Horizon Point Consulting

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.

  • 3 Quotes to Consider When Leading Volunteers

    3 Quotes to Consider When Leading Volunteers

    Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead volunteers as a staff member as well as a chair of an all-volunteer board. It can certainly be a challenge, but it is also a great privilege and offers surprising rewards!

    I remember planning an awards event several years ago that went awry. We had more than a dozen people show up that did not RSVP. My first thoughts were: where will we seat them & will there be enough food? As I look back, I am so thankful for the volunteers who jumped in to help. That was one of the first times I truly thought about the importance of volunteers and the impact of leading others.  

    These 3 quotes are some of my favorites and certainly ring true for leading volunteers.

    If you are leading a group of volunteers and have the opportunity to help select them, remember this quote. Look for individuals that are willing to share their unique talents and gifts, but who also share similar values and believe in the mission and vision of your group.

    Always, always, always appreciate others! A simple thank you gift, note or text can go a long way. Since volunteers don’t receive a paycheck, showing your gratitude can have a major impact.

    Great leaders, regardless of who they are leading, should have a servant’s heart. I’ve had the opportunity to serve alongside some amazing servant leaders and can only hope I reflect a servant’s heart while leading volunteers.

     

    Where can you volunteer today? 

  • Can I Get Your Attention?

    Can I Get Your Attention?

    I’m the mother of three boys. Two teenagers and one about to hit that “preteen” stage. Most days I want to bang my head against the wall. I feel like I need a support group for moms of teens. I miss when they were little and hung on my every word. Now I’m lucky if I can get them to take the earbuds out long enough to hear anything I say. 

    We recently went on vacation and I forced them to put their phones away and engage in conversation with me. That request got me dirty looks and eye rolls. Then we started playing twenty questions on our four-hour drive to our destination, which led to lots of laughs, some light-hearted banter, and even some great conversation. And the best part, they even ASKED to play again on our way home a few days later and voluntarily put their phones away! 

    I will readily admit that I hate technology. I think that while it’s a necessary evil and has definitely advanced our society and most of the tasks we do daily, it has also created a disconnect between us as people. We struggle in every aspect of our lives just to get someone’s attention, to get them to look up from their phones, computers, video games, or whatever screen they are glued to. According to a 2016 Nielsen study, adults spend over ten (10) hours per day staring at a screen! 

    A Careerbuilder study showed that 55% of participants surveyed said that their cell phone was their #1 distractor at work, followed closely by the internet and social media (both of which can be accessed on a cell phone). Is allowing employees to have cell phones on their person during work hours costing your organization, both in productivity and in lost customers? In just the last few weeks I can count multiple times when I went to a retailer or fast food restaurant and had to wait because the employee was distracted by their cell phone. 

    This inability to give and receive undivided attention extends into leadership as well. In his blog post Attentiveness (One of the Overlooked Leadership Skills), Jason Barger talks about the distracting times we live in, the expectation to always be multi-tasking, and valuing the individual moments. Those leadership skills that are most valued are those that tie back to leaders who give their undivided attention, who truly listen, and who show interest. 

    Steven Madenberg’s compares our lack of attention to how Charlie Brown and the gang always heard their teacher, Mrs. Donovan (who knew she had a name?!) in his blog post Leaders and the Gift of Undivided Attention. How often do we walk away from a conversation and realize we only heard half of it because we were distracted?

    I recently had a manager come to me upset that during a candidate interview another manager on the panel was visibly texting on his cell phone. We talked through coaching that manager on appropriate interview etiquette. A couple of weeks ago while eating lunch at Panera I heard the gentleman at the booth behind me talking on the phone. He was conducting a phone interview and ended up having to end the call because he was distracted by the lunch crowd in Panera. He didn’t set himself up in a position to be able to provide that candidate with his undivided attention and as a result, may have given the candidate a bad impression of the organization. 

    Think back over the last few weeks, what are some situations in which you realize you were distracted? What could you have done differently to ensure that you were giving your undivided attention? 

  • 4 Reasons to Outsource

    4 Reasons to Outsource

    I came across a post on a Facebook group a few weeks ago.  The mom participant posted a question to the group asking how people simplified their lives.  She has three young children, and I took her post to mean she wanted to spend more meaningful time with her kids but didn’t know which direction to take or have the ability to do as a working mom. 

    Most of the responses to her question came down to two types of responses 1) limit your kids (and your) extracurricular activities 2) outsource.  People recommended outsourcing laundry, grocery shopping, ironing, and clothes shopping among other things. Get rid of spending time on the things that don’t add value and meaning the responses seemed to suggest.

    In business, outsourcing is also an option that provides an opportunity to focus on meaningful things while at the same time often reducing costs. This New York Times article acknowledges this and also indicates that outsourcing human resource functions is on the rise.  At Horizon Point most of the work we do, when it comes down to it is outsourcing human resource work.

    So when and why should you outsource?

    I would suggest that there are four key reasons or situations to outsource in business:

    1. When things are non-essential or don’t create value.  Just like the responses to the mom post, saying no to something is saying yes to something else.  If you have the resources to hire someone to do your laundry you can spend that time on a Saturday at the park with your kids when you would normally be doing laundry. Or you could hire a nanny to take your kids to the park while you do laundry- which is more meaningful and value-added?  Same with grocery delivery. 

    Likewise if you outsource, let’s say payroll as an HR function, you can focus more on employee engagement as a more value-added activity than processing payroll (Let me just caveat this by saying, both having clean laundry and payroll being right are essential, they just aren’t differentiators in life and in business- it’s gotta be done, but it’s really no fun to do it and it is a time suck.) Many of these things that don’t add value are also being are automated, which is similar to outsourcing for this reason. 

     

    2. When you don’t have the expertise.  I’ve got a big hole in my den ceiling right now because apparently something is leaking from upstairs.  I have no idea what is leaking, why, and how it is ending up in my den. I could try to fix it, but I would most likely create more of a mess and it would take countless hours for me to learn how to fix it.  It is much more effective and efficient for me to hire someone that has expertise in this area to stop water from dripping out of my ceiling. In the same way, outsourcing things that you don’t have in-house resources for is a good reason to call in some experts.  For example, you may need to outsource leadership training because you don’t have a person that is trained and experienced enough to do this. Often this makes sense for project-based work, not ongoing needs. 

     

    3. When you need someone that doesn’t have a dog in that fight.  Another reason to bring in expertise is that you need an objective third party to facilitate whatever activity that needs to be done.  We see this a lot in outsourcing 360 evaluations, engagement surveys, and anything where anonymity is needed to ensure the integrity and participation in the activity.  Other types of activities where I see more people bringing in experts is for organizational design and development activities such as looking at how an organization is structured and making recommendations on how to improve it or in coaching someone to better performance.  The main value the outsourcing brings in these cases is objectivity that obviously needs to be tempered with outsourcing to an expert that knows what he/she is doing. 

     

    4. When you are in transition.  The mom who posted on the message board is in a phase in her life where many things require her undivided time and attention. She has lots of competing priorities and is trying to sort through managing them.  

     

    Likewise, businesses are often in this place.  At Horizon Point, we have found living all of our company values (people first, passion, productivity, continuous learning and improvement, and give back) by helping companies that are in this type of growth transition.  It usually presents itself as a company that has grown past 50 people, where the office manager or a similar role has been doing “HR” and the owners/leaders of the company realize this isn’t going to work long term. They need an expert to help them be successful at all things people -to give them a competitive advantage- but they don’t have one in house.  They are like the mom with three young kids who still have two that can’t tie their shoes without help. Eventually, her kids will learn to tie their shoes and she won’t have to devote time to this every morning, but not without her teaching them to tie their shoes.  

    We come in and help the company identify internal (and on occasion, external) talent that can be the people leaders they need with some guided help and practice.  They outsource their HR to us temporarily, but the key piece of this outsourcing is teaching someone else to be their HR leader. We are working ourselves out of the job and we want to, just like the mom tying the shoes is doing.  She doesn’t want to tie her kids’ shoes forever.  

    We’ve worked through a few engagements like this at Horizon Point over the last four to five years, and there is nothing more rewarding that seeing a company continue to grow and thrive because you’ve helped them pick the right person to lead their HR function and helped them learn how to do it. 

     

    What do you find is best to outsource in life and in business?

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  • The Table

    The Table

    I was so excited about my husband’s Christmas gift in 2018. We had just begun renovating our home which would include an outdoor living space. We discussed wanting a large table in this space to be able to have people over to eat and fellowship regularly.   

    I contacted a friend who owns a company that does custom woodworking and asked him to get a table created for us.  Nine feet long I told him, sassafras wood, bench seats.  The table wasn’t ready in time for Christmas nor was the space to put it, so I printed a picture of one similar and wrapped it up for my husband to open Christmas morning.  

    I was excited to see what I expected to be his excitement over the table.  But when he opened the box and figured out what it meant, he began to fire off a series of questions, mainly focused on how big the table was going to be.  I got no thank you, just an interrogation that was followed by him getting up and pulling out our renovation plans to measure the space we intended to put the table in.  

    “I don’t think it is going to fit.” He said.    

    “Do you want chairs to fit on the ends?” He asked me.  “Because I don’t think they will fit.” 

    We re–visited this discussion in some similar form no less than ten times over the course of the next week.  

    At first, I was hurt, but by the end of the first week of his worry over the table fitting, I was downright mad. And we had it out over the table more than once. What I thought would have been an exciting gift turned into something I wish I had never done.   

    A few weeks later I was facilitating some training for a client titled “Understanding Yourself and Others for Managers.”   

    This training focuses on building self-awareness and using that awareness to become aware of others and adapt leadership style and decisions based on the personality of the person(s) you are working with.  

    It uses the DiSC Model to do this:  

    I had an epiphany during the training when talking about conflict at work created by personality differences, realizing that these differences had largely prompted our table dispute.  

