Category: Personal Development

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for stories and best practices for personal wellness and wellbeing, skills improvement, and  more.

  • Leaders, Focus on Moving your Middle- Play Offense, Not Defense

    Leaders, Focus on Moving your Middle- Play Offense, Not Defense

    Let’s pretend you have a performance appraisal system that rates people on a scale of 1-7.  One being the worst, seven being rock-star status.   You have ten direct reports and you have honestly and accurately rated them all (we’re assuming a perfect world here, bear with me).

    Here’s the breakdown of where people fall:

    You have three people in the 1-3 range.

    You have six people in the 4-6 range.

    And you have one lone rock star at 7.

    Which group should you focus most of your energy on in the coming year?

    If customer satisfaction research leads us to any insight on this, you would ignore the bottom three and focus almost all your effort onto moving the six in the middle towards your rock star.

    According to the 2016 Forrester Research U.S. Customer Experience Index  that is described in The Power of Moments, “If you elevate the positives (those in the 4-6 range) you’ll earn about nine times more revenue than if you focus on eliminating the negatives (those in the 1-3 range).”

    But the middle majority typically gets less attention than anyone else.

    The research showed that most business executives focused on eliminating the negatives to their financial peril.   I think most leaders do this too.  They spend so much of their time and energy on those that aren’t cutting the mustard to the detriment of those worth the effort in moving to the rock star category. (more on how to move them in our next post).

     

    Don’t let the urgency of your bottom- the vocal minority that always seems to be screaming the loudest- keep you from focusing on the important middle majority that is worth your time and effort in investing.

     

  • Networking Authentically

    Networking Authentically

    As we continue to explore authenticity, let’s consider authenticity in networking. As we all know, networking is essential for the job seeker. I recently found a survey that claimed 85 percent of jobs are found through networking. So, how can we network, bring our “A” game and continue to be authentic?

    1. Develop an elevator speech. The key is storytelling. Be honest and be you! Check out a previous post from the Point Blog for tips: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/blog3/item/networking-during-the-holiday-season/.
    2. If you are attending a formal networking event (such as a job fair), do your research ahead of time. Find out what companies will be there and determine which of those companies may be a good fit for you; this is key – you want to find companies who value what you value. Check out their websites to find core values, mission statements and more.
    3. Follow up with your network. Within a week, reach out to your new contact(s). Do your best to recall something memorable about your conversation and bring this up in your call, email or note. Thank them for the opportunity to talk and invite them to lunch or coffee.
    4. Utilize LinkedIn. Prior to networking, create an authentic profile. Then, connect with your new contacts.

    For more ideas, check out: Top 5 Networking Tips For Job Seekers.

  • How to Train Leaders to Act with Courage

    How to Train Leaders to Act with Courage

    I remember when I got feedback one time after a leadership training session that the training needed to include more role-playing.

    I hate role-playing.

    Or at least participating in it, so I assumed everyone else hates the exercise of pretending too.

    But besides hating it, I thought there were other learning methods that could emulate the same type of result that role-playing could, so I avoided it.

    But when I think about trying to coach and teach people through critical leadership moments- those that require courage- role-playing, or at least practicing what needs to be done may be the best method of learning short of doing it and just seeing how it goes.

    Practice or “preloading a response” as it is called in The Power of Moments, is particularly important in situations where courage is required.  This is because people “often know what the right thing to do is.  The hard part is acting on that judgment.”

    Practice can lead to positive outcomes in particular with certain leadership situations like standing or speaking up for what is right, praising someone (most people think they do this enough that practice isn’t needed, but if you watch people in most organizations and leadership positions, it isn’t done nearly enough) and or reprimanding or terminating someone.

     

    This practice of practicing creates a how to do it instead of a what to do guide.

    I’m reminded of how important this may be in trying to help our seven year old become a leader.

    He’s gotten into trouble this spring more frequently than usual.  Part of this has come through our conscious decision to allow him more freedom.  We are trying to resist the urge to be helicopter parents. Beyond our immediate watchful eyes, he’s made some bad choices and acted in a way that has led to consequences.

    We typically handle this behavior by telling him he isn’t doing the right thing according to our family guiding principles: 1) Be kind 2) Be honest. We’ve found that most all kid infractions and for that matter, almost all human infractions, can be summed up in a violation of one or both of these things.

    Then after this talk of explaining that he has done wrong, we punish him.

    But in getting feedback for ourselves and from others, we hear, “He knows what’s right and wrong.”

    He just doesn’t seem to know how to do it.

    Especially when he seems to be influenced more than most by what other people think of him especially boys his age.  And Lord knows the seven year old boy brain isn’t a fully developed thing.

    So as my husband and I have talked about this, we’ve started to see how we might role play with him through situations he may find himself in where he is tempted to violate being kind and/or being honest.

