Horizon Point Consulting

Category: General

Horizon Point writes about dozens of leadership, career, workplace, and workforce topics. Sometimes we write whatever we want. Read this category for general blogs from the HPC team.

  • Talents: A real life example

    Over the last week, I’ve given a lot of thought into which client I should highlight as an example of discovering talents.  There have been many, all unique, with so many talents to share.  I anticipate using this person as an example throughout the process of describing how you discover yourself and match it to the market, so it has been difficult to pick the “best” one.

    With much thought, I’ve decided to make this example personal.  No, I’m not going to describe myself and my journey, but I’m not going to use a paying client either.  Instead, I’m going to use someone who is more like me in genetics than anyone else on this planet, and someone who I helped before I even realized that career development was even what I wanted to do. Helping Graham, my brother, helped me discern that I wanted to be the go-to person for career help.

    Why personal?  Because career exploration and decisions are very personal.  By describing someone who I have seen grow and mature through this process, I feel as though I can more adequately describe its impact.

    So, with all that said, Graham will be my “guinea pig” as I walk you all through a real example the career process.

    Graham did the KSAO process for talent identification indicating his top 2-3 strengths in each area:

    Knowledge:

    Sales and Marketing — Knowledge of principles and methods for showing, promoting, and selling products or services. This includes marketing strategy and tactics, product demonstration, sales techniques, and sales control systems.

    I would also add for him: Administration and Management — Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.

    Skills:

    Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problem solving.

    Judgment and Decision Making — Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.

    Ability:

    Inductive Reasoning — The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).

    Memorization — The ability to remember information such as words, numbers, pictures, and procedures.

    Remember, you can click on the title of each of these to see career matches.  What do you think Graham does for a living today? There isn’t a lot of consistency in his career matches based just on this.  Stay tuned for next week as we discuss passions and then describe Graham’s passions in relation to our process.  If you can’t figure out what he does yet, the pieces will come together over the next few weeks.

  • “Mind on, Hands off”

    LESSONS ON LEADERSHIP FROM BOB WOODWARD

    I had the unique opportunity to hear Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate Scandal, speak in a private session to the Blackburn Institute at the University of Alabama.  Bob was asked the question, “What advice would you give to students about leadership?”

    Instead of giving points on leadership, or even discussing one of the seven Presidents he has interviewed,  he told the story of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post.  By describing the key points of one of their discussions about the Watergate story he emphasized these key points:

    • She was “mind on, hands off”.    Meaning she hand her mind on the details of the business but did not micromanage.   She turned people loose to do their jobs.
    • She knew what business she was in and had a statement of purpose to direct that business.   This gave her the ability to take risks and have patience to develop stories that drove her business.  She didn’t look at chasing the stock price or correcting issues with the quick fix, instead she focused on doing the business she was in, which she knew would lead to positive results.
    • She had a “never, don’t ever tell me never” mentality.  Which led to results like Pulitzer prizes and exposing hard truths.

    What story of a true leader can you tell?

  • Stuck in the Middle

    4 TIPS FOR C LEVEL EXECUTIVES TO EMPOWER THE MIDDLE MANAGER

    I often think that being a “middle manager” may be the worst place to be in the organizational hierarchy.    I often have middle managers in my leadership classes who complain that they feel stuck in the role of go-betweener.  They feel as though the purpose they serve is to act as a buffer between employees and upper management without the authority to make key decisions that they feel are best for their people and the company.

    I recently saw this happening to a middle manager that told me, “I feel like I can’t do my job for fear of losing my job.” One individual was going around him to complain to the C level executive. Instead of the CEO asking the middle manager for his take on the situation, the CEO threw him under the bus and changed a decision that had already been made in order to please the complainer.  This middle manager was stuck in a place where he wasn’t empowered to make his own decisions about how to handle his unit of work for fear that his boss would change the decision.   Instead of thinking,  “What is best for this employee or my people?” he was stuck in the “What would my boss think?” mentality even when he knew his boss didn’t have all the facts.

