Personal Development Archives

2 Things to Do to Address HR’s Biggest Pain Points

We had a great time and learned a lot at the Alabama SHRM Conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s always great to network with colleagues and learn from some of the best in our profession. We try to make this type of event part of our professional development game plan.

In order to learn even more at the conference, we asked the professionals who stopped by our booth to complete a short survey where they identified their biggest pain points in HR.

Here’s how the results shook out (subscribers click through to see chart):

While there was no stand-out pain point above all the others, the highest scoring area was compliance training at 31%. Next in line were leadership training and employee development at 24%. In trying to make some sense out of these trends from the additional comments people added, two key things emerged:

HR professionals’ biggest pain points are the things that impact the business in the long term. When you add it all up, so many of the things are people development issues- employee development, training of all varieties and succession planning- all critically important, but….
The pain points aren’t being impacted for one of two reasons:
1. Lack of buy-in from upper management
2. Lack of time to address

So how do we address the things that are keeping us from impacting the important things? I found some insights from the conference:

There was so much focus at the conference on HR needing and wanting to be a “strategic business partner” and wanting a “seat at the table”. This ties to number 1 here. The gist of how to get a seat at the table and therefore buy-in from upper management was you gotta prove it. The best way to prove it is through data that shows the impact on the bottom line. In one of Jennifer McClure’s she focused on utilizing data to help make better human capital decisions, not to track metrics that have happened in the past. For example, she used data to get her boss to buy-in to an HRIS system that was needed.For example, one professional noted that the biggest pain point he/she has is succession planning. Comments he/she made tied to this issue went something like this… “We think the leaders that have been here 10 years will stay another 10 and even though I know they all won’t; there is no buy-in at the top to start planning in case people at the senior management level do exit for whatever reason”.Want to get senior management’s attention in order to get buy-in to start planning? Put in front of them the replacement cost of someone at that level and the lost time in productivity due to someone at that level exiting unexpectedly. Most cost to replace stats (SHRM has some good resources on this) show a 100-200% of base salary cost and that doesn’t even factor in lost time due to productivity.
In terms of addressing lack of time to address key HR pain point areas, two insights showed up from the conference during Dawn Hrdlica-Burke’s lunch keynote on HR needing a revival. Some simple, yet profound insights were offered as methods to get rid of the “stuff” and to devote time to purpose and addressing your greatest HR pain points.

Get control of your email.
A great guy was sitting next to me at the lunch. When she mentioned getting control of your email, he leaned over and said, “I’ve started checking email ONLY at Noon and at 4 pm and it has increased my productivity dramatically.” I knew he wasn’t joking when we emailed after the conference about getting together for some business development reasons and I got an automatic reply from him stating that he only checks email at Noon and 4, and he would respond to me during one of those times. Well done! What is he doing during with that increased productivity time? My hope would be he is addressing some of those key pain point areas that impact the bottom line.
Delegate.

Once you’ve maximized some productive time by not letting your email control you, you can either delegate 1) the stuff that is keeping you from getting to your critical HR pain point areas (and a pain point may actually be one of these) or you can 2) delegate the pain point area. For example, if compliance training is your number one pain point area that you don’t have enough time to get to (and I would tell you this isn’t a strategic priority, it is just a get it done and check if off thing), then find a quality vendor that can deliver this training for you in a way that leads to more efficiency. But wait you say, “I can’t do that, it will cost money and I’m back to my issue of lack of buy-in”. See number 1 above. Prove the value of outsourcing it to with data. You know you’ve found a good vendor when they can provide you with this data to prove it.

We at Horizon Point spend a lot of time focusing on helping clients address those strategic pain point areas that are critical to employee development. Contact us if you need to consider how you might bring in help to address those priorities that lead to a more engaged workforce. And we can help you with the data to prove it’s worth it. An example here.

What is one thing you can do today to address a pain point?

June 2, 2015

10 Books Leaders Need to be Reading

Leaders are readers. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow as a leader is to read about leadership and take the knowledge gained from your reading and apply it.

When asked about the best leadership books out there, here are the ones I recommend.

Great leaders lead themselves first. You can’t lead others if you can’t leader yourself through strong personal habits. The best personal leadership book I have found is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Leaders are influencers. For a timeless classic on influence, read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Leaders are Empathetic. Read what I believe to be the best fiction ever written. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Even if you read it as a student, it’s a good one to re-read, with a particular focus on the leadership lessons to apply. Also check out The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People by Kevin Leman
A leader customizes his/her style based on whom he/she is leading. To understand situational leadership in order to customize, read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard.
Leaders understand how to run an organization. For insights on what makes an organization successful, read Good to Great by Jim Collins. For the entrepreneurial leader wanting to understand how to run a great start-up and/or scale and grow one, read Scale by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel and EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey.
Leaders know the most important decisions they make are people decisions. To know how to hire the best, read Who?: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
Leaders know that once they answer the Who question they need to be able to explain the Why to them. To understand the importance of Why, read Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.
Although answering Why? takes you a long way in motivating others, for more insights on motivation and building people and teams, read The Leadership Challenge byJames Kouzes and Barry Posner and Boundaries for Leaders by Henry Cloud.
Leaders learn from the success and failures of others. Pick up a biography or memoir of a leader. Some good ones are: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and the biographies of different presidents and visionaries by David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose.
Leaders have some good reference books to turn to when they need tools or templates to help them succeed. Keep a copy of the The Successful Manager’s Handbook on your desk for this purpose.

Which leadership books have had the most impact on you?

Like this post? You may also like:

Horizon Point Book Review 2014

Horizon Point Book Review 2013

Harvard Business Review: 11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read

May 5, 2015

4 Tips for reconciling the irony of stress and productivity in the workplace

What’s impacting performance in the workplace more than anything else these days? Many people would say it is stress, which is pushing some to the point of full-blown mental health issues.

Consider how Graeme Cowan, author of Back From the Brink, describes this reality in the Fall 2014 issue of Global Corporate Xpansion Magazine:

“In a hypercompetitive global economy, organizations must be ‘on’ 24/7. Yet this scramble for perpetual performance is taking a harsh toll on employees. They relentlessly push to get ahead and stay ahead- working longer days, emailing after hours, taking fewer vacations- often with little acknowledgement for their efforts. The result is a workforce that’s not just disengaged (Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report revealed that 70 percent of U.S. employees fall into this category), but also stressed and depressed.

And here’s the irony. The constant hustle aimed at increasing productivity and profitability actually decreases both.”[i]

So what should you do as an employer to combat this irony?

Assess both the level of stress and the causes of stress in your workforce. Developing and administering an organizational survey to assess the level of stress in employees can help you effectively develop a plan to reduce stress levels at the workplace through policies, practices and programs. You can’t know what to change if you don’t know what the sources of issues are. In addition, if you do put a plan in place, you can’t know if and how you’ve improved if you don’t have baseline measurements to compare.
Provide stress management training to your staff. Providing stress management training to your employees can help increase productivity and profitability in the workplace. Hopefully you have committed to assessing the stress level of your organization (see #1) and have a skilled training provider that can take that information and develop a customized stress management program for your organization.
Analyze your talent management processes, particularly your selection process. Does it assess people for organizational and job fit? For more reading on this, check out an article I published inHR Alabama– see page 16. If people aren’t aligned with the organizational purpose and the job purpose, stress is bound to ensue, leading to decreased productivity.
Design policies, procedures and tools that allow people to work smarter not harder and that put controls in place to keep people from falling victim to the toll that working 24/7 takes.

For more food for thought on this see:

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

Should Employers Ban Email after Work Hours?

Stress Leave

Need more help as an employee or employer to manage stress? Download Stress Management: How to Deal with Stress in the Short and Long Term

December 9, 2014

Impacting the performance of employees when you just want them to show up, do their job and not complain

“I just want them to show up and do their job and not complain,” said one burned-out manager to me not long ago. He was struggling with how to motivate the performance of several members of his staff, and in his exhaustion to try to be a leader, had adopted a mindset of something far from leadership.

So how do leaders influence and impact the performance of employees when sometimes we just want them to show up and do their job and not complain?

1. Adopt a Leadership Mindset. First, a mindset of leadership needs to be present. Leadership is grounded in seeing people as assets and realizing that the greatest responsibility of the role is to invest in people to drive their performance. This means spending most of our time as leaders with those we are trying to develop, not wishing they would disappear into the oblivion get their work done and not bother us. My manager client is never going to be able to drive performance in his employees long-term if his mindset about what his role is doesn’t change to one of leadership.

2. Get over your own burn-out. You can’t motivate performance if you’re burned out yourself. My client was tired. On top of dealing with employee issues that were unpleasant, he was trying to run a business, meet client needs and juggle a never-ending myriad of tasks. The personnel issues were just another thing that he was barely spending enough time on to be able to see any results, and his people know from his actions that they are being seen as just another annoyance in a never ending cycle of being hopelessly behind and burned-out. If you aren’t working smarter, not harder, why would they? Part of a leadership mindset is setting an example. If you are burned out and annoyed, you’re probably complaining and that’s why they are complaining too.

If you are burned out:

Take some time to regroup; get away if you have to and unplug.
Manage your time. Consider how you can kill two-birds with one stone by empowering your people through delegation.
Get rid of stuff that doesn’t matter- say no. And saying no to investing time your employees shouldn’t be one of the no’s on your list. Saying no to things that aren’t important leads you to be able to say yes to your employees, who are important.

The bottom-line is leaders impact the performance of their employees by the example they create. If you want people to show up, do their job and not complain, then do the same. Adopt a leadership mindset and find ways to get over the burn-out and negativity you may be experiencing. If you can’t, then maybe you’re in the wrong role.

You’ll find that if you empower employees through your positive mindset and results, you’ll get much more than just a group of non-complainers who do their job. You’ll get a group of people who are engaged in their work and drive productivity. Start with yourself and it will rub off on those you seek to lead.

October 31, 2014

How Personality Assessment Can Help You Be A Better Leader

“This is why I’m not married anymore,” said a participant in a recent leadership training class. She was partly kidding, but it was obvious that the results of her personality assessment, which were being used to launch the leadership training series we were conducting for her company, had struck a cord.

Her personality assessment showed that she was a highly dominant, take charge, get it done kind of person. These characteristics had served her well in her role in finance with the organization, but she realized that maybe her personality had impacted the success of her marriage.

In another conversation with the director of a college career center, concerns were expressed about students’ ability to know themselves- their strengths and areas for development- and take this knowledge into the workplace in order to succeed. In designing a leadership workshop for them, our first approach was to implement a personality assessment to help these student leaders with the self-awareness they seem to so desperately need.

As we’ve often said, self-awareness is the first step in establishing yourself as a leader. Although it isn’t the only way, personality assessment can help with this self-awareness and then provide a framework for building interpersonal relationships, providing feedback, delegating and a host of other leadership issues.

Here are some assessment tools/vendors we use based on client needs (Note: It’s important to know which personality assessment is right to use based on your organization’s needs. You should define the needs first- are you wanting to facilitate teambuilding, leadership coaching or training, make better hiring decisions, etc.- then pick the best assessment, not the other way around.):

Hogan Assessments

DiSC Assessments

Tools from Assessment Associates International

Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

How as a personality assessment helped you at work or in your personal life?

September 26, 2014