Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Work

Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.

  • Beyond Grit: Getting Situated to Bring Out Your Best

    Beyond Grit: Getting Situated to Bring Out Your Best

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more aware of how much my situation impacts my wellbeing. The space I’m in. The place I call home. The people around me. All of it influences how I think, how I feel, and how I show up.

    I’ve also become more willing to ask whether something needs to change instead of assuming I just need to work harder.

    Angela Duckworth’s book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, gave me language for this. The researcher who helped us understand grit now asks us to consider how our surroundings can help us put that grit to good use.

    One question from the book has stayed with me:

    “Can we learn to worship strategy as much as strength?”

    For those of us accustomed to pushing through, that is a question worth sitting with.

    1. Situational Awareness: Go Beyond Grit

    We’ve written quite a bit about grit at Horizon Point. In Leaders, Set Manageable Goals to Lead and Run Well, I shared how breaking marathon training into smaller pieces helped make a big goal manageable. In Open the Door to Growth, Grit and Yourself, Emily connected perseverance and self-awareness with a workplace that encourages people to grow.

    In Mommas Maintaining Grit?, I wrestled with what perseverance looked like while caring for a sick child and trying to meet work commitments. My husband, in-laws, and team helped make that week possible. I also questioned whether grit leaves enough room to reevaluate our goals and shift focus toward what matters in a particular season.

    Looking back, I can see situational awareness in that story. The demands changed, and so did the support and priorities I needed. Passion and perseverance were still there, even when they looked different from what a quiz might measure.

    Together, these pieces point toward the importance of the conditions surrounding our effort.

    Duckworth takes that idea further in Situated. We often focus on willpower at the point between a thought and a response: resist the distraction, choose the better behavior, make yourself do the hard thing.

    She encourages us to move to the left. Before the thought comes the situation. What could we change there to make the behavior we want easier to repeat?

    If you want to focus, where is your phone? If you want to exercise, how easy is it to get out the door? If you want your team to speak honestly, what happens when someone raises a concern?

    As Duckworth writes:

    “A little willpower goes a long way when you use it to get situated first.”

    For leaders, this means examining what surrounds the behavior we’re asking for. Our calendars, meeting practices, relationships, and responses to mistakes all shape what people do next.

    What in your situation is helping you become who you want to be? What is making it harder?

    2. Situational Agency: Do Something About It

    Awareness gives us a starting point. Agency asks us to act on it.

    Four ideas from the book stood out to me.

    Set Up Your Space

    Align where you are and what is around you with your goals.

    This can be as simple as putting the book you want to read within reach or finding a quiet place for work that requires concentration. At work, it might mean making the tools people need easier to access or protecting time to finish work between meetings.

    We ask people to manage their time while filling their calendars. We ask for collaboration without creating opportunities for connection. Getting situated means paying attention to whether the space and routines support the goal.

    Pick Your Peers

    One of my favorite examples is the commitment-card practice used by the De La Salle football team.

    Players write their goals on an index card and commit to a named teammate. They exchange cards, and that teammate observes their follow-through during the next week. At the following team gathering, the partner reports on whether the commitments were met.

    The card makes the goal visible. The relationship gives someone a reason to follow through.

    Think about what this could look like on your team. Each person identifies one specific commitment for the week and shares it with a peer. They check in, offer support, and have an honest conversation about what happened.

    That kind of accountability takes trust. It also gives us a practical way to help each other do what we said we would do.

    Make Mentorship the Mode

    Get one. Thank one.

    Who helps you see possibilities you might miss on your own? Who offers perspective when you’re too close to a situation to see it clearly?

    Seek out that person. Make time for the relationship. And thank the people who have already played that role in your life.

    Then consider who needs the same from you. Mentorship can happen in ordinary conversations when we ask a thoughtful question, share what we’ve learned, or help someone recognize a strength they haven’t yet seen.

    Champion Cultural Carriers

    Pay attention to the people who make a culture’s values visible through their everyday behavior. Who models curiosity? Who welcomes someone new? Who makes it safe to ask for help?

    Support those people, and examine the norms we accept simply because they are familiar. Status quo bias can keep us in situations long after we’ve stopped asking whether they fit.

    This year, my family made a significant change. We moved more than 300 miles from where my husband and I grew up and the only hometown our children had known.

    Being hometown kids raising kids in our hometown came with relationships and roots we value. It also came with expectations we had grown accustomed to following.

    Moving has given us more margin, more proximity to the things we value and enjoy, and less pressure to conform to what we’ve always conformed to. It has helped us choose more intentionally how we want to live.

    A move isn’t everyone’s answer. But questioning a familiar situation can help us see choices we didn’t realize we had.

    3. Situational Responsibility: Help Others Get Situated

    The book also prompted me to reconsider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

    The familiar pyramid makes it easy to imagine we finish with one need and climb to the next. Duckworth revisits a more fluid understanding: Maslow did not draw that pyramid, and our needs don’t disappear as we grow. We continue to need safety, belonging, esteem, and opportunities to develop. Different needs come to the foreground at different times.

    That matters at work. Someone can be ambitious and still need rest. A capable leader can still need belonging. A person doing meaningful work can still be worried about paying the bills.

    Duckworth’s discussion of self-transcendence takes this further. Beyond developing our own potential is the opportunity to use it in service of something larger than ourselves.

    That is situational citizenship: helping create conditions in which others can thrive, too.

    We don’t all have the same freedom to change our circumstances. Leaders have a particular responsibility to consider the situations they create for other people. Can we offer clearer expectations, access to a mentor, room to learn, or a more sustainable workload?

    At Horizon Point, growing people means paying attention to both the person and the workplace around them. Getting situated can help us bring out our best. Leadership asks us to extend that opportunity to others.

    What lights you up? Go let it shine so others can see you—and do the same.

  • Moving Beyond Annual Reviews: Continuous Feedback in Action

    Moving Beyond Annual Reviews: Continuous Feedback in Action

    Years ago, I worked for a company that handled performance reviews in the typical, traditional way. Once a year, I sat down with my manager, heard some positive feedback about the work I had done, and received a small raise—just above cost of living.

    The problem? Pretty much everyone received the same thing, including the person who never seemed to get the job done.

    Effective? Not really.
    Encouraging? Not especially.
    Helpful to the employee who was struggling? Definitely not.

    There Has to Be a Better Way

    So, what is a more effective way to recognize, encourage, develop, and—when necessary—redirect your people?

    At Horizon Point, we believe performance management works best when it isn’t treated as a once-a-year event. It should be an ongoing conversation.

    That starts with some simple but important practices:

    • Set clear expectations from the beginning. A good job description and clarity around responsibilities give employees a strong starting point.
    • Give feedback regularly. Don’t save the good—or the difficult—for an annual review. Timely feedback gives employees the opportunity to learn, adjust, and grow.
    • Talk about goals. Make space for conversations about where employees want to go and how their goals connect with the needs of the organization.
    • Coach, don’t just evaluate. Ask questions, listen, and help employees think through challenges and opportunities rather than simply telling them what to do.
    • Make development ongoing. Growth shouldn’t happen only when someone is struggling or ready for a promotion. It should be part of the employee experience.

    Put It Into Practice

    We’ve explored several of these ideas in previous Horizon Point posts. If you’re looking for practical ways to improve the conversations you’re having with employees, these are good places to start:

    Lead Better: The Power of Values in Performance Management
    Performance management isn’t only about goals and metrics. This post explores how values, expectations, feedback, coaching, and accountability work together. Two tools worth adding to your coaching toolbox are the SBI Model for feedback and the GROW framework for coaching conversations.

    4 Ways to Get Unstuck with Professional Development
    Development doesn’t always require another class or formal training program. Sometimes it begins with a better conversation. One tool we enjoy using is the One-on-Ones Box from Unstuck Box, which provides prompts that can help make those conversations more intentional.

    Building Career Paths That Keep Your Best People
    Career conversations shouldn’t end after the interview. Leaders can continue asking employees about their goals, interests, strengths, and next steps—and look for places where those aspirations intersect with organizational needs. Our Leaders as Career Agents (LACA) approach provides a structure for doing just that.

    The Goal Isn’t a Better Annual Review

    It’s a better relationship between leaders and employees.

    Clear expectations. Regular feedback. Honest conversations. Meaningful development. Accountability when it’s needed. And an understanding of where the employee wants to go next.

    When those things are happening throughout the year, the annual review becomes less of an event—and more of a continuation of conversations that are already taking place.

    Three Books for Better Conversations

    Want to strengthen those conversations even more? These are three resources we come back to often:

    The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier — A practical guide to asking better questions so leaders can coach employees instead of immediately jumping in with answers.

    Radical Candor by Kim Scott — A useful framework for combining genuine care for people with clear, direct feedback about performance.

    Crucial Conversations — Practical tools for navigating the difficult, high-stakes conversations that are an inevitable part of leading and developing people.

    The common thread? Better performance management isn’t really about the review form. It’s about equipping leaders to have better conversations—consistently, clearly, and with the development of both the employee and the organization in mind.

  • How Organizations Can Support Sustainable Performance

    How Organizations Can Support Sustainable Performance

    High performance matters. Sustainable performance matters more.

    Organizations need results, but those results shouldn’t depend on constant urgency, overwork, or a few high performers carrying the load.

    Sustainable performance is about creating an environment where people can do good work, continue to grow, and contribute over time. It combines clear expectations with strong leadership, meaningful development, and workplace practices that recognize people as more than simply a measure of productivity.

    At Horizon Point, this connects closely to one of our core values: People First. Putting people first doesn’t mean lowering expectations. It means recognizing that long-term organizational performance and the employee experience are closely connected.

    Here are 3 Ways to Support Sustainable Performance:

    1. Give People Clarity

    Employees need to know what matters most.

    Clear priorities, realistic expectations, good communication, and an understanding of how individual work connects to larger organizational goals can reduce unnecessary friction and help people focus their energy where it has the greatest impact.

    Leaders can regularly ask: Are we making it clear what success looks like—and what matters most right now?

    2. Develop Leaders Who Develop Others

    Managers have a significant influence on the everyday employee experience. Sustainable performance requires leaders who can do more than assign work and track results.

    Strong leaders communicate expectations, provide feedback, recognize contributions, coach through challenges, and help employees continue developing.

    This is especially important as organizations promote high performers into leadership roles. Technical expertise may earn someone a promotion, but leading people requires a different set of skills.

    For more on this, see The Leaders You Need Are Already Here and Horizon Point’s From Manager to Coach: Coaching Leadership That Builds Teams.

    3. Make Growth Part of the Work

    Development doesn’t always require a formal training program.

    Career conversations, mentoring, cross-training, stretch assignments, job shadowing, assessments, and opportunities to take on new responsibilities can help employees build skills while also strengthening organizational capacity.

    Recognition matters, too. When people know their contributions are seen and valued, it can strengthen connection and engagement. Horizon Point’s Recognition Is Not a Perk—It’s a Retention Strategy offers additional perspective on the relationship between recognition and retention.

    Here are a Few Helpful External Resources:

    Gallup Workplace — research and insights on employee engagement, managers, workplace culture, and performance.

    SHRM — practical tools and resources related to talent management, employee experience, leadership, retention, and workplace practices.

    The Energy Project — resources focused on energy, resilience, and sustainable performance at work.

    Start Small: Supporting sustainable performance doesn’t require launching another major initiative.

    Start with three questions:

    Do our people know what matters most?
    Are our leaders equipped to support and develop their people?
    Are we creating opportunities for people to learn, grow, and contribute?

    The answers can point to where small changes could have a meaningful impact.

    Sustainable performance isn’t about asking people to continually do more. It’s about creating the conditions that help people consistently do their best work—and continue growing along the way.

  • Employee Communication: Building Trust in Teams

    Employee Communication: Building Trust in Teams

    Recently, Jillian and I facilitated a series of employee focus groups for one of our clients. Leadership intentionally stepped out of the room to create space for open and honest conversation. Employees were invited to share their thoughts on the organization’s culture, leadership, training, communication, and anything else they felt was important.

    Although the focus groups were facilitated by Horizon Point and leadership was not present, many employees were still hesitant to participate. Their concerns weren’t about the questions being asked—they were about what would happen after they answered them. Would their feedback somehow make its way back to their manager? Would speaking honestly affect how they were viewed? Would anything actually change as a result of what they shared?

    Those concerns highlight an important reality: communication isn’t just about creating opportunities for employees to speak. It’s about creating an environment where they believe it’s safe to do so—and where they trust their voices will be heard.

    When employees don’t believe it’s safe—or worthwhile—to speak honestly, valuable insights remain hidden, small issues become larger ones, and organizations lose opportunities to improve.

    Communication Starts with Relationships

    Providing feedback isn’t just about the conversation—it’s about the relationship. Trust determines whether feedback is received as an opportunity for growth or as personal criticism. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott describes effective leadership as caring personally while challenging directly. Without trust, even the best-intentioned feedback can be met with skepticism or defensiveness.

    At Horizon Point, we often talk about Relationshipping—the intentional practice of building and nurturing relationships to better understand, support, and serve others. Relationshipping doesn’t begin when a difficult conversation is needed. It’s built over time through consistent actions: listening with curiosity, following through on commitments, treating people with respect, and demonstrating genuine care.

    Employees don’t communicate openly because they’ve been told their opinions matter. They communicate openly because their experiences have shown them they do. Trust isn’t built during annual surveys or focus groups—it is built in the hundreds of everyday interactions between leaders and employees.

    Psychological Safety Requires Humble Leaders

    Psychological safety isn’t about making everyone comfortable. It’s about creating an environment where employees feel safe asking questions, sharing ideas, admitting mistakes, respectfully disagreeing, and providing honest feedback without fear of embarrassment or retaliation.

    Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the single most important characteristic of high-performing teams. The common thread wasn’t that these teams avoided difficult conversations—it was that people felt safe enough to have them.

    Creating that kind of environment requires humility from leaders.

    We often work with leaders who say they want honest feedback, and most genuinely do. The real test comes when that feedback challenges a decision, questions a process, or exposes a blind spot. Our natural instinct is often to explain our reasoning or defend our intentions instead of seeking to understand the employee’s experience.

    One of the things I often tell leaders when conducting job analyses is that no one understands a job better than the person doing it every day. The same is true when identifying problems or opportunities for improvement. The employees closest to the work often know where processes break down, what creates frustration, and where changes could have the greatest impact.

    Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions and creating an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing what they know.

    One of the most important lessons leaders can learn is that intent and impact are not always the same. A leader may have every intention of improving communication, efficiency, or morale, while employees experience the decision very differently. Rather than defending intentions, effective leaders become curious about the impact. They ask questions, listen without interrupting, and remain open to adjusting course when necessary.

    Listening Isn’t Enough

    Creating opportunities for employees to provide feedback is only the first step. Organizations invest significant time and resources into employee surveys, focus groups, suggestion boxes, stay interviews, and exit interviews. Simply asking for feedback creates an expectation that employees’ voices will be acknowledged.

    That doesn’t mean leaders need to implement every suggestion. Employees understand there are budget constraints, competing priorities, and operational realities. What they do expect is transparency.

    Close the communication loop.

    Tell employees what you heard. Share what actions will be taken, what won’t be implemented, and why. Provide realistic timelines when possible, and thank employees for their honesty and willingness to contribute.

    When feedback disappears into a “black hole,” employees begin to wonder why they were asked in the first place. Eventually, they stop offering ideas, raising concerns, or participating in future feedback opportunities—not because they don’t care, but because they’ve concluded it won’t make a difference.

    Employees don’t expect every idea to become reality, but they do expect their voices to matter.

    Final Thoughts

    As we wrapped up each focus group, one thing stood out. Employees cared deeply about their organization. They wanted to share ideas, solve problems, and help make their workplace better. Their hesitation wasn’t about having something to say—it was about wondering whether it was safe to say it and whether anyone would truly listen.

    Healthy workplace communication isn’t built through annual surveys or occasional focus groups. It’s built every day through relationships, psychological safety, humility, and consistent follow-through. Leaders who listen with curiosity, invite honest dialogue, and communicate transparently create cultures where employees feel heard, respected, and empowered to contribute.

    Because when employees stop talking, organizations stop learning.

  • 15 Years of Workplace Innovation. What Will the Next 15 Bring?

    15 Years of Workplace Innovation. What Will the Next 15 Bring?

    It’s the summer of anniversaries. On July 4th our country will celebrate its 250th anniversary.  Relatively young for a country, but a milestone nonetheless.

    In August, my husband and I will celebrate 20 years of marriage. Still possibly a young marriage, but a milestone anniversary as we enter our midlife years.

    And this summer, Horizon Point celebrates our 15th anniversary. Established as a business- but still an adolescent- we’ve always been predicting and navigating what will happen next when it comes to the workplace.

    Fifteen years ago, writing my first blog post seemed to be the official way to announce the business. I looked for the post and that first platform of those infant writings, but couldn’t find it.  It was written on a platform that is long forgotten and no longer in existence.

    The post played off the theme of Sarah Bareille’s song “Uncharted”. And boy, we’ve navigated some uncharted territory-some anticipated and some totally unexpected- shaping the workplace.

    How the Workplace Changed Over the Past 15 Years

    In 2011, smartphones were taking over, millennials were taking over, and cloud computing was changing how we worked and collaborated.  We were coming out of the “Great Recession” yet many employers were still complaining about the quality and quantity of labor.

    Throughout the first several years of business, “employee experience” became a buzz phrase, people wanted to constantly talk about the five generations in the workplace and what it meant and DEI initiatives began to take off.  “Wellness” became a workplace strategy.

    As we approached 2020, remote and hybrid work largely driven by technology and the desire to retain and expand talent pools began to creep up on all of us.  Around 2018 we began to get an explosion of calls about help with compensation. We were still largely operating at recession wages ten years after the recession. Then the pandemic hit and accelerated these paths exponentially.

    The Great Resignation hit and we were up to our eyeballs at work helping a diverse set of employers recruit and retain talent in this new paradigm.

    And although I wouldn’t have dreamed of all that AI can do and how it could help me write a blog post fifteen years ago- yes, I did dump the topic for this blog post in ChatGPT to help me begin- there are some things that still remain the same and will continue to shape the workplace for the next 15 years.

    Looking Ahead: What the Next 15 Years May Bring

    Here are my predictions:

    How and Where Work Gets Done:  We will still be “arguing” over the mix of work- remote, hybrid, in office, etc. etc.- and what is best universally and by company and industry. We will still be arguing what makes people most “productive”.

    I found Adam Grant’s most recent research interesting around why and what type of boss wants people to return to the office full-time.  Spoiler alert: it isn’t really about productivity.

    I myself have re-examined this in the last year or so, to a varying degree of extreme.  We’ve always had the core values of people first coupled with productivity driving us to not care “when and where work gets done as long as it meets the client’s needs.”  We all work from home and work based on client demand and our own personal time clocks and rhythms to maximize our motivation, productivity, and outcomes. This looks different for each of us.

    But as we transition into year sixteen of the business, I will be relocating with my family six hours away from where I’ve done life and business for the last fifteen years. I still have total confidence work will get done to meet client needs. Will it look different, yes, but it will still be work getting done. If you want to read more about our decision to move, you can find it here. Home and work, at least in my industry, can be almost anywhere in 2026 and beyond.

