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…).

  • Sexual Harassment: A Cultural Change

    Sexual Harassment: A Cultural Change

    Sexual harassment is not pervasive due to a need to change the law, but instead the need to change cultural values within an organization. This was the message I heard recently at an HR conference. In all the years that I have conducted sexual harassment training and helped organizations to implement policies, procedures, and conduct investigations, I’d never thought about it that way. But it makes sense.

    Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made sexual discrimination, including sexual harassment, illegal. So why over fifty years later is sexual harassment making waves in the headlines? We’ve all heard the stories of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill Cosby, and the list goes on. How were they allowed to conduct themselves in such a manner for so long without repercussion?

    A former co-worker recently shared a story with me about a manager where she worked making unwanted advances towards a younger seasonal employee. While the employee did not report this behavior to management, she did complain to another employee who was compelled to report it. The result? She was terminated and told that because the position was seasonal, she just wasn’t needed any longer. An investigation into the complaint was never conducted.

    The company in question has a sexual harassment policy in place, they have a very detailed investigation process. But in this case, those tools were useless because the company’s cultural values didn’t match what their policy stated. Many of the women whose stories we’ve heard in the headlines had similar experiences. They tried to report the behavior and were told it was no big deal or to just let it go.

    So how do we change the cultural values toward sexual harassment in the workplace?

    Changing the company culture includes:

    • Taking each and every complaint seriously, conducting a thorough investigation, and taking action to cease the behavior. If employees understand that such behavior won’t be tolerated, they’re much less likely to act in such a manner in the workplace.
    • Providing sexual harassment training to all employees within your organization, creating an open-door culture where employees feel safe bringing forth such complaints, and where they know that their complaints will be taken seriously. If employees know that they will be taken seriously, they are more likely to file a report. If your organization gets a reputation for ignoring complaints, employees won’t speak up and many will eventually leave the organization.
    • Training leadership on how to respond to such complaints, how to conduct investigations, and how to help move the company culture in the right direction by modeling the appropriate behaviors. Many managers admit that they don’t know how to respond to such complaints and receiving such complaints makes them uncomfortable, so instead of addressing it, they ignore it.
    • Reviewing company policies on workplace relationships and determining what is appropriate for your organization. Where does your organization draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate workplace relationships?

    By taking complaints of sexual harassment seriously, utilizing the tools your organization already has in place, and providing training to your staff, you can begin to move your organization’s cultural values in the right direction.

    To read more about sexual harassment in the workplace, check out these posts:

    #MeToo and the Onslaught of Sexual Harassment Training Requests

    3 Ways to Make your Workplace Harassment Training Successful

  • What do you value most?

    What do you value most?

    Values – integrity, authenticity, honesty, loyalty, service – and the list goes on. Values are what make each person unique. Individuals want to work in organizations that prioritizes values, and companies seek out individuals who add value to their organization.

    A Career Decision Making Tree is one tool we use at Horizon Point in guiding individuals in career planning. We share this in our career development course with other professionals; it’s available in our workbooks also. The idea is to determine what you value most in a career, which are the roots of the tree (i.e. career must haves). Then, you can narrow down your list of careers. We often facilitate this after a formal interest inventory assessment.

    Satisfaction in your career is closely connected to values. Doing work that you are passionate about and that you find value in often predicts job satisfaction.

    Unsure of what you value in work? Use this free assessment at Career One Stop to find out: https://www.vawizard.org/wizard/assessment-combined.

  • Increase the Value of your Organization’s Biggest Asset

    Increase the Value of your Organization’s Biggest Asset

    “Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” – Sir Richard Branson

    As another school year comes to a close, my boys have already started getting that end of year fever. To them the end of the school year means a break from learning. To me it means a summer filled with opportunities to teach them things they can’t experience in a classroom. With that comes the opportunity to encourage them to challenge themselves and set personal goals for what they want to accomplish during the summer (besides sleeping in).

    Performance reviews are a great opportunity for leadership to sit down with employees and not only review their past performance, but to also help employee set personal learning goals for their future as well. While employees are an organization’s best asset, those assets are only worth what an organization puts into them. The more an organization encourages employees to seek out continuous learning opportunities and the more resources an organization provides for employees to do so, the more valuable the employees become to the organization.

    There are countless ways for an organization to provide continuous learning opportunities. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are ways to help your employees grow in their careers. Some options include:

    • Tuition Reimbursement Programs
    • In-House Training Programs
    • Webinars & Conferences
    • Lunch and Learn Sessions
    • Vendor Presentations (these are often provided for free)
    • Mentor/Shadowing Programs
    • Monthly Informative Newsletters

    Providing training opportunities to employees not only helps them to increase their knowledge, it helps them feel more connected to the organization. Leaders can encourage employees in their efforts through continuous feedback and review of the goals set during the performance review process.

    Are you increasing the value of your organization’s biggest asset through continuous learning?

  • Top 10 Quotes on Authentic Leadership

    Top 10 Quotes on Authentic Leadership

    As we continue to explore authenticity, I think it’s important to focus on how to actually be an authentic leader. One of the best ways to learn is to pay close attention to the authentic leaders you know in real life and those who are doing the work publicly and sharing their experiences. We always look for research and subject matter experts to inform our work, so here are ten authentic leadership quotes we often reference:

    10) “Authentic Leaders are not afraid to show emotion and vulnerability as they share in the challenges with their team. Developing a solid foundation of trust with open and honest communication is critical to authentic leadership.” – Farshad Asl, The “No Excuses” Mindset: A Life of Purpose, Passion, and Clarity

    9) “Authentic leadership is the full expression of “me” for the benefit of “we”.” – Henna Inam, Wired for Authenticity: Seven Practices to Inspire, Adapt, & Lead

    8) “Authentic leadership is revealed in the alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do.” –Michael Holland, Founder & President, Bishop House

    7) “Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet — thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing — consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust.” – Lance Secretan, The Secretan Center, Inc.

    6) “Authenticity and knowing who you are is fundamental to being an effective and long-standing leader.” -Ann Fudge

    5) “Without trust we don’t truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.” – Stephen Covey

    4) “It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.” –Zig Ziglar

    3) “Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” – Andy Stanley

    2) “A genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of consensus.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

    1) “A true leader is one who is humble enough to admit their mistakes.” – John C. Maxwell

    To read more about Authentic Leadership, visit my blog post Authenticity and Authentic Leadership.

  • What are Company Values and How do you Create Them?

    What are Company Values and How do you Create Them?

    We’ve been spending some time here at The Point Blog highlighting some of our company values. 

    But what exactly do we mean by company values and how do you form them?  Many people, I believe, misinterpret what organizational values are and should be. This leads leaders to stay away from setting them, limiting their ability to drive organizational competitiveness through a common company language and culture.

    So, organizational values are: 

    1. Not moral in nature. They aren’t right or wrong in a universal sense.  
    2. They are however, right or wrong for your organization.
    3. They should be guiding principles that govern behavior.  They should be able to help people discern do this/don’t do this by calibrating against one or more company values.
    4. If done right, the values should lead to a competitive advantage for an organization. 

    So if you need company values, how do you create them?  Here’s the process we use with our clients: 

    1.  Case Studies.   We start with a case study process.  Based on the size of the leadership team charged with coming up with the values, we ask small groups (of no more than four people per group) to create a case study of two great things that have happened in the organization and two total fails.   The groups then report out to share their case studies.   If you would like a copy of the worksheet we use to get people to develop the case studies, email me.  

    2.  Behavior identification and classification.  The case studies are shared by each group and someone from our team listens.  On flip charts we begin to map out key behaviors indicated through the case studies.  We take the negative case studies and ask them to identify or state the opposite, positive behaviors so that everything is mapped out in a positive framework. 

    Once participants begin to see us doing this, they catch on to the process and begin providing us with words for the behavior map usually without even being prompted.   We then take these phrases and words and ask people to identify trends.  Many things come together to actually mean basically the same thing, and we combine or strike out words and phrases to generate themes.   

    3.  Value Emergence. What emerges are values that create an environment that allows for certain kinds of behaviors and  prohibits others. The themes more often than not distill down to 3-6 value words or statements.   We ask participants to take this list back with them and reflect on them. After about a week we regroup and finalize the values.  

    4.  Drive company culture through values. Most often, we then set goals and people-based initiatives off these values, creating a culture driven by values.  

    The goal of this entire process is to identify common ways of working and a common language through values that drives competitive advantage for an organization.  The values are already there and/or a sought after state for the organization, we just pull them out and define them so initiatives can be designed around them.  

    We’ll spend some time on the blog over the next few weeks giving examples of how people practices and programs are designed around values.   We’ll show how they come to life for an organization.  

    What are your company values?