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.

Tell ?Show ? Do: Leading when Someone has High Will and Low Skill

I watched my friend resist the urge to buckle her toddler into her stroller. She could have done it well and much quicker than her little one, but she took a deep breath and said, “Ok, you buckle yourself in just like I showed you.” The precious little girl smiled up at her and said, “Okay mommy!” with pure joy.

The same was true with my five-year-old who has wanted so badly to put her hair up in a ponytail holder by herself. I walked out to the car the other day and she beamed with pride. While waiting for me to load her little brother into his car seat, she had put a piece of her hair up with a ponytail holder. It stuck out the side of her head in an extremely awkward way but she had done it all by herself, and she was proud.

Both of these sweet little girls had a high will to perform the task at hand. They wanted to learn and express their ability to do a task with independence.

Many people you lead maybe like the young child who has a high desire to do the job and do it well but needs help developing the skills to do the job to the standard or pace needed to do it successfully and that takes practice.

You’re going to have to take a deep breath, be patient, and tolerate a few crooked ponytails before it is done at the speed and standard you want, but it is well worth it in order to maintain the high level of pre and post effort/will.

Trying to take over or just doing it yourself will kill the will, but being too passive and not providing enough direction will kill it too.

The model for leadership when someone’s skill level is low but will is high is to teach through an approach that first tells them how to do something; then shows them how to do it; then allows them to do it on their own first with you observing; and then moving to doing it totally independently.

Tell ? Show ? Do.

For example, someone I work with had a high desire to begin facilitating one-on-one leadership coaching sessions. She hadn’t ever done it before but did have transferrable skills in working one-on-one with students and adults facilitating career coaching. She is really good at working with people one-on-one and has a high desire to do this well as it is one of the primary ways she lives out her professional mission statement to make people better through her influence.

But she was nervous about the content which was novel to her and the method, also novel to her.

So we employed Tell ? Show ? Do.

I walked her through the content, method, and tools verbally. She asked questions and we discussed nuances that might be necessary to consider given the person she was coaching and their needs and environment. It’s important to note that when someone has a lower level of skill, having tools they can use to help them is a huge help. Instead of telling them, “Oh, just do it this way” you instead give them tools they can also actively deploy as they learn and get better at doing.

Next, she watched me facilitate about half a dozen sessions utilizing the method and the tool. We discussed/debriefed after each session, and you could tell she was gaining confidence through observing it being done in real-time with real situations.

Finally, we switched roles and she facilitated about half a dozen sessions while I watched her do it and gave her feedback after each session.

Now, she does these sessions on her own and she just finished employing the Tell ? Show ? Do model to teach another colleague of ours how to do the same thing.

It’s really exciting to see how using this method can be used over and over again to help people learn and grow both as the person learning through and as the person teaching it.

Pretty soon, my five-year-old will be teaching me new tricks about how to put my hair up and my friend’s little girl will be teaching her doll how to buckle up in the stroller. Teaching a skill when mastery is accomplished helps to continue to drive will in us all.

How do you build up a person’s skill level when they have a high will to do a job with excellence?

Note: Sometimes you can misdiagnosis a low skill level when in fact the issue is not skill-based but confidence based. Be attuned to distinguishing the ability to do with confidence to do it. For more thoughts on this, read this.

November 5, 2019
The Number One Thing that Leads to Team Success
The last three books about workplace effectiveness I’ve read have all discussed it. Two of our clients are having lots of trouble with it. It is what research shows us leads to team success more than any other factor. It is the concept of psychological safety.

According to Amy Edmondson, a lead researcher on the topic, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”

And according to research conducted by Google:

Following the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Code-named Project Aristotle – a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone) – the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”

Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found — it’s the underpinning of the other four.

The New York Times Article describing the Google study stated the following:

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’ Dubey said. ‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’

What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘good’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

What happens when psychological safety isn’t present in a team? At the very least, the best ideas aren’t generated, and the best results aren’t achieved. The whole is not greater than the parts.

At its worst, and we are seeing this firsthand right now, psychological safety can cause a culture of undermining and distrust so pervasive that people literally lie, steal, and engage in self-destructive behaviors at work.

Does your team and workplace have psychological safety?

To measure a team’s level of psychological safety, ask yourself and your team if you/they agree or disagree with these statements:
1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
After the findings at Google, they developed tools to help teams cultivate psychological safety. Check out these great resources here to help your team(s) cultivate the one characteristic that can breed the most success:

Psychological Safety Tools

How are you cultivating psychological safety at work?

Need more resources on this topic?:

Scholarly article by Edmondson on the concept

Edmondson’s TedTalk on the concept

Books I mentioned that talk about the importance of psychological safety:

The Trillion Dollar Coach

Brave New Work

No Hard Feelings
October 25, 2019
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?

October 17, 2019
Leaders, Know the Skill and Will of Those You Lead
I’ve found myself talking about skill and will a lot lately. Whether it be in one-on-one leadership coaching sessions or in group training, the conversation is often directed towards customizing a leadership approach based on the needs of the person being “led”. Much of our basic leadership training modules focus on customization based on personality, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. A person’s level of skill in doing a job or task and a person’s will to do the job or task (which includes aspects of personality) are critical to success.

So what is skill and what is will?

Skill: A person’s ability to do a job or tasks well which comes from him/her having the knowledge, experience and/or raw talent needed to achieve the desired results.

Will: A person’s desire to do a job and do it with excellence which comes as a result of personality and internal motivation. A person being on the right bus (organization) and on the right seat (job) on the bus also impacts a person’s will.

Simply put, skill is the fact that a person has what is needed to do the job well, a person’s will is that the person actually wants to do the job and do it well. Each dimension also breeds and fuels off each other. If you are good at something, you often like it, and if you like to do something you often get good at it.

So many things can go wrong when we mismatch our leadership to a person’s skill and will. This can occur when:
1. We don’t diagnosis someone’s level of skill and/or will correctly.
2. We are so afraid of “micromanaging” that we don’t correctly realize people need guidance at times based on their level of skill.
3. On the opposite extreme, we are so afraid something may go wrong that we do micro-managing, which leads to crushed will when someone who does have the skill needed to do a job is “over led.”
4. We know someone has a certain level of skill and will with one thing so we label them the same level of skill and will for everything. Skill and will can and are variable based on a variety of factors at any given time.
In order to avoid these mistakes, the first thing to do is to correctly diagnosis a person’s skill and will level based on the task or job at hand. You do this by:

1 Simply ask the person where they think their skill/will falls. Most people can give an honest assessment of these levels if you’ve built trust with them. I ask questions like: How do you feel about doing this on your own? Have you ever done this before? What problems do you think you will face or are you concerned about? Do you want to do this? Why or why not? Simply asking questions will help you know where people are.

2. Ask them to walk you through how they would do something/achieve an outcome. Can they articulate steps in achieving an outcome or provide specific examples of when and how they’ve done it or something similar before? If so, their skill level is most likely high. If someone talks in vague generalities about how to do something, they most likely won’t have the maximum level of competence needed to achieve the result. You can also assess their enthusiasm for the task and desire to do it through this exercise. (Note: This is a good interviewing tactic too when hiring to assess for skill and will.)

3. Observe them doing the task/job to assess where they are. Quite simply, if you watch someone do something you can tell if they can do it well or not. You can assess their confidence, skill, and enthusiasm through observation.

4. Debrief after they do something to assess their like for the activity and their desire to do it again. What did they learn and how will they grow to develop further skills based on what they learned? Do they want to do it again or are they bored by it? Oftentimes, when someone reaches a high level of skill, will can begin to diminish because a been there, done that attitude begins to set in. If the person can build on those skills by teaching others the skill(s) and or adding the next level of complexity to the task/job, you can continue to maintain will and interest.

Once you’ve diagnosed someone’s level of skill and will, it is then time to put these two pieces together to determine how you should best lead the person.

Giving examples of how to lead I find is the best way to illustrate what you can do right and what you can do terribly wrong. With that being said, we’ll devote the next few posts to scenarios based on all four combinations:
- low skill & high will
- high skill & high will
- high skill & low will
- low skill & low will
Stay tuned…..

Note: Many of the thoughts and ideas derived with skill and will come from the Situational Leadership approach developed by Hersey and Blanchard. This approach uses different terms than skill (competence) and will (commitment), but many of the thought processes are the same. I’d suggest reading The One Minute Manager if you are interested in learning more about this model and the practical application of it in the workplace.
October 15, 2019
How to Make Personality Differences Work to Your Advantage

Hanging pictures on the wall. Proofing documents. Formatting presentations. Checking to make sure calculations in a spreadsheet is correct.

I really dislike doing all of these types of tasks. They all require, quite honestly, a sense of detail and accuracy and, of course, patience that doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not how I’m wired.

My husband, on the other hand, finds satisfaction in hanging pictures on the wall, taking care to make sure they are level and perfectly spaced and aligned. He likes to measure, just like he did with the table. And it makes me happy that he finds satisfaction in it, so I don’t have to be frustrated by it.

Two people, I work with find satisfaction in proofing documents. Another can format presentations in a way that makes the people who create PowerPoint templates look like amateurs. And a contractor we use regularly for compensation projects loves spreadsheets, formulas, and checking to make sure they are right.

Personality differences in the workplace and at home are often a source of headache. Our default is to see our differences as contradictory instead of complementary. But they can actually lead to team and organization competitive advantage if the diversity of differences is harnessed.

A person’s personality leads them to like certain tasks and activities and dislikes others because of the energy or stress that activity creates. If you look at the map of the DiSC model of personality below, you can begin to see what types of activities people with certain profiles would like.

For example, the contractor I work with on compensation projects is a C. She likes the analytical, detail-oriented, and systematic approach to the data analysis. I, on the other hand as an I, like the task of convincing a potential client that we are the best organization to conduct their compensation analysis, and I like speaking on topics, including compensation, to help inspire and persuade people to do things in an innovative way. She and I make a great team for securing and conducting compensation related work.

If you are interested in figuring out how to harness personality diversity in your workplace, I would look at it from a task or activity-based perspective. Here’s how:

1.     Get a big stack of sticky notes in a variety of colors. You’ll need as many colors as you have people on your team.

2.     Give each person on your team a big stack of one color of sticky notes. An assigned color indicates a person on your team.

3.     Ask each person to write down everything they can think of that they do at work by individual tasks. One task/activity equals one sticky note.

4.     Ask them to code the task on each note with a + or a -. + meaning they enjoying doing it a – meaning they do not.

5.     Have everyone stick their sticky notes up on the wall.

6.     Give everyone the chance to review the notes on the wall and allow them to pull off notes that have a – on them that would actually be a + for them.

So for example, my sticky notes could all be blue and I write down “Run payroll” on one note and put a – sign by it.   I stick it on the wall.  A colleague of mine could look at that and say, “You know I think I would like to do that, or I do like to do that.” and they could take it off the wall.

Once this takes place, have a discussion about what tasks people have taken off the wall that they would like to do. Does the person that put it up there really want to divest of that task? Can you move things around? Some cross-training may be required.

Are there certain colors that have changed hands so to speak? Are people in the wrong “jobs”?

Think about moving beyond job descriptions to how people’s personality and interests can drive work assignments to lead to engagement.

There will be things no one likes do to. That’s just life and these things will still have to be done, but you might be surprised how much you can move things around. This can lead to people being more productive, and therefore your team more productive because you simply let personalities compliment each other instead of conflicting.

It’s a different way of thinking about how to get work done, but it could be one that might just help to diminish some of your personality conflicts at work in a unique way.

How do you ensure that personalities complement instead of conflict with each other at work?

September 17, 2019