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.

  • Boundaries & Rules around Working Successfully from Home

    Boundaries & Rules around Working Successfully from Home

    It’s Sunday afternoon as I sit at my computer and plan for the week ahead. I’ve been working from home for almost a decade now. My boundaries and rules have certainly changed over the past several years. As with most things, experience is the only way to do something well. This week, I’m sharing my top tips for setting boundaries around successfully working from home.

    When I came on board with HPC, it was way before Covid, and remote work was not super common, so I discovered what worked and didn’t work through trial and error. During those early days, my children were in grade school & it was ideal for me to work when the house was quiet, so I did that. But I also constantly checked email and it wasn’t uncommon for me to work well into the night, even on the weekend. This was a huge shift for me, coming from a typical 8 to 5 role. No one was asking or expecting me to be available 24-7. My natural helper, people pleasing personality dictated my schedule those days.

    With several remote working years under my belt now, I feel so much more comfortable with the flexible schedule I can create every week. Here are three ways I set boundaries and rules to successfully work from home:

    1. I create a list, several (actually). At the end of each week, I create a daily list for the next week. Prioritizing 3 things that I need to accomplish each day works best. The daily list includes work responsibilities, but I also include personal responsibilities. For example, some form of exercise (ideally taking a walk outdoors) is on there most days, weather permitting. 
    2. I plan deep work early in the day and early in my week. I do my best to protect my Fridays. I make sure the most important tasks and meetings happen early in the week and day if possible. I recommend checking out the book,  When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, which helped me discover the time of day that I’m most productive.
    3. Time blocking is so very helpful. Within my list(s), I often estimate how long I plan to work on each project or task. I often add these “time blocks” to my calendar to remind myself as well as to share with my coworkers what I have planned or the day and week. You can read more about time blocking in this article from Lifehack.org – How to Start Time Blocking to Get More Done.

    Are you and or your team working remotely? What are your tips? 

    Here are a few more articles from The Point Blog you might want to check out:

    SPECIAL FEATURE! How to Put the “Home” in Office

    Creating a Work Space that Brings People Together

    Book Review of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

  • Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog. 

    Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring everybody on the manufacturing floor with her big, bad, scary HR presence…until she just started talking to people. Every day, she walks the floor and speaks to each individual person with a smile and a “good morning”. She talks to people without needing anything from them. Now, the employees respect her and see her as a valued resource, not a spooky monster. This is “relationshipping”, and it’s critical for workplace wellness and employee engagement. Just like Ivey trained herself to be a relationshipper (and indirectly trained others), you can train yourself by practicing these strategies:  

    Today, I talked with 50 program managers about “Creating a Culture of Radical Candor”, i.e. Kim Scott’s framework of caring personally about people and being willing to challenge them directly. The spooky version: instead of tricking people into believing you care about them (manipulative insincerity) or treating people like besties (ruinous empathy), let’s train ourselves and those around us to practice radical candor, or graceful accountability as we call it at HPC. 

    Have stories about effective employee engagement? We’d love to hear them! Send us a note at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.

  • Office Space- Does Design Really Matter?

    Office Space- Does Design Really Matter?

    In the second paragraph of Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmul, Ed describes the offices of Pixar like this: 

    It has well thought-out patterns of entry and egress that encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate.  Outside, there is a soccer field, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, and a six-hundred seat amphitheater. Sometimes visitors misunderstand the place, thinking it’s fancy for fancy’s sake. What they miss is that the unifying idea for this building isn’t luxury but community. Steve (Jobs) wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate.

    In a whole book dedicated to explaining how to create creativity, why would the design of the office come up in the second paragraph? Is it that important?  Is it even important now given a post-COVID world where the research did show most of us can be just as productive if not more not at an office? 

    There is varying research on what type of office space, if any at all, helps produce various business outcomes. But Catmul’s emphasis on design points to something. Where and how you work should take into consideration your purpose. Considering what you want to accomplish in a space is the first consideration in design, and in Steve Jobs case, the design of Pixar was specific to the purpose of enhancing collaboration because this leads to creative output. 

    So as you consider the debates on how to design an office, or simply allow people the ability to work from wherever they want, consider your purpose. What are you trying to foster? Odds are, one single office design can’t foster every purpose that creates meaningful outcomes.  

    In the next few posts, we will focus on some things to consider as you design thoughtful places to work. Stay tuned! 

  • Grown men in tank tops usually aren’t my jam, but… can they teach us something about leading?

    Grown men in tank tops usually aren’t my jam, but… can they teach us something about leading?

    Grown men in tank tops usually aren’t my jam.

    So when Pat McAfee made his appearance on Gameday this year to replace a former Georgia football player that looked really good in a suit (more my jam), I was like what the heck? 

    I watched him for a minute, determined he was there to sensationalize, pull in a different type of audience, and create some new dynamic I wasn’t into. I thought I’d lost a little bit of respect for the Saturday morning football institution, even if Corso is still there picking his favorite team, glorified mascot head and all. 

    But my husband keeps showing me clips of McAfee’s show.  (To note, tank tops aren’t my husband’s jam either.  He’s even more buttoned up than I am when it comes to stuff like that.) 

    “You’ve got to watch this,” he’s said at least three times to me in the past two weeks. Usually when he says this, it is because he’s watched it and he knows I am going to take some organizational psychology/leadership lessons from it and run with it. 

    As I’ve watched, the popular host isn’t really sensationalizing anything- unless you take into account his frequent foul language- which is also, you guessed it, not my jam.  He’s teaching leadership and organizational psychology 101.  Lessons I try to teach myself and others each day.  Like: 

    • “Take care of your people.” Pay people what they are worth. You trying to short change everyone around you only leads to you short changing yourself. 
    • Stand up for what you believe in and don’t back down when people criticize you for it.  Ignore the outside “noise” both the good and the bad. 
    • “Humility drives you to success.” 
    • You have to customize your leadership to the people you are leading. 
    • Humor helps.  Deploy it often. 
    • Surround yourself with the GOATs of the world and listen to them. Learn from them. As I’ve watched and not just listened to the show, you see how attuned McAfee is to listening to his guests. He’s not silently interrupting- trying to think about what he is going to say next while someone else is talking- and he’s not literally interrupting either. He’s sitting there with his ears and mind on and he’s soaking it all in. 

    If you want to listen to the episodes that my husband keeps putting in front of me, here is the two most recent examples: 

    Pat McAfee Responds To Report He pays Aaron Rodgers “Millions” for Weekly Interviews

    Coach Saban Talks Punishment vs Discipline, How He Motivates His Team

    Thanks to my husband and Pat McAfee, I’m learning that it’s not wise to judge a book by its cover.  Leadership 101. 

  • Mom, I’m Bored

    Mom, I’m Bored

    “Mom, I’m bored,”  said one kid from the backseat after we told them NO MORE DEVICES on a road trip to kick off the summer. 

    You see, devices for them create the stimulation that makes them, well, crazy. 

    So after allowing them on the first leg of the trip without any constraints, we put a cease and desist order out on all devices and prayed we wouldn’t all kill each other over the course of the next hundreds of miles. 

    Our trip began with a desire for our kids to see all 50 states before our oldest leaves for college in six years. With this in mind, I had the grand idea to create books where they could write and draw about what they wanted to see, what they did see, and what they liked and didn’t like about each place we visited throughout the years. 

    With devices in hand, these books sat empty.  

    After the electronics were taken away and after a few “I’m bored” whines came from the backseat, the books came out. 

    And what was inside them was nothing short of creativity on full display. 

    Our oldest is into shoes now and he started drawing them. 

    Our middle created fun facts and drawings about each state we visited, and then created drawings where she narrated the story line she had also created about the images.  Apparently, limes can be our friends. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Our youngest drew what only he knew them to be, but then told us, “This one is a flower, this one is a roller coaster. Mommy, can you draw me an alligator?” 

    And so I got in on the creative process and drew just that.

    As we’ve focused on creating space all year at Horizon Point, the point that space is absolutely needed to innovate and create has been a key theme.  

    But first, before we can have the space to create and innovate, we probably need to create some space to be bored. 

    In fact, research supports just this. Boredom is the spark that creates the flame. 

    To facilitate some boredom that leads to your mind seeking something that leads it to create and innovate perhaps we all should: 

    1. Don’t Look Down. Put a cease and desist order on your devices.  All of them. 
    2. Get away. Get somewhere you aren’t normally. See the novel. Take a road trip. 
    3. Look Up. Pay attention to your surroundings.  
    4. Capture. Have something that can capture your creativity once you get bored, like our kids “diaries” as the little one calls his. 
    5. Collaborate. Maybe you might be drawn to draw a little something out of the norm like my alligator. 

    Turns out boredom also may help get the crazies out.  It’s good for our mental health too.  Our kids were much less on edge once we swapped the devices for the space to create. 

    How comfortable are you with being bored? 

    More on this topic: 

    The Creative Benefits of Boredom from HBR