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…).

  • Who Is Your Successor?

    Who Is Your Successor?

    How many people do you know that have left a job or stepped down from a volunteer leadership position, regardless of the reason? Have you ever been that person? I have. Let’s talk about it. 

    Every day, organizations find themselves with a newly empty desk chair. Responsibilities unassigned. Balls dropped. Projects unfinished. On average, that chair sits empty for 40-60 days, depending on which report you read. Think about your own organization. Do you know your “time to fill”? With the talent market like it is right now, your time to fill may be even longer. Think about all that lost productivity a.k.a. lost revenue + cost of recruitment + myriad of other expenses we know fall into the total cost of hiring one person. Whew! 

    We can be proactive and cut the time to fill significantly. We need to talk about succession planning (even if you don’t want to). Sharlyn Lauby talks about this on the ADP Spark blog in her article “5 Reasons You Should Have a Succession Plan (Even If You Don’t Want To)”. Another iteration of something I hear myself saying at least once a week, Lauby states, “It’s absolutely essential for organizations to think about the “what ifs” associated with an employee not being able or available to do their job.” We have to be prepared if we want to maintain long-term success. 

    I recently left a job that I loved for the job that I was made for. It wasn’t easy, but it was right for me. As the first domino fell, so did the next one, and the next one. I had to tell two volunteer-led organizations that are dear to me that I could not finish out my term on the board of directors. I was, of course, willing to help train my successor…who I realized did not exist. Not for my job, nor for my volunteer roles. It was a shock to these systems for me to leave suddenly. But it didn’t have to be. 

    Sharlyn Lauby said something else I hear myself saying constantly: “Succession planning isn’t as hard as it sounds”. It’s as simple as paying attention to the talent already within your organization. Forbes contributor, Stuart Levine, describes strategic talent management and successful succession planning as a system where “People are identified for their potential to guide the organization in the future as much as for their current strengths”. The wisest talent managers think in the future and live in the present. When executed well, succession plans can be the lifeblood of an organization. 

    Remember that job I loved and left? I was teaching at a university, focusing on professional and career development of business students. We frequently invited industry partners to visit classrooms and speak to students about their successes and their challenges, sometimes in a recruiting capacity, sometimes purely educational. Sherwin-Williams was one of my favorite companies I invited to participate – let me acknowledge my bias as their former HR intern – because I think they do many, many things extraordinarily well, including talent management and succession planning. Did you know upwards of 85% of their hires are internal? Did you know some of their current top leaders started with the company as management trainees decades ago? Here’s what that looks like. Sherwin-Williams is a shining example of an organization that thinks in the future and lives in the present. They have extensive training and development that is specifically designed to capitalize on the existing strengths of potential leaders in preparation for their inevitable opportunity for internal promotion. They pay attention to every single potential leader and how he or she can be strategically developed to lead in a way that is best for him or her individually and best for the company. It’s really an incredible system. 

    So how do you get started? SHRM has excellent resources to help any organization create succession plans. Here are two reads I recommend:

     

    If you have more time and are ready for a deep dive, check out Developing Leadership Talent, part of the SHRM Foundation’s Effective Practice Guidelines Series. 

    Succession planning is important. I have experienced the stress of having no plan in place when someone left, and I have been the cause of that stress for others. The proof is in the successful organization pudding: pay attention to and develop your talent now. Who is your successor? Don’t wait until you’re leaving to figure it out. 

     

    Have questions about how to incorporate strategic talent management and succession planning in your organization? Horizon Point can help. Call us at 256-227-9075 or email us at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.

  • If You’re Not Onboard, Get Off the Ship!

    If You’re Not Onboard, Get Off the Ship!

    The best piece of advice I heard at the recent SHRM19 National Conference came from Cy Wakeman’s session “Business Readiness: Ensuring Our Teams are Ready for What’s Next.”

    As a consultant, I spend a great deal of my time helping organizations navigate change, from determining what change is needed to creating the roadmap of how to accomplish the change to how to get employee buy-in. The hardest part is often getting employees on board, helping them understand the need for change and addressing their resistance.

    The current change management process caters too much to the individual employee when it should focus more on the overall business need for change. Leaders spend a great deal of time sitting on the sidelines with those few employees on the bench trying to convince them why they need to get in the game with everyone else. They allow the minority of employees who want to resist the change to stall the process or to even quash it.

    According to Cy, leadership needs to stop trying to please everyone and focus on those employees who are champions for change and who understand the vision, because they will be the ones who drive change forward. And change is all about ensuring the sustainability of the organization and creating an opportunity for growth. Those resistant will only hold the organization back and will never support the change. Their resistance is driven by their own ego, not what’s in the best interests of the organization.

    So how can organizations effectively navigate change management?

    1. Don’t jump the gun. Change management isn’t a race, it’s not about being the fastest out of the starting gate. Take the time needed upfront to thoroughly assess the need for change, the options for how to make the change, and the impact each option will have on the organization as a whole. Proper planning will lead to proper execution. Making snap decisions too often leads to the need to backtrack, which causes employees to lose faith in leadership’s ability to manage and makes them more resistant to change.
    2. Explain the why then move forward. It’s important to maintain a level of transparency with employees. Explain the why behind the change in terms that all employees can understand and outline how the change will positively impact the organization as a whole. But don’t dwell on it. Once you’ve explained it, move on to the how and when. Don’t let resistant employees continue to question the why this is where change stalls.
    3. Think inside the box. A key point that Cy made was that we’ve been conditioned to “think outside the box” and that method of thinking tends to lead to passing the buck. The tendency when we think outside the box is to think of how we can use others to get things accomplished. She recommends we start thinking inside the box by asking “what can I do” instead of “what can others do”.
    4. Stop trying to please everyone. You will have resistant employees, it’s inevitable. Stop focusing on pleasing them. Organizations change because it’s necessary to continue to thrive and grow. It’s best for the organization as a whole, so stop wasting your energy on that small minority who refuse to get on board, who protest change. They are stalling your organization’s growth and the majority of employees who are supportive of the change are suffering as a result, so is the organization. Those employees have a choice, and Cy put it so eloquently:

    “Stay in joy or go in peace, but you can’t stay in hate.”

     

    For more on change management, you may also enjoy our posts Change Management: Celebrating the Small Victories and 4 Ways to Help Change Happen When Change is Hard

  • 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?