Category: Skills Improvement

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for personal skills improvement.

  • Celebrate Your Accomplishments

    Celebrate Your Accomplishments

    The new year always brings with it conversations of resolutions and setting goals. It’s the chance to look at the year ahead and decide what you want to accomplish in the next twelve months, both personally and professionally. We sit and we write down those goals and we make our checklist. And throughout the year we (hopefully) mark items off that list. But what do you do when you mark an item off that list? 

    At Horizon Point, we celebrate our accomplishments. Each quarter during our team meeting we go around the table and each team member shares a list of ten things we accomplished during the quarter and then picks one that we want to celebrate and how we want to celebrate it. The how is totally up to us and varies from things like a gift card to a local shop or restaurant to a new pair of running shoes to a book we’ve been wanting to read. For me, my latest accomplishment list included graduating from Tulane Law School with my Master’s in Jurisprudence in Labor and Employment Law, a two-year journey that was both long and fast. Part of my celebration included going out to dinner with the team. 

    As you go through 2023, I challenge you to create an accomplishment list. It may include items that are on your goals list and you might find that it includes items that are not on your goals list. Just 8-10 things that you accomplished each quarter, and then pick the one that you want to celebrate and how you want to celebrate it. And these accomplishments can be personal or professional. 

    If you are the leader of a team, try doing this with your team this year. Ask every member of your team to share their accomplishments each quarter. This can be through an accomplishment list like we do at Horizon Point or you can choose your own format. The important thing is to get your employees to take the time to recognize their own accomplishments and to celebrate them. The celebrations don’t have to be something big; it can be a small gesture like a handwritten note congratulating them on their accomplishments for the quarter. 

    How will you celebrate your accomplishments in 2023? 

  • Another Year Around the Sun; Focus for 2023

    Another Year Around the Sun; Focus for 2023

    I celebrated my birthday last week. The older I get, the more I realize there are only a handful of things
    in life that are truly important. Since my birthday falls in early January, it is a great time to reflect on what
    went well and what didn’t the previous year, and to set intentions for focus for the upcoming year.

    Prior to writing this post, my daughter, a high school senior, asked me to proofread a college scholarship
    essay. I may be biased, but it was wonderful. She gets it. It helped me realize that maybe I am doing
    something right, and also confirmed my thoughts on what goals and intentions are truly worth my effort.
    Here is just a small blurb from the essay:

    …as I try to listen to my teacher explain the economical state of our country. After I finish my homework
    during class, I watch the tiny seconds hand of the clock tick by as I wait for the class to end. When the
    day is done, I let out a sigh of relief as I know I am about to go home to the most important thing in my
    life: my family, the people I know without a doubt believe I can achieve whatever I set my mind to, no
    matter the circumstances…

    At Horizon Point, we determine an annual theme every January. As a team, we talk through business
    development, focus, and direction for the year. I have decided to do the same in my personal life. A few
    areas I hope to focus on this year are health, financial wellness, career goals all while keeping my faith
    and family at the center of it all.

    Do you set goals or action plans for the new year or on your birthday? Here are a couple of previous
    blog posts to inspire you to take action.

    4 Things my Goals Taught me in 2022 about how to be Brave in 2023

    Do You Have a Plan of Action to Reach Your Goals?

  • Feed Your Future With Feedback & Feedforward

    Feed Your Future With Feedback & Feedforward

    Next week, I’m talking about Feedback and Feedforward at the Tennessee SHRM Conference. While preparing for this session, I’m reflecting on my own feedback and feedforward skills. Am I following my own advice in giving meaningful feedback and practicing feedforward? If I do receive input from others, am I following up and actually implementing any change? Are you? 

    Just this morning, I received (unsolicited) feedback from my husband that I have not been practicing what I preach in work-life balance. I enjoy my work, paid and volunteer, so much that I have found myself with a plate that isn’t just full…it’s spilling over. Now I have my own homework to do to take this feedback to heart and actually examine my schedule and commitments. 

    Have you received similar feedback? That is, unsolicited feedback? Let’s talk about the types of feedback: 

    UnsolicitedThe Kind You Didn’t Ask For

    SolicitedWell, You Asked For It 

    ObservationIt’s Not What They Said, It’s How They Said It

    How often do you actually solicit feedback? For most of us, that type of feedback is the least common. We typically receive unsolicited feedback and/or observe feedback behaviors. Why? It is a whole lot easier to see our problems in others than it is to see them in ourselves. Even though we may be able to deny our problems to ourselves, they may be very obvious to the people who are observing us. 

    We can probably all work on soliciting feedback and actually listening to it. Today, since I already know an area that I need to work on, I’m thinking about the practice of Feedforward. Here’s how it works: 

    1. Pick a behavior you want to change that would make a significant, positive difference in your life
    2. Describe what you want to change with someone (one-on-one)
    3. Ask the person for two suggestions for the future
    4. Listen attentively to the suggestions
    5. Thank them

    Feedforward is a smart, effective way to take action and have accountability for the change you’re working on. 

    I’ll leave you with this quote from Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There:

    “We’re being told all day long how we’re doing. And the reason we accept this feedback and actually attempt to respond to it (e.g., if we’re down in sales, we’ll try harder to bring the figures up) is that we accept the process: An authority figure “grades” us and we are motivated to do better because of it. It’s not like that with interpersonal behavior, which is vague, subjective, unquantifiable, and open to wildly variant interpretations. But that doesn’t make it less important. It’s my contention— and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book— that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze.”

    Use our free resource – Practice Feedback & Feedforward Worksheet – to check in with yourself and others and set timely goals for improvement and mutual commitment. 

    How can you feed your future? 

    Attending the TN SHRM Conference? Catch Jillian’s session on September 13 at 3:15pm. Learn more about #TNSHRM22 at horizonpointconsulting.com/whatsup. 

  • Negotiation Styles and Why They Matter

    Negotiation Styles and Why They Matter

    Later this month I’ll be speaking at HR Florida about Negotiation Skills. We are all negotiators, even if we don’t realize it. Think for a minute. What did you do when your alarm went off this morning? Did you immediately jump out of bed or did you negotiate with yourself to allow yourself just “five more minutes?” Did your kid talk you into letting them pack cookies in their school lunch instead of a granola bar? Or did you agree to allow Jim to take the lead on the new project at work because Ally has too much on her workload as it is?

    While I’ll spend most of my session at HR Florida talking about how to navigate the negotiation session itself, there’s one important topic that I’ll tackle first, and that’s negotiation style. Based on the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) there are five styles:

    1. Competing: Those who exhibit the competing style are aggressive and uncooperative. They are power driven and pursue their own interests at the expense of others. Competing may mean standing up for what’s right, defending what they believe is correct, or simply trying to win.
    2. Collaborating: Those who exhibit the collaborating style are both assertive and cooperative. They attempt to work with the other party to find a solution that meets the needs of both parties by trying to understand the issue from both sides and identifying the underlying concerns, then trying to find alternative solutions that meet those the needs of both sides. This may mean exploring a disagreement to learn from each other, resolving some condition that would have them competing for resources, or trying to find a creative solution to an interpersonal problem.
    3. Compromising: Those who exhibit the compromising style are intermediate in both assertiveness and cooperativeness. The goal is to find an expedient, mutually acceptable solution that partially satisfies the needs of both parties. Compromising falls on the middle ground between competing and accommodating, giving up more than competing but less than accommodating. It might mean splitting the difference or some give and take.
    4. Avoiding: Those who exhibit the avoiding style are unassertive and uncooperative. They do not immediately pursue their own concerns or the concerns of the other person. They do not address the conflict, but instead choose to side step it, postponing the issue until a better time or simply withdrawing from the situation completely.
    5. Accommodating: Those who exhibit the accommodating style are unassertive and cooperative, this is the opposite of competing. They neglect their own concerns and instead choose to only satisfy the concerns of the other person, thus self-sacrificing their own needs.

    What’s important to understand about negotiation styles is that while we may have a dominant style, for example my dominant style is compromising, we use all five styles depending on the situation that we’re negotiating and it’s important to understand that the style you use in a negotiation can have a huge impact on the outcome of that negotiation.

    For example, think about the following situations and consider what negotiation style you would use and why.

    • Going to buy a new car
    • Asking your boss for a pay raise
    • Trying to negotiate a multi-million dollar contract at work

    Now, think about the negotiations that you will need to make in the next week and what styles you will need to use to successfully complete those negotiations.

  • How to Develop Inclusive Training

    How to Develop Inclusive Training

    When was the last time someone asked you how you prefer to learn? Has someone ever asked if you need assistive technology? 

    As a trainer and facilitator, I definitely miss the mark sometimes on inclusive training. It’s hard. There’s no way around it; it’s not easy to design or deliver training in a language, structure, platform, etc. that works well for every learner. It’s hard, but it’s so important to try. 

    There is robust research out there about learning styles, learner variability, and inclusive curriculum design. Let’s look at this excerpt from research about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a “framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn”. 

    UDL is based on the premise that learner variability is the norm. UDL researchers emphasize that there is no “average” or “typical” learner and that all learners have varied abilities, strengths, experiences, and preferences… aspects that can be dynamic and changing depending on one’s context and development… 

    As an instructional design framework, UDL provides a structure to proactively build in supports that address the learner variability that exists within any group. Taking learner variability into account, the process of planning instruction in alignment with UDL guidelines allows educators to consider and integrate flexible and supportive options that are helpful for all learners from the outset. 

    UDL-based instruction can make existing educational practices more inclusive, by providing support to a wider range of learners.  

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Here is a graphic from CAST, the creators of UDL, that outlines the three major components of UDL and questions to ask yourself as a trainer or educator:

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    What is your team doing to acknowledge and understand different learning styles? How are you accommodating differences? 

    One great, free resource for understanding learning styles is The VARK Questionnaire. This is a free, simple quiz that anyone can take on a smart device. VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic – the four primary learning styles. The quiz measures a person’s preferences for each style and includes a Multimodal Style for those of us who prefer to learn through more than one method. 

    VARK also provides free insights, such as “How can VARK help my Business?” and “Using VARK in Online Learning”.  

    Once we understand the instructional design piece, we need to think about inclusive training from a participant perspective. Who’s in the room? Is it only top leadership? Only junior managers? A combination? 

    Here’s research to consider from the NeuroLeadership Institute about “everyone-to-everyone” learning, a practice that shifts the paradigm of traditional training to a model that allows all team members to engage with learning at the same time.  

    Because social norms are based on the assumption that everyone else is doing something, if people aren’t engaging in the new behavior — which is likely in a company of 10,000 people if only 100 of them learned new habits — they’ll continue to engage in old, undesired behaviors since that’s what they see.

    A better approach is what we call ‘everyone-to-everyone learning’.

    In this model, the entire organization goes through the same learning experience at the same time. Instead of day-long or multi-day, in-person workshops — which can’t be administered to all employees at once without bringing the organization to a standstill — learning consists of memorable, bite-sized sessions delivered virtually.

    Simply put, you’re able to shift from a model of teaching a few people a lot slower to teaching a lot of people a little bit very quickly. And at an organizational level, this ends up being far more effective.

    Is everyone-to-everyone learning something you can implement? Could this model be adapted for your organization’s structure and needs? 

    Ultimately, it’s not easy to design learning for everyone, but it’s important to do the work and make our best effort at inclusive training. Talk to your team about their preferences and needs, and do some research and experiment. Be the first domino!