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…).

Leaders, Pace Yourselves with 3 Tips from an Elite Runner to Do So

Week 7 Mileage: 35 miles

Long Run Distance: 16

Our training crew took part in the Hartselle Half Marathon to cover our 13-mile long run last week. It’s a quaint race through back roads of farmland. With a field of only 260 runners, cooler temps (finally!), and a volunteer crew that epitomizes southern hospitality, it was a great way to kick off a weekend.

I went into a race, much to my husband’s aggravation (he likes a game plan even more than I do), without a particular time goal or strategy. I just wanted to enjoy the run and see where it took me based on how I was feeling.

The day before the run, though, I tuned into a Marathon Training Academy podcast on my way back from a business trip and picked up a few tips that were in the back of my mind.  This show was an interview with Jared Ward, a top ten-marathon finisher in the Rio Games, a statistics professor at BYU, a father of soon to be three kids, and a self-described “running nerd”.

Jared wrote his masters thesis about optimal marathon pacing, and in the podcast, he described the lessons he learned from this research:

1.     Pace yourself. More experienced runners, and those that finish faster, tend to pace themselves, i.e., they don’t let the excitement of the race make them go out faster than they should. They started out slower and finished faster (running negative splits). Because of this, in the case of his research, the runners who did this were able to qualify for Boston. “Be conservative with your starting pace. The marathon is a long ways and it is going to beat you up throughout,” he says.

2.     Know when to surge. Those who finish faster know when to surge. They take advantage of the terrain, specifically running faster on the downhill to improve overall performance.

3.     Be consistent. His final piece of advice for those wanting to improve performance in the marathon is consistency. “Having a consistent approach is what helps,” he said, citing that one of the best runners in the world says four years of consistent training is needed to graduate into elite status.

Although I’m not striving for elite running status, I do want to get faster and I do want to lead better. I ran negative splits in the race, taking advantage of the advice to surge on a downhill which actually started my stronger pacing about mile 5.  I started out slow which was able to help me have energy to kick it at the end.

Leadership is a lot like the marathon. It takes pacing, strategy to know when to surge, and the consistency to see the plan through.

One of the things I see most in leadership coaching (and in myself as well) is that driven, type A leaders get excited about a plan and they go out too fast wanting the results too quick, and they (me) get impatient when it doesn’t happen. This leads to one of two things then happening: 1) they (me) either, move on to the next flavor of the month, never seeing anything through, or they 2) (me) end up being too exhausted to finish strong and see the plan to completion. This causes us as leaders to neglect to see the people involved in the process that are learning from our own inconsistency. We never, because of the message we send in our own behavior, teach others to appreciate the strategy of knowing when and how to pace and surge at the right times.

Although this race didn’t result in a PR, (I ran it in 2:01:23. My PR was actually in this same race two years ago at a 1:54 something.) I walked away with something much better- a new friend. She was a mom of two under the age of five, like me, trying to beat her PR of 2:02. We pushed each other through the last mile to the finish line.  I would haven’t ever have run the pace I did in the last mile without her beside me pushing me.

I’d like to think that in leadership, just like in this race, if I had been so focused on going out fast to get to the result I wanted, I would have bonked before the end. More importantly, this would have prohibited me from enjoying the race and making a new friend. Pacing, knowing when to surge, and being consistent in running and in leading focuses us for the long hall, giving us the opportunity to push each other to finish strong.

Go finish strong today!

September 23, 2016
Leaders, Take your Meetings on the Road

Week 5

Week 5 Mileage: 32

Long Run Distance: 14

When you are training for a marathon, you spend a lot of time with the people you are training with. Thirty-two miles for us this week equaled about three to three and half hours together on the road.

You would think we would run (no pun intended) out of things to talk about.

But we don’t.

Whether it is talking about the weather (when on earth is this heat going to let up??), talking about sports (college football kicked off last week in case you missed it), politics and culture (Colin Kaepernick not standing up for the national anthem led to a lively discussion) or talking about funny things kids did or said, I find running generates discussion that leads to problem solving and ideas generation.

Other the last week of runs, I can think of a least three good ideas that arose from our conversations. We also talked our way through solving a variety of problems for each other, or at least providing varying perspectives on them that could lead to better problem resolution.

As a leader, problem solving and idea generation is critical to innovating and therefore surviving in business. Most of this comes through cultivating an environment and mindset that allows for fluid thought to take place. And research shows that simply moving helps generate a natural flow of thinking and conversation that leads to creativity.

So the next time you need to have a meeting don’t get everyone around the conference table. Get outdoors, on the road or trail and start walking or running and talking.

Like this post? You may also want to check out:

Guide to Walking Meetings

7 Powerful Reasons to Take Your Next Meeting for a Walk

Harvard Business Review: How to do Walking Meetings Right

September 9, 2016
Do you need a spin off? How innovation and entrepreneurship prevail
Is there such thing as too big in business? Can a company become too big and therefore too bureaucratic, thus limiting its ability to innovative entirely? To address this question, the easy answer is to just point you to reading The Innovator’s Dilemma. It answers this question thoroughly. But for the sake of this blog post, I’ll tell you, it depends.

The book will tell you it depends on whether or not what you are creating is a disruptive technology or a sustaining technology. The best way I can describe the difference in the two is that sustaining technologies improve upon something already accepted in the market. Disruptive technologies are just that, disruptive, in other words, they rock the market – and quite often the companies that play in that market’s- world.

Sustaining technologies prevail precisely because of good management practices (that big and bureaucratic at times can help foster) revolving around listening to customers and therefore allocating resources to pursue the best bets. However, the process of creating disruptive technologies can suffer from good management. As the author Clayton Christensen says, “The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies.”

Those companies that succeeded in disruptive technologies, “created different ways of working within an organization whose values and cost structure turned to the disruptive task at hand.”

With the fast-paced nature of most marketplaces now, its imperative for companies to be in the business of disruption. Many companies are realizing the need for different structures to create different outcomes, having both the structure that fosters good decision making for sustaining and the structure for disruption.

If you’re thinking your organization needs room for disruptive technologies to emerge in order to stay in the game, here are some ideas for you from the least to most drastic:
1. Create reward systems for those to innovate within your structure. I wrote about last week how one best place to work and leader in innovation asks people to bring up ideas/designs that help meet a customer need they have identified. If the idea is patented and goes to market, the employee gets a share of the royalties.
2. Create an internal incubator. A good post on this can be found here: Worried About Your Best Employees Starting Their Own Businesses? Trap Them With An Internal Incubator… This also goes to show that the best way to innovation is to have innovative people. Reward and create structures that keep your innovators in-house.
3. Spin off a whole new division/company. Google recently reorganized under the name “Alphabet” in an effort to “separate it’s money making businesses from its moonshot ones.” I imagine the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma when heard about this one. One separated company is GoogleX, which has been around for a while, but acts somewhat like an internal incubator focusing on those “moonshots” like driverless cars. “The change is an effort to keep Google innovative,” says the New York Times article announcing the change.
HR can and should help companies understand what organizational structures best support the goals at hand. If disruptive innovation is your target, you may need a new game plan.

Do you need a spin-off to stay competitive?
August 9, 2016
Innovate or Die? And the Best Places to Work
Innovation is a buzzword in business now. In a fast-paced world where change and adapting is necessary in order to survive in business, innovation seems to be what all people want to point to that keeps companies alive. “Innovate or die” we hear.   But is it worth all the hype?

Despite the fact that I often hate cliché words or phrases (don’t ask me about what I think about the word “synergy”, for example), I’m on the innovation bandwagon. I believe in today’s business world it truly is what separates the winners from the losers.   And you can see why in the way that the Business Dictionary defines innovation as “The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay”. This view of innovation connects it to why it separates the winners from the losers- it’s the process by which value is created.

But we often speak of innovation in terms of products or services. While very important, my focus, however, is on how people or human resources/capital innovation takes shape in the workplace and how it contributes that value that translates into dollars and cents.   Interestingly enough, many of the most innovative companies are also labeled as best places to work.   This is no coincidence.

We are now at Horizon Point self-proclaiming ourselves as “Workplace Innovators” (you can see more on this at our newly designed website), helping companies and communities hire, grow and lead in an “outside of the box” (there I go again with another cliché) way. Which happens to help us lead them to be award-winning companies recognized for their people practices.

After spending a few months delving into the research on innovation specifically from a human resources lens, and talking to company leaders who drive the best workplaces, I will be spending the next few weeks covering what creates innovative workplaces. These areas will include:
1. You can hire for fit AND diversity- How the most innovative companies hire
2. The name of the game is FREEDOM- How innovative companies motivate and retain the best
3. Rules to preserve freedom and culture- How innovative companies go about rule-making.
4. Does size matter? How innovation and entrepreneurship grow in all sizes.
5. What does a HR leader at an innovative company look like?
6. You can’t innovate without your house in order- Capital Resources, you gotta have them
7. A Final Word on How to Create an Innovative Organization: Do you believe are people fundamentally good?
In each post, I’ll make a case of why each thing is vital to an innovative workplace and then give suggestions or a checklist on how to examine your organization against this standard and make revisions or changes to adapt your organization towards these standards for innovation.

If you’re interested in diving into the details I looked at to draw these conclusions, there will be a number of articles and books linked in the posts. Overall though, check out these must reads that are grounded in research and/or first-hand experience from innovation thought-leaders:
1. The Innovator’s Dilemma (and many of its footnote references)
2. The Lean Start-Up
3. Steve Jobs
4. Work Rules! (and many of its footnote references)
5. Drive
6. Entreleadership
7. Great By Choice
8. And one cool tool I discovered in the midst of all this research is http://buzzsumo.com/. It is a content analyzer that shows you, by entering keywords, the top posts by social shares and the top influencers. Make sure you check these for quality and validity though if you are going to use them; just because it’s shared the most doesn’t mean it’s the best.
We hope you find our couple of months of hiatus from blog posting valuable as you read more about what we’ve discovered as we intensely researched the topic of innovation in the workplace.

What do you think makes a workplace innovative or a best place to work?
July 12, 2016
Talent Management Strategy Lessons Learned from T-ball

Guest Blogger: Drew Ward, husband of Horizon Point’s Mary Ila Ward

If you have ever had a son or daughter play tee ball there is only one word that can describe it…chaos. After being asked if I would coach tee ball this year my first thought was, “Lord, please give me the patience that I need to help teach the kids the game of baseball.” My second thought was, “How can we go from chaos to controlled chaos with 11 five and six year olds running around?” Little did I know that a couple of weeks into the season I would be utilizing many of the management skills that I use on a day to day basis.

One of my favorite things in my day to day work is strategic planning. I enjoy coming up with a strategy, putting that strategy into play, and then seeing the results of hard work. Three games into my inaugural season as a tee ball coach we had a record of zero wins, two loses, and one tie. You could say that I had officially received my tee ball education. At that point, I quickly realized that it wasn’t a lack of talent or that the kids weren’t trying hard enough, but that I as a coach wasn’t doing what I needed to do to give the team the best chance to be successful. The first time that I mentioned this to my wife she looked at me with a puzzled looked and said, “It’s tee ball!”

In our league, we can have a maximum of nine batters per inning and we play a total of four innings. An inning ends by making three outs or the fielder running and tagging home plate after the ninth batter of the inning. A few games in, I quickly learned the odds favored getting nine batters to the plate each inning and that an average inning consisted of 6 runs scored. If you could score 7 or more runs in an inning, or if you could hold a team to 5 runs or less in an inning, the advantage quickly swung your way.

Our goal quickly became scoring 7 runs in an inning and finding a way to strategically place our batting order to make that happen. It didn’t take me long to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our kids. At this young age all kids are in different stages of development, and we have some that can hit the ball to the fence and others that we are lucky if they can hit it past the pitcher. We have some that can really run and others that we could clock with a sun dial. I quickly begin to strategize ways that we could turn our weaknesses into strengths and reach our goal of 7 runs per inning.

We quickly began constructing our lineup with the assumption that we would get nine batters per inning and therefore our stronger hitters were positioned in the lineup so that they became the last batters of the inning. If one of my fastest players was the leadoff hitter, then I intentionally put one of my weakest hitters three spots later in the fourth hole because the percentages suggest that the fourth batter of the inning is going to come up to the plate with the bases loaded. I know that 90% of the time this particular batter in the fourth hole is going to hit it back to the pitcher, and 99% of the time with the bases loaded the others teams coach is going to tell his pitcher if it comes to him to try to run and tag home for the force out. This plays right into what I want him to do since one of my fastest players is on third base who I know that 99% of the time is going to beat that pitcher to home plate and safely score. We have now taken one of our weakest hitters and turned them into a strength player in our lineup.

If we have a hitter that pulls the ball to the third baseman no matter how we line them up, then they will always bat behind our player that more times than not gets an extra base hit so that we eliminate the force play at third base that is an easy out for teams to make. If we have a slow runner then he will be positioned in the lineup to be on third base when we have a stronger hitter at the plate therefore allowing him more time to run home safely. By strategically placing our batters in a particular order we have managed to turn weaknesses into strengths and over our last five games have reached our goal of averaging seven runs per inning which has also lead to five straight victories. And let’s face it, winning is pretty fun if done in the right way, and even five and six year olds know this. It’s especially fun when each kid knows that they contributed to the win.

How is this any different than what many of us do every day in our business life? Many of us are tasked with putting our employees in a position to succeed so that ultimately the business achieves victory. Little did I know that this would also come in handy on the tee ball field.

May 10, 2016