    Moments that require courage.  Courage to go against the crowd.

    So, for example, before he leaves our house to go play in the neighborhood or start his school day, we don’t remind him to be kind and honest, we walk through a situation where he might be challenged to do it.

    For example:

    “Pretend I just made fun of (insert name of someone in his class) by calling them fat.  What would you do next?”

    “Your teacher just told you to put down the iPad and start on your math assignment. What will you do next?”

    “You knock on (Insert name of friend here) door and he isn’t home.  What will you do next?”

    Based on his responses we continue the role-play and what if dialogue.

    The responses to these questions may sound like no brainers, but to him they often aren’t.   Just like how to fire someone may be a no brainer to someone seasoned at doing so, but to someone who hasn’t ever done it, it’s not.

    The scenarios are endless in his seven year old world and in the world of leadership, and there is no way for us to cover them all.  But by bringing things up before they happen and allowing time for him to think through what he will do- “preloading a response” we hope he will be enabled to know how to act with courage and kindness and honesty, instead of having to deal with the consequences that come because he simply hasn’t practiced to make perfect.

     

    How do you help leaders practice the hard stuff?  The stuff in which courage is made?

  • Authenticity and Authentic Leadership

    Authenticity and Authentic Leadership

    I just read an article about authenticity and authentic leadership that is going to stick with me. The big takeaway:

    “See, authentic leadership is all about self-awareness, positivity, solid ethics, measured transparency and personal development; far more nuanced than just being ‘real’.”

    – The Difference Between Authenticity and Authentic Leadership by Morgan Browning, President and COO, Emergenetics International

    To read the full article click here.

  • How to Know When to Fire the Prima Donna

    How to Know When to Fire the Prima Donna

    How do you know when to fire the prima donna? You know one when you see one. Before you can define exactly what a prima donna is, you can name one. In the flesh. And they have most likely made your work life hell at some point or another.

    Prima Donnanoun: “a vain or undisciplined person who finds it difficult to work under direction or as a part of a team.”

    Merriam-Webster

    What do you do when faced with one?  Or, how do you get leadership to realize there is one in your midst?  

    For a variety of positive reasons that have nothing to do with prima donnas, I love 360° assessment and feedback tools.  If you need to spot and prove you’ve got one in your midst, a good 360° and a person’s response to their 360° feedback will help you nail one.   (Any type of formal or informal feedback mechanism can work, but a 360° gives you quantifiable data.)

    Here’s what you do and the signs you look for along the way:

    1 Give a 360° assessment and/or encourage leadership/HR to administer them. Make sure it includes a self-assessment and a 360° (peers, subordinates, boss) view. If you need some ideas on good ones, email me. You can also read our case study for Total Employee Engagement with a client that used 360s successfully.

    2. Look at the results of how the person rates himself or herself compared to the aggregate of the way others rate them.

    Sign one:  Prima donnas have an inflated view of themselves.  In other words, a prima donna will rate themselves as higher than their raters on almost all if not all dimensions of the assessment.

    3. Look at the results of the aggregate average of the way others rated them compared to the sample/norm average.

    Sign two: Prima donnas have lower aggregate ratings from their peers than the sample average.  In other words, prima donna’s raters rate them an average of 2.6, let’s say on a dimension and the sample norm is 3.5 (on a five point scale). You see this across most if not all dimensions of the assessment.

    4. Have a feedback session with the potential prima donna to explain and discuss the results.  Up until the feedback point, you really don’t know if you have a prima donna based on sign 1 and 2. You may just have someone who is incompetent either in skill or will. But you have real trouble when….

    Sign three:  A prima donna doesn’t own their results.

    Sign four:  A prima donna places blame on everyone except themselves for the less than stellar results.  It could be another person, a group of people, the organization, or heck, they could blame it on the weather, but they take ZERO ownership.

    The Coup de Gras:  A Prima Donna (or maybe we’ve crossed over into clinical narcissism by this point) expresses a level of PRIDE in their results. You may hear something like “Well this shows why I’ve been successful.” Or “This is what I’ve had to do to be successful.”

    Once you get to Sign Three, you know you don’t have any choice but to fire the person.  Because when behavior isn’t owned, you can’t do anything about it.  The person has declared they are uncoachable. Sign Four and the Coup De Gras are just icing on the cake.

    The prima donna will continue to reek their toxic nature to the organization and continue to be proud about it because you did nothing about it, even with the quantitative feedback on it.

    Furthermore, those who rated them will also be punished because you did nothing with their feedback. You may even be showing them that to be successful, the prima donna is in fact right. It does take behavior like theirs to be successful. That’s when you know you’ve lost the game – empowering toxic behavior.

    Do you have prima donnas in your midst?  What do you do to diagnosis and deal with the challenges they bring?