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…).

  • 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


  • 5 Ideas for Retaining Talent in a Tough Labor Market

    5 Ideas for Retaining Talent in a Tough Labor Market

    Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent.  If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent.

    Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things.

    But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be implemented?  Here are a few suggestions:

    1. Customized total rewards/benefits.  In other words, what a 20-year-old wants/needs are different than what a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old need and want. You could use other criteria besides age to illustrate this point as well. One-sized fits all benefits don’t work anymore. Ala Carte benefits and pay are more effective.  

    For more thoughts on this, you might find these posts helpful:

    A Look Back On the Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

    3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    2. Two-way senior leadership exposure. Senior leadership needs to be exposed to front line staff and vis versa in order to identify and develop high potential employees and align them for growth opportunities. Set-up a time where senior leadership regularly “walks the floor” and interacts with the front line.  

    3. Link all practices and rewards to company values. 

    For more thoughts on this, you might find these posts helpful:

    Marketing Your Core Values and Culture

    6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values

    4. Implement “buddy systems”.  This is a system where HR or bosses are not involved but where people can connect with others at work about problems or issues and work them out with their peers.  These could be work or non-work related. Allow latitude for those solutions to be implemented.

    5. Capture learning while it is being made.  Make videos of products being made and designed especially if you deal in customized things that aren’t produced regularly (processes not on paper but in the video). This can help people who are creating the learning be able to meet number two and three above and also help people who are learning from them fulfill need three.

    With turnover costing companies 100-300% of the person’s annual salary, not to mention the challenge of finding people in this tight labor market, it is worth implementing things that make sense for your business to help you retain and train those you already have.

    Which of these five things makes the most sense for your organization to help you retain talent?

  • Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week.

    Her employer, a nationally known retailer, gave her an occurrence against her attendance record for leaving work early.

    A co-worker of hers received an occurrence a few weeks before for leaving work early as well. In her case, she had a heart attack during her shift and was carted out of the building on a gurney and into an ambulance.

    While these are two extreme cases, attendance occurrence programs are bad for business. Here’s why:

    1. Occurrence programs discourage employees from taking sick days. If you get an occurrence for calling out sick, you’re more likely to go to work sick and suffer through. As a result, you’re less productive while at work, it takes you longer to recover from an illness, and you end up passing your germs on to everyone else you work with. And if you offer sick leave, but punish employees for using it, what message are you really sending?
    2. They penalize employees for things outside of their control. Life happens. You get sick, your kids get sick, you get stuck in traffic because of an accident. Whatever the case, sometimes life just happens. And occurrence programs penalize you for those things that may be completely out of your control.
    3. They’re counter-intuitive to a culture of work-life balance. Most companies today promote a culture of work-life balance. But if you punish employees when life does happen, you’re showing your employees that while you talk the talk you don’t really walk the walk.
    4. Occurrence programs punish all for the actions of a few. While I fully believe in addressing attendance issues, many companies that implement an occurrence program have done so as a result of the actions of just a few employees. Attendance issues should be addressed individually. Occurrence programs punish good, productive employees just the same as it does those poor performers. Which then leaves those good performers wondering why they try so hard.
    5. If you’re concerned about lost productivity as a result of absenteeism, why aren’t you worried about the cost of turnover that results from an occurrence system? If you analyze the data of lost productivity due to absenteeism and compare that to the lost productivity as a result of termination due to that occurrence system (also add in there the cost of replacing a termed employee), what you may find is that it’s costing you more in turnover than it is in absenteeism.

    Again, I’m not saying let attendance issues go. I fully believe in addressing attendance problems individually with those employees who abuse the system, and it’s usually pretty easy to determine when the system is being abused. However, attendance policies need to be flexible, they need to allow for the unexpected. They need to show employees that while they are expected to be at work and be productive, the organization understands that life happens and that when life does happen they can go and take care of it without the added stress of wondering if their job is in jeopardy as a result.

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