Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management and Development

We provide full service talent management and talent development consulting services. Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research.

  • 3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    3 Steps to Actually DO Succession Planning

    With the great resignation still continuing and baby boomers, who many feel delayed retiring, now retired or retiring in large numbers due to the pandemic, succession planning has never been more important. 

    But as we’ve seen through many of our clients (and ourselves!), the need to get something done and getting it done are two different things.  When it comes to succession planning, I think the key challenge is not knowing where to start and the steps to take once started.  Overall, you need to:

    1. Know your current talent state.  This involves several sub-steps of determining: 

    a. What’s your talent funnel? This means mapping how people progress through the organizational hierarchy, determining the number of people needed at each level of hierarchy, realizing how turnover affects each level, and getting a good picture of the number of people needed to fill key vacancies. 

    b. What are your performance standards? This should be mapped out through your mission, vision, and values as an organization and connected to the KSAOS of each position. 

    c. And how do you measure them? A performance evaluation tool should be used, and in the case of succession planning especially, a way to measure performance potential should be deployed. 

    d. How is each person performing towards your company’s performance standards? Your measurement tools give you the way to determine how people are performing towards standards.  In this step, it’s critical that leaders deploying the tools should be trained on how to use them effectively and given the bandwidth to execute this process effectively. 

    e. And what do they want out of your career? Understanding what individuals want and expect out of their career progression is imperative to this process.  If you don’t know what people want, you may plan for progression that ends up being sabotaged because it doesn’t meet people’s needs or expectations.  For more on this, read about our Leaders as Career Agents Process (Taylor is also speaking about this at the Birmingham SHRM meeting in May if you want to learn more!)

    2. Know what you need to fill talent gaps both in terms of the number of people as well as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOS) needed for each position vacancy.  This should consider not only what is needed to fill key vacancies in the current state, but also what will be needed to facilitate organizational growth.  It also includes an accounting of what training and development are needed to equip people to fill the gaps.  

    3. Execute a talent management and development system and plan to meet the needs found in your gaps.  Again, to execute effectively it is essential that leaders deploying the process are 1) trained to deploy it and 2) are given the bandwidth and support to deploy it well.  In addition, it is critical that there be a calibration process done through collaboration to work across department lines to facilitate effective succession planning. 

    Want to learn more about this process through a real-life case study?  Mary Ila is speaking at ALSHRM 2022 today (May 3, 2022) about this, but you can also catch her at Florida SHRM speaking on the topic in August 2022. 

    How do you successfully execute succession planning for your organization? 

  • Is Your Organization In the Learning Zone?

    Is Your Organization In the Learning Zone?

    Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with a lot of organizations about the importance of psychological safety. A 2012 study by Google showed that psychological safety is far and away the most important factor of a team’s success, yet many organizations lack the psychological safety required to be successful. 

    A few years ago, I worked with a client that was going through some major changes and employee morale was at rock bottom. As I began speaking with employees one theme stood out, employees didn’t feel safe speaking up. There were a number of reasons for this, including the fact that they felt their voices weren’t heard, their ideas were shot down or ignored, their requests for improvements fell on deaf ears, and yet they were expected to increase performance, meet tough deadlines, and help get the company out of the red. They were working in an organization that fell into the Anxiety Zone. There was low psychological safety but high accountability.

    Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, is the top authority on psychological safety. She has spent the past thirty years studying the effects of psychological safety on work teams and has found that there are four zones that organizations fall into.

    The zones are defined by the level of psychological safety and motivation (keep in mind motivation can be negative or positive) and accountability the team has. The zones are described as follows: 

    Learning zone: In a learning zone, team members experience high accountability and high psychological safety. This is the ideal learning environment for innovation and growth because even though members are responsible for their actions, their team offers continuous support.

    Comfort zone: Team members have high psychological safety and low accountability. While this zone is more relaxed, almost like a vacation, there is no push for creativity and growth.

    Apathy zone: With low psychological safety and low accountability, team members fall into the apathy zone. There are no repercussions for mistakes, teams lack adequate communication and support, and individuals struggle to care about their work.  

    Anxiety zone: Team members experience low psychological safety and high accountability. Communication breaks down and when mistakes are made, people are often too scared of punishment or humiliation to take responsibility. Opportunities for learning and innovation are scarce. 

    Which zone is your team in and if you’re not in the learning zone, how can you help your organization get there? 

     

  • Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…Unless the Team is Dysfunctional

    Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…Unless the Team is Dysfunctional

    This week, I had the great pleasure of facilitating in-person training with a group of junior managers who are working diligently to improve team and unit dynamics among their direct reports. They quickly identified the teams they lead that are functional vs. dysfunctional, and we had some deep discussion about why some teams work and some don’t. 

    Patrick Lencioni is a subject matter expert on organizational health and team dynamics, and his model of the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” is embedded in most training about how and why teams work or don’t. The foundation for the model is Trust, followed by Healthy Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. 

    Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

     

    Trust must come first, and trust isn’t always easy to establish. Effective team leaders build trust through psychological safety, which in turn creates an environment where healthy conflict can sprout. 

    Our instinct when we hear Conflict is to physically cringe (unless you’re someone who is wired for it), but Healthy Conflict is simply the open sharing and ideas – allowing space for innovation and continuous improvement through challenging and questioning. Without it, a team will never achieve cohesion and commitment. 

    Another way to think about Commitment in teams is buy-in – are all team members bought-in to the shared purpose and goals? Without buy-in, the team will lack internal accountability. 

    When team members are not comfortable holding each other accountable to shared purpose and goals, any results achieved maybe by happenstance, not by clear and cohesive teamwork. Results improve exponentially when all members of the team hold themselves and each other accountable. 

    If teams have Trust, Conflict, Commitment, and Accountability, but struggle to value collective team success over individual achievement, they will ultimately reach some level of dysfunction. A team of people who are focused on their own independent successes are really just a group. There’s a difference!

     

    So, take a minute to evaluate a team you’re a part of. How many of the critical pillars of functional teams do you have? Is your team stuck in one of the dysfunctions? What insights can you take from Lencioni’s model back to your organization? 

     

  • Growth Mindset in Career Development

    Growth Mindset in Career Development

    We’ve been talking about having a Growth Mindset for the past few weeks. If you missed it, check out the series kickoff blog here: What is Growth Mindset? 

    This time of year, we often get the opportunity to work with high school students looking for guidance related to the next steps after graduation. Career development for students looks like career exploration and exposure. That should start way before the final two years of high school, but it is definitely a priority for most students (and their parents) as secondary education draws to a close. The number one recommendation I have for high school students is to job shadow and/or conduct informational interviews to gain as much exposure as possible before selecting a career path. Check out 4 Tips for an Awesome Job Shadow or Informational Interview.

    Growth mindset looks different for individuals who are in the early stages of their careers. It looks like learning and growing. Check out The Essentials of Professional Development for ideas at this stage.

    For mid-career, growth mindset looks like continued development and sometimes a revisit to exploration and exposure. It is not uncommon for individuals to seek a career change in the middle of their careers. If someone is looking to make a change, an interest assessment is often a great place to start. A free assessment recommendation and more can be found in Career Change – Is it for you?

    As our Growth Mindset series comes to a close, we encourage you to adopt a growth mindset and reach out to us at HPC if we can help!

  • Training and Developing Growth Mindset

    Training and Developing Growth Mindset

    Two weeks ago, Taylor kicked off our new series on Growth Mindset: what is it?! Today we’re exploring a growth mindset in training & development. 

    The Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) defines growth mindset as


    …the belief that your skills and abilities can be improved, and that ongoing development is the goal of the work you do. However, creating a growth mindset culture isn’t just about having optimistic employees, but creating a space where employees strive to learn, enjoy being challenged, and feel encouraged to develop new skills.

    Let’s look at a case study of NLI’s work with Microsoft. 

    A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started a revolution from a revelation: the success of the company was dependent upon a culture of continuous learning and a workforce of “learn-it-alls” instead of “know-it-alls”. 

    Training and development became the forefront of the Priorities, Habits, and Systems of the company. 

    NLI’s growth mindset work follows a structure of Priorities → Habits → Systems. In the case of Microsoft, executive leadership adopted a growth mindset as a major priority to be supported through habitual training and learning activities and embedded into organizational systems like performance management and pulse surveys.  

    Microsoft created “interactive online modules with rich storytelling and multimedia” for their employees to learn independently and on-demand about the why, what, and how of growth mindset. Managers were given conversation guides to help drive and facilitate meaningful discussion about growth mindset within departments and teams. When team members exhibited growth mindset habits, they were recognized and positively reinforced.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Graphic: NLI Growth Mindset Case Study Collection

    Training is often thought of as sitting in a room (physical or virtual), facing forward, listening to a facilitator read words from slides. Training doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look and feel like that. 

    Our team hosted an interactive workshop this week where participants sat around one large table with the facilitators, everyone facing inward and around at each other. Learning was facilitated through large group discussion, partner discussion, independent work, and even physical movement around the building and the block (we literally walked around the block during a break!). 

    Is your training stale? How can you shift the paradigm to a Growth Mindset in your training and development priorities, habits, and systems?