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…).

  • Horizon Point’s Favorite Authors of the Year

    Horizon Point’s Favorite Authors of the Year

    We always do a book of the year and oftentimes a Top 10 list for certain types of books each year.   What I’ve found in my reading this year, though, is that there are some really good authors out there putting out more than one great read.

    They are thought leaders that write about things that span across the professional and personal and across industries and cultures.  They capture the heart and head with enjoyable prose and research-backed guidance. All help to guide better leadership, better workplaces, better homes, and better communities.

    Here are the authors we recommend putting on your 2019 reading list:

    Chip and Dan Heath.  These two wrote our book of the year – The Power Moments.  I’ve found their book Switch to be equally engaging and practical to apply.  I’m looking forward to reading the others they have out as well.

    Brene Brown.   A writer that gets to the heart of authenticity, Brene uses research and personal stories to create a narrative that is impactful. We read one of her books as a team and found that her voice may resonate more with women than men.  However, thinking about her voice whether it resonates with your gender or not, and reading prose of different mindsets is an important part of understanding others.  Men and women alike should pick up her work.

    Adam Grant.  Adam wrote our 2017 book of the Year, Originals. We also enjoyed hearing his insights at SHRM18, read about it here and here.

    Beyond Originals, his book Give and Take is powerful and we look forward to anything else he puts out on the market.

    Cy Wakeman.   I found myself saying “amen” over and over again and highlighting Cy’s work in both Reality-Based Leadership and No Ego, plotting ways to incorporate her insights into our leadership training content.  She gets that so much of what leaders deal with in the workplace is unnecessary drama and outlines practical ways, along with tools to use in the appendix of each book, to “ditch the drama.”

     

    Who is your top author for 2018?

     

     

  • Horizon Point’s Book of the Year

    Horizon Point’s Book of the Year

    In January, we declared this year the year of authenticity. Authenticity would be at the heart of what we would pursue as individuals and as a business.

    So, of course, we set out to find a book of the year about authenticity. There are a lot of books out there directly related to this, and we as a team read at least a few of them. But none of them quite fit what we were trying to pursue, of what we were meaning by living as an authentic leader and leading an authentic life.

    But, one favorite book stuck out for the year. We referenced it in more blog posts and kept coming back to it as a team, even though it was something we read in March of this year.

    This book, The Power of Moments, through research-backed analysis- describes how to create moments, or rich experiences through elevation, insight, pride, and connection.  It engages the reader in thinking about how to practically elevate themselves and others by creating more moments.

    Moments “rise above the routine and break the script”. They come from an action that creates insight. From practicing courage by pre-loading responses providing meaningful and personalized recognition, being obsessed with completion, and by creating shared purpose and meaning.

    Living authentically, we realized, comes from pursuing moments and helping create them for others.

    The ending of the book cites research on the five most common regrets of those who are dying. Number one on this list is not having the courage to live a life true to themselves instead of the life someone else expected them to live.  A life lacking in authenticity was the biggest regret, a life filled with minimal points of elevation, insight, pride, and connection.

    We hope you will pick up a copy of our recommended book of the year. We hope it will allow you to pursue in 2019 and beyond the authentic life. We wish you a life full of moments for yourself and for those you love and lead.

  • I Think It Was His Eyes That Got Me

    I Think It Was His Eyes That Got Me

    I think it was his eyes that got me. Deep brown, wide and curious with one a little lazy, I noticed he seemed a little lost in the mix. Or maybe what got me was that he was wearing the same Hulk Smash Halloween costume my kindergartener was wearing during their Halloween class party over two years ago.

    I was there as a mom trying to help with the chaos of five and six-year-olds amped up on candy and holiday excitement when I noticed him. The teacher had a neat pumpkin game where each child was given a small plastic pumpkin with a lowercase letter on the bottom of it. Each child was then supposed to go find the uppercase match also on the bottom of a plastic pumpkin hidden in the field by the school.

    I noticed the teacher quietly pull this precious boy aside and talk with him about what his letter was. He didn’t know his letters yet. His was a g.

