Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Career Development

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  • SPECIAL FEATURE! BBB Torch Awards Speech

    SPECIAL FEATURE! BBB Torch Awards Speech

    On November 15th of this year, Mary Ila was asked to speak on Character and fostering workplace ethics at the BBB Torch Awards. Her topic was inspired by our Horizon Point book of the year named Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. Mary Ila wasn’t able to attend, but Jillian showed up and presented in her place. We hope that you enjoy this special treat from this year’s event.

    Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.   The BBB team across North Alabama does a tremendous job in fostering workplace ethics and we are happy to be a part of the organization as members, as Taylor, one of team members serves on the board, and for the chance to spend a few minutes talking with you today. 

    Robin asked me to speak to the first criteria of the Torch Award application- Character. 

    The question in the application states: “As CEO, President, Owner or Executive Director your leadership character sets the tone for your entire organization. As a leader, explain how you behave intentionally and communicate with your leadership team, employees, customers and stakeholders in a way that is consistent with your beliefs.”

    When we at Horizon Point have applied for the Torch Award before, I haven’t felt qualified to answer this question on my behalf, my team has answered it. And today is no different. In my quest to try to leave you here feeling energized about character, I asked them all what they thought. 

    And each one of them were spot on in living into one of our values- continuous learning and improvement- to breathe into our individual and collective learning about character. I’d like to use that learning to challenge your assumptions. And that is that character is not a static trait; it is a process that must be practiced. 

    In Adam Grant’s new book Hidden Potential, he describes what makes up culture. He says, “In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines (I would call them behaviors) that reflect and reinforce our values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable- what should be rewarded versus what should be punished.  Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works. Our assumptions shape our values which in turn drive our practices.”

    When we talk about the most desirable leadership traits we often cover practices and values, but we often neglect to understand or even see our assumptions and assumptions are the base of the pyramid. The base impacts our thinking, feelings, and behavior at all other levels. 

    And at the base of our pyramid on character, two assumptions largely define, at least in America, how we frame the character: 

    One:  Character is innate. It is a fixed characteristic.  You are born with it or you aren’t.  Putting this another way, character is a will issue not a skill issue.  We talk about skill and will alot in the work we do and often say, hire for will (because it is static, innate, not changing) and train for skill (because it can be learned and people can acquire and grow in skills), but what if character is a skill? What if it is malleable and we can learn and grow at it? This is a key premise of Grant’s book that he backs up with a lot of research. 

    Two: We assume and behave like character is binary.  You are either right or wrong.  If you are acting with character, you can put a label of “right” to it.  If you are acting contrary to character you are “wrong” and it is easy to identify and label it.  You know it when you see it.  But what if character lives in the gray?  What if at one time one behavior in one situation is acting with character, and in another set of circumstances that same behavior demonstrates the absence of character? 

    This isn’t fun thinking because our brains want us to simplify things.  Right or wrong is much easier, it takes less energy to sort through.  But exercising anything requires energy and practicing the assumption that character is a skill that must be actively practiced takes energy.  Sometimes a whole lot of energy. 

    As Brene Brown says in her book Dare to Lead, “the mark of a wild heart is living out these paradoxes in our lives and not giving into the either or BS. It’s showing up in our vulnerability AND courage and above all else, being both fierce AND kind.” 

    Character lives in:

    Showing grace AND holding people accountable

    Leading AND following

    Deciding AND seeking input. 

    In choosing to show up AND choosing not to. 

    It’s not about choosing one thing that on the surface seems on the opposite end of a spectrum, it’s about choosing to embrace and live out both all at once through the lens of our values. 

    Of the paradoxes I find hardest to navigate in this season of my life, it is showing up AND not. I live in the space of such privilege that I have an endless amount of choices on how to spend my time. You see, anytime you or I decide to show up for something or someone we are also making the choice to not show up for a million other things. I’m in the season now of leading a team and a business while also leading, along with my husband, three children ages almost thirteen to four. Embracing this AND is my biggest challenge and also my greatest opportunity to grow in character by actively practicing the skill.  

    For example, our middle child- the cream of our cookie as she likes to call herself- is the greatest guilt tripper on the planet and she likes to lay it on THICK. I think this guilt tripping comes from the guilt tripping she does to herself more than anyone else.  This is the child that has won the student of the month for initiative and/or leadership since Pre-K and she thinks she needs to be and do all for everyone in order to lean into who she is. And she expects others around her to do the same. But she can take this too far.  She is her mother.  Bless her. 

    She wants me to be at EVERYTHING, participating in everything at school, like she sees many of her friend’s mom’s doing.  Earlier in my life, when I made most of my parenting mistakes with my first born- bless his soul, I hope he forgives me one day- I would have felt like it was a character flaw within me to miss something he wanted me to attend.  And if my oldest had laid a guilt trip on me at age nine because I was missing something because of work, I probably would have said something along the lines of, “Your daddy and I work to put food on the table and a roof over your head. Quit complaining! I can’t be at everything!” I would have taken my guilt and turned it into shame for him.  

    But as I’m learning and growing I’m trying to flex and grow the muscle of character and realizing that sometimes I need to show up for my kids AND sometimes I need to show up for someone else.  And that by actually showing up for someone else sometimes, I’m really showing up for my kids too.  

    I missed the cream of the cookie’s annual soccer tournament between 4th grade classes because our work team was on a retreat to celebrate many things- a birthday, a work anniversary, a marriage, and a great year as a company.  I intentionally decided to do that (even though she did lay the guilt on thick) and used it as an opportunity to talk with her about living in the AND in the best way I knew how.  Instead of getting defensive, I communicated, explained and hopefully conveyed that she is important, but the world does not revolve around her (a lesson many of us still need to learn) and that my team at work was important too.  I tried to teach her and remind myself of the value of People First, our first value at Horizon Point and in my life, by having a conversation with her.  I tried to remind her (and me) that there is no way for her to be everything for everyone at all times and to also ask her questions about why she might be upset about why I can or can’t attend something. 

    I’ll be at her annual Turkey Bowl game and have said no to half a dozen other appointments in order to be there.  She’s the co-captain of her class’ football team and I hope she leads them with a People First mindset. 

    In thinking about this, how many of you really didn’t want to show up to this today? It’s okay, you can raise your hands, I won’t be offended.  Whether you were willing to admit it or not, the choice you made to show up today could be based on a variety of factors. But I hope your decision to show up here AND not show up somewhere else was done with intent. And based on your values. Your beliefs. 

    In a world where a lot of us grit and bare our way through life and we don’t stop to think about why and what to show up for, I think character can be found in sometimes showing up AND sometimes not. And in flexing the muscle to think it through. Only you can answer whether or not showing up to this luncheon today was the leaderful thing to do based on your commitment to character. Coming here may have been an escape or an excuse from what you really needed to do. And trust me, I am seeing that a ton right now in the leadership and executive coaching and training we do. Leaders not showing up to do the hard things.  I think this largely stems from being uncomfortable with embracing AND.  You know, as Brene Brown said, the “kind AND fierce” kind of AND. 

    Coming here may have been the very best possible thing that you could do on a Wednesday at lunch for fostering workplace ethics. Only you can decide, but I hope you do discern it through your values. And that you are constantly challenging your assumptions. 

    In the words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” 

    I don’t know what you have next on your agenda for today. Maybe it is having a difficult conversation you’ve been dreading, or avoiding it. Maybe it is picking up your kids from school or visiting an ailing parent.  Maybe it’s going home and taking a nap or going to the gym.  Any number of these things could be the next right thing you can and should do to build your character. Whatever you decide to do for the rest of the day, I hope you choose to behave in a way that grows you in your skill of character.  And yall, sometimes that truly is taking a nap. It’s a lot harder to practice character when you are tired or burned out. 

    The beauty of growing in your character skills is that through your modeling and influence you will help others flex their muscles to grow in character skills as well, and that’s what leadership is all about. 

  • 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. 

  • Insights from our NCDA Session about: Delivering Career Services to Diverse Populations with Inclusive Pathways

    Insights from our NCDA Session about: Delivering Career Services to Diverse Populations with Inclusive Pathways

    Jillian and I had a great time at NCDA in Chicago this month with our small group! We shared and learned about best practices for delivering career services to all groups.

    We started with a fun beachball toss to learn more about the diversity of the participants in our session. Who knew so many career professionals are introverts by nature! We shared these tips for supporting individuals and groups in their career development journey:

    1. Cater to Your Audience – Do you know your learning style and the style for those you serve? Take The Vark to find out. 
    2. Provide clear expectations while also giving individuals ownership and opportunities to drive their individual goals – Do you use SMART goals? Read about setting them in this article from Forbes.com: The Ultimate Guide to S.M.A.R.T. Goals.
    3. Be accessible and open to feedback – Do you ask for feedback? Here are some tips from a blog post written by Jillian: Feed Your Future with Feedback and Feedforward.

    As a group, we had discussions around having a People First mindset. It all comes down to serving others & meeting people where they are.

    Here are a couple of books we recommended during our session. You should check them out too!

  • How to conduct an effective one-on-one meeting

    How to conduct an effective one-on-one meeting

    I’ve been experimenting with the Ink and Volt One On One Pad to help me organize my thoughts.  I organize around these 4 four pillars: 

    • Current work
    • Future work (business development and proposals out)
    • Short and long term development priorities for the person I’m meeting with
    • Personal needs/support

    I use our Insightly software to refresh my memory on what everyone has going on with the first two (the software calls these “Projects” and “Opportunities”) before the meeting. I record these things on the Ink and Volt pad.  I also take a look at each person’s task list in Insightly before the meeting.  Doing this always makes me keenly aware of how on top of it everyone on our team is.  They are always juggling multiple priorities to meet multiple current and future client needs by living two of our other values- Passion and Productivity. 

    Usually, the person I’m meeting with that is driving hits all of these pillars without me having to.  If they don’t, I circle back around to things I have on my list once they are finished with theirs.  Sometimes the meetings are more focused on one of these things more than the others, but I always try to hit all of them. Some people gravitate towards needing to talk about one pillar over another and it is my job as a leader to make sure I follow their lead on the needs they have.

    1. One-on-ones should lead to a greater team dynamic. We used to spend way too much time in our whole team quarterly planning meetings talking through current projects. Invariably, one or two team members were focused on the project but the others weren’t.  We were wasting other people’s time talking through every project and every proposal as a team. While it’s valuable for everyone to understand each other’s work load, spending thirty minutes of a half-day team meeting on one project in which only part of your team is involved is a waste of time and effort.  Therefore, we have made sure that when a quarterly meeting is coming up, we have one-on-ones the week before if possible.  Needs that involve the whole team come up during the one-on-ones and then can be discussed at the whole team meeting where collaboration needs to take place.
    1. Finally, one-on-ones should focus on open feedback and communication. If tough issues aren’t coming up from time to time (both personal and professional) in these meetings, then something isn’t being done right.  One-on-ones should be a place where psychological safety is being demonstrated- both ways.  If all conversations in one-on-ones are surface level and tactical, then no one is growing.  

    We also spend one or two one-on-one meetings a year facilitating our Leaders as Career Agents process which dives deeper into development priorities, and at times, we schedule a longer meeting if we need to take a deep dive into a specific project, proposal, or issue. 

    How do you make your one-on-one meetings the best they can be? 

  • FACD

    FACD

    Last week, HPC met with our contacts with the state department of education. The meeting centered around current training, plans for a focus group and specific grades that could potentially be our next area of focus. In reflection, we have worked in partnership with them for more than 10 years. What began as a grant funded training project grew into a wonderful partnership that has allowed us to provide professional development with educators across our state year after year. Currently, we are training 100+ educators on career development and providing state and program specific resources. 

    Here are the benefits I’ve seen from this partnership that continues to develop professionals who are literally preparing our future workforce.

    1. Teachers, counselors, administrators, and career coaches learn from one another, sharing resources that are most helpful in their area(s).
    2. Training content is being soaked up and is finding its way into lesson plans, field trips, and career days.
    3. Collaboration flourishes as participants have the opportunity to create a group within their cohort to work on an assignment about an in-demand career. The assignment ultimately becomes a resource library of presentations that anyone in the training can access.
    4. Completers of the course seek credentials and have the opportunity to receive continued education on topics most relevant for them and the students they serve.

    Do you have a need for training or professional development in your school or organization? If so, let us know and I’m sure we can help or point you in the right direction!