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.

  • Bullying Doesn’t Just Happen at School: Workplace Bullying

    Bullying Doesn’t Just Happen at School: Workplace Bullying

    I recently saw an article about a nine year old boy in Denver who took his own life after being bullied during his first four days of school. My youngest son is eight and I can’t imagine him ever feeling like his only choice is suