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 Advantages to Hiring Workers Over 50

    4 Advantages to Hiring Workers Over 50

    In writing about how to increase your candidate pool,  multiple LinkedIn comments cropped up related to hiring workers over 50.   For example, one comment read:

    “Don’t practice age discrimination or you could miss out on some rock steady workers. Those who give thumbs down to the over 50 crowd really do miss out on some great employees.”

    Through these comments, it was obvious I should have added a 5th way to increase your candidate pool in the article:  Include Older Workers.

    Also through these comments, there were reasons included as to why hiring workers over 50 is a good idea. Overall, hiring “older” workers can:

    1. Allow you to take advantage of skills and attitudes that are only really acquired over time.  So much of what we learn is through experience and that can only be gained over time.   Hiring those with 25-30+ years of workplace experience brings skills that are only gained through 10,000 plus hours of practice.   Read Outliers for more on 10,000 hours of practice.
    2. Provide mentoring relationships.  Mentoring relationships can go both ways but having older workers mentor younger workers can allow for the dissemination of things learned through experience (#1) without a mentee having to experience the setback and heartbreaks of bad decisions.   Not to mention the meaningful relationships that add value to any organization.
    3. Help with perspective.  I mean this in two ways.  I have experienced workers that are older than I am that can best be described as “wise”.  Meaning, they have a perspective that helps me, well, get some perspective.   Teaching and demonstrating not to sweat the small stuff, enjoying the stages of life and acting with patience and perseverance are qualities older workers can instill in the workplace.  And that brings me to the second view of bringing perspective in the workplace. In the larger context of diversity, hiring workers of all ages helps a workplace innovate.
    4. Help you understand your customer.  Chances are your customers are in all different ages and stages of life.  Having a workforce that is pigeon-holed into just one demographic limits your ability to see multiple markets and angles, thus limiting innovation and revenue possibilities.

    What advantages does your organization gain from “older” workers?

  • 4 Ways to Increase Your Candidate Pool

    4 Ways to Increase Your Candidate Pool

    My LinkedIn Daily Rundown feed started out today with “Jobs are cutting experience requirements….” Reporting that, “an extra 1 million jobs were opened up to candidates last year with “no experience necessary.’”

    There is a lot of buzz about the hot job market now with the unemployment rate at a pre-recession low.

    But what do you do to fill jobs in this economy?

    As the Daily Rundown suggests you can:

    • Lower requirements.Whether it be experience, education or skill requirements, lowering them can increase candidate pools. I often find that job descriptions have qualifications in them that really aren’t “required” to be successful in the role.  Do a job analysis and figure out if you can and should lower your requirements. Some more food for thought on this can be found here.

    In addition, we suggest:

    • Eliminating requirements. Doing a job analysis may show you that you not only need to lower requirements, but eliminate them all together. One thing I’m finding more and more employers considering eliminating a totally clean criminal history. Opening yourself up to hiring ex-offenders may be a wise move. To learn more about the Second Chance Initiative targeted at helping employers and communities navigate through the advantages and also challenges of hiring ex-offenders, read more here.

    Lowering and/or eliminating requirements may require more skills-based training for new hires, but if you focus on hiring for fit and diversity (will dimensions instead of skill dimensions), you may end up with better employees anyway.

    • Raising your wages. More on that here.
    • Sourcing better. Pursue passive candidates instead of posting and praying.Pick up the phone and call people, do a search for potential candidates on LinkedIn, send an email to your professional contacts.  It isn’t rocket science. Attract interest by creating interest beyond your job posting on Indeed.

     

    All of these efforts lead you to be able to fish out of a different pond than one(s) you’ve been fishing in.  And sometimes the best catches can be found in the ponds that aren’t overfished.

     

    How do you increase your candidate pools to make better hires?

  • Leaders Should Be Learners

    Leaders Should Be Learners

    Guest blog written by: Steve Graham

    The Commitment:

    Leaders set the tone for an organization.  They must be agile in their responses to the ever-changing marketplace and business climate.  Leaders are charged with growing organizations, and learning is a part of the growth process.

    Learning can take various shapes within an organization.  It can be organic, formalized, personalized, or on-demand.  Whatever the shape, learning needs to be part of a leader’s commitment to improve both personally and professionally.   One big lesson of learning is how to use failure.  The old saying, “Failure is not an option”, is not realistic.  Even though failure is not a strategic goal and we do not desire to fail, it is always a reality.

    Part of the commitment for leaders to be learners is becoming comfortable with vulnerability.  Leaders do not have all the answers and admitting that with confidence makes the leader authentic.  Leaders must go first! According to Patrick Lencioni, in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business: “The only way for a leader of a team to create a safe environment for his team members to be vulnerable is by stepping up and doing something that feels unsafe and uncomfortable first.”  Being first means becoming comfortable with vulnerability.

    The Example:

    Leaders who value the impact of learning on growth and talent retention drive an organization where learning is part of the organizational DNA.  Those who set the example in their commitment to learning create organizations that are serious about learning.  How a leader uses failure to learn can set a good example for how to use these important lessons for improvement.  In the field of academic medicine, M&M (Morbidity and Mortality) Conferences are used to examine failures and medical errors. These are powerful in learning what went wrong and finding answers to correct problems and improve medical care.  The key objective of a well-run M&M conference is to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. If Medicine finds value in learning from failures, should more organizations not do the same?  Yes! Leaders who are learners set an example and establish the value of learning within an organization.

    The Investment:

    Learning should never end. It is an investment in time and money.  Many leaders give excuses of why they cannot take time to learn.   Learning should be a priority and not an option.  It is an investment that successful leaders embrace. 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. Savvy leaders recognize this means investing in their own learning journey, so they can develop the processes and behaviors required for ongoing success.”  Dr. Staats recent publication, Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive, illustrates the importance of making the lifelong investment of learning.

    The Connection Between Executive Coaching & Learning:

    Coaching is an important part of learning.  It enhances the leader’s ability to be a better active listener.  Listening is a fundamental part of success as a leader.  In his bestselling book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, well-known Executive Coach, Marshall Goldsmith states: “80 percent of our success in learning from other people is based on how well we listen.”  Are you hearing more than listening?  Listening takes practice. It is a learned skill that successful leaders focus on to become better.

    Executive coaching is part of sound leadership development.  It can be incorporated to help leaders become more self-aware and learn to be more approachable and authentic in their influence.  Another great resource on how learning makes a better leader is a book titled: Learn Like Leader: Today’s Top Leaders Share Their Learning Journeys.

    When coaching is used with other learning initiatives, it helps develop a deeper purpose for the leader.  Developing the complete leader involves being committed, setting an example, and making an investment in self and others.  Focus on learning as a strategic resource in personal and 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 and professional coaching, health care administration and strategic human resource management. Steve is also the Founder and President of Valiant Coaching & Talent Development, LLC.

    He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, 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.

  • Dealing With the Disgruntled

    Dealing With the Disgruntled

    I recently received an email from a company (hoping to sell me their services) that included an article on “resignation violence” and told the story of an employee who went in to HR to resign her position and ended up attacking the HR representative.

    Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that while workplace violence by co-workers is relatively low, it is on the rise.

    During my career, there are a few situations that come to mind when I was concerned about going in to a meeting or became concerned during a meeting due to an employee’s response.

    According to OSHA, nearly two million American workers report being the victims of workplace violence annually. Imagine how many instances go unreported each year. Keep in mind that in many of these reports the accused assailant isn’t a co-worker, but visitors, vendors, contractors, and customers.

    The FBI reports that approximately 80% of active shooter events occur in the workplace.

    Workplace violence isn’t always a result of something that occurred in the workplace, often it’s a result of some other event or issue within that individual’s life.

    So how can organizations help to minimize the risk of workplace violence?

    1. Conduct pre-hire checks. This may include contacting employment references, conducting background checks, and requiring drug screens. It could also include searching for a candidate’s social media presence.
    2. Have a well-defined zero-tolerance workplace violence policy. Make sure that your policy outlines what may be considered workplace violence. It’s not just physical violence, it can also be verbal assaults, bullying, visual threats, and more.
    3. Make sure employees know the reporting process. If an employee experiences workplace violence, do they know who to report it to and the process of investigation that will occur as a result? And if an employee files a report, make sure they are taken seriously and investigated promptly.
    4. Provide regular training. All employees should receive annual training on workplace violence. Leadership should understand how to handle complaints, who is responsible for investigating, and what that investigation process looks like. Training should include what to do in the event of an active shooter.
    5. Implement safety precautions. Assess your vulnerabilities. Does your facility have cameras, is a key card required for access, do you regularly do safety walks to make sure outside lighting is in working order, what’s your visitor check in procedure? Once you’ve assessed your weaknesses, determine how you will fix them.
    6. Offer an Employee Assistance Program. I’ve talked about this before. It’s a benefit that I strongly believe in providing to employees. There have been many situations in which I referred employees to the EAP. It is a benefit that can help both those employees who are exhibiting signs of stress or anger that could lead to potential workplace violence as well as the victims of workplace violence.

    Is your organization successfully minimizing the risk of workplace violence?

  • The next activity you need to do with your leaders: What needs to start, stop or stay?

    The next activity you need to do with your leaders: What needs to start, stop or stay?

    “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” Max DePree

    Feedback is a critical to any successful performance management and development process.  With trends in feedback moving leaders towards less formal mechanisms of feedback and away from a formal performance appraisal, we still need to be thinking about how to define the current state of someone’s behavior and performance in order to direct what we want to see.

    And sometimes we can formalize things and still make them feel “casual”.   A way to do this is to have a 1. Start 2. Stop 3.  Stay session.

    To do this:

    1. Get your team together.

    2. Give everyone a sheet of flip chart paper and different colored markers​.

    3. Ask them to write their name on the top of their sheet.

    4. Get each participant to create three columns labeled START, STOP, STAY.

    5. Get everyone to hang their flip chart piece on the wall​.

    6. Ask everyone to walk around the room indicating one behavior or action in each column on everyone’s paper.  Let participants know that if an item is already on the wall that they want to write down, to go ahead and write it down again.   Note:  This requires that everyone in the room know and interact with each other enough to have valid input.  If this isn’t the case, you may want to consider splitting the group up or telling people if they don’t know someone well enough to skip them.

    7. Get everyone to take their notepad down and review it. Prompt people to review in a way that:

    • Identifies patterns or trends. Are people saying the same things?
    • Checks
    • for self-awareness. Are they surprised, not surprised, upset, or glad to see what they are seeing?
    • Leads them to see if there are any clarifying questions they’d like to ask about their feedback. For example, (see a chart for me below done in a group training with a client) one person wrote I needed to start “090” them.  I didn’t know what this meant. Turns out it means to go back to the basics, or the remedial course (not the 100 level course) with them. This was such good feedback because it validated some of the puzzled looks I was getting at times in training when I assumed people knew what I was talking about but they didn’t.  I was thinking their looks meant they disagreed with me, but it meant they didn’t understand.

    8. Wrap up the exercise by asking each participant to commit to start, stop or staying on one thing on their list that they think will help them the most and get them to share what they are committing to with another person in the group for accountability.

     

    I find some people are really hesitant to do this in a group setting.  They think it won’t go over well because either 1.  People won’t be honest or 2.  People will get their feelings hurt and get upset.   Both of which can make the exercise counterproductive.

     However, I’ve actually found the opposite to be the case.  Facilitating this with clients has been one of the most positive efforts in performance development I have witnessed.  It leads to great dialogue and changed behaviors. Try it.  If it bombs, you can blame me.

    If you want a safer route, you can start by doing it one-on-one.   Ask people first for them to make a list of things you need to start, stop and stay.  Then reciprocate by providing them and list and talking one-on-one about it. 

     

    What are your go-to methods for getting and giving great feedback?