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…).

  • Leadership Reminders From my Night in O’Hare

    Leadership Reminders From my Night in O’Hare

    Things don’t always go as planned. 

    After a great week at SHRM19 in Las Vegas, I planned to be back in the comforts of my own home Wednesday night. But thanks to bad weather and a missed connection, I spent the night at Chicago O’Hare Airport. I was exhausted and just wanted to get home. But what could have been a miserable experience turned out to be an adventure. And as I sit here watching the sun come up over Chicago, waiting for my flight home, I’m reminded of a few leadership lessons. 

    1. Be flexible. Things won’t always go as planned. Be willing, and able, to adjust to unexpected changes. Be willing to consider plan B or plan C, and sometimes Plan D. And don’t be surprised if someone else comes up with a better solution. As I stood in line last night waiting to try to get a flight home, I considered my options, which included flying into Nashville and driving almost two hours back to Huntsville. When I finally got up to the ticket counter, the customer service rep came up with a better solution for me, she switched my airline from United to American and was able to get me on an early morning flight and have me home by 10 AM when every United flight wouldn’t have gotten me home until late afternoon. 
    2. Be patient. Try to look at the situation from other perspectives and understand what those involved are trying to accomplish or are enduring. Due to the bad weather, the line at customer service took me almost two hours to get through. I was tired and not looking forward to a night in the airport, but I knew that it was due to circumstances outside of anyone’s control and the Delta customer service reps were working diligently to help fliers find a way to their destinations. Even though I stood in line for so long, the experience was a positive one and I didn’t mind the long wait. (the free fruit snacks and bottled water helped!)
    3. Seek out a mentor or partner. Find someone who has been there and done that who you can learn from, or at the least, someone who is in the same boat that you can walk the walk with. Last night while grounded in Milwaukee I met Allison on the plane. She too attended the SHRM Conference and was trying to get back to Huntsville. We decided to stick together through this adventure and that made it much more bearable, and even fun. And since neither of us has ever found ourselves missing our flight and stuck overnight in an airport, it was nice to have someone else to figure it out with. 
    4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Sometimes you just can’t figure it all out on your own. Others may have information or solutions that you need, you just need to ask. After getting our return flight figured out, walking for what felt like forever to our new terminal gate, and trying to figure out how we were going to get any sleep, we met a very nice housekeeper and asked her how we could get a blanket. She led us to the jackpot! Thanks to her help we found two bags full of fresh blankets and were able to use them to make ourselves “beds” on the floor so that we could get at least a little bit of sleep during the night. 

    You don’t have to be in a leadership role to practice leadership. How do you practice leadership at work or outside of work? 

  • Put Your Phone Away: The 1 Best Piece of Advice for Today’s Adults and Teens?

    Put Your Phone Away: The 1 Best Piece of Advice for Today’s Adults and Teens?

    I’ve been asked to speak to a group of high school student leaders this week.  I’m always open to almost any topic the organizers want me to cover that I have expertise in.  In this case, what started off as a talk about communication skills morphed into talking about building confidence. The adult leader said that she felt as though this was a challenge for most youth of today.  

    I see this point and also see where there are a variety of factors contributing to it. One factor that I see related to both challenges in communication skills and confidence is the frequency of time that youth (and adults) spend on their phones.  

    I consider this a note to myself as much as it is advice in general, but the phone has become what I call the marshmallow of our times.  

    Remember the marshmallow study in the 1970s which showed that children who were able to delay gratification and wait to get two marshmallows instead of one were shown to be more successful by a variety of measures? As stated in this article:  

    The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures. (You can see the follow-up studies here, here, and here.)

    I’m not one to say that any piece of technology is the source of all evil, but when used to an extreme, which is what it has become for many, the modern cell phone has become:

    1. A source of instant gratification (the marshmallow) that we can’t seem to put down or delay looking at.  
    2. It is has become a way to avoid direct communication with people. 
    3. It has become a way in which youth especially judge their self-worth through social media and other online interactions that aren’t based on reliable or useful sources for building self-worth and confidence.   
    4. All of which I believe is leading to lower confidence levels (among other negative things) in youth and adults.  
    5. Which then leads us all to fall victim to not shining our light in the way that positively reflects the talents, abilities, and gifts we have to offer, further thwarting self-confidence.  

    In the marshmallow study, the same article cites environmental factors that affect a child’s ability to have self-control and delay gratification, namely if they have been in situations where adults don’t follow through on what is promised.  This leads children to be conditioned to not believe that the second marshmallow will ever come (maybe their parents are on their phone and that’s why they don’t follow through?).  

    But the article emphasizes that we can cultivate behavioral patterns that help us delay gratification (put the phone down) and build our own confidence levels: 

    You and I can do the same thing. We can train our ability to delay gratification, just like we can train our muscles in the gym. And you can do it in the same way as the child and the researcher: by promising something small and then delivering. Over and over again until your brain says, 1) yes, it’s worth it to wait and 2) yes, I have the capability to do this.

    Building the muscle of putting down the phone when it isn’t necessary can help build confidence and patience in us all.

    Some ideas to do this:  

    1. Commit to putting up your phone in certain environments, situations, or times of the day.  Just like going to the gym at a routine time, find routine situations and times where the phone is off limits.  This exercises your self-control and patience.  
    2. Intentionally engage in face-to-face conversations with your peers and family at regular intervals. Commit as a group to put your phone up during certain times and interactions. 
    3. Take social media apps off your phone that you find yourself spending too much time on and/or ones that you can tell sabotage your self-confidence.  If you find the social media outlet as one in which you are constantly comparing yourself to others or you find yourself putting off doing more important and life-fulfilling things (things that build your gifts and build relationships) because you are constantly on the app, this is a clear sign it is eroding your confidence. Remove it. Use the time you would normally devote to your phone engaging in activities and relationships that help your light to shine. This produces a double boost in self-confidence. It removes that which is diminishing your confidence and focus on activities that build skills and abilities leading to a strong sense of self-worth and fulfillment.  This skill-building and confidence can then end up impacting others in a positive way too.

    I find it hard when speaking to youth not find a way to incorporate this clip from the movie Coach Carter into my talk.  So somehow in talking about cell phones, marshmallows, communication, and confidence, I’ve found myself back in a place where this clip conveys a most important message that we all need a reminder of from time to time. 

    Please don’t hide your light behind the glow of your phone.   

  • 4 Main Sources to Get Wage Data

    4 Main Sources to Get Wage Data

    I hope to see you at #SHRM19 next week!  If you are attending, stop by and see me at 10:45 am on Tuesday in Westgate Ballroom A for my session – “Do You Need to Raise Your Wages:  A Step-by-Step Guide for Evaluating Your Wage Practices”.  

    If you can’t make it, one of the most important steps in this process is to get good market data.  Where do you find this? 

    First: Contact your local Chamber of Commerce and/or Economic Development Entity and see if they do a local or regional wage survey that you can participate in and/or purchase.  Most communities do something like this, and some don’t charge you anything if you participate by providing your own data. 

    Second: Identify online sources (both free and that may cost you money) that can provide you with data you need. I’ve found that using BLS, Onetonline.com Payscale.com and Salary.com provide good aggregate data that gives a general picture of salaries by position across the country and in specific regions.   I never use one of these sources alone.  I pull them all together and aggregate the numbers in order to even out any skewed data.  

    Third:  Identify trade or professional associations you may be a member of or want to join to access data for specific positions, industries, and/or geographic regions.  For example, when looking for recent college grad salaries across geographies and position titles, we use NACE.    

    Fourth: Contract with third-party consulting and compensation firms to provide you with off-the-shelf surveys they do at regular intervals or ask them to provide a customized wage analysis for you.  Most of the time, a customized analysis isn’t cheap but for highly specialized and competitive positions, the investment can be worth it.  

    Where do you find the best data to decide if your wages are in line with the market?  

     

  • Create Insights Instead of Giving Feedback

    Create Insights Instead of Giving Feedback

    “….But the most helpful advice is not a painting. It is instead a box of paints and a set of brushes. Here, the best team leaders seem to say, take these paints, those brushes, and see what you think you can do with them. What do you see, from your vantage point? What picture can you paint?” from Nine Lies About Work

    A few weeks ago, we talked about how neuro research shows us that for learning to happen, insights have to be created. We talk a lot about giving and receiving feedback in the workplace and how necessary it is.   But what if it is more important to create insights than to give positive or negative feedback?

    What’s the difference? Feedback is about you telling people what you think and giving them the path forward from that in most cases.  Insights are people discerning what they think.

    Research shows us that people are more likely to act on what they think not what you think because insight is brain food which creates dopamine which makes us feel good. (When was the last time traditional feedback gave you a shot of dopamine?)

    So as a leader, creating insights may be the better way to get the results you need rather than trying to give feedback.

    How do you do it though? Our previous post suggests some ways. There are also some helpful ways in Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall.   Their “insights” suggest focusing on the 1) past 2) present and 3) future and all revolved around asking good questions, not giving good answers*.

    1. Start with the Present: Ask, “What three things are working right now?” For more on this, especially when utilizing it for change management purposes, read here.
    2. Revisit the Past: Ask, “When you had problems/situations like this in the past, what did you do that worked?”
    3. Finish with the Future: Ask, “What do you already know you need to do? What do you know already works?”

    My little girl loves to paint and draw. Often, she asks me to help her draw something. We’ve been on a heart drawing kick lately. The first few times, I’ve drawn a heart on a page or a canvas for her to color or paint in. But then I stopped doing it and just left her to it. What I discovered was that her own hearts were better than anything I could have ever helped her create.  I just need to provide the tools and she can do the rest better than I can.

    How are you providing the right tools and asking the right questions in order to give people the opportunity to grow?

    *Nine Lies About Work is an insightful book linked to a lot of research. The way they phrase the nine lies, though, may just be a matter of semantics, so don’t let the titles of the lies fool you. Read the context in the chapters. In this case, you may be giving feedback in the form of creating insights.  Don’t take this to mean you need to scratch giving feedback. Just make sure you do it in a way that leads to learning and engagement instead of in a way that leads to disengagement. For more, read the book on how to do this.

  • The Essentials of Professional Development

    The Essentials of Professional Development

    Written by: Steve Graham

    As a coach, I often work with clients who are needy for knowledge.  They desire to grow professionally and often feel stuck in their current work environment.  It is no secret that when an organization values developing their people, the benefits for both the employee and organization are numerous.  The benefits often include: lower turnover, increased engagement, and a smarter workforce. Professional development goes beyond cookie-cutter training programs.  It involves a deeper commitment to learning.

    Learning can take various shapes within an organization. It can be organic, formalized, personalized, or on-demand.  Whatever the shape, the approach to learning is the first essential of professional development.  According to Dr. Brad Staats, Associate Professor of Operations at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business: “Today’s fast-paced, ever-changing, global economy requires us to never stop learning or we risk becoming irrelevant.”  Dr. Staats’ recent publication, Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive, illustrates the importance of making the lifelong investment of learning.

    The second essential of professional growth is to take the lead in your development.  Do not wait on your organization to offer growth opportunities. There are various resources available, and some are even free.  Resources include:

    1. Continuing education/certification programs from professional associations.

    2. Higher education-based professional and graduate certificate programs.

    3.  LinkedIn’s Lynda.com

    4. Free online courses, like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

    5. Webinars, TED Talks, seminars, and conferences.

    The third essential of professional development is finding a style of learning that works for you.  Do you prefer a structured learning program and in-person environment? Or, do you want to work at your pace and complete learning via a virtual (online) program?  These are important questions to answer before you search for the right opportunity. Some virtual programs offer digital credentials, like a badge, that adds to your professional credibility.   

    Creating a professional development plan is the fourth essential of professional development.  The plan will serve as a guide in setting development goals, deadlines for completion, and illustrating how the professional development fits into your overall career or professional brand.  For example, if your work requires project management, or if you desire to become a Project Manager, then becoming a Certified Project Manager would be a goal.

    The professional development plan should identify the areas you desire or need to grow, and what methods will be used to attain these goals? How will you use the new knowledge?  Whatever your plan, make sure you have enough interest to pursue additional learning in that area. Growing as a professional also means growth as a person. There needs to be an alignment between “who we are” and “what we do”.  This is one path to finding satisfaction in our work. Professional development can offer more confidence and career opportunities.

    No matter your position within your organization, you need to focus on growth.  Learning also helps with brain health. A study by Harvard Medical School found that “Every brain changes with age and mental function changes along with it. Mental decline is common, and it is one of the most feared consequences of aging. But cognitive impairment is not inevitable.”  If you want to stay relevant and confident, then invest in professional development.  

    About the author: Steve Graham serves as Vice President for Marketing, HR Business Partner, and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive & professional coaching, health care administration, and strategic human resource management.

    He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, a certified coach with the International Coach Federation, and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development, and International Coach Federation. LinkedIn.com/in/hstevegraham