    I offered this person up some advice for improving his situation, but today I’d rather address what C level leaders should do to empower middle managers and get them out of the “stuck” position:

    1. Set the vision and mission and give examples of how this should affect decision making for your middle managers.
    2. Regularly communicate with your middle managers. Do not create an environment where you are only talking to them when something goes wrong.
    3. If someone comes to you with a complaint about their manager, ask them if they have discussed the issue with their manager. Unless it is an issue related to harassment, direct that person back to their immediate manager to discuss and resolve.  Emphasize that their manager is the decision maker and that you are there to support him/her.
    4. If there are frequent issues of people coming around their manager to discuss issues with you, examine why this is happening and have a candid conversation with this manager. It may be that you are micromanaging decision making instead of empowering and teaching your middle managers to be leaders instead of the go-between.

    When have you had someone override a decision you made and how did it make you feel?  What was the result of the decision being changed?

  • Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

    I attended a seminar last week discussing ways to improve productivity and communication in the workplace. One thing that stood out to me in the presentation was the emphasis the presenter placed on eliminating stressors so that people could be innovative and creative. He placed a value on innovation and creativity as the only differentiating factors in creating a sustainable advantage.

    What if standard or traditional work arrangements are creating workplace stressors and reducing innovation and creativity?

    This leads me to consider a tie to a book I mentioned last week,  The Elephant and the Flea  and its emphasis on employing free agents. Charles Handy writes,

    “Meantime, more and more people are going to become aware that their knowledge which drives innovation and creativity has marketable value. They will be reluctant to sell it for a time-based contract, a wage or a salary.  They will want to charge a fee or a royalty, a percentage of the profits.  The difference is that a salary is paid for time spent, whereas a fee is money paid for work produced, irrespective of the time spent on it.” (italics mine.)

    The beauty of this model is that you not only get results, but you get people who are less stressed because they are in control of their own situation, which allows them to be creative and innovative and produce better results.  It also may cost you less.  Many who charge a fee for work produced don’t come with the added cost of a benefit package.

    Or consider the FutureWork Institute described in the book Now You See It. Describing the founder of the institutes philosophy, the author Cathy Davidson writes,

    “The workplace of the future had to start taking into account the life desires, not just the work ambitions, of workers.  She was convinced that the best, most creative workers in the future might not be workaholics with the eighty-hour workweeks, but people who had figured out what way they love to work and how they work best.”

     

    My two year old snoring is eliminating my stress and fostering my creativity…

    As I sit hear writing this post on a Saturday at home, my two year old is asleep in my lap.  Although it took a little maneuvering to get him situated so that I can type,  I can’t help but think that creativity does come when we are in control of when and how work gets done. But maybe that’s the point… blurring the lines of work and life so much that you don’t realize to consider it work, which fosters creativity and innovation.  What could eliminate stress and make writing more enjoyable than two year old contently asleep in your lap?

    What way do you love to work and how do you work best?

     

    Like this post? You may also like this one as well.

     

  • New Addition to Thursday- Career Development Series

    I will be starting a weekly blog post on Thursdays (in addition to our leadership focused blog post on Mondays) that focuses on Career Development.  Although this will be useful information for people of all ages, it should particularly be helpful for students.  Hope you enjoy this new series!

    Here’s what we’ll cover:

    Part 1: Your Horizon

    A.  Know Yourself:  Explore your talents, passions and values to make wise career decisions.
    -Talents as employers see them- KSAOs (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other Characteristics)
    -Passions through your Holland Code
    -Values- know your ideal workstyle and lifestyle
    B.     Understand the Market
    -Are you useful?
    -Explore bright outlook careers
    -What do employers want?
    C.     Match Yourself:  Explore Your Horizon
    -Use what you know about yourself and what you know about the market to learn about careers
    -Conduct informational interviews
    -Job shadowing keeps you from hiding in someone else’s shadow
    -No one gets a good job these days without an internship(s)

    Part 2:  Success Tools

    A.     Define your mission
    B.     Be a 3%er- set goals
    C.     Practice Makes Perfect, why you need 10,000 hours and grit to succeed
    E.     Create a network and find a mentor
    F.     It isn’t all about the money
    G.    Don’t neglect happenstance
    H.   Give Back!

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