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.

  • Boundaries & Rules around Working Successfully from Home

    Boundaries & Rules around Working Successfully from Home

    It’s Sunday afternoon as I sit at my computer and plan for the week ahead. I’ve been working from home for almost a decade now. My boundaries and rules have certainly changed over the past several years. As with most things, experience is the only way to do something well. This week, I’m sharing my top tips for setting boundaries around successfully working from home.

    When I came on board with HPC, it was way before Covid, and remote work was not super common, so I discovered what worked and didn’t work through trial and error. During those early days, my children were in grade school & it was ideal for me to work when the house was quiet, so I did that. But I also constantly checked email and it wasn’t uncommon for me to work well into the night, even on the weekend. This was a huge shift for me, coming from a typical 8 to 5 role. No one was asking or expecting me to be available 24-7. My natural helper, people pleasing personality dictated my schedule those days.

    With several remote working years under my belt now, I feel so much more comfortable with the flexible schedule I can create every week. Here are three ways I set boundaries and rules to successfully work from home:

    1. I create a list, several (actually). At the end of each week, I create a daily list for the next week. Prioritizing 3 things that I need to accomplish each day works best. The daily list includes work responsibilities, but I also include personal responsibilities. For example, some form of exercise (ideally taking a walk outdoors) is on there most days, weather permitting. 
    2. I plan deep work early in the day and early in my week. I do my best to protect my Fridays. I make sure the most important tasks and meetings happen early in the week and day if possible. I recommend checking out the book,  When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, which helped me discover the time of day that I’m most productive.
    3. Time blocking is so very helpful. Within my list(s), I often estimate how long I plan to work on each project or task. I often add these “time blocks” to my calendar to remind myself as well as to share with my coworkers what I have planned or the day and week. You can read more about time blocking in this article from Lifehack.org – How to Start Time Blocking to Get More Done.

    Are you and or your team working remotely? What are your tips? 

    Here are a few more articles from The Point Blog you might want to check out:

    SPECIAL FEATURE! How to Put the “Home” in Office

    Creating a Work Space that Brings People Together

    Book Review of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

  • Celebrate Your Accomplishments

    Celebrate Your Accomplishments

    The new year always brings with it conversations of resolutions and setting goals. It’s the chance to look at the year ahead and decide what you want to accomplish in the next twelve months, both personally and professionally. We sit and we write down those goals and we make our checklist. And throughout the year we (hopefully) mark items off that list. But what do you do when you mark an item off that list? 

    At Horizon Point, we celebrate our accomplishments. Each quarter during our team meeting we go around the table and each team member shares a list of ten things we accomplished during the quarter and then picks one that we want to celebrate and how we want to celebrate it. The how is totally up to us and varies from things like a gift card to a local shop or restaurant to a new pair of running shoes to a book we’ve been wanting to read. For me, my latest accomplishment list included graduating from Tulane Law School with my Master’s in Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law, a two-year journey that was both long and fast. Part of my celebration included going out to dinner with the team. 

    As you go through 2023, I challenge you to create an accomplishment list. It may include items that are on your goals list and you might find that it includes items that are not on your goals list. Just 8-10 things that you accomplished each quarter, and then pick the one that you want to celebrate and how you want to celebrate it. And these accomplishments can be personal or professional. 

    If you are the leader of a team, try doing this with your team this year. Ask every member of your team to share their accomplishments each quarter. This can be through an accomplishment list like we do at Horizon Point or you can choose your own format. The important thing is to get your employees to take the time to recognize their own accomplishments and to celebrate them. The celebrations don’t have to be something big; it can be a small gesture like a handwritten note congratulating them on their accomplishments for the quarter. 

    How will you celebrate your accomplishments in 2023? 

  • Another Year Around the Sun; Focus for 2023

    Another Year Around the Sun; Focus for 2023

    I celebrated my birthday last week. The older I get, the more I realize there are only a handful of things
    in life that are truly important. Since my birthday falls in early January, it is a great time to reflect on what
    went well and what didn’t the previous year, and to set intentions for focus for the upcoming year.

    Prior to writing this post, my daughter, a high school senior, asked me to proofread a college scholarship
    essay. I may be biased, but it was wonderful. She gets it. It helped me realize that maybe I am doing
    something right, and also confirmed my thoughts on what goals and intentions are truly worth my effort.
    Here is just a small blurb from the essay:

    …as I try to listen to my teacher explain the economical state of our country. After I finish my homework
    during class, I watch the tiny seconds hand of the clock tick by as I wait for the class to end. When the
    day is done, I let out a sigh of relief as I know I am about to go home to the most important thing in my
    life: my family, the people I know without a doubt believe I can achieve whatever I set my mind to, no
    matter the circumstances…

    At Horizon Point, we determine an annual theme every January. As a team, we talk through business
    development, focus, and direction for the year. I have decided to do the same in my personal life. A few
    areas I hope to focus on this year are health, financial wellness, career goals all while keeping my faith
    and family at the center of it all.

    Do you set goals or action plans for the new year or on your birthday? Here are a couple of previous
    blog posts to inspire you to take action.

    4 Things my Goals Taught me in 2022 about how to be Brave in 2023

    Do You Have a Plan of Action to Reach Your Goals?

  • Feed Your Future With Feedback & Feedforward

    Feed Your Future With Feedback & Feedforward

    Next week, I’m talking about Feedback and Feedforward at the Tennessee SHRM Conference. While preparing for this session, I’m reflecting on my own feedback and feedforward skills. Am I following my own advice in giving meaningful feedback and practicing feedforward? If I do receive input from others, am I following up and actually implementing any change? Are you? 

    Just this morning, I received (unsolicited) feedback from my husband that I have not been practicing what I preach in work-life balance. I enjoy my work, paid and volunteer, so much that I have found myself with a plate that isn’t just full…it’s spilling over. Now I have my own homework to do to take this feedback to heart and actually examine my schedule and commitments. 

    Have you received similar feedback? That is, unsolicited feedback? Let’s talk about the types of feedback: 

    Unsolicited – The Kind You Didn’t Ask For

    Solicited – Well, You Asked For It 

    Observation – It’s Not What They Said, It’s How They Said It

    How often do you actually solicit feedback? For most of us, that type of feedback is the least common. We typically receive unsolicited feedback and/or observe feedback behaviors. Why? It is a whole lot easier to see our problems in others than it is to see them in ourselves. Even though we may be able to deny our problems to ourselves, they may be very obvious to the people who are observing us. 

    We can probably all work on soliciting feedback and actually listening to it. Today, since I already know an area that I need to work on, I’m thinking about the practice of Feedforward. Here’s how it works: 

    1. Pick a behavior you want to change that would make a significant, positive difference in your life
    2. Describe what you want to change with someone (one-on-one)
    3. Ask the person for two suggestions for the future
    4. Listen attentively to the suggestions
    5. Thank them

    Feedforward is a smart, effective way to take action and have accountability for the change you’re working on. 

    I’ll leave you with this quote from Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There:

    “We’re being told all day long how we’re doing. And the reason we accept this feedback and actually attempt to respond to it (e.g., if we’re down in sales, we’ll try harder to bring the figures up) is that we accept the process: An authority figure “grades” us and we are motivated to do better because of it. It’s not like that with interpersonal behavior, which is vague, subjective, unquantifiable, and open to wildly variant interpretations. But that doesn’t make it less important. It’s my contention— and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book— that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze.”

    Use our free resource – Practice Feedback & Feedforward Worksheet – to check in with yourself and others and set timely goals for improvement and mutual commitment. 

    How can you feed your future? 

    Attending the TN SHRM Conference? Catch Jillian’s session on September 13 at 3:15pm. Learn more about #TNSHRM22 at horizonpointconsulting.com/whatsup. 

  • Negotiation Styles and Why They Matter

    Negotiation Styles and Why They Matter

    Later this month I’ll be speaking at HR Florida about Negotiation Skills. We are all negotiators, even if we don’t realize it. Think for a minute. What did you do when your alarm went off this morning? Did you immediately jump out of bed or did you negotiate with yourself to allow yourself just “five more minutes?” Did your kid talk you into letting them pack cookies in their school lunch instead of a granola bar? Or did you agree to allow Jim to take the lead on the new project at work because Ally has too much on her workload as it is?

    While I’ll spend most of my session at HR Florida talking about how to navigate the negotiation session itself, there’s one important topic that I’ll tackle first, and that’s negotiation style. Based on the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) there are five styles:

    1. Competing: Those who exhibit the competing style are aggressive and uncooperative. They are power driven and pursue their own interests at the expense of others. Competing may mean standing up for what’s right, defending what they believe is correct, or simply trying to win.
    2. Collaborating: Those who exhibit the collaborating style are both assertive and cooperative. They attempt to work with the other party to find a solution that meets the needs of both parties by trying to understand the issue from both sides and identifying the underlying concerns, then trying to find alternative solutions that meet those the needs of both sides. This may mean exploring a disagreement to learn from each other, resolving some condition that would have them competing for resources, or trying to find a creative solution to an interpersonal problem.
    3. Compromising: Those who exhibit the compromising style are intermediate in both assertiveness and cooperativeness. The goal is to find an expedient, mutually acceptable solution that partially satisfies the needs of both parties. Compromising falls on the middle ground between competing and accommodating, giving up more than competing but less than accommodating. It might mean splitting the difference or some give and take.
    4. Avoiding: Those who exhibit the avoiding style are unassertive and uncooperative. They do not immediately pursue their own concerns or the concerns of the other person. They do not address the conflict, but instead choose to side step it, postponing the issue until a better time or simply withdrawing from the situation completely.
    5. Accommodating: Those who exhibit the accommodating style are unassertive and cooperative, this is the opposite of competing. They neglect their own concerns and instead choose to only satisfy the concerns of the other person, thus self-sacrificing their own needs.

    What’s important to understand about negotiation styles is that while we may have a dominant style, for example my dominant style is compromising, we use all five styles depending on the situation that we’re negotiating and it’s important to understand that the style you use in a negotiation can have a huge impact on the outcome of that negotiation.

    For example, think about the following situations and consider what negotiation style you would use and why.

    • Going to buy a new car
    • Asking your boss for a pay raise
    • Trying to negotiate a multi-million dollar contract at work

    Now, think about the negotiations that you will need to make in the next week and what styles you will need to use to successfully complete those negotiations.