Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Skills Improvement

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for personal skills improvement.

Create Insights Instead of Giving Feedback
“….But the most helpful advice is not a painting. It is instead a box of paints and a set of brushes. Here, the best team leaders seem to say, take these paints, those brushes, and see what you think you can do with them. What do you see, from your vantage point? What picture can you paint?” from Nine Lies About Work

A few weeks ago, we talked about how neuro research shows us that for learning to happen, insights have to be created. We talk a lot about giving and receiving feedback in the workplace and how necessary it is. But what if it is more important to create insights than to give positive or negative feedback?

What’s the difference? Feedback is about you telling people what you think and giving them the path forward from that in most cases. Insights are people discerning what they think.

Research shows us that people are more likely to act on what they think not what you think because insight is brain food which creates dopamine which makes us feel good. (When was the last time traditional feedback gave you a shot of dopamine?)

So as a leader, creating insights may be the better way to get the results you need rather than trying to give feedback.

How do you do it though? Our previous post suggests some ways. There are also some helpful ways in Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. Their “insights” suggest focusing on the 1) past 2) present and 3) future and all revolved around asking good questions, not giving good answers*.
1. Start with the Present: Ask, “What three things are working right now?” For more on this, especially when utilizing it for change management purposes, read here.
2. Revisit the Past: Ask, “When you had problems/situations like this in the past, what did you do that worked?”
3. Finish with the Future: Ask, “What do you already know you need to do? What do you know already works?”
My little girl loves to paint and draw. Often, she asks me to help her draw something. We’ve been on a heart drawing kick lately. The first few times, I’ve drawn a heart on a page or a canvas for her to color or paint in. But then I stopped doing it and just left her to it. What I discovered was that her own hearts were better than anything I could have ever helped her create. I just need to provide the tools and she can do the rest better than I can.

How are you providing the right tools and asking the right questions in order to give people the opportunity to grow?

*Nine Lies About Work is an insightful book linked to a lot of research. The way they phrase the nine lies, though, may just be a matter of semantics, so don’t let the titles of the lies fool you. Read the context in the chapters. In this case, you may be giving feedback in the form of creating insights. Don’t take this to mean you need to scratch giving feedback. Just make sure you do it in a way that leads to learning and engagement instead of in a way that leads to disengagement. For more, read the book on how to do this.
June 4, 2019
What’s on Your Career Bucket List?
The end of the school year brings final exams, award ceremonies, parties, and best of all, summer. My boys have been counting down the days. And with their countdown comes the usual question I face every year.

“What are we doing this summer?”

I always try to do fun things with them throughout the summer that they will each enjoy. But with three boys ranging from 9 to 15, that’s not always easy. Their interests don’t always match up. What my nine-year-old finds thrilling, my fifteen-year-old finds more boring than watching paint dry.

So this year, I’m putting the decision making in their hands. I’ve tasked each of them with creating a summer bucket list. The parameters are:
- Something we can all do together.
- Nothing really over the top cost wise.
- Things that can be done in a day (no more than a two-hour drive one way).
- At least four items on each of their lists needs to be educational.
I’ve also asked each of them to give me at least three longer trips they’d like to take. Together we’ll pick one.

Our Leaders as Career Agents training helps employees create a career bucket list. Participants are asked where they want to be in their careers in one, three, five, and ten years. Then they are asked to set goals that will help them get there.

Goals need to be SMART. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based.

A Harvard Business study showed that only 17% of participants set goals, and only 3% of those actually wrote down their goals. The 14% who had goals in mind were ten times more likely to be successful than those who didn’t set goals. And the 3% who wrote down their goals were even more successful.

Setting goals is only the first step in succeeding. I recently read an article about goal setting that made a great point. View your goals in terms of “I am” instead of “I will.” Focus on how am I going to start taking action to achieve the goal now versus I’ll work on achieving the goal at some point.

Find ways to keep your goals front and center. A few years ago my sister-in-law decided to lose some weight. To keep her goal in mind and help keep her from cheating on her diet, she found a picture of herself before she gained the extra weight and stuck it on her refrigerator door to remind herself what she was working towards. In the context of your career, it may mean having regular performance meetings with your manager or finding a mentor in your organization that can help you achieve your goals. It may mean blocking out time on your calendar each week to work on your goals.

So where do you see yourself in a year, or ten? And how are you going to get there?
May 23, 2019
3 Ideas to Help Your Recruiting Efforts
In our last post, we discussed strategies for retaining talent in a difficult labor market. Hopefully, you’ve focused efforts there, but most likely, you also need to figure out the best ways to recruit talent.

Here are some ideas for doing so:

1. Expose Yourself! Exposure is a key problem in attracting talent, especially for B2B companies. Developing programs that expose people in the community to your company and jobs are important. We aren’t all Apple and Google.

You can do this through partnership with schools in your area, marketing campaigns, involvement in community and charitable endeavors and by giving your employees tools to talk about your company in the community in a positive way. An employee referral program may be a good strategy related to this.

Work with your marketing department to create a communications plan for exposure in your primary geographic area(s) for recruitment.

2. Look for talent in all the “wrong” places. Explore looking for talent that you may not have ever considered before. Here are a few areas to consider and resources and ideas to connect with these populations:
- Individuals with criminal records. There is a significant national movement to hire those with prior backgrounds. Many organizations fear doing this, but there are multiple reasons do so in the right context. Check out these resources:
Getting Talent Back to Work

70 Million Jobs
- “Stay-at-home” moms or moms that have left the workforce to raise children and are now wanting to return. This could also include people who have left the workforce to care for people other than their children.
The Mom Project

JPMorgan Chase ReEntry Program
- The “retired” or “semi-retired”.
AARP Resources
- Outsource. Contractors, consulting firms and/or freelancers may be the best way to get work done.
72 Best Freelance Sites

Oftentimes when you connect with diverse talent pools, you see that you need to think differently about how jobs may be structured. Not everything requires a traditional FTE. Some of your best and most productive workers just may be a shift in mindset away.

3. Reevaluate your wages. More on this here. I’ll be speaking on this at SHRM19 in Las Vegas at 10:45 am on Tuesday, June 25^th, so if you’re there, come join me for an in-depth dive on this.

What is one thing you can do today to boost your recruiting efforts?
May 21, 2019
The Essentials of Professional Development

Written by: Steve Graham

As a coach, I often work with clients who are needy for knowledge. They desire to grow professionally and often feel stuck in their current work environment. It is no secret that when an organization values developing their people, the benefits for both the employee and organization are numerous. The benefits often include: lower turnover, increased engagement, and a smarter workforce. Professional development goes beyond cookie-cutter training programs. It involves a deeper commitment to learning.

Learning can take various shapes within an organization. It can be organic, formalized, personalized, or on-demand. Whatever the shape, the approach to learning is the first essential of professional development. 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.” Dr. Staats’ recent publication, Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive, illustrates the importance of making the lifelong investment of learning.

The second essential of professional growth is to take the lead in your development. Do not wait on your organization to offer growth opportunities. There are various resources available, and some are even free. Resources include:

1. Continuing education/certification programs from professional associations.

2. Higher education-based professional and graduate certificate programs.

3. LinkedIn’s Lynda.com

4. Free online courses, like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

5. Webinars, TED Talks, seminars, and conferences.

The third essential of professional development is finding a style of learning that works for you. Do you prefer a structured learning program and in-person environment? Or, do you want to work at your pace and complete learning via a virtual (online) program? These are important questions to answer before you search for the right opportunity. Some virtual programs offer digital credentials, like a badge, that adds to your professional credibility.

Creating a professional development plan is the fourth essential of professional development. The plan will serve as a guide in setting development goals, deadlines for completion, and illustrating how the professional development fits into your overall career or professional brand. For example, if your work requires project management, or if you desire to become a Project Manager, then becoming a Certified Project Manager would be a goal.

The professional development plan should identify the areas you desire or need to grow, and what methods will be used to attain these goals? How will you use the new knowledge? Whatever your plan, make sure you have enough interest to pursue additional learning in that area. Growing as a professional also means growth as a person. There needs to be an alignment between “who we are” and “what we do”. This is one path to finding satisfaction in our work. Professional development can offer more confidence and career opportunities.