    I couldn’t get the boy out of my head, so a week or so later, I emailed the teacher and asked if I could help him learn his letters. I know nothing about the best methods for educating young children, but I thought I could at least spend a little time on letters. How hard could that be?

    Two years have gone by. As you can see by this year’s Halloween photo, he trick-or-treated with us this year. His mom, my friend now, was working her second shift job and couldn’t take him. In those two years, we have learned his story, grown to love him and his family and are trying to help them with the challenges that poverty and, honestly, bad choices throw at people.

    You see, not long after I started working with him at school, I learned that his father was in jail, his mother had been in and out of jail (mostly out since he had been born). All on drug-related charges. Although she’d worked briefly at a gas station, she generated money to live off through the only thing she knew how to do easily- sell drugs.

    Over these couple of years, she’s opened her heart to me and I’ve come to see that things aren’t always what they seem on the surface. I’ve come to find that those that we most want to condemn in the world are in the situations they are in, yes because of poor choices, but also because of the lack of resources, and not just financial resources, that many of us often take for granted because they are so readily at our disposal.

    I’ve realized that the barriers I learned about and taught people about through the Facilitating Career Development curriculum are real barriers and often stacked on top of one another.

    Here are the barriers I’ve seen and the story of this family as we’ve tried to walk alongside them to overcome them:

    1. Past mistakes that can’t be erased or overcome even once people make a choice to live a different way. My friend made a choice about a year ago to stop living the way she was living. She decided she couldn’t go back to jail, couldn’t keep selling drugs to keep a roof over her family’s head.  We went to lunch and I heard her entire story, surprised at how candid and honest she was about her mistakes.  And also, I hate to admit, surprised at how her anxieties and fears were similar to my own. Mamas really just want a good life for their kids; it’s what we worry about the most.

    We went to the NCC after lunch.  There she got some clothes for a couple of her kids (she wouldn’t take any for herself because she said had what she needed) and we talked about a pathway out of her situation. Pamela and Tim and all the staff at the NCC are a great resource to walk alongside people to understand their situations, provide practical and accountable solutions, and have the patience and grace to stay the course with people.

    She needed help with the utility bill, and Pamela told me that this was how she knew she wasn’t dealing anymore. If she wanted to, Pamela said, she could get money fast to pay to keep the lights on through dealing again. She wasn’t doing it though. The NCC provided support to pay part of the utility bill.

    In between this happening and now, she’s been evicted from her rental home, lived with two of her children and a new grandbaby in an extended stay motel, moved in with her father where she and our brown-eyed boy slept on an air mattress in his one bedroom apartment and within the last month, they have moved into an apartment on their own where she is struggling to pay the rent.

    She’s held down a job now for more than four months, but the news came that her court date for charges dating back to 2015 was on the settlement docket. We went to court and waited her turn only for her case to be postponed till next year. Tim with the NCC sat and waited with us.

    It’s hard for me to understand how and why the judicial system takes so long. But even though she has started to make better choices, her past mistakes will shape her future. We don’t know what that will look like when her case comes back up again.

    While I’m not in any way saying people should not be held accountable for their mistakes, the fines and fees and punishments that go along with the judicial system hold people back from getting to a point of self-sufficiency. So do predatory lending practices and government systems that incentivize the opposite of good outcomes and self-sufficiency. This is most apparent for those who are trying to lead a different life than the one that got them into these systems. Which leads me to my next barrier.

    2. Transportation. I take for granted that I can get in my car at any time, never have a second thought if it will start and never worry about where gas money will come from. Transportation is a tremendous barrier for people trying to find and keep a job to lead to a better life.

    Because of my friend’s past, she owes fines and has to have a special kind of insurance to get her drivers license back. We are working on this.  In addition, once that is taken care of, the cost of a vehicle comes in. The NCC is working with her if and when we can get her license squared away to provide her with a vehicle she can pay the center for weekly. She will have to participate in drug testing on a regular basis to keep the vehicle.

    Right now, she is paying for a ride to and from work with a co-worker (at a price that is way more than what she should have to pay) and her daughter has a car that provides some transportation options at times.

    3. Childcare. Ever wondered what people with kids do when they have jobs that aren’t at times most people work? Second shifts start right about the time kids are getting out of school. If you don’t have family or your job doesn’t pay enough to cover the cost of child care, what do you do?  In addition, what do if you can find childcare and pay for it, but it ends well before your shift does?

    We’ve helped my friend to work around this barrier, but have you ever thought about these questions before? It’s a conundrum to work through.

    4. Finding and keeping a job (that also covers a minimum standard of living). I’m proud that my friend has been working towards sustainable employment. She worked at the chicken plant for a while but was let go for accumulating too many points for absences due to the health and legal issues of two of her children.

    She has a job she really likes now. She got it by her own efforts through a temporary agency. She has been hired on with the company in a permanent role that will start next month, which also comes with a raise and benefits.

    A weekly paycheck of approximately $300-400 might get you in a Kia, but it does not go far. It always seems to be a game of waiting for the next paycheck to come around because the money is always used to pay for basic necessities. And helping to understand what the most basic necessity is at the moment is also hard.

    I will say, it is hard to understand the mindset of spending when there isn’t money to spend. The NCC is working with my friend to help her understand how to budget and to provide small amounts of support to provide necessities when needed. The budgeting problem is tied to another barrier as well.

    5. Simply not knowing what you don’t know. I take for granted that my parents spoke openly with me as a child about what things cost and what we could and couldn’t afford. I had a savings account as a child, and my parents had incomes and saving habits that never led us to live paycheck to paycheck. I didn’t pick or chose my way into this, I was born into it. My friend was born into her situation and her brown-eyed boy was too. We are trying to create opportunities for exposure to a different way.

    In addition, with every problem, my friend has brought my way I have at least one person I can pick up the phone and call about trying to alleviate the problem. Take her legal problems. I know her attorney and the judges in Morgan County, and I have no problem contacting them due to our personal and professional connections.  If my friend has problems with school for one of her kids I pick up the phone and call my contacts at the central office or the principal of the school that her children attend.  I have known someone in my network I can immediately pick up the phone and call, and the NCC has been the most called upon resource. Again, I didn’t choose these connections, I was born into most of them.

    I thought everyone could just pick up the phone and call someone they know. They can’t, because they don’t know who and what they don’t know. I thought most everyone knows how to live within their means. When the means are so small and no one has taught you how to do that, a lot of people don’t or can’t.

    In all of this, the NCC has been the avenue of hope, prayer, accountability, and patience for my friend and me as we try to navigate and overcome these barriers. There are people in our community that are honestly trying and are overlooked or judged because of past mistakes and the environment they were born into. They just need a hand, a prayer and someone to walk alongside them to be their neighbor.

    And walking alongside people requires financial resources. Not handouts but hands up. I’ve found the NCC to be the best source for a hand-up for our neighbors.

    As we do at Horizon Point each year, we try to live our value of giving back. In an effort to continue to help people like my friend with the life skills, workplace skills, and love needed for success, we’ve chosen to partner with the NCC for Giving Tuesday.

    Horizon Point will match every donation dollar for dollar given to the NCC on Giving Tuesday up to $5000.00. We hope you will join us in changing our community one relationship and hand-up at a time. Help us make a big difference, please donate here.

    For more information on the Neighborhood Christian Center of Alabama, Inc. (NCC), visit their website here.

     

  • 4 Ways to Help Change Happen When Change is Hard

    4 Ways to Help Change Happen When Change is Hard

    “For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.”

    from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

    Change is all around us.  In our personal and professional lives, just when we might get to used to something, it changes.  Many of the most life-altering personal changes that we choose like marriage and children we tend to embrace and get excited about.  We put ourselves in these situations of change.

    At work, though, changes often occur, and we didn’t prompt them. They are unsettling and hard.

    We work a lot with clients helping them manage change.  In addition, when we are asked to come in to do training, whatever type it is, it is usually because the organization wants some type of change to occur.

    So how do we help people through change?  I think the first thing to do is acknowledge that change is exhausting and then build strategies to help people avoid or overcome that exhaustion.  As stated in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, “Change is hard because people wear themselves out….What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”

     

    Here are four ways to help fight that exhaustion to make change easier.

