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.

  • Do Meetings Negatively Impact Productivity?

    Do Meetings Negatively Impact Productivity?

    Last week, during a meeting with a client’s leadership team, we got on the topic of just how much time they spend each week in meetings. One of the managers told me that meetings take up about five to six hours of his day, every day! That only leaves him two hours to get his work accomplished. When I asked him to tell me about his meetings, his list went something like this:

    8 AM- Meeting with team 1 to discuss issues

    9 AMM- Meeting with team 2 to determine what issues from 8 AM meeting are critical

    10 AM- Meeting with team 3 to determine how to manage/resolve critical issues determined in 9AM meeting

    And this is EVERY day! Three hours of his day are spent discussing the same topics with different groups.

    How often have you attended a meeting and walked out thinking “that was a waste of my time” or “that could have been said in an email.” Have you ever gone to a regularly scheduled meeting for months and then have someone in that meeting tell you that there probably isn’t a need for you to attend?

    Studies show that high level executives spend on average over twenty hours per week in meetings. That’s half of their workweek! Lower level managers spend between about ten and fifteen hours per week in meetings. They are such a part of our lives that companies like MeetingKing.com  and Meeting Stats  help to quantify time and money spent on meetings as well as help to organize and track meeting information.

    While we can’t eliminate meetings from our workday, there are strategies that we can use to make sure those meetings are successful and lead to an increase in productivity instead of a decrease.

    1. Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if it’s really necessary. Can you accomplish your goal by sending an email, or picking up the phone for a quick call? Are you duplicating information that is covered in another meeting?
    2. Invite the right people. As you add others to the meeting invite, ask yourself if they really need to attend, or if the information presented during the meeting can be passed along to them afterwards. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, has the “two pizza rule”.  Never invite more people than what two pizzas would comfortably feed.
    3. Prepare in advance. In order to maximize your time, plan the meeting out in advance and send a copy of the meeting agenda out to the attendees at least 24 hours prior if possible. Then stick to it (both the agenda and the allotted time). According to Meeting King, research shows that 39% of employees admit to dozing off during meetings. Don’t let your meeting drag on so long that you’re putting them to sleep!
    4. Designate a scribe or secretary. Have someone take meeting minutes that can be distributed afterwards to those employees who were not invited (or couldn’t attend), but need to know what was discussed or decided during the meeting.  
    5. Reassess the need. If you have standing meetings, reassess them occasionally to determine if they’re still necessary. Is the content still relevant, do they overlap with other meetings that could be combined, are those in attendance still required, and are they effective?

    If you tallied up the time you sent in meetings in the last month, how much of that time would you consider productive versus unproductive?

  • Using Your Heart Not Your Head

    Using Your Heart Not Your Head

    I’m pregnant. With our third child.

    We are beyond excited and joyful about this new life coming into existence.

    But when you have an 8-year-old and almost 5-year-old, you and your husband both have demanding yet rewarding careers, and you are what the doctors call old enough to be of “advanced maternal age,” you get some interesting comments when you tell people this news. Some of my favorites have been:

    “You know, they say women with three kids are the most stressed.”

    “Well, when did that happen?” (I’m not sure if they were asking about conception or the decision to have another child, so I stayed away from answering it. Awkward.)

    And my favorite, “Oh no.”

    Of course, the overwhelming majority of what we have heard is a heartfelt “Congratulations!”

    But the truth is, we logically have had some of these less than positive thoughts. What are we doing? Or more accurately, how exactly are we going to do this?

    But my heart has been telling me something different than what my logical brain has been telling me. This started almost two years ago. And the same feelings (not logic) seemed to have struck my husband about mid-summer of last year too.

    We are both driven by logic in our work and are called to make decisions using logic not emotions. But in this big decision, we became all emotion.

    And that emotion came out of a place of our hearts. The fact that we have more love to give was the simple answer. We believe our two kids have the same kind of more love to give and this decision will strengthen them, not harm them.

    So we are having a baby.

    The heart often leads us to the best decisions. It doesn’t mean they are the easiest ones. They often lead us to uncomfortable questions from others, sleepless nights, extra work, and rollercoasters of highs and lows. But, often, they lead us to the best possible decision and the best possible place to be for ourselves and for others.

    On this Valentine’s Day, whether it is at work or in another aspect of your life, where do you need to follow your heart not your head?

  • 4 Leadership Habits to Schedule

    4 Leadership Habits to Schedule

    During my bout with the flu when my husband was proceeding to tell me about how busy his calendar was, he showed it to me on his phone later.  He actually did this while we were in the emergency room while I was hooked up to an IV that was administering fluids and nausea drugs to me while I waited to be admitted.  Hey, there is only so much you can talk about in the ER.  I was somewhat out of it (go figure) but talking about his schedule for the week reminded me of some good habits we ought to schedule as leaders:

    1. Write one handwritten note to thank someone each week.  His calendar had “write notes” scheduled in a fifteen-minute time block one day a week. I didn’t ask but I know this is a reoccurring “appointment”. I know this means he is to write two notes thanking someone on his team or one of his colleagues at work for a job well done. He started this habit several years ago and has stuck with it.

    Go order a box of fifty personalized notecards and write one a week each week through the year. You’ll know you’ve met your goal if you run out before the end of the year.

    2. Check in with your team regularly in group and one-on-one sessions.  He starts his day off at 6:30 am every morning with a fifteen-minute meeting with one of the departments he manages. It helps them know what happened the previous day and night (he works for a hospital, so they are never closed) and to make sure everyone is on the same page for what needs to be accomplished that day.

    He also had a couple of one-on-one meetings with direct reports on his calendar. These are scheduled monthly in one-hour meetings.  He also had his one-on-one meeting with his boss on his calendar. I like that this is the standard that all leaders follow in the organization. He also had a bi-weekly executive team meeting on his calendar that is also the standard for the organization.

    Schedule time to regularly check in with your people at intervals that make sense for you and your team. I do a monthly lunch with each person on my team, and we have quarterly group meetings. Daily meetings aren’t needed for the type of work we do, but they are needed in short intervals for the work one department my husband manages. Figure out what is right for you and put it on your calendar and stick to it.

    3. Professional Development Time. When I was in the hospital sick, one thing my husband was trying to get out of going to was a training on time management. Granted, he had a valid excuse to not go because I was in the hospital, but all he had to do was walk down the hall to attend and I didn’t need him.  I actually wanted to go listen in more than he did to calibrate the training content he was getting against what we use for time management training content. Nevertheless, he has quarterly two-hour professional development trainings that are incorporated into his calendar.

    Professional development often gets pushed aside in our schedule, but it is necessary for so many reasons and it can be done in so many different ways. We schedule one major conference for professional development for everyone on our team each year and then talk quarterly about “continuous improvement and learning” (one of our company values) goal for each person.  It could be as simple as researching certifications in a field of interest to reading a book to attending some type of formal training or class.  Just like your cadence of meetings with your team, figure out the professional development cadence that works for you and schedule it.

    4. Planning Time. My husband had time blocked off on his calendar to prepare and plan for certain things. A meeting on a Friday, for example, might prompt an hour time block on the Wednesday before to gather materials and prep for that meeting. He is diligent about not walking into anything unprepared.

    I’m not as good as scheduling these prep blocks of time, but I find sitting down on Friday afternoons or Sunday afternoons and plotting out the three main things I need to get done for the week and the other tasks that need to get accomplished is important. The week goes much better when I keep this habit. I put the goals/to-dos on a calendar for the week while looking at what meetings are scheduled. This helps me to mentally block adequate time off to get the important things accomplished. If I’m not best suited to do it or I don’t have time to do it, this is the time that I delegate tasks and schedule time for follow-up with the person I’ve delegated the task/goal to if necessary. We also use a CRM/Project Management system Insightly to help with this.

