Your Match Made In Heaven… Organizational Fit Trumps Job Fit

We’ve been doing a lot of research around the idea of a match.com for employers and employees here at Horizon Point. Let’s face it; behind a person’s choice of spouse, the choice of employer (both the organization and your boss) may very well be the most important choice you make in terms of overall satisfaction. One of our key questions around this idea is: What characteristics are most important in terms of employment marital bliss? Dating sites have isolated key variables leading to marital satisfaction by matching people correctly, can’t we get better at doing the same thing for employers

6 Tips for Driving Results through Performance Evaluation Structure

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately related to performance evaluations. Specifically, these questions center on how to structure evaluation forms in a way that supports priorities of the organization and drives individual and, therefore, organizational performance. Of course, it’s really not about the form at all. It’s about knowing what drives the performance of your organization, translating that to individual metrics, then equipping leaders with the ability to focus on constant performance feedback. 1. Make it values based. Center your evaluation form around the values of your company not individual characteristics like “dependable”, “initiative”, “communication” etc.   If you

Goal Setting – Feedback

I want to round out the goal setting discussion by focusing on the importance of feedback.  To illustrate, feedback has played a critical role in a current client business coaching engagement.  To begin the coaching process this past summer, we employed a 360° feedback mechanism to help set priorities for the client’s development.  Feedback was first necessary to set goals and priorities. Based on areas for improvement, we developed four questions that she asks herself each and every day.  These are all “yes” or “no” questions.  (As example, a question I ask myself every day is “Did I do something to develop new business

Goal Setting – Diminishing Returns

In my last post, I talked about the importance of goal commitment when setting goals for yourself and/or those you lead. Today, I want to discuss the law of diminishing returns and how it relates to goal setting.  I have honestly thought about a dozen different things that I want to focus on for the New Year, have you?  The law of diminishing returns tells us that the more goals we set, the less likely we are to achieve them.  One goal distracts from another, leaving us less likely to accomplish anything. From a personal perspective, one way to avoid

Goal Setting – A Series

Research has shown that goal setting, if done correctly, is one of the most supported motivational techniques (Jex & Britt 2008). Setting goals can help you maximize success for yourself and/or the people that you lead. We’ve all heard of the acronym “SMART” that guides good goal setting: Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time bound I certainly advocate for following these guidelines with any resolution or goal you set. But there are three things that I want to focus on over the next few weeks that have been shown to be important components of goal setting that are not emphasized as