No matter your position within your organization, you need to focus on growth. Learning also helps with brain health. A study by Harvard Medical School found that “Every brain changes with age and mental function changes along with it. Mental decline is common, and it is one of the most feared consequences of aging. But cognitive impairment is not inevitable.” If you want to stay relevant and confident, then invest in 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 & professional coaching, health care administration, and strategic human resource management.

He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, a 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. LinkedIn.com/in/hstevegraham

May 16, 2019
5 Tips for Using Assessments in Hiring
In a difficult hiring market, it is hard to think about adding another layer to your hiring practices that potentially screens people out instead of in. As one hiring manager said to me last week, “I just need people with a pulse.”

But one reason why you may be hunting for people that are alive and not much more is because you aren’t hiring the right people to begin with, so turnover is a challenge and a cost to you in more ways than one.

If done correctly, assessments can be a valuable part of your hiring strategy. To maximize assessments:
1. Don’t test selectively. You need to determine which assessment(s) you are going to use and when in your process you will use them, then test all candidates that get to that step in the process. Deciding to assess some and not others can open up a lot of problems in 1) finding value in the tool(s) 2) defending you hiring practices in the case of any legal issues.

2. If using a self-report assessment, use a normative assessment. Normative assessments are those that are normed to a sample population. This is different than a self-report assessment that isn’t compared to a fixed standard.

Examples of popular tests that aren’t normative are DiSC, MBTI and Strengths Finder. These assessments, while valuable given the correct usage, aren’t designed to make hiring decisions. They can be useful in the hiring process to consider a person’s personality/style and ask good questions in an interview, but they aren’t for screening candidates in or out because there isn’t a comparative standard to do that.

3. When you use a normative assessment, you need to create target ranges (scores) for the assessment dimensions for the positions you are hiring for. For example, if you are hiring a customer service representative for your company and you are considering using an assessment that has the dimension of “conformity” on it. The scale is 1-10 ranging from 1 requires structure to perform to 10 not comfortable/successful performing in a structured environment. You have a very structured script and process for how your representatives answer the phone, talk to customers, and document issues and resolutions in your system. Therefore, you may set your target range that the person needs to score between 2-4 to be an ideal candidate for your position of a customer service representative.

All this being said, there are a variety of ways to set the targets including subjective analysis by managers, job analysis, generic industry models, and/or by comparison to your current top performers. We recommend a combined job analysis and comparison to your top performers’ method.

4. Check for Validity & Other Important Factors. There are a variety of types of validity and important considerations:
- Face Validity– Does it really measure what is says it measures? Does the conformity measure actually measure for conformity?
- Predictive– Does it predict success on the job? 1) Is exhibiting conformity relevant to success as a customer service representative at your company? To what extent do customer service representatives need to be 1 to 10 okay or is conforming to be successful here? Is a 6 on a scale of that too high?
This is why we recommend setting your ranges based on comparison to your top performers.
- Reliability: Are scores consistent? Will the same person taking the test multiple times get the same score? If I take the test today when I’m in one mood where I’m feeling rebellious because of someone trying to control me, will I get the same score on conformity when I take the test a week later and I’m at work as a customer service representative that requires conformity?
- No Adverse Impact: The test does not discriminate against any protected class. Will Caucasian females scoreless on my measure of conformity than Asian males on my measure of conformity as a population in a way that is statistically significant?
- Administrative: Is the test easy to use and administer in terms of giving the test, receiving results, and understanding them? In this day and age, is the test mobile friendly, does it have features that accommodate for people with disabilities, etc.? These are all things to be considered.
5. Train hiring managers on using the assessment. If those making hiring decisions don’t know about the test and/or understand it, they won’t use it or they will discount its value.

Set up training to walk through details of the assessment with all hiring managers, get their input and feedback and help them use the assessment to their advantage. Keep data on the value of the assessment and share it with hiring managers at regular intervals and set-up a time to onboard new hiring managers on your entire hiring process, including the selection instrument.

We are excited to announce that Horizon Point has launched a sister company, MatchFIT, LLC, that applied these best practices in the design of an assessment to help companies find the right talent through a work values-based approach. In addition, the assessment will help companies diagnosis their organizational FITness in order to determine if they are a place that will attract the right kind of talent.
May 14, 2019