    Start scheduling time to express gratitude, to lead well, to grow professionally, and to plan – all habits that a leader should have on their calendars. And quite possibly, in that order. If you aren’t doing any of these things now, start with gratitude, then add the next habit once you’ve made gratitude a reflex.

    Where are you lacking in one (or more) of these areas when you look at your calendar? Where are you excelling in scheduling these leadership habits?

  • Is Your Workplace Full of Facts or Opinions?

    Is Your Workplace Full of Facts or Opinions?

    You can find me most afternoons between 3:30 and 4:30 pm working on 2nd grade homework. While I work until the normal quitting time of 5:00 pm one to two days a week (thanks to grandparents), my schedule at least three days a week revolves around being done in time to pick up kids and start what often seems to be a harder job than what pays the bills- getting my 2nd grader through 2nd grade.

    One interesting assignment he had in his homework packet a couple of weeks ago was to identify whether a list of statements was fact or opinion.  As I was preparing myself to explain the difference to him, I was surprised to find that he understood the difference much better than most adults.

    Statements like, “It’s fun to run.”  that were on his sheet he easily spotted as opinion.   He said, “I like to run, but most people in my class don’t, so that’s an opinion.”  

    He seemed to be better at looking at a statement from not only his perspective but the perspective of others to be able to decide if it was fact or if it was opinion.  Conversely, he knew that “There are seven continents,” for example, was a fact.

    It reminded me of a conversation I had with a General Manager who told me his team needed help with communication.  He said, I get people coming to me saying, “”Lisa is lazy.’ It drives me crazy,” he said, “when people come to me with statements like this.”

    “I usually take a deep breath and then ask why the person coming to me thinks that,” he said.

    To which, he said he usually gets a response even further from the facts like, “She is ALWAYS late!”

    He said, “I just want people to come with to me with facts. For example, Lisa has been fifteen minutes late three times this week.  You can see that here on her timecard where she scanned in.”

    “Can you teach people to do that?” he asked. “To just give facts and not opinions?”

    Maybe some 2nd grade homework would help this team.  And in reality, an exercise of identifying a list of statements as fact or opinion might actually be a good exercise to incorporate into workplace communication training.

    What I find though, is that the manager did something that I would recommend.  He asked a question to try to get to a fact and away from an opinion.   Opinions are usually emotionally charged and don’t necessarily lead us down the best decision-making path.   

    So to start, if you find yourself in this situation as a leader, I would encourage you to ask good questions if you find yourself getting opinions instead of facts.  Many of the questions revolved around what my 2nd grader seemed to intuitively do, which is to get the person to think about a perspective other than their own.

    In Daring to Lead,Brene Brown offers some good questions when she talks about building confidence through curiosity.   Some are:

    “Tell me more.”

    “That’s not my experience…” Tell me about yours….

    “Help me understand…”

    “Walk me through…”

    “We’re both dug in.  Tell me about your passion around this….”  (I’m finding more and more that when I disagree with someone, we are just as passionate about the same thing, but approaching it through a different set of experiences, assumptions and/or personality. Getting back to the core passion can help mitigate the opinions, tensions and problems.)

    “Tell me why this doesn’t fit/work for you.”

    “What problem are we trying to solve?”

    And this one is my favorite… “I’m working from these assumptions…. what about you?”

    You see, we oftentimes need to actually understand people’s opinions through their own lens in order to help everyone get to the facts.  And pointing out someone is just stating an opinion usually leads us in the opposite way we are trying to get to.  By asking questions so that people realize that what they are saying is an opinion grounded in a set of personal experiences and assumptions often paves the way for the discovery of the actual facts.

    How often do you get fact and opinion confused?


  • 6 Lessons Learned from Rumbling with the Flu

    6 Lessons Learned from Rumbling with the Flu

    The flu knocked me out cold last week.  Then it knocked my kids out. Trying to take care of two people that have the flu while you have the flu just doesn’t work well.  After trying to take care of one of them on his first day down, the other one started running a fever. I felt worse than I had if that was even possible and I looked at my husband and said, “You have to stay home from work tomorrow. I need help.”

