Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Talent

Beyond Talent is our line of resources for professionals in the workplace who are individual contributors without people supervision responsibilities. Read this category for blogs on professional and career development to excel in your current role or help you prepare for your next level career.

  • Why Appreciation in the Workplace Matters

    Why Appreciation in the Workplace Matters

    Remember Mary Ila’s take on “How to Be Authentic with Your Appreciation at Work”? We reference Chapman & White all the time in training and coaching with our clients. To celebrate Valentine’s Day with full hearts in the workplace, we’re bringing you an early look at the new updated version of The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. 

    We subscribe to the newsletter from Appreciation at WorkTM and got one of the first announcements of the new, post-COVID research on professional appreciation. Right away, I asked the team if we could do a blog about it. New research!? Yes! Here’s the blurb we got: 

    Appreciation at Work has done peer-reviewed research and polling through and post-COVID. The result of this research is a completely new chapter on how to effectively show appreciation to remote and hybrid employees including topics such as: 

    • the variety of remote work relationships 
    • trust in remote work relationships 
    • creating and maintaining a workplace culture 
    • the employer/supervisor perspective 
    • the employee perspective 
    • the key to keeping remote employees 
    • what neuroscience is showing 

    This edition also includes updated research (50+ citations) of data shared about the importance of appreciation and its positive impact on the functioning of businesses & organizations (including increased productivity and higher profitability when your employees feel appreciated.

    Source: Appreciation at Work

    I read it, loved it, laughed, cringed, and mostly just appreciated for the millionth time that Gary Chapman & Paul White adapted the Love Languages for professional relationships. They present their research on appreciation at work in a relatable, real life way. Here are some of my favorite quotes, classic and new:

    • “During the Great Resignation of 2022, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that employees were three times more likely to resign due to a lack of appreciation in comparison to financial compensation issues.”
    • “When leaders actively pursue teaching their team members how to communicate authentic appreciation in the ways desired by the recipients, the whole work culture improves. Interestingly, even managers and supervisors report they enjoy their work more. All of us thrive in an atmosphere of appreciation.”
    • “74% of employees never or rarely express gratitude to their boss.” (Reminder that appreciation is important up, down, and sideways!)
    • “There is a distinct difference between the Quality Time employees desire from their supervisor and what they value from co-workers. In response to this issue, we expanded the Motivating by Appreciation Inventory to allow individuals to indicate what actions they desire and from whom they want them.”
    • Acts of Service are about the other person, not about you. “Ask before you help. Don’t assume you know what help they want or need. If you are going to help, do it their way.”
    • “Our research with over 375,000 employees found that Tangible Gifts is the least chosen language of appreciation.” So if you’re going to do it, it’s important to give gifts “primarily to those individuals who appreciate them” and “give a gift the person values”. (Lorrie wrote about HPC’s take on gifts in “A Few of Our Favorite Things”.)
    • “The surest way to find out the appropriateness of Physical Touch is simply to inquire.” Many people appreciate a good high five, fist bump, or handshake to celebrate a job well done. Just check with them first, and don’t hold it against them if they prefer not to touch.

    Chapman & White also devote an entire chapter to the ROI of genuine appreciation. Take a look at these charts from the book: 

    Flow chart indicating that personally relevant authentic appreciation leads to employee engagement; which leads to reduced turnover, reduced absenteeism, and improved productivity; which leads to a better bottom line. 
    Table chart indicating the overall impact of employee engagement in organizations. One column lists results of employee engagement, and one column describes the associated research findings.

    Regarding remote and hybrid teams, Chapman & White basically say the needs are the same as fully in-person teams, but the intensity of certain needs are different. Here’s a snippet from the chapter on remote teams: 

    “In one study, prior to COVID-19, with almost 90,000 individuals who had taken our online assessment…we found that Words of Affirmation was the most desired appreciation language, followed by Quality Time and Acts of Service. But remote employees chose Quality Time as their primary language of appreciation more frequently (35% of employees) than workers on site (25%). The same pattern was found with employees both during the pandemic and afterwards.” 

    They go on to say, “…the single most important lesson we learned for effectively communicating appreciation to remote colleagues is that one must be more proactive than in face-to-face relationships. The most important factor is to understand, affirm, and relate to your colleagues as people.”

    If you saw our new team video highlighting our operating values, or if you’re a longtime HPC friend, you know that People First is our number one value. We are all just people, with the same ups and downs, and the same desire to be loved, appreciated, and valued. If we were to sum up the 5 languages book(s) in the simplest terms, we’d say Be People First. Be people first toward yourselves, and be people first towards others. 

    If we remember to be People First, we just might get better at genuine appreciation all on our own. 

    For individuals or teams interested in learning more about The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, we highly suggest starting with the MBA InventoryTM, then reading the book (or listening to the audiobook). If you purchase the book, it comes with an access code to take the inventory. If you’d like to jump straight to the inventory, you can buy a single access code or codes for your entire team here. (I feel like it’s important for me to say that we’re not being paid to promote any of this, we just really like it.)

  • By his and His hands

    By his and His hands

    “If there’s something stirring in you now, and you know what it is, do that. There’s no need to overthink it. A mistake here and there isn’t going to kill you, so don’t waste time worrying about that. It’s infinitely better to fail with courage than to sit idle with fear, because only one of these gives you the slightest chance to live abundantly. And if you do fail, then the worst-case scenario is that you’ll learn something from it. You’re for sure not going to learn jack squat from sitting still and playing it safe.“

    On his 40th birthday trip with friends, my husband sent me a picture of a paragraph from a book I gave him for Father’s Day the previous summer.  He’s not a big reader, but sitting on a Dominican beach waiting for me to join him, he had finally started reading the Chip Gaines book I had given him several months earlier. 

    “This is so me,” he texted along with the paragraph where Chip described the joy and satisfaction he gets from working with his hands. 

    Today, as I pulled out the book to try to find the exact quote for this blog post, I found the note I wrote to him for Father’s Day stuck within its pages.  Among other things, the note said, “I’m committed to whatever direction you feel God is leading you and us in, but I don’t ever want you to shy away from something because of lack of confidence or fear. Like he says in one of these books, ‘fear dressed up as wisdom provides very poor counsel.’ Let’s move forward with faith instead of fear, trusting God to lead us. I love you.” 

    You see, we’d been fighting a lot over the last year or so because he was working in a job and career that was making him miserable.  I’m prone to catch on to misery quicker than he does, but he was finally starting to begin to admit it himself. 

    Although he loved- and still does- so many of the people he had the privilege of working with as well as aspects of the work, a variety of factors were leading to misery.  One of which, I would realize later, was that although some of the people he led as a healthcare administrator got to work with their hands regularly, he didn’t.  And he was at work so much, and devoted to spending time with our kids if he wasn’t, that he never got to heed the good advice of sabbathing with his hands because he worked with his mind.  There wasn’t time to. 

    He’s one to grit his teeth and bare it, being brought up to believe that hard work- whether you like that work or not- is what makes you have worth and value.  I had wanted him to quit for over a year, confident we could make it work financially if he did.  But he was no “quitter.” 

    He was and is a smart, good looking guy (I know I’m biased, but he is).  He is by all standards a privileged white male.  He could do whatever he wanted. 

    No one ever told him growing up, “You know, you should find work that involves working with your hands because you seem to like to do that.” He didn’t take shop or any Career Tech classes for that matter in high school because he was taking all Advanced Placement ones.  His GPA, ACT, and GMAT scores pointed him towards careers where he would sit behind a desk and or in meetings almost all day everyday and lead people. The whole world was telling him this was his path to success. 

    It was pretty easy for him to get there.  He hardly studied for the GMAT and scored in the top 25%. Getting into graduate school to earn a Masters in Health Administration and an MBA wasn’t difficult for him.  Did he enjoy doing it? Was he able to use his God given gifts and passions?  Who knows?  No one had ever said to him nor had he said to himself that that was the point or even a consideration. 

    But what had been so “easy” to get to had become unbearably hard because he hated it.  A week after Father’s Day when I wrote that note, the decision was made.  He would no longer have to grit his teeth and bare it. He’d been given the chance to figure out a route that hopefully would be more fulfilling and desirable, more prone to how he is designed.   

    By the 40th birthday trip, he’d taken some time to process and plan his next steps and self reflect, helping him realize what he needed.  What he could offer.  The path, whether the world told him he was crazy or not, involved working with his hands a whole lot more. 

    Of the two points I think I want to make in this post, one is this: in a world with multiple career paths, we often point others and ourselves down the wrong ones because we don’t allow them and ourselves to figure out what makes us tick.  I think the general assumption has been we do this the most to those who are less privileged.  To those that have to get a job to make ends meet, whatever job that may be. However miserable the job may be. 

    While this is certainly true, I think we do it just as much at the very opposite end of the spectrum.  To the ones that seemingly have all the options in the world because of their privilege.  Such is the misery of the smart, attractive white male.  We decide for them and they decide based on what the world says successful careers are.  All of which involve professional degrees and dress pants.  And if we are honest, the privileged still live in a world where the stereotype is that successful men need to be in careers where their wife can stay home and raise kids and keep domestic life for a family running.  Where she can work if she wants to, but heaven forbid would have to.  It’s a different pressure than having to choose a job to be able to put food on the table, but it is actually of the same vein. Pressure to earn regardless of the cost. 