    My husband is a DC and I am an iD (or a Di depending on the situation).  I was in my warm and fuzzy and also fast-paced box of getting the present- yay! Surprise! So fun!  Why would I stop and measure how big the table needed to be?  It needs to be big, nine feet sounds good! 

    My husband, on the other hand, had retreated into his C box of total questioning and skeptical with a healthy dose of cautious and reflective to go with it.  To exasperate this mindset, he had started in a role at work about a year prior that put him in a position of leading facility operations at his hospital, almost all of which is governed by strict compliance standards.  Meaning, most of his days were measuring and measuring twice. And documenting that measurement. He had brought this mindset and the importance of it home with him. This led him to process and agonize over and over again – this table isn’t going to fit.   

    And then, when we both got mad that we weren’t being understood, we both jumped into our full-blown D, aka- lion, box to duke it out over whose mindset was right.  And we know what happens when two lions fight.  There will be blood.  

    Sounds like something you’ve dealt with at home? At work? Yep, I thought so.  

    So what do we do?  

    1. Be self-aware of how you are wired and how that causes you to behave.  A good way to verbalize this is to utilize the DiSC model in identifying priorities:

    The priorities of different styles are the words around the circle.  My priority in the table giving situation (and most all situations) was enthusiasm and action, causing me to behave in a way that made me decide to “surprise” my husband and not pay attention to the details (aka- the size of the table) of the surprise. 

    2. Be aware of how others are wired and how that causes them to behave. With the table situation, I should realize that my husband’s main priority is most often accuracy, causing him to want to know the exact details of the gift and be involved in those details to ensure they are accurate.  

    3. Ask yourself, is the way I behave based on my personality consistent or different than the person I’m working with?  Obviously, in the table situation, our priorities are the complete opposite.  In the DiSC model, the styles that are opposite of each other on the circle either end up 1) combative or 2) complementary to one another. 

    4. Then, ask yourself, what conflicts could arise because we are the same or different? In this situation, our lack of awareness and attention to the priorities of each other led to combativeness.  My feelings were hurt because I got zero enthusiasm from him, and he was frustrated because he could not ensure accuracy.  

    5. Then, realize the Platinum Rule– The platinum rule states that we should treat others like they would want to be treated (contrary to the Golden Rule of treating people like you want to be treated).  We all have different needs and priorities as the DiSC model points out. If I’m giving a gift to someone I love, I should think first about their needs and priorities, not my own.  The same goes for leading with a servant leadership approach.  As much as I love a surprise, he does not.  Getting the table should have been handled differently. And the response to the table surprise could have been handled differently as well if only we had both been self-aware and aware of the needs of each other.  

    Whereas we laugh about the table debacle now (by the way, it fits quite nicely in the space, thank you very much!), it is an example of how we can let our differences get in the way when we approach any number of things lead to way bigger issues.  

     

    It also points to the fact that we can allow our differences to complement instead of contradicting each other, leading to better outcomes.  More on that in our next post…. 

  • 1 Great Way to Grow in Your Interpersonal Skills

    1 Great Way to Grow in Your Interpersonal Skills

    Interpersonal skills are a distinguishing factor in what makes people successful.  I’m not talking about us all needing to be extraverts, I’m talking about us being able to understand ourselves and others and relate to people in a way that builds connections and relationships.  Many people refer to this as emotional intelligence. 

    I often hear employers talk about how job candidates’ interpersonal skills are lacking.  Components of this include poor communication skills, low self-awareness, inability to control emotions and to read and respond to emotion in others.  Many cite the constant connection to technology leading to the demise of strong interpersonal skills in people. 

    So how do you improve interpersonal skills?  Because it is a somewhat nebulous concept, creating concrete actions to improve may also be a challenge. 

    But in listening to the HR Happy Hour Podcast, Episode 385- The State of Recruiting– guest Jim Stroud says the following about helping build interpersonal skills in recruiters: 

    So ways to build up interpersonal skills I would say would be to volunteer your services at some charitable function.  Maybe help out in a soup kitchen. Something where you deal with the homeless or just people in general because you may think of yourself as a patient person, but you never really know how patient you are and good you are with people when you have to deal with people who may not be as privileged as you are.  And you have to bite your tongue and you have to take yourself out of the equation. 

    And I think as you do things like that you build up empathy and interpersonal skills that all transfers over when you are talking to candidates.  You won’t see them so much as numbers or resumes, you’ll see them as real people. And that will help you build bonds with candidates that will help you get more referrals from candidates, which will help you find people that don’t necessarily want to be found. 

    He’s saying to do something that doesn’t seem connected to our job which actually leads to better job performance and results. I totally agree with Jim although I don’t think I’ve ever even thought to give this simple advice to anyone looking to improve their interpersonal skills. 

    So, if you want to improve at the skill everyone seems to need, but the world seems to be wired to cultivate less of, sign up to volunteer at regular intervals where interaction with others, especially people who are less fortunate than you are, is required. 

    Employers would be wise to incentivize and support this type of effort in their workforce as well. 

     

    Where are you volunteering today?