    My husband hasn’t missed a day of work in over twelve years due to illness.  His illness or anyone else’s. We could retire now on what he has built up in his sick leave bank if we could actually cash it in and it wasn’t now all rolled into a comprehensive time off bank.

    His response was to proceed to tell me everything that was on his calendar at work the next day. In other words, he was telling me he couldn’t miss work.

    I was not happy. “Reschedule things or send someone else in your place,” I said and went to lay back down.

    I had already postponed a dozen things from the previous two days due to the flu. Everyone was understanding.  I knew the people my husband works with would be understanding too.

    As a matter of fact, he was not feeling well either. He had texted me earlier saying he was sitting in his office with his fleece on and still freezing along with “I can’t quit coughing.”  That day, a colleague told him he didn’t look good and sent him to the employee health clinic to get his temperature taken. He had a low-grade fever but told her “that isn’t really fever” and went to his next meeting.  Where I imagine everyone sat on the opposite side of the room from him.

    So why was he upset about staying a home? And why was he so adamant about pushing through not feeling good himself to go to work?  I knew it wasn’t because he didn’t think he should or didn’t want to help out. He has always helped out at home.

    When I finally asked why he so adamant about going to work (in a text message to him because I was so fuming mad about his reaction), he said, “I just hate it when I have obligations and I don’t fulfill them.”

    My husband’s sense of obligation towards work isn’t isolated to him.  In fact, a survey by NSF International cited at least 26 percent of US workers admitting to going to work sick, with men twice as likely to show up at the office when ill than females.  One Forbes article cited as high as fifty-five percent of American workers going to work when sick.  And showed this infographic breaking it down:


    And If I was capable of a coherent thought during this time, I would have probably sympathized with my husband, also feeling guilt over missing so many work-related meetings and deadlines.

    Nevertheless, he stayed home the next day and we were all able to rest.  But what I’ve learned (and maybe he has too) from a week* of flu hell is this:

    1. No one really cares if you miss work for a day or a week.  In fact, they want you to because 1) they don’t want to catch what you have and 2) they most often genuinely care about your wellbeing.
    2. Speaking of wellbeing, people want to help when you’re sick.  Let them bring you soup, cover the meeting for you, and or drop off play dough for your kids to play with and a bottle of wine for you when you are feeling better. (Yes, soup, play dough and wine, among other things, were left on our porch by sweet friends during this time.)
    3. In general, we put more pressure on ourselves to perform and show up than anyone else does.  You can’t get better if you’re sick worrying about what you may be missing or not getting done.  Rest and then catch up. I was surprised at how much I was able to catch up on in less than a day of work.  My schedule the next week will be jammed with rescheduled meetings, but it will get done.*
    4. And some things don’t actually need to get done.  Being sick helps you eliminate that on your to-do list that you really don’t need to do.  Pretend you are going to have the flu for a week and then decide what you really need to get done and/or attend.
    5. Also, being sick helps you realize that some meetings are really completely unnecessary and/or your involvement in them is.  One meeting I had to miss had three of us from Horizon Point scheduled to attend. It was totally inefficient for all of us to be there. I suspect one of the meetings my husband had to miss that he was most worried about had his boss and three other colleagues of his in attendance. Geez. In the case of my meeting, my two colleagues went and moved things along better than if I had been present.  Getting out of the way sometimes is helpful. Don’t let it take getting the flu to realize that.

    How do you react to work obligations when you’re sick?  

    *So, after writing this thinking I was feeling better, my one week of flu hell turned into two weeks of flu hell with three days spent in the hospital.   Take my advice (that I didn’t take) in number three and seriously rest. I pushed too hard when I was feeling better and it caused a relapse that involved uncontrollable vomiting leading to dehydration, low blood pressure and low potassium levels.   Amidst all of this, my husband was a saint and he didn’t even have to miss that much work because his office was down the elevator and around the hall from my hospital room. ☺