Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Work

Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.

Methods to the Madness of Goal Setting

It’s that time of year. New Year’s resolutions abound still on this 10th day of the New Year. We’re sticking to them now. Will we by month end?

New Years’ resolutions are quite simply, goals. They can be set at any time of the year, and there are as many methods for setting and pursuing them as there are failed attempts at reaching them.

But goal setting is a method that works. Research shows it does if it is handled within certain contexts and parameters. For the sake of full disclosure, I’m all about goal setting as a performance management method. I wish more company’s performance management and evaluation processes were centered around setting good goals tied to company values and strategy. Then, leaders could coach people regularly towards goal attainment through wise action planning and implementation.

But the method to the madness in goal setting that works, depends on you. The method you choose to determine and also analyze your goal(s) for appropriateness is a matter of preference, not a matter of right or wrong.

However, three I like and recommend:

Stephen Covey- What’s the most important thing?

Zig Zaglar- Wheel of Life

Michael Hyatt- Pursuing the right thing in the right way

All have pros and cons and cater to different personalities, mindsets and segments of life. But all can work if you pick the right method and then, most importantly, have a solid plan for reaching them. The action toward the goal is much more important than the goal itself (or as Nick Saban says, it’s the process)

I’ll be describing each of these methods above so you can have some fuel for thought on which one might work best for you this year. Then I’ll round out January with why the action plan and implementation is actually more important than the goal.

Take the month of January to set sound goals and put a plan in place to pursue them. The time it takes to do this is will help you achieve success for the rest of the eleven months in 2017.

January 10, 2017
Top 10 Posts of 2016 and the Icing on the Cake

2016 showed us, at least in terms of the popularity of blog posts, that it was a year of innovation. More than half of our top 10 blog posts for the year focused on innovation in the workplace:

You Can Hire for Fit AND Diversity: How the Most Innovative Companies Hire

The Name of the Game is FREEDOM: How Innovative Companies Motivate, Get, and Retain the Best…

Innovate or Die? And the Best Places to Work

Rules to Preserve Freedom and Culture: How Innovative Companies Go about Rule-Making

How Neuroscience Is and Will Revolutionize HR

Others that came in on top were a splash of leadership:

Being a great leader is a lot like being a standout salesperson

And work-life integration/balance:

4 Lessons Learned from a Week of Being Unplugged

And HR/Talent Management Lessons:

What are your biggest HR Pain Points?

HR Santa Clauses focus on the Employee Experience

And because my husband says he focuses on quality and not quantity, his lone guest post of the year made the top 10 list:

Talent Management Strategy Lessons Learned from T-ball

Icing on the cake for blogging came in the way of being published several times on Huffington Post.

Is Leaving Work to Stay at Home a Parenting Issue or a Workplace Engagement Issue?

Do You Want to Go to Timeout? Leadership Lessons from Disciplining a Two Year Old

Do We Really Want to Have It All?

Millennials Don’t Feel Entitled to Your Job, They Want You to Help Them Chart Their Career

Bridging the Divide… Education for the Future

What was your favorite topic of 2016?

December 30, 2016
2016 Book of the Year

At Horizon Point, we’ve been in the habit of providing end of the year book recommendations and reviews. You can check some previous ones out here:

The Best Books of 2015

10 Books Leaders Need to Be Reading

The Best Book to Give Every Person on Your Christmas Gift List

Book Review 2013

We like books so much, we even provide book favorites off schedule like this Top 10 List of Leadership Books.

But this year one book was so good that our 2016 recommendation is simply one:

When Breath Becomes Air

For us, a reoccurring theme seemed to emerge in 2016, and that is the importance of story. Of an individual’s story, a company’s story and a community’s story. As we worked to help individuals chart a career path or coach them to greater leadership success, as we sought to help companies guide talent management practices through values and innovative practices, and as we helped communities understand and grow their workforce, we realized that it all really begins with the story.

As we wrote about in a blog post back in May of this year, “When you know the answer to ‘who’ can then better design the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.” Stories help us do this.

When Breath Becomes Air is a powerful story, a memoir, of a man who finds himself, at a point when he feels like his life and career is just beginning, diagnosed with a disease that is very uncommon in the young. As he grapples with his illness, we find an unbelievably talented (more brilliant than most of us could ever dream of being) human being struggling to reconcile how to spend his finite time here on earth, given all the gifts and talents he’s been given and also cultivated through his own hard work.

And although the book may be too philosophical, or even depressing, for some, and whether we know we have a short amount of time to live like Paul does in this story or not, we all deal with his fundamental question, “What makes life meaningful?”

You will see in Paul the answer to this question really comes down to family and faith, and quite honestly, meaningful work.

As 2017 approaches, we hope that you are first and foremost, healthy, and that unlike Paul in the story you aren’t faced with having to daily grapple with your mortality. However, we do hope that you spend some time discovering what makes life meaningful for you and then pursuing it wholeheartedly. And we hope that in 2017 you explore your story and ask others about theirs. Maybe this in and of itself is really what makes life meaningful- pursuing your story and helping others pursue theirs.

What is your story?

December 27, 2016
Bridging the Divide… Education for the Future

A country divided is what we are all hearing. I’m tired of hearing it, are you?

But as I examine the problem, realizing I am, like we all are, a part of it, I think Steve Boese in his HR Technology Blog described the problem best as he summarized the meaning of a chart illustrating the growing income divide in our country:

Their jobs, if they are employed, are worse than the ones they used to have. They have less job security than ever before. They are increasingly unprepared to do many of the ‘new’ kinds of jobs that might improve their situation. And every day some 23 year-old Stanford grad invents some new technology that has the potential to automate, disaggregate, and ‘productize’ with an app or a algorithm the kinds of work they used to rely upon to take care of themselves and their families. Self driving cars are going to be awesome, right? Unless you are a bus, taxi, or commercial truck driver. If you have one of those jobs, well, good luck.

I am stupid and I do think it’s the economy. And I think until we all figure out ways to have this incredible, amazing, technologically wonderful future more evenly distributed we will remain a country very divided.

And I believe, like Horace Mann said, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance, wheel of the social machinery.”

Here in lies our solution, education, but it must be education preparing the current and future generations to be prepped for the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past, as Boese points to.

There are many organizations focused on education of and for the future. One such organization is HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Life science, shaped by our growing understanding of the human genome, is one such industry of the future.

HudsonAlpha’s Educational Outreach team is “helping create a workforce for life science companies of the future. The education programs train future scientists through hands-on classroom modules, digital learning, materials and in-depth school and summer camp experiences for educators and students.”

Many of their resources, like the resources that other people and organizations are creating as we seek to move our educational system to a place of relevance, are free to anyone and everyone. For example, Touching Triton is a free online educational activity that builds an understanding of common complex disease risk influenced by factors from family history, environment, and genomic data. HudsonAlpha also has an app that explains cells at their basic level on various reading/grade levels. Download iCell here.

All major issues, especially education and income equality are complex issues. They aren’t fixed by one golden sword.

But getting technology that can deliver free education into the hands of all allows for learning about and from technology that can equip us all for the future. It can be the mode for delivering free, cutting-edge educational resources, while at the same time providing a mechanism for learning and comfort with technology that is more than required for today’s workforce. And maybe, just maybe, it can help heal divides that result from income inequality in my community and yours.

So, today a challenge: Please share 1) any free digital or online educational resource that you know of that equips students, young and old, for jobs of the future and/or 2) any resource that gets technology in the hands of all so these educational resources can be accessed.

As is so commonly the case, it isn’t that the resources aren’t available, it’s that exposure and awareness of the resources is not. Let’s fix this by making a listing such resources, like HudsonAlpha’s, go viral.

December 6, 2016
Navigating the New Overtime Regulations: Can you classify people in same position differently?
If you are in HR, about all you’ve dealt with in the last few weeks, maybe even in the last few months, has been how to handle the new FLSA overtime regulations. As one of our excellent advisors with Horizon Point, Nancy Washington Vaughn, wrote in a previous blog post about how to navigate the new regulations, “On December 1, 2016, the federal annual salary threshold for white-collar employees exempt from overtime pay will increase to $47,476 from $23,660.”

In dealing with this from a consultative perspective, an interesting question came up with a client recently. Can you classify employees under the same job title and job description differently?

My gut response, was no. You classify positions, not people. In fact, our best practice job description template has at the top of it a field for classification in which the position is indicated as being exempt or non-exempt.

But upon further investigation, you in fact, can classify people under the same job description, differently, in relation to considering whether or not they meet the threshold for exempt status (in addition to considering the duties test related to the roles). Here are some reasons that may effect their pay and therefore warrant different classification:
1. Part-time versus full-time
2. Experience
3. Performance
But employers should proceed with caution. As Paul DeCamp, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in Reston, Virginia said in this SHRM article,“Because any differential in compensation details can seem unfair to employees and thus invite scrutiny and potentially a claim, such as for an equal employment violation, it is important that employers be consistent in how they draw any such lines and that there be a clear and well-thought-out business reason for any pay differences.”

Much of what I have read from various sources suggests distinguishing those who fall into different classifications based on pay in the form of levels as to minimize questions and scrutiny.

What is giving you the most heartburn over the new regulations?

You may also find beneficial: 5 Steps to Efficiently Navigate the New Department of Labor Overtime Regulations
November 22, 2016