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.

New Years Resolutions 101: Don’t put the cart before the horse
It’s a new year. Have you set your resolutions or goals? Most of us do, but then give up on them by the end of January.

One key reason I see people fail at goal setting in the leadership and career coaching we do (and for myself as well) is because we put the cart before the horse. We set a goal and don’t have any method put in place for measuring progress towards it or achievement of it.

Maybe a couple of examples will help:

1. I’m so guilty of this, so I’ll use myself as an example first.   In 2013, I set a goal for my family to sit down at the dinner table and eat together on average four times a week. And as you can read about in this post, in 2013 this goal was a total flop.   One of the main reasons it was a failure was because I put the cart before the horse. I didn’t put in place a way to track it and therefore my progress towards it, which lead to no motivation and no results achieved.

I reset this goal in 2014, with a plan to track progress towards staying on track for this effort because I felt like making dinner together as a family a priority and a habit is important to my family’s health in so many ways. Thank goodness for my mother-in-law and one of her Christmas presents to me at the end of 2013. It was a simple weekly calendar booklet that had a magnet on the back.    I set out to plan our weekly meals on this, design a grocery list around it and then simply check off the days we had achieved a meal at the table. It was stuck to the refrigerator as a visual reminder all year.

As you can see here, the “5” at the top is the number of days we ate together. Not all weeks were this good, but overall, the goal was met. More importantly, I’ve established a habit that will hopefully keep this priority going without setting a goal for it (and hopefully my mother-in-law knows how much I love this simple tool and has another one waiting for me this Christmas).

2. One of the clients I love working with went about establishing an accountability culture in 2013, and created a performance dashboard to track their progress.

You can read more about their story as a company here. As I now work with this team coaching their managers, I love setting goals with them because they have already established ways to measure performance.   It is not uncommon, when setting goals with companies and individuals for one of the goals, or sub-goals of a large goal, to first put in place a way to measure and track performance towards the desired outcome. With this company, the horse is already there and it helps pull the cart.

If you are looking to set your New Year’s Resolutions or make sure they are achieved, don’t put the cart before the horse:
1. Put in place a mechanism for tracking goal progress and attainment.
2. Make the tracking mechanism visual and put it where you see it ALL the time.
3. Monitor and record performance toward the goal with your mechanism at least weekly.
4. Recalibrate if your mechanism is creating more work, thus decreasing motivation. Don’t get rid of the goal, just find a more efficient way to track it that leads to synergies in other areas.
If you need help doing this, our goal setting worksheet, which includes a section for “measurement” of each goal may help you.

How are you measuring your goal(s) for 2015?
January 1, 2015
4 Tips for reconciling the irony of stress and productivity in the workplace
What’s impacting performance in the workplace more than anything else these days? Many people would say it is stress, which is pushing some to the point of full-blown mental health issues.

Consider how Graeme Cowan, author of Back From the Brink, describes this reality in the Fall 2014 issue of Global Corporate Xpansion Magazine:

“In a hypercompetitive global economy, organizations must be ‘on’ 24/7. Yet this scramble for perpetual performance is taking a harsh toll on employees. They relentlessly push to get ahead and stay ahead- working longer days, emailing after hours, taking fewer vacations- often with little acknowledgement for their efforts. The result is a workforce that’s not just disengaged (Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report revealed that 70 percent of U.S. employees fall into this category), but also stressed and depressed.

And here’s the irony. The constant hustle aimed at increasing productivity and profitability actually decreases both.”[i]

So what should you do as an employer to combat this irony?
1. Assess both the level of stress and the causes of stress in your workforce. Developing and administering an organizational survey to assess the level of stress in employees can help you effectively develop a plan to reduce stress levels at the workplace through policies, practices and programs. You can’t know what to change if you don’t know what the sources of issues are. In addition, if you do put a plan in place, you can’t know if and how you’ve improved if you don’t have baseline measurements to compare.
2. Provide stress management training to your staff. Providing stress management training to your employees can help increase productivity and profitability in the workplace. Hopefully you have committed to assessing the stress level of your organization (see #1) and have a skilled training provider that can take that information and develop a customized stress management program for your organization.
3. Analyze your talent management processes, particularly your selection process. Does it assess people for organizational and job fit? For more reading on this, check out an article I published inHR Alabama– see page 16. If people aren’t aligned with the organizational purpose and the job purpose, stress is bound to ensue, leading to decreased productivity.
4. Design policies, procedures and tools that allow people to work smarter not harder and that put controls in place to keep people from falling victim to the toll that working 24/7 takes.
For more food for thought on this see:

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

Should Employers Ban Email after Work Hours?

Stress Leave

Need more help as an employee or employer to manage stress? Download Stress Management: How to Deal with Stress in the Short and Long Term
December 9, 2014
No Rules, Just Shoes for Sensitivity Training

One of our favorite clients requested that we come in and conduct “sensitivity training” for employees. According to Wikipedia, sensitivity training “is a form of training with the goal of making people more aware of their own prejudices and more sensitive to others.” The client wanted to make sure that employees understood how to conduct themselves around each other and customers and to understand the legal standards around discrimination.

Of course, we at Horizon Point aren’t very good at conducting your standard, run-of-the-mill employee training that revolves around an instructor standing at the front of the room telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. Number one, that’s just plain boring, and number two, this kind of training doesn’t lead to changed and improved behavior on the job.

So we shook it up a bit, and after getting groups in the class to research and explain with examples what legislation such as Title VII of Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Sexual Harassment Law, and The Age in Employment Discrimination Act, our theme for the training became:

When it comes to knowing how to interact with others in the workplace, the legislation that surrounds this dynamic can become overwhelming. Overwhelming to the point that it inhibits your ability to accomplish anything for fear of doing something wrong.

The challenge of our “Beyond Talent” approach to “Sensitivity Training” is to simplify it. And quite simply, you simplify how to interact with others by taking a walk around in their shoes before saying or doing something. Throw the law or rule books out the window and challenge people to get to know people who are different than they are and try their “shoes” on for size. By doing this, nine times out of ten you’ll act in a way that won’t ever get you in legal hot water, but more importantly, this way will build more engaged and productive workplaces because people are treated with respect and valued for who they are and what they contribute to the team.

Have you ever been thorough a sensitivity training? What was the best take away?

September 8, 2014
Get a best friend at work and other tips on work and life wellbeing

At the recommendation of the Alabama Society of Human Resource Management’s Wellness Director, I downloaded a copy of Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter. The book describes the five essential elements of wellbeing (in order of importance) to be:

Career

Social

Financial

Physical

Community

The authors emphasize how each element is intricately interwoven with each other.

Here are some tips for maximizing work wellbeing by seeing wellbeing from a holistic perspective:

Don’t be a workaholic. “While you might think that people with high career wellbeing spend too much time working, they actually take more time to enjoy life, have better relationships, and don’t take things for granted. They love what they do each day.”

Get a work best friend. “Our research revealed that just 30% of employees have a best friend at work. Those who do are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, have higher wellbeing and are less likely to get injured on the job.”

Salary matters, but it isn’t everything. “Generally, those who have a lot of money can do what they want when they want to do it. Money can increase short-term happiness by giving us more control over how we spend our time, whether that means a shorter commute, more time at home with family or additional social time with friends.” And “What we found was that financial security- the perception that you have more than enough money to do what you want to do- has three times the impact of your income alone over overall wellbeing. Further, the lack of worry about money has more than double the impact of income over wellbeing.”

Being engaged in your work leads to giving back to the greater community. “In one organization we studied, workers who were the most engaged in their jobs donated 2.6 times more than those who were not engaged in their careers.” We agree. Read more at Passion + Productivity = Give Back

How does your work wellbeing impact other areas of your wellbeing?

August 25, 2014
2 Ways to Get What You’re Worth

Out looking for a job or considering a discussion with your boss about a raise? If you are, you need to do your research to consider what the knowledge, skills and abilities you have are worth in the marketplace and to the company in which you work or are negotiating with. (Note: The best time to negotiate your worth is before you accept a job. Once you get locked in a job and a salary range, usually the only way to get a substantial raise is to switch jobs either through a promotion or a move to another organization.)

Get the facts about what you’re worth in the market.

The first thing to do is compare what you do with salary data that is free out there. Some places to look review salary data:

Career One Stop

Salary.com

Salary Expert

BLS

Take all these sources and compile them to average out what an overall market range is for your role. Having the facts about what the market will pay for your skills will help you create a case for your value.

Know what you’re worth to the organization and suggest that worth be tied to your compensation package.

Next, you need to consider how you will or are currently adding value to the organization that may be outside the scope of the traditional job description tied to published salary data. If you are, we suggest instead of trying to get that value quantified through a salary, really prove this worth by suggesting that part of your compensation be tied to that extra value you add. You don’t get that extra unless you create a win-win for the company.

For example, if you are awesome at looking at company processes, realizing where there are inefficiencies and cutting costs which leads to increased profitability and margins, gather your numbers and facts and present a case to get a share as a part of your compensation of that increase profitability you created or know you can create.

If, through your efforts, you are able to bring in more clients or business, quantify this and request part of your compensation be tied to a cut of the increased revenue that comes from your efforts.

Most employers will be impressed with the initiative you take to tie your results to company results. Yeah, its riskier to not have it all in guaranteed in salary, but the alternative is more than likely a 2-3% increase a year and no one gets rich off this.

How do you make a case for your value?

Want more? You may also like:

Know Your Value

Why you should STOP being afraid of negotiating salary

August 14, 2014