By Kris Dunn It’s one of the unwritten rules of management. It’s also one of the hardest things for new managers to wrap their heads around. “It’s not your fault, but it’s your problem.” Let’s deconstruct that a bit. New managers were often very high performing individual contributors (ICs). The great thing about being an IC is that you only have to worry about one person – and that person is you. But your performance as an IC convinced us that you’d make a good manager of people. For the most part that’s true. One point that sneaks up on
“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.” What departments and/or managers do people in your company clamor to get into? What drives this clamor? I’ve seen it before. No one wants to work in finance, but everyone wants to be in marketing. Or everyone is trying to figure out a way to work for manager A instead of having to report to manager B. What is driving the popularity of the department or the person, and should we pay attention to it? Is the number of people who want to
We’re talking about measuring leadership here at Horizon Point this month. In an increasingly prove-it-to-me through data world, one of the things that we don’t do a good job of measuring, and I wonder if we ever really will, is leadership. It’s so complex. I think part of the reason we have trouble measuring it is because we have trouble defining it. What is leadership? What is great leadership? Most people will tell you that leadership is some form of influence. It’s getting work done through others. True, but what do we want to accomplish because leadership is at work?
We, at Horizon Point, love a good book or two. Here are our recommendations for you to consider for your 2016 reading list and/or ideas as gifts to give this holiday season: Mary Ila’s recommendations: For help shaping your New Year’s resolution: Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith. Goldsmith, one of the best executive coaches in the world, helps you understand that most of self-improvement isn’t necessarily about starting something, it is about stopping something. He gives a simple method for analyzing and measuring our daily behavior in order to see positive habits form which lead to results.We use this process in our leadership
My take on performance management is quite different than it was 10 years ago. I once worked for a company that basically rewarded all employees for their continued employment, and performance was not really taken into consideration when we all received a 5% raise. Regardless of how fabulous of a job I was doing or how not-so-fabulous my co-worker in the cubicle over was doing, we both received the same reward. This was not motivating me to be a better employee nor was it motivating for my mediocre colleague. Fast forward well over a decade. Not only has the world