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…).

  • 3 Introverted leaders and the leadership lessons we can learn from them

    3 Introverted leaders and the leadership lessons we can learn from them

    We used to think leaders were born, not made. Now we know through training, coaching and mentoring the skills needed to be an effective leader can be learned.  However, there are certain leadership situations, company cultures and team dynamics lend well to certain types of personality traits (“born” characteristics) that individuals possess that make a person more effective in their leadership role. 

    One of the most common personality continuums discussed today is introversion/extraversion.

    A rundown of the dynamic can be seen here: 

    Orientation of energy

    E     EXTRAVERSION

    Energized when you are with people 

    Talk out your ideas

    First you live it – then you understand it

    Enjoy the interaction

    Breadth of inter

    INTROVERSION    I

    Energized when you are alone

    Reflect on your ideas before vocalizing

    First you understand – then you live it

    Enjoy the concentration

    Depth of interest

    Unfortunately, there is still an “extravert ideal” that surrounds leadership, especially in western culture.  Whereas some situations and roles demand someone who is energized by others, outgoing, gregarious and people oriented, some leadership roles and situations are served better by the leaders who are thinkers, driven by ideas and oftentimes driven by solitude or small, intimate relationships, otherwise known as the introverts among us. 

    Consider these three introverted leaders and how their disposition made them more effective: 

    Moses.  As the leader of the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land, Moses (especially the movie portrayal of him) may imply that he was an outgoing orator with the skills to fire up his people and move them forward.  However, Moses spoke with a stutter and utilized his more extraverted wingman, Aaron, to speak to the people (Exodus 1-15).  His introversion is also seen in his humility. Numbers 12 accounts that he was a “quietly humble man, more so than anyone living on earth.”

    Introverted leadership trait seen in Moses that is needed for today’s leader:  Humble and reflective

    More on leadership lessons from Moses

    Stephen Wozniak. When you hear Apple, most immediately think of Steve Jobs as the leader. However, Apple most likely would have never existed without Stephen Wozniak, the brainy electronics geek and consummate nice guy that designed the circuit boards that created Apple’s first computer. He co-founded the company with Jobs.   In the early years of Apple, Wozniak was the worker bee and genius that drove the creation of the personal computer. 

    Introverted leadership trait seen in Wonziak that is needed for today’s leader:  Innovation through concentrated hard work and depth of knowledge

    Rosa Parks:  As one of the icons of the Civil Rights movement, Rosa Parks was a small, unassuming woman. Her refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white person may portray her as confrontational person, but that she was not. And because she wasn’t, her impact was far-reaching. Just think, would a gregarious, outspoken extravert have made the same impact on the bus that night by refusing to give up their seat? 

    Introverted leadership trait seen in Rosa Parks that is needed for today’s leader:  Determination and quiet resolve. 

    Know an introverted leader?

    How does their introversion make them a better leader?

    Other introverted leaders you should learn more about: Eleanor Roosevelt, Warren Buffett, Al Gore, Gandhi, Einstein, Stephen Spielberg, Larry Page

  • Passion + Productivity = Give Back

    Passion + Productivity = Give Back

    “Rarely are there ever great achievements without great expectations.” 

    A mid-sized manufacturing firm in a small Alabama community demonstrates the give back mindset through their passion and productivity. This focus has transformed an almost bankrupt company into a thriving and profitable business. Not only that, their passion and productivity prompts them to give back to the community in which they live and work. 

    The company’s mission statement reads, “We are passionate about resolutions that positively impact our customers.” With this mission, the President of the Company states, “We have products and solutions that can help make customers more productive, save money and keep people safe. Why would we not want everyone to know this? We can help enrich the lives of others by what we do. Because we believe this, we can approach our work with not just hard work by an element of intense emotion. This type of enthusiasm is contagious. The longer people work in this environment the more infected they become.”

    Their work does not stop with “intense emotions”. It extends to a focus on productivity as well. “Productivity is a measurable activity. Every week we get together as a team and review a couple dozen key indicators to be certain that we are meeting our internal and external standards. The bottom line of how this is demonstrated is letting our yes be yes and our no be no. Our vision is to be the trusted source for tough mining and industrial rubber solutions. We will bend over backwards, increase productivity, to make certain we keep our promises to one another and to our customers,” states the company President. 