    But for my husband, the work all this led to was difficult in the form of it being a little bit like slow torture.  It hadn’t always been like that, but the last time I had remembered talking to him at work and it sounded like he was enjoying it was when he called me back after being up the ceiling of an operating room trying to figure out why there was a leak.  “You were up in the ceiling? In your dress pants?” I asked, “Isn’t there someone else that is supposed to do that?” 

    “I wanted to see it for myself,” he said. “I wanted to fix it.” 

    He wanted to fix it with his own two hands.  Not just his mind.  He’d been solving so many problems over the past 15 years with his mind and his hands were desperate to be put to use. 

    He still solves a lot of problems with his mind now, but he gets to use his hands to implement those solutions.  And he is happier.  And our family is happier.  And by His hands, we are still fed.  We have never been anywhere close to having to go without our daily bread. 

    Now, a year and half after this transition, he’s away this week fixing flooring at an investment property we have. (Not paying someone to fix the floors was another source of fighting for us until I realized doing it on his own was much like being in that operating room ceiling.  He needed to do it with his own two hands. He needed to fix it himself.) 

    Earlier this year, he turned a house into a home for a family that had been living in a hotel for over two years. In a world where those who have made mistakes in the past can’t get financing or a chance to rent a decent home, he decided to change that.  One property and one family at a time.  

    He built a swing set out back for their young kids to play on. “They need to be able to play outside,” he said.  And then he went about building.  Not buying a swing set kit to set up, but building a swing set with no plans, just his two hands working with his mind. 

    And for my second key point of this post and of what this whole post was originally designed to be about, he’s redone our home office.  He designed it with his mind, and every single thing in the office he built himself from scratch with his own two hands.  And it is beautiful.  And functional. 

    Here are a couple of sneak peek pictures of it, but it will be featured on a new website he is “building” to showcase, in part, the work of his hands.  The site is a little bit real estate, a little bit travel, and a whole lot of our family’s journey to capture what makes spaces and places home.  We will post the full feature of the website next week as it goes live with advice on how to design a home office, or any office for that matter, without taking the home out of it. 

    BEFORE
    By “his” hands
    AFTER

    As you move into your work week, I hope you’ll take some time to think about what makes you tick and if that is provided at all in the work you do day in and day out.  Do you get to build your equivalent of swings sets and office spaces?  Because if you aren’t, you most likely aren’t building beautiful things that end up helping others live and work well either.  It is a courageous and loving act instead of the fearful one. We all need to figure out what makes us tick, not because it is self-serving, but precisely because it is the exact opposite. 

    By his hands, my husband is serving, and by His hands, a gracious God has moved our transition that was plagued with fear and expectations of what we are supposed to do to one where we are doing what we are meant to do. 

  • Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog. 

    Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring everybody on the manufacturing floor with her big, bad, scary HR presence…until she just started talking to people. Every day, she walks the floor and speaks to each individual person with a smile and a “good morning”. She talks to people without needing anything from them. Now, the employees respect her and see her as a valued resource, not a spooky monster. This is “relationshipping”, and it’s critical for workplace wellness and employee engagement. Just like Ivey trained herself to be a relationshipper (and indirectly trained others), you can train yourself by practicing these strategies:  

    Today, I talked with 50 program managers about “Creating a Culture of Radical Candor”, i.e. Kim Scott’s framework of caring personally about people and being willing to challenge them directly. The spooky version: instead of tricking people into believing you care about them (manipulative insincerity) or treating people like besties (ruinous empathy), let’s train ourselves and those around us to practice radical candor, or graceful accountability as we call it at HPC. 

    Have stories about effective employee engagement? We’d love to hear them! Send us a note at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.

  • What’s Relationshipping, and How Do I Do It?

    What’s Relationshipping, and How Do I Do It?

    Networking establishes connection. Relationshipping builds bridges and two-way streets with sidewalks and wildflowers! When we relationship (yes, we’re using it as a verb), we have a sense of belonging. Belonging feeds engagement, creativity, and passion, which generate business success and real community impact. Come relationship with us!

    I recently had the great pleasure to speak at the NAVIGATE Nonprofit Network Conference as part of the Building Effective Teams track with Leadership Greater Huntsville. NAVIGATE is focused on equipping nonprofit leaders with the unique KSAs needed to operate on a lean budget, raise funds for continued operations, and provide services with a real impact. At the center of everything they do: RELATIONSHIPS. 

    As usual, I researched what others in the world are saying about Relationshipping. Here’s what Cornerstone Coworking had to say: 

    “When you can speak highly of a person or a business because you have a relationship with them, I feel like that is valued so much more than just passing along a business card because you stuck it in your purse. 

    Next time you find yourself stuck in a networking event, find the one person that is just standing out to you and start a conversation; not strictly focused on work, but about their life, their journey and what the future holds for them, personally and professionally. I guarantee, you’ll begin to build a relationship with someone and might be excited about what it turns into; might even be your next business partner!”