    As technology continues to advance, even 24/7 industries like healthcare, public service/safety, and manufacturing will have to examine if it will be realistic to operate 24/7/365 without some drastic changes.  Because what will drive all this is the next one…

    Our quality and quantity labor crisis will only grow:  We aren’t making enough babies in the United States or across the world.  Immigration policy is a hot button and I believe will remain so for the near future.  People are exiting the workplace left and right, some for valid reasons, like a much deserved retirement, and for some not so good, for example, the decline of working-age men in the workplace and what this idleness is causing.

    We’ve written about all of this extensively.  You can find more about this labor crisis that will only grow here:

    The Evaporation of Male Labor Force Participation

    What’s Affecting the Labor Force Participation Rate?

    We will still need (and there will still be a gap in) good leadership:  If you asked me at the beginning of 2026 what we would receive the most requests for this year, I honestly would not have said leadership training. Boy was I wrong.  We are getting a minimum of 1-2 requests a week for leadership training proposals, and I’m not talking about a one-and-done stab at leadership development.  I’m talking months and months of a willingness to invest in identifying and growing leaders.

    Driven by the first two above, the quality (and quantity) of good leaders will be needed.  And it will be about embracing authenticity, vulnerability, bravery, and courage. It will demand self-differentiated leaders. For more on this visit work done by Brene Brown and the late Edwin Friedman.

    And like we’ve often said, what got you here won’t get you there. Good leaders can be grown, but it takes training in a different type of skillset than being a good doer.

    With this in mind, we have launched the Doer2Leader Program to meet this demand that isn’t going anywhere.

    AI will continue to shape the workplace and the classroom: I used AI sparingly just a year ago. I use it pretty much every day now. My kids use it on the regular for school and non-school related things. How will it look in 15 years? I’ll leave that to the experts in the field to discern, but I know it will make an impact.  We will need people who know how to leverage constantly evolving technology wisely. I don’t think it is going to largely replace humans at work, or at least not to the extent that number two above won’t continue to be a problem.

    Education will continue to need to focus on in-demand skills, not degrees, but it will continue to need to help students know how to think, not just do:  It’s hard for me not to look at this from the lens of a mother instead of someone trained in organizational psychology.  Although I’m not sure of the means to get to it (and how the trends in school choice do or don’t impact it), I do know we’ve got to do education better.  We’ve made strides in the last fifteen years in resurrecting the focus on career and technical education. But, in my opinion, we still aren’t doing enough to integrate cross disciplinary instruction and thinking as well as character development into our educational pedagogy across the country.

    We are largely still asking kids to memorize things they can look up online, structuring classrooms like we did during the industrial revolution and failing to show students how to connect the dots across multiple disciplines, ideas, and basic life skills. Haves and have nots continue to be further divided based on who gets this type of learning in the home and who doesn’t.

    The “traditional” worker will shrink: Those who think and not just do will not stay in the “traditional” workplace. They will go out on their own and do their own thing or work for someone who will let them do so. They won’t be governed by corporate policy or the corporate grind and by work hours and mindsets that aren’t conducive to their lifestyle desires or pay systems that don’t reward them for their value and performance. Some will couch this along the lines of generational issues, but I think there is more to it than that.

    The best and brightest will leverage technology, interpersonal skills, and vision, and tell the workplace to peace out if it doesn’t get a grip with things mentioned above and the value they create. I am seeing this in droves now and it will continue.

    This will continue to separate the haves from the have nots (for which I am concerned) and place more of a demand on traditional employers and educators to figure out how to train and lead marginalized groups. This drives a set of challenges we’ve got to figure out as a collective how to address.

    The One Prediction I’m Confident Making

    I’ll be wrong and I’ll be right about some of these things.  But what I know for sure is we will have to keep innovating the workplace if we will continue to be relevant as a business and if any other organization will be for that matter.

    What are you expecting the future of work and the workplace to look like and how do you stay on top of the constant evolution?