    The focus on passion and productivity extends beyond the walls of the organization and into the community. 

    “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” 

    The company seeks to spur more passion and productivity in the community by partnering with organizations, churches and schools that impact individuals. 

    Through the Partners in Education Program in their community, the company works with high school students to help them maximize their potential by providing college scholarships, hosting a parent night and providing one-on-one career coaching to students at the school. The combination of these programs helps the school with resources that are not readily available otherwise. The company hopes that these efforts will help students form a plan, create goals and reach their potential in order to become productive citizens. 

  • 3 Highlights from the 2014 NCDA Conference

    The 2014 National Career Development Association Conference in Long Beach, CA was a tremendous experience.  Here’s what I learned along with some thoughts on leadership actions for us all to consider:

    1.  Career Development in an Employee Engagement Strategy. I heard about how Boeing and GM are setting up systems (mainly through online tools) to facilitate employees to take ownership of their careers and for leaders to take ownership of facilitating career development discussions and planning with their employees as a part of performance management.

    I personally learned how true this lesson is through an experience a friend had before we departed.  The organization he works for has a new CEO. He had a one-on-one meeting with him, and the first question the CEO asked him was, “What are your career goals?”  He then engaged in a discussion with my friend about how he could help him facilitate the growth of his career. This is the first time my friend has experienced this and his engagement with his organization is now renewed.  He called it “refreshing.”

    ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Ask your employees,  “What are your career goals and how can I help you reach them?”

    2.  Planned Happenstance Happens.  As a career development theory I’ll have to admit I wasn’t immediately drawn to, I saw it in action when a lady attended one of my sessions with a desire to put a plan in place to facilitate business and industry connections with schools.  The session I was speaking about wasn’t on this topic, but the roundtable I presented earlier in the conference was. I was able to provide her with the handouts and resources for this hopefully enabling some food for thought for her on how to do this in her community. She shared with me how her community set up a program where teachers were immersed in business and industry that I was able to learn from.

    ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Put yourself in a position to interact regularly with others you wouldn’t routinely get the chance to interact with. You can be a resource to them and they can be a resource to you. We all have something to learn from those around us.

    3. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”  -Richard Buckminster Fuller@BryanLubic did a fanatic job in a roundtable illustrating how you can use tools to create experiences that lead to career decisions and actions instead of telling people what career path they need to take.  Teach people how to fish, don’t give them a fish.

    ACTION ITEM FOR LEADERS:  Show and do, don’t tell. No one likes a dictator or a know-it-all.

    Agree?  You may like this post.

    What take aways did you have from your last conference or professional development experience?  How did you act on them?

  • 2 Reasons You Should Consider Dual Career Ladders

    2 Reasons You Should Consider Dual Career Ladders

    Being in a leadership role seems to be the ideal in most companies. Leading is what people strive for, and in most cases I think this is the norm because it is the only path by which advancement can take place. Want to move up and get paid more? Well then you have to lead and manage others.

    Another way to help people grow

    A client we’re working with is considering dual career ladders for the organization. With this organizational structure, there are advancement opportunities into the traditional route of leadership, but there is also a path by which people can grow by demonstrating technical expertise in their field.

    Why you should consider dual career ladders

    Dual career ladders may be a good route for your company because:

    1. Not Everyone is suited for or has the desire to get work done through others. Quite frankly, some people would rather do the work themselves and may be best suited to do so. Getting work done through others can be extremely challenging, and for some, can be draining instead of stimulation. If people are in roles that are constantly proving to be draining instead of energizing, productivity will suffer. Which leads to the 2nd reason to consider dual career paths…

    2.  Dual Paths can help your company be more successful. By placing people in the roles where they contribute the most, the company gains success through talent.

    Dual career paths may not be feasible for all companies due to size of the organization or the nature of the work, but the structure begs the question for any organization about how to provide opportunities for people to advance and grow in their careers.

    The best place to start if you are considering how to determine who is best suited for an expert role or a leadership role is to assess your talent. There are a variety of instruments that are effective for this purpose (email us if you want some recommendations), but the most important way to assess people for advancement opportunities is to ask the hard but simple question, do you want to lead? It’s much easier for people to honestly answer “no” if there is an option to grow in their career through another path. I think we hear the answer “yes” to the question do you want to lead more than we should because it’s the only option.

  • I’m Spending a Lot of Money on This: Getting and Measuring Bang for Your Buck Through Leadership Coaching

    I’m Spending a Lot of Money on This: Getting and Measuring Bang for Your Buck Through Leadership Coaching

    We’ve spent the last few months here at The Point blog talking about Leadership Coaching. Posts have included a run down on what to look for in a coach, should you hire a coach, our coaching process, how to seek feedback, how to practice feedforward and how to address the most common coaching issues.

    Does coaching work? 

    According to scholarly research in an examination of coaching effectiveness on 370 coaching participants, coaching produced results equivalent from moving someone from the 50th  percentile to the 93rd percentile and which equates to being at least three times more effective than leadership training impact on performance.

    Coaching is effective.

    But it isn’t cheap.

    So is it efficient?  In short, yes. The same scholarly article sites strong Return on Investment (ROI) in a different study that indicated the coaching to be worth 5.7 times the initial investment. This shows, spending money (on coaching) made the company 5.7 more money than what they spent on the coaching. You’ve got to spend money to make money, or so they say.

    Coaching provides bang for the buck.

    But will it work for you and give you bang for your buck?

    Just because leadership or executive coaching has been cited to be both effective and efficient for certain organizations, how do you know if coaching will pay off for your organization or if it has if you’ve already engaged a leadership coach?

    First, you hire a coach that measures the performance of their endeavors.

    If you want a complete run down on how to evaluate coaching we suggest reading:

    A Practical Guide to Evaluating Coaching: Translating State-of-the Art Techniques to the Real World(Peterson & Kraiger, 2004)

    But, for the sake of your time here’s what we do and suggest (and many of these ideas come from the above reading):

    1. Make sure your purpose is defined at the beginning so you can measure performance against that purpose.

    2. To measure did it work? Gather individual data  (we use a 360° feedback tool) at the beginning of the engagement and then issue the same data gathering process at the end of the coaching engagement to see if improvements are present. Sometimes this can be too cumbersome or time consuming to administer the 360 again. If that is the case, pinpoint key areas cited for improvement and simply gauge these areas for improvement through a shorter survey.

    3. To measure did it work? Measure success against goal attainment. Were the goals or learning objectives in the coaching achieved? This is simply a yes or no thing, and of course begs the question of goals needing to be set at the beginning of the process.

    4. To measure did it work? Get the leaders of the leaders being coached to evaluate change in performance level before and after the coaching. Has desired performance level been achieved?

    5. To measure did it work? Get the participants to provide feedback on the effectiveness of coaching by issuing a questionnaire to them. The article cited above has a good one that could be utilized.

    6. To measure did I get bang for my buck?:  Look at individual results achieved during the coaching time period compared to the cost of the coaching (this is measuring ROI).

    For example, at the individual level was the purpose of the coaching engagement to help someone improve their time management skills? If so, how much more efficient are they with their time and how much is their time worth? If they make $100,000 a year (considering a 40 hour work week which we know is probably on the short end of the time most leaders work each week), each hour of their time is worth almost $50.00.   If they improved efficient use of their time by an estimated 10%, then this efficiency gain equates to a value of $10,400 a year. Did the coaching cost more or less than this?  Let’s just say the coaching cost $5000.00. Well you just go a 100% return on your investment.

    7.  To measure did I get bang for my buck? Look at results at the organizational level during and after the coaching engagement. Obviously, every organizational gain isn’t a direct result of coaching, other factors come into play, but this needs to be measured. For example, did sales, quality, production efficiency, etc. increase as a direct or indirect result of people who have been involved in the coaching?

    Anything worth doing, which coaching should be worth doing, is worth doing right.  And the only way to know if it is done right is to evaluate effectiveness and efficiency.

    Are you measure the results of your organizational initiatives such as leadership coaching? If so, how?