    With further supporting evidence, Meridian Resources says:

    “The term networking is overused, old, and tired. It is so 1990s. 

    We have the illusion of connection, but perhaps we have lost something very important in the activity – the art of building and nurturing true and lasting relationships, which has a significant impact on our personal and professional well-being.

    Do we find that it is more efficient to send a text than to make a call? Do we find it easier to send a quick email rather than to write a letter? Do we prefer communicating through technology within the safe cocoon of our office rather than personal conversations in the hallway? When we venture out, do we actively take the time to meet others and, more importantly, get to know them?”

    When I was a grad student, our career services director put us through a series of professional development courses at which we rolled our eyes…until we realized how relevant and meaningful his wisdom was. He introduced to us the term “relationshipping” as an alternative to traditional networking. In other words, shifting the mindset from swapping business cards to building and nurturing connections with a purposeful intent of understanding and serving others and the greater good. So…how do we do it? Meridian Resources outlines 6 steps: 

    1. Change Your Intent

      Build new relationships when you don’t “need” them. Instead of thinking WHAT can this person do for me, think WHO is this person and how can we support each other.

    2. Be People First

      People First is Horizon Point’s single most important operating value. Others use it, too. Angie Tinnell says, “People are fascinating with incredibly interesting stories to share. Stop parachuting into conversations and holding every minute hostage with all the things you’re passionate about. Instead, start getting excited about all the things the person across from you is passionate about.”

    3. Communicate Differently

      Pick up the phone and have a conversation. Write someone a handwritten thank you note. Take every opportunity to be around other people, whether it is enjoying coffee, lunch, or attending a business conference.Then, check in on people. In our hyper-active social world, the intentional “wanted to see how you are doing” message with no favor to ask at the end, can go a long way to building a strong relationship.
      For a refresher on Communication Skills, read our blog about the GREET Model!
    4. Serve Others

      Get out of yourself by putting others first.
      Instead of seeking people that can help you, look for people you can help. Not only another person, but extend yourself within the community.

      Be a connector.
      Think of two people in your life right now who don’t know each other, but would benefit from connecting with the other.

    5. Be Humble

      Humility is defined as doing for others without seeking attention by taking credit for your actions. This is the most essential element of relationshipping. A good dose of humility makes us approachable and receptive to others’ opinions, views, and support.

    6. Express Gratitude

      Acknowledge and sincerely thank those that help you along your journey. Sometimes the smallest action can make a tremendous difference in the future.

    At the end of the day, our entire lives are about relationships. Family, friends, partners, colleagues, suppliers, providers, we could not make it without them. How can you get better at Relationshipping?

     

  • Who’s on First? Solving the Talent Development Puzzle

    Who’s on First? Solving the Talent Development Puzzle

    Last month, I had the true pleasure of spending an entire day with HR practitioners and partners who are innovating HR across the Southeast. Being fired up about talent development, as I always am, I shared stories of Horizon Point’s work helping clients craft thoughtful, strategic talent development processes. 

    Talent development case studies often start with the “Who’s on first?” problem. You know the one I mean.

    We don’t often know who’s on first or what’s on second. Who’s getting promoted, nearing retirement, or leaving the organization for another opportunity? When they leave, who’s up next in the succession plan? How are we developing emerging talent? How are we keeping track of the pipeline for future hires? Whew! 

    The Association for Talent Development (ATD) says, “Definitions vary by country and culture, by industry, by organizational strategy, and by the responsibilities of the people practicing it. At the heart of talent development are the people—the talent. Ultimately, the function of talent development is to build employees’ knowledge, skills and attitudes so the organization can succeed and grow.” So how do we do that? 

    Step 1: We start with the basics, like current number of employees, organizational chart, turnover rates, etc. to help us understand the funnel and answer the question: How many high potential employees does it take to fully execute a strategic succession plan? 

    Step 2: We ask what high potential employees will actually need to effectively execute the plan. This step involves job analysis and developing competencies or KSAOs. 

    Step 3: We train the trainer. We equip all current executives and managers with the understanding and skills for ongoing execution of the succession plan, so that the HR department (and/or HPC consultants) isn’t solely responsible. Talent development is everyone’s responsibility. 

    At this point, we help the organization shift into ongoing strategic talent development, with or without our help. To maintain development goals, organizations will incorporate assessments and coaching into the formal performance management and leadership development processes. 

    For example, we helped two clients develop custom assessments that are mapped to their organizational values and self-defined leadership competencies. These assessments help inform decisions about leadership readiness and/or promotability. 

    By combining objective data and subjective insight from trained people managers, organizations can strategically solve the talent development puzzle!

    Read more from HPC related to strategic talent development: