Horizon Point Consulting

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.

Chocolate Anyone? Symbols to Remind You to Be Grateful and Spread Gratefulness

“I’ll be right back,” the lady said to her colleague. “I’ve got to finish giving my chocolate bars away.”

The colleague nods. I’m sitting next to him at a conference breakfast, and I look at him with must have been a look like, “What? Chocolate bars? At breakfast?”

He smiles, and says, “You’ll have to ask her about them.” I could tell he was indirectly saying, it’s her story to tell, not mine. Yes, ask her about the chocolate I will.

I see her hand a chocolate bar to a server and give him a hug.

She finally comes and sits back down and smiles. I, of course say, “So you have to tell me about the chocolate bars.”

I’ve never seen anyone light up so much as she tells me about how her habit with chocolate bars comes from her very first client that manufactures them. Nancy, I learn is her name, and she explained to me that she had come out of a bad job situation in HR management. She said she had been battling breast cancer and her employer was absolutely awful in helping her through this, so she quit.

She interviewed for a position at the chocolate manufacturer, to which the hiring manager told her she was overqualified for the role and that she needed to start her own business in HR compensation consulting.

“I’ll hire your company then to work with us on some compensation issues we are having,” he told her. And he gave her a chocolate bar as she left.

The chocolate giving lady then went on to say that this was the beginning of a new life for her. She did start that business, and five years later, everywhere she goes she gives out chocolate bars to people to show gratitude and to challenge people to reach for their dreams.

She told me, “I didn’t even realize this was my dream until he challenged me to do this.” Grinning again she said, “Now it is only right for me to pass this along.”

So today, I challenge you to take a lesson from Nancy and figure out what your own chocolate bar is. Then, figure out a way to not to only share it with others, but more importantly, share it to constantly remind yourself of what and who you have to be thankful for and to pass that on.

Like this post, you may also like:

Love Lives Here a new book out by Maria Goff. Maria and her husband, Bob, who wrote Love Does, give out real keys to their own home as their chocolate bars. This is a way to show that love resides in their home and is therefore something to be shared.

Count Your Problems and Be Thankful

Leaders Start With Gratitude

March 21, 2017
Rounding- It’s Not Just for Doctors

By guest blogger: Steve Graham

“Rounding” is a term most people associate with doctors. Doctors make rounds to check on patients and engage with those involved in patient care. This practice has existed for decades in healthcare. In most business environments rounding is not as common, but it should be!

In his best selling book, Hardwiring Excellence, Quint Studer comments on how leaders tend to be task-oriented, however, most people desire a deeper level of connection. According to Studer, almost 40% of staff leaves due to a poor relationship with their supervisor or manager (Studer 2003). One great thing about rounding is that it’s not expensive, and can help with employee engagement and talent retention.

Leaders who hide in their offices, and are rarely visible, are missing prime opportunities to strengthen their relationships with team members. “When leaders round, it is key for leaders to recognize the employees’ needs. Rounding is powerful in meeting the basic needs of your team.” (Studer, 2003) Rounding is not a micro-managing tactic, it is a people strategy. Exceptional leaders understand the value of connecting with their teams, seeing them in action, and being visible in good and bad times.

When I was in high school, I witnessed rounding first hand, even before it was a popular people management topic. This leader, who was a hospital administrator, started most days with visiting every unit of his facility. Ok, I know what you are thinking “every morning!” Yes, it is time consuming, but the return on your investment is worth it. You do not have to do this every morning, but at least once per week. On one of these mornings, I was invited to round with him. It made a lasting impression on me. Seeing the staff faces light up as he visited each floor, I noticed a genuine sense of happiness as they saw him approaching. Rounding was as routine to this leader as brushing his teeth. When he was not able to round, the void was obvious. Team members would call his office to make sure he was o.k. They cared-because he cared.

If you are not rounding, start! Be authentic in your approach. Do not approach rounding with a “to-do” list or formal agenda. Let the interactions come naturally. You are rounding to observe needs not activity. Part of leadership is establishing trust. Rounding is beneficial in breaking down barriers and becoming more connected to your team.

About the author: Steve Graham serves as Vice President for Marketing, HR Business Partner, and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive & professional coaching, health care administration, and strategic human resource management.

He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation, and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development, and International Coach Federation. LinkedIn.com/in/hstevegraham

March 14, 2017
4 Reasons Why Job Hopping is a Good Thing
In my first gig out of college as a corporate recruiter, I had responsibility for the grind of hiring classes of customer service reps. Volume recruiting at its finest.   When I was trained by a co-worker on the company’s process for screening applicants, my fellow team member told me that the process used to include screening people out who were “job hoppers”- those that shown through their resume- couldn’t seem to stay at one job for more than a year or two at a time.

Then the lawyers got involved and told us we couldn’t screen people out for that. I understood both sides. On the view of screening those job hoppers out, the company invested a substantial amount of time in training quality customer service reps. If someone had been shown to not stay with a place for longer than a year or two through their past behavior, (and past behavior predicts future performance had been drilled into my head from an interviewing and screening perspective) the company was making bad decisions hiring those that might not even stay through the entire training period.   And, although rule follower I am not, I could see why the lawyers told us not to. Whisper potential adverse impact and you cut it out.

But now I see another reason why screening people based on their “job hopping” isn’t a best practice.   In today’s workplace, average length of service is declining, hovering at less than five years for all workers. People change jobs quite often, and often for advancement and career growth reasons.

Now when I look at someone’s resume and see they have been in the same job for more than 8-10 years, I am more inclined to think, what is wrong with you? Why have you moved up, done more, gained more experience?

A quote I saw on LinkedIn a couple of days ago said something along the lines of, “What we used to call job hopping is now called career experimentation.”

Whether you think the wording is all bull or not, there some potential advantages to hiring a job hopper:
1. Diversity of experiences, which could lead to an ability to innovate and to contribute in a way that the company may not have thought of before.
2. Indication of motivation and drive. Because many people job hop in order to advance in pay and/or responsibility, job hopping could show a greater level of drive than someone who is content to stay in one role at one company.
3. Ability to find cultural fit. Because job hoppers have seen different work environments, they are better able to compare and contrast environments to know what environments are the best fit for them and seek out those environments and opportunities.
4. A social capital advantage. People who have worked at a variety of places are bound to know more people. And as social capital replaces human capital (who you know and what they collectively know as opposed to just what you know) as the biggest asset an employee can provide, having those who are well networked on your team can lead to better outcomes.
As an employer, you’ve got to weigh your opportunity cost as to what a job hopper may bring to your table. Considering the amount of time and training it takes for them to be a contributing member of your team, not to mention recruitment/replacement costs for particular roles, verses the above advantages is worth the analysis.

Do you love or hate job hoppers?

Like this post? You may also like:

Millennials Stop Apologizing for your Job Hopping
February 21, 2017
Don’t Set Goals if You Don’t (Have a) Plan to Act
There’s some great methods out there for setting goals:

Are Your Goals Comfortable, Delusional or Somewhere in Between?

A Holistic Goal Setting Method

A Simple Goal Setting Method

And based on how a method’s strengths and weaknesses relate to your own personality and preferences, you can find a method out there that is right for you.

But don’t do it if you don’t:
1. Have a plan to act
2. Plan to act
Goal attainment doesn’t happen through osmosis. It happens through a process I like to look at this way:

MISSION/PURPOSE -> GOALS -> ACTION PLANS -> TASKS -> BEHAVIORS

Breaking it down this way begins with the big picture and ends with the thing that causes the achievement of the big picture- every single thing you actually do or how you behave.

To illustrate this, I’ll walk you through how we do this by planning as a company on a quarterly basis. A road map might help:

The Annual Goal: Set one BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) as Jim Collins calls it that is difficult but not delusional. Our annual goal is always a revenue-based goal that considers a particular profit margin to achieve within that revenue goal.

The Action Areas: These 2-5 areas will drive your annual goal. In our case, they are lines of business focus for us. For example, one is our Career Development Facilitator (CDF) line of business that has been a line of business for us for several years; another is a new, niche area within our current HR consulting business; and the final one is a focus on a new line of business that we have never pursued before (although we get calls about it often).

The Action Steps: These steps are broken down by quarter. You start DOING something here instead of just deciding. For example, in our CDF action area, we are focusing on: 1) acting to pursue business in a new state that is ripe for the training because it is required for certain positions 2) use the data we have gathered from past participants to develop an off-shoot course and 3) exceed expectations in our current delivery of programs. You see that two are focused on growth and one is focused on what truly drives our growth- delivering a quality product day in and out. We almost neglected this last one, but if we did, it would totally throw off how we round out the last step, which is:

Setting Tasks: This is where the rubber meets the road, and in the case of our business, this is how we determine what we do each day. We typically set tasks on a weekly basis to drive our time management for the week.

We are transitioning this year in how we do this process. We have been using a simple Excel spreadsheet that catalogues tasks by our company values (which inadvertently links nicely with action areas), but given our company’s growth and hopeful continual growth, we are switching to a more advanced tool to help us with this, and that is program called Insightly.

This process may seem complicated, but it actually isn’t. The first two steps took us about 30 minutes to create when we sat down for our annual planning meeting. Of course, having good data to help you do this makes it much quicker and easier.

The action steps for two quarters took about another 30 minutes of discussion. We used to plan out all four quarters then realized things change so much, that doing the last two quarters of the year too far in advance was a waste of time because they depended so much on the results of the first two quarters worth of effort.

Our task setting takes about 30 minutes a week to do and, although we are very much a company of hard and fast paper and pencil list makers, we are hoping we can transition this into Insightly with ease and make it a habit that ends up taking less time.

If you are more interested in this process, email us here and we’ll send you the mapping tool to get you started.

Happy planning and doing!
February 7, 2017
Are Your Goals Comfortable, Delusional or Somewhere in Between?
We’ve been talking about methods for goal setting here at The Point Blog to set us all up for a successful 2017. The last “method” I want to share really isn’t a method, but great food for thought for considering goals and setting them.

It comes from Michael Hyatt who has most recently put out a course to help people prepare for 2017 called 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever.

As a guest on the Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn, he discussed the limitations and possibilities of making 2017 the best year yet. In thinking about these things, he encourages considering whether your goals are in the:
1. Comfort Zone- Where a small, incremental improvement is being sought.
2. Discomfort Zone- Where there is some doubt and uncertainty about how you are going to accomplish the goal. It makes you sweat.
3. Delusional Zone- Where you don’t have the capacity, talents, etc. to achieve something.
Hyatt says, “All the great stuff in life happens in the discomfort zone.”

As I think about this, I think in most cases we set goals in the comfort zone. It’s something to put some effort towards so we feel like we are doing something, but it isn’t nearly challenging enough. It’s something we know we can do. For example, setting our company revenue goal at the same level it was last year, or maybe even a small, 5-10% increase, is a comfort zone goal. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. Losing 10 pounds when you really need to lose 30 is a comfort zone goal. You’ve probably lost those same 10 pounds before. Over and over again. For myself, I realized for fitness goals, running a marathon is a comfort zone goal. I already know I can do it. Several years ago this was a discomfort zone goal.

Discomfort makes us sweat. And sweat may be uncomfortable at first, but it feels oh so good when we actually expend the effort to produce it. In business terms, we’ve averaged between 5-35% year over year growth since beginning in 2011. We’re shooting bigger this year, setting a goal closer to 50% growth for 2017. This makes me sweat, and wonder how we are going to do it, and realize it is going to take additional resources of time and manpower to do it, but I’m tired of being comfortable. For fitness, running a sub four hour marathon would be a goal at this level for me (this isn’t on my 2017 goal list, though). I don’t know if I could run that fast for 26.2 miles. I would have to shave about forty-five seconds a mile off my PR time to do it, but if I put the sweat equity in, it is possible.

Delusional is our business being a multi-million dollar business in 2017. We just aren’t there yet, haven’t planned for it, and don’t have the service line or the time in just a year to develop the service and/or product lines to get there. And that’s okay. I will never qualify for the Boston Marathon, or at least not in the age bracket I am currently in. I would have to run a 3 hour and 35 minute marathon to do it. Cutting 45 seconds per mile off my time may be doable, but cutting 45 minutes off my total time just isn’t going to happen. The good Lord didn’t make me to be an elite runner, and that’s okay too.

So as you consider your goals for 2017, I hope they are on the border of anxiety because this is where peak performance happens. And peak performance is fun.

Sweat it out in 2017, friends.

If you like this, take a look back at our 2017 Goal Setting Series:

Methods to Madness of Goal Setting

A Simple Goal Setting Method

A Holistic Goal Setting Method
January 31, 2017