    1. Limit your choices.  Much has been written about highly successful people who always wear the same clothes and/or always eat the same things, day after day.  Take, for example, Steve Jobs and the standard uniform he wore:  black turtleneck and jeans. Or Nick Saban and his supposed diet of a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie every morning for breakfast.  Why is this helpful?  Because if you don’t have to think about these things, it leaves you more mental energy to think about more important things.  Some practical things to do in limiting your choices:
    • Subscribe to services to limit your choices:  You may not want to eat an oatmeal pie every morning or wear the same thing every day.  Subscription-based services can help you limit your choices and also infuse variety in them. For example, meal services where meals are delivered to your door can be a good idea. What you eat is pre-chosen after you answer a few questions about preferences. These are saved and used to chart your weekly meals and you don’t have to think about your grocery list or if you forgot the key ingredient.  It is all right there. Subscriptions to clothing boxes (Trunk Club is my favorite), automatic reordering through Amazon, and other similar places can also help you cut the thinking out of everyday choices to help store up your mental reserves for more important things.
    • Set your three big to-dos for the day:  Your choices of to-dos are probably massive each day. Multiply that by weeks, months and years and it is a whole lot to wrap your mind around.  But, if you sit down each day (or week) and list the three things that are most important to get done that day, you are inadvertently limiting your choices of chasing multiple to-do rabbits.  I’m using Michael Hyatt’s FullFocus Planner to help me to do this.  Although some of the planners are overkill, I really like the set-up that prompts you to set three big rocks each day.  These should stem from the goals you set at the beginning of each quarter in the front of the planner.
    1. Scale the good.  Focus less on the bad.   Our minds are wired to problem solve.  While this is often a good thing, constant problem-solving mode zaps our energy and leads to fatigue.  To combat this mental default, sit down each week on your own or with your team and determine one thing that went right last week.   Use that to then focus your energy for the week of replicating that right instead of finding and fixing the wrong. Oftentimes this indirectly gets rid of a lot of problems.

    As it is stated in Switch, “Ask yourself, ‘What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?’ We need to switch from archeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.”

    1. Start behaving as though things are the new normal. I heard a clinical psychologist speak at a conference earlier in the week.   He described an activity he does with people who have come to him for marriage counseling.  In this, he asks the couple, what do people do in a happy marriage?  He said it takes a bit to get them actually listing behaviors, but when they get on this track, they list things like: they say I love you, go on dates, have sex, call to check in during the day, send flowers, cook each other meals, etc… You get the picture.  Then he tells them to pick one of these things and do it.  So, he makes them declare Thursday night date night (or hey, sex night) and asks them to commit to that.   He says, “Don’t try to be in love, just do what people in love do.”

    This obviously is tied to focusing on the good, not the bad as stated in number two, but it goes beyond that in building upon number one by not thinking about it. Just do it.  It builds in our automated sense to create habits, thus diminishing mental fatigue.

    1. Create change scripts.  If you are leading a change with a group of people, we find creating change scripts for communicating the changes to be very helpful.   We’ve created a format that outlines how to do this based on the way people process information. For example, most people start with the what when communicating change instead of the why, which immediately triggers the wrong part of the brain- hello panic- and then no one listens to the rest of what you have to say.

    You walk through filling in the blanks based on the outline, so it is designed to help limit the exhaustion and often paralysis that can come from thinking, “How on earth do I tell people this?”

    It also helps people stay on the same script, limiting confusion and assumptions that make change management harder than it has to be. If you’re interested in talking to us about this, reach out to us.

     

    Change is hard, but if you can limit the fatigue that comes from daily life that is compounded by the change process, you can help yourself and others navigate change more successfully.

    How do you keep your energy at a level at a place that allows you to navigate change effectively?

  • To be the Best, Run with the Best

    To be the Best, Run with the Best

    Since running my first marathon in 2009, it’s been in the back of my mind.  Can I run a sub-four-hour marathon?  Of the two I’ve done, I would have to shave more than twenty minutes off my time to do so.

    This summer, I started running occasionally with someone who runs fast.  So fast, she has qualified for Boston and qualified this year to run the New York City Marathon. I think her marathon PR is around a 3:24. This means she has finished a marathon about an hour faster than I have. She typically runs each mile at least one to two minutes faster, if not more even during her casual runs, than I am used to running.   And the other people she runs with do the same.

    I like her as a person and felt like her company would be nice. So I thought, well let’s just see if I can keep up.

    Running is often a metaphor for leading and living, and what I’ve found to be true in this new occasional running group is to be better, you have to surround yourself with people who are better than you are.

    Smarter, faster, stronger.  A better entrepreneur, wife, leader, heck, a better person in general.  If you want to be it, find someone or people who are that, and spend time with them.

    The things that I think hold true for being around people that are better than you are:

     

    1. You don’t have to be around them all the time to feel their impact. These ladies get up EARLY to run.  While in the summer that time was around 5 am, I went a couple times a week with them.  When that start time was pushed back to 4:30 am when school started back, I’ve found it hard to mentally wrap my mind around getting up that early.  Coupled with some inner ear problems I’ve had that is the worse first thing in the morning, I’ve only been running with them less than once a week now.  However, doing an 18-mile-long run with them showed me I could hold a sub-nine-minute mile for that long and make my sub-four hour marathon time possible.

    So, if you can devote one hour a week to being around those that are better in the arena you are trying to improve in, do it.  Everyone has one hour they can carve out each week, and it is worth it.  Schedule that time and stick to it.

     

    2. Their impact begins to become a habit or come naturally. When I’m not running with them, I’m still running faster than I used to.  Running in the nine to ten-minute mile pace has now become running in the eight to nine-minute mile pace for me.   The slower pace now seems weird or unnatural.  Running a half-marathon solo a couple of weeks ago led to a PR of 1:48:50 (8:18 per mile pace) and it felt good.

    So, when you aren’t physically with those who are better than you are, harness what they’ve taught you and practice it solo.   You might even want to schedule a solo “race” or trial run to help you see if you can go it alone, using their positive influence to move you forward.

     

    3. You’ll find that what you set out for them to help you improve in isn’t the only thing they make you better in. The person I started running with has a child the same age as one of mine.  They are both having a hard time reading in school.  I’ve found it hard to find people that I am friends with or that are good friends with my son who are dealing with the same challenge.  Talking about this while we run has helped me with perspective, insights, and calmness about the situation.  My husband ran with us for a bit right before the first report card of the year came out.  After we finished, he said, “Man, it was so good to hear her say she had the same worries that we do.  We aren’t the only ones dealing with this.”

    So, when you surround yourself with better people, don’t silo them into the one area you think they can help you improve in.  Be open to their insights as it relates to all aspects of life by building a holistic relationship with them.  Conversely, don’t see them as perfect either.  Just because they are making you better in one area doesn’t mean they are a God.  Offer them grace (and yourself grace) when it comes to learning and growing.

     

    4. Their impact allows you to have an impact on others.  The same child that struggles with reading does not struggle with running.  He loves it, and he is fast.  And if there is anything I’ve found to be true, it is when things are hard (like homework and school are for him right now) you’ve got to have an outlet to pursue some things you are great at and love.

    Running with her has allowed me to see this running fast thing as an opportunity to connect with my speed-demon seven-year-old.  Running unites us in a common passion. We’ve signed up for the Huntsville Marathon together.  He will do the kids’ marathon, where he will run 25.2 miles before race day, keeping a log, and then run the last one mile on race day when I run the 26.2 miles all at once.  I may not make my PR and sub-4:00 goals, but if I were a betting person, he will at least win his age group if not more.  Seeing him excel at something he loves is way better than me hitting my goal.

    My favorite runner is Shalane Flanagan.  She just finished 3rd in the New York City Marathon (where my fast friend finished in 3:42).  She’s my favorite because she seems to get this point so well.  She is committed to making herself and others better through creating opportunities for mutual gain.  To read more about this, check out the article from Runner’s World that was written after her stunning 2017 NYC Marathon win.

     

    When you find the opportunity to grow and learn from someone who is better than you are, take that experience and use it to help someone else learn and grow.  Or at least use it to share a passion with someone.

    How do you surround yourself with people who are better?

     

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