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…).

Increase the Value of your Organization’s Biggest Asset
“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” – Sir Richard Branson

As another school year comes to a close, my boys have already started getting that end of year fever. To them the end of the school year means a break from learning. To me it means a summer filled with opportunities to teach them things they can’t experience in a classroom. With that comes the opportunity to encourage them to challenge themselves and set personal goals for what they want to accomplish during the summer (besides sleeping in).

Performance reviews are a great opportunity for leadership to sit down with employees and not only review their past performance, but to also help employee set personal learning goals for their future as well. While employees are an organization’s best asset, those assets are only worth what an organization puts into them. The more an organization encourages employees to seek out continuous learning opportunities and the more resources an organization provides for employees to do so, the more valuable the employees become to the organization.

There are countless ways for an organization to provide continuous learning opportunities. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are ways to help your employees grow in their careers. Some options include:
- Tuition Reimbursement Programs
- In-House Training Programs
- Webinars & Conferences
- Lunch and Learn Sessions
- Vendor Presentations (these are often provided for free)
- Mentor/Shadowing Programs
- Monthly Informative Newsletters
Providing training opportunities to employees not only helps them to increase their knowledge, it helps them feel more connected to the organization. Leaders can encourage employees in their efforts through continuous feedback and review of the goals set during the performance review process.

Are you increasing the value of your organization’s biggest asset through continuous learning?
May 10, 2018
Top 10 Quotes on Authentic Leadership

As we continue to explore authenticity, I think it’s important to focus on how to actually be an authentic leader. One of the best ways to learn is to pay close attention to the authentic leaders you know in real life and those who are doing the work publicly and sharing their experiences. We always look for research and subject matter experts to inform our work, so here are ten authentic leadership quotes we often reference:

10) “Authentic Leaders are not afraid to show emotion and vulnerability as they share in the challenges with their team. Developing a solid foundation of trust with open and honest communication is critical to authentic leadership.” – Farshad Asl, The “No Excuses” Mindset: A Life of Purpose, Passion, and Clarity

9) “Authentic leadership is the full expression of “me” for the benefit of “we”.” – Henna Inam, Wired for Authenticity: Seven Practices to Inspire, Adapt, & Lead

8) “Authentic leadership is revealed in the alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do.” –Michael Holland, Founder & President, Bishop House

7) “Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet — thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing — consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust.” – Lance Secretan, The Secretan Center, Inc.

6) “Authenticity and knowing who you are is fundamental to being an effective and long-standing leader.” -Ann Fudge

5) “Without trust we don’t truly collaborate; we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.” – Stephen Covey

4) “It is true that integrity alone won’t make you a leader, but without integrity you will never be one.” –Zig Ziglar

3) “Leaders who don’t listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” – Andy Stanley

2) “A genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of consensus.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

1) “A true leader is one who is humble enough to admit their mistakes.” – John C. Maxwell

To read more about Authentic Leadership, visit my blog post Authenticity and Authentic Leadership.

May 3, 2018
What are Company Values and How do you Create Them?
We’ve been spending some time here at The Point Blog highlighting some of our company values.

But what exactly do we mean by company values and how do you form them? Many people, I believe, misinterpret what organizational values are and should be. This leads leaders to stay away from setting them, limiting their ability to drive organizational competitiveness through a common company language and culture.

So, organizational values are:
1. Not moral in nature. They aren’t right or wrong in a universal sense.
2. They are however, right or wrong for your organization.
3. They should be guiding principles that govern behavior. They should be able to help people discern do this/don’t do this by calibrating against one or more company values.
4. If done right, the values should lead to a competitive advantage for an organization.
So if you need company values, how do you create them? Here’s the process we use with our clients:

1. Case Studies.   We start with a case study process. Based on the size of the leadership team charged with coming up with the values, we ask small groups (of no more than four people per group) to create a case study of two great things that have happened in the organization and two total fails.   The groups then report out to share their case studies.   If you would like a copy of the worksheet we use to get people to develop the case studies, email me.

2. Behavior identification and classification.  The case studies are shared by each group and someone from our team listens. On flip charts we begin to map out key behaviors indicated through the case studies. We take the negative case studies and ask them to identify or state the opposite, positive behaviors so that everything is mapped out in a positive framework.

Once participants begin to see us doing this, they catch on to the process and begin providing us with words for the behavior map usually without even being prompted.   We then take these phrases and words and ask people to identify trends. Many things come together to actually mean basically the same thing, and we combine or strike out words and phrases to generate themes.

3. Value Emergence. What emerges are values that create an environment that allows for certain kinds of behaviors and prohibits others. The themes more often than not distill down to 3-6 value words or statements. We ask participants to take this list back with them and reflect on them. After about a week we regroup and finalize the values.

4. Drive company culture through values. Most often, we then set goals and people-based initiatives off these values, creating a culture driven by values.

The goal of this entire process is to identify common ways of working and a common language through values that drives competitive advantage for an organization.  The values are already there and/or a sought after state for the organization, we just pull them out and define them so initiatives can be designed around them.

We’ll spend some time on the blog over the next few weeks giving examples of how people practices and programs are designed around values. We’ll show how they come to life for an organization.

What are your company values?
May 1, 2018
Company Values: Are You Learning?

During a recent workshop with junior high students, one topic we discussed was becoming an apprentice for life. Now, more than ever, continuous learning is relevant regardless of your industry (or your age). At Horizon Point, it is one of our core values, and it is one of my favorite things about my career and the company I work for.

Continuous Learning. We believe continual learning is a key driver in creating passion and productivity in life and in work. To that end, we invest in the personal development of our people because we know that people are a company and community’s greatest asset (People First). We work with clients who believe in continuous learning and take steps towards continual self-improvement in order to maximize their passion and productivity.

Soon, HPC will be having a quarterly planning meeting. Unlike most meetings, it’s not something we dread. We look forward to sharing successes, checking in on our annual goals and determining priorities for the upcoming quarter. One item that is always on the agenda is continuous learning (or professional development). Again, this isn’t something we dread, we select our own professional development and as long as we keep the budget in mind, we always get the “go-ahead” to do it!

This is yet another way we live out our company values. We also incorporate this into the work we do with companies and individual clients. Is continuous learning part of your career? Check out these reads to learn more about continuous learning:

How to Plan Time for Self-Learning

Lifelong Learning is the Key to Career Shifts

5 Reasons to Create a Culture of Learning in Your Organization

April 26, 2018
How to Move Your Goods to Greats
Our previous post, “Leaders, Focus on Moving Your Middle – Play Offense, Not Defense”, emphasized the importance of focusing on moving your middle majority to high performers.

But how do you do that? How do you get your good players, or your B players, to become A players?

They all can’t be converted, but those who have usually have a leader that:

1. Sets high expectations. This comes in the form of setting challenging goals and holding people accountable to them.

2. After high expectations are set, the leader then provides Assurance and Confidence. This involves saying things like, “I know we’ve set challenging goals, but I know you are capable of achieving what we’ve set out to do. This is why I’ve given you responsibility to do this.”

3. Finally, Direction and Support is provided. This involves:
- Being approachable and available when needed.
- Providing stretch assignments to help the individual grow.
- Creating exposure to risks and failure. As a leader, you should expect failure and help people be comfortable with it coming. This could include asking people when you meet with them regularly about how they failed during the week. This shows you expect it and you want to know what was learned from it.
When a leader can successfully set high expectations, provide assurance and confidence as well as direction and support, it leads to increased self-awareness for an individual.

This then allows for authenticity to be shaped through hard work, determination and challenging assignments.

Finally, and most importantly, you’ve then done what leadership is all about. You’ve modeled how leaders create more leaders – completing the full circle of equipping someone else to move others (not just themselves) from good to great.

How do you grow people to become star performers?
April 24, 2018