely won’t have the maximum level of competence needed to achieve the result.  You can also assess their enthusiasm for the task and desire to do it through this exercise. (Note: This is a good interviewing tactic too when hiring to assess for skill and will.)

    3. Observe them doing the task/job to assess where they are.   Quite simply, if you watch someone do something you can tell if they can do it well or not.   You can assess their confidence, skill, and enthusiasm through observation. 

    4. Debrief after they do something to assess their like for the activity and their desire to do it again.  What did they learn and how will they grow to develop further skills based on what they learned?  Do they want to do it again or are they bored by it? Oftentimes, when someone reaches a high level of skill, will can begin to diminish because a been there, done that attitude begins to set in.  If the person can build on those skills by teaching others the skill(s) and or adding the next level of complexity to the task/job, you can continue to maintain will and interest.

    Once you’ve diagnosed someone’s level of skill and will, it is then time to put these two pieces together to determine how you should best lead the person.   

    Giving examples of how to lead I find is the best way to illustrate what you can do right and what you can do terribly wrong.  With that being said, we’ll devote the next few posts to scenarios based on all four combinations:  

    • low skill & high will
    • high skill & high will
    • high skill & low will
    • low skill & low will

    Stay tuned…..

     

    Note:  Many of the thoughts and ideas derived with skill and will come from the Situational Leadership approach developed by Hersey and Blanchard.   This approach uses different terms than skill (competence) and will (commitment), but many of the thought processes are the same. I’d suggest reading The One Minute Manager if you are interested in learning more about this model and the practical application of it in the workplace. 

  • 4 Reasons to Outsource

    4 Reasons to Outsource

    I came across a post on a Facebook group a few weeks ago.  The mom participant posted a question to the group asking how people simplified their lives.  She has three young children, and I took her post to mean she wanted to spend more meaningful time with her kids but didn’t know which direction to take or have the ability to do as a working mom. 

    Most of the responses to her question came down to two types of responses 1) limit your kids (and your) extracurricular activities 2) outsource.  People recommended outsourcing laundry, grocery shopping, ironing, and clothes shopping among other things. Get rid of spending time on the things that don’t add value and meaning the responses seemed to suggest.

    In business, outsourcing is also an option that provides an opportunity to focus on meaningful things while at the same time often reducing costs. This New York Times article acknowledges this and also indicates that outsourcing human resource functions is on the rise.  At Horizon Point most of the work we do, when it comes down to it is outsourcing human resource work.

    So when and why should you outsource?

    I would suggest that there are four key reasons or situations to outsource in business:

    1. When things are non-essential or don’t create value.  Just like the responses to the mom post, saying no to something is saying yes to something else.  If you have the resources to hire someone to do your laundry you can spend that time on a Saturday at the park with your kids when you would normally be doing laundry. Or you could hire a nanny to take your kids to the park while you do laundry- which is more meaningful and value-added?  Same with grocery delivery. 

    Likewise if you outsource, let’s say payroll as an HR function, you can focus more on employee engagement as a more value-added activity than processing payroll (Let me just caveat this by saying, both having clean laundry and payroll being right are essential, they just aren’t differentiators in life and in business- it’s gotta be done, but it’s really no fun to do it and it is a time suck.) Many of these things that don’t add value are also being are automated, which is similar to outsourcing for this reason. 

     

    2. When you don’t have the expertise.  I’ve got a big hole in my den ceiling right now because apparently something is leaking from upstairs.  I have no idea what is leaking, why, and how it is ending up in my den. I could try to fix it, but I would most likely create more of a mess and it would take countless hours for me to learn how to fix it.  It is much more effective and efficient for me to hire someone that has expertise in this area to stop water from dripping out of my ceiling. In the same way, outsourcing things that you don’t have in-house resources for is a good reason to call in some experts.  For example, you may need to outsource leadership training because you don’t have a person that is trained and experienced enough to do this. Often this makes sense for project-based work, not ongoing needs. 

     

    3. When you need someone that doesn’t have a dog in that fight.  Another reason to bring in expertise is that you need an objective third party to facilitate whatever activity that needs to be done.  We see this a lot in outsourcing 360 evaluations, engagement surveys, and anything where anonymity is needed to ensure the integrity and participation in the activity.  Other types of activities where I see more people bringing in experts is for organizational design and development activities such as looking at how an organization is structured and making recommendations on how to improve it or in coaching someone to better performance.  The main value the outsourcing brings in these cases is objectivity that obviously needs to be tempered with outsourcing to an expert that knows what he/she is doing. 

     

    4. When you are in transition.  The mom who posted on the message board is in a phase in her life where many things require her undivided time and attention. She has lots of competing priorities and is trying to sort through managing them.  

     

    Likewise, businesses are often in this place.  At Horizon Point, we have found living all of our company values (people first, passion, productivity, continuous learning and improvement, and give back) by helping companies that are in this type of growth transition.  It usually presents itself as a company that has grown past 50 people, where the office manager or a similar role has been doing “HR” and the owners/leaders of the company realize this isn’t going to work long term. They need an expert to help them be successful at all things people -to give them a competitive advantage- but they don’t have one in house.  They are like the mom with three young kids who still have two that can’t tie their shoes without help. Eventually, her kids will learn to tie their shoes and she won’t have to devote time to this every morning, but not without her teaching them to tie their shoes.  

    We come in and help the company identify internal (and on occasion, external) talent that can be the people leaders they need with some guided help and practice.  They outsource their HR to us temporarily, but the key piece of this outsourcing is teaching someone else to be their HR leader. We are working ourselves out of the job and we want to, just like the mom tying the shoes is doing.  She doesn’t want to tie her kids’ shoes forever.  

    We’ve worked through a few engagements like this at Horizon Point over the last four to five years, and there is nothing more rewarding that seeing a company continue to grow and thrive because you’ve helped them pick the right person to lead their HR function and helped them learn how to do it. 

     

    What do you find is best to outsource in life and in business?

    4 Tips to Help You Delegate Learned from Grocery Delivery
    You Gotta Gitcha Some Help to Lead and Run Well
  • 4 Actions for Simple, Quality Leadership

    4 Actions for Simple, Quality Leadership

    We welcomed our third child almost three weeks ago.  With five-plus years between this one and our now middle child, we got rid of almost every piece of baby gear we owned. We kept the car seat and base, but come to find out, car seats expire. Who knew? 

    It’s amazing how many seats, swings, monitors, plastic crap, etc. you can get for a baby. Most move, make noise, light up and can be quite expensive. We had a lot of this stuff for our first child. 

    So, as we went to decide what “gear” we had to have, we took a minimalist approach this time around.  We got: 1) car seat 2) stroller 3) sling and 4) borrowed a small seat and a boppy pillow from a friend.  None light up or move and our infant seems to be quite content. 

    Turns out, too, that the minimalist approach might be best too with leadership practices that lead to satisfied employees. Research out from Microsoft shows that four things lead to satisfied aka content employees: 

     

    1. Don’t make people work evenings and weekends (and you working evenings and weekends makes them think they should): 

     

    “One of their findings was that people who worked extremely long workweeks were not necessarily more effective than those who put in a more normal 40 to 50 hours. In particular, when managers put in lots of evening and weekend hours, their employees started matching the behavior and became less engaged in their jobs, according to surveys.”

     

    2. Have one-on-one meetings with your direct reports: 

     

    “Another finding was that one of the strongest predictors of success for middle managers was that they held frequent one-on-one meetings with the people who reported directly to them.”

     

    3. Build your network and relationships across departments: 

     

    “People who made lots of contacts across departments tended to have longer, better careers within the company. There was even an element of contagion, in that managers with broad networks passed their habits on to their employees.”

     

    4. Stop keeping people in meetings all the time: 

     

    “The issue was that their managers were clogging their schedules with overcrowded meetings, reducing available hours for tasks that rewarded more focused concentration — thinking deeply about trying to solve a problem.”

     

    Your leadership practices don’t have to be fancy.  Simply respect people’s time out of work, meet with them regularly, build relationships, and stop having so many meetings.  

    Which one of these things can you implement today to be a better leader?   

     

  • 1 Great Way to Grow in Your Interpersonal Skills

    1 Great Way to Grow in Your Interpersonal Skills

    Interpersonal skills are a distinguishing factor in what makes people successful.  I’m not talking about us all needing to be extraverts, I’m talking about us being able to understand ourselves and others and relate to people in a way that builds connections and relationships.  Many people refer to this as emotional intelligence. 

    I often hear employers talk about how job candidates’ interpersonal skills are lacking.  Components of this include poor communication skills, low self-awareness, inability to control emotions and to read and respond to emotion in others.  Many cite the constant connection to technology leading to the demise of strong interpersonal skills in people. 

    So how do you improve interpersonal skills?  Because it is a somewhat nebulous concept, creating concrete actions to improve may also be a challenge. 

    But in listening to the HR Happy Hour Podcast, Episode 385- The State of Recruiting– guest Jim Stroud says the following about helping build interpersonal skills in recruiters: 

    So ways to build up interpersonal skills I would say would be to volunteer your services at some charitable function.  Maybe help out in a soup kitchen. Something where you deal with the homeless or just people in general because you may think of yourself as a patient person, but you never really know how patient you are and good you are with people when you have to deal with people who may not be as privileged as you are.  And you have to bite your tongue and you have to take yourself out of the equation. 

    And I think as you do things like that you build up empathy and interpersonal skills that all transfers over when you are talking to candidates.  You won’t see them so much as numbers or resumes, you’ll see them as real people. And that will help you build bonds with candidates that will help you get more referrals from candidates, which will help you find people that don’t necessarily want to be found. 

    He’s saying to do something that doesn’t seem connected to our job which actually leads to better job performance and results. I totally agree with Jim although I don’t think I’ve ever even thought to give this simple advice to anyone looking to improve their interpersonal skills. 

    So, if you want to improve at the skill everyone seems to need, but the world seems to be wired to cultivate less of, sign up to volunteer at regular intervals where interaction with others, especially people who are less fortunate than you are, is required. 

    Employers would be wise to incentivize and support this type of effort in their workforce as well. 

     

    Where are you volunteering today?

  • Productivity from Patience

    Productivity from Patience

    Note: This is the first of a two-part post on the value of abiding in patience in order to achieve the best kind of learning. The value is described here, whereas how to do it is contained in the second post here. 

    Patience is not one of my virtues. And oftentimes, the world reinforces what seems to be the need for it not to be. Get it done and get it done fast so you can get more done is often the mantra whether we consciously or unconsciously preach this to ourselves or hear it from others.  And we are often rewarded for that “productivity”.

    As Nathan Foster states in his book, The Making of an Ordinary Saint, when discussing the discipline of study, “I just couldn’t seem to escape the obsession with being productive.  I’m always trying to get more done quicker, and when I can’t clearly see my progress, I get irritated. Feeding my driven angst is my compliance to the sin of comparison and its subtle, destructive fruit, competition.” 

    You nailed me, Nathan. And I see myself passing this on to my children. 

    As I wait, somewhat impatiently, for the arrival of our third child, who we all thought would make a quick and early appearance, I’ve had a month of reminders about the value and grace that comes in the form of waiting. Or as Jen Wilkins describes in her book In His Image,  “Patience is not just the ability to wait, but to abide.” I have spent July trying to abide. 

    Most of these reminders have come from abiding in reading daily with my son.  My husband and I have passed the “sin” of competitiveness onto him through both nature and nurture.  His need to get things done and get them done quickly encompasses just about every behavior in his life.  Everything is a competition. And when he can’t “win” he gets frustrated and reacts in ways that try everyone’s patience, including his own.  And his frustration spills into a lack of confidence in reading that spills into other areas with a lack of confidence. 

    His challenges with reading are magnified through epilepsy that impacts the language center of his brain.  Nature gives him a double whammy where “abiding” in the process of reading, and many other things for that matter, are just plain hard.  

    So we fight our urges, both his and mine, by reminding ourselves before we start reading each morning that 1) we are going to take our time and that 2) we are not going to get frustrated.  

    Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t.  But as Foster says in his book about journeying from frustration to joy, “Yet grace understands my humanness. Grace gives me space to keep going, appreciate the process, and accept what I lack.” 

    And giving ourselves and others grace often leads to meaningful learning.  As Foster says, learning is a process in which the divine is acutely evident: “It was so easy to bring God into learning. I felt his delight in showing me how things work. His love for creativity was immensely evident.” 

    By taking time off to do what I thought was have a baby, I’ve gotten the opportunity to abide in a routine of daily morning reading that has lasted almost of a month out on our back porch with my children.  It has been a blessing and process which has revealed how valuable patiently abiding in practice at a pace that is unrushed and uncompetitive leads to results that often doesn’t actually come from actively focusing on being “productive”. 

    My son’s reading has improved over the summer, and we are still working on abiding in the process of learning in a way that doesn’t lead to frustration.  It is something we will always be working on: learning in the traditional sense and in the sense that abiding in learning makes us more self-aware and better human beings. It makes us the best kind of learners, lifelong ones.

    As Wilkin’s says, “We may overlook the possibility that the waiting itself could be the good and perfect gift, delivered right to our doorstep.”*

    Where do you need to abide in order to learn through patiently waiting today?

     

    *My good and perfect gift came in the form of time with our two children before the good and perfect gift of their baby brother arrived the day after I wrote the blog post.  We joyfully welcomed Graham Samuel Ward into our family on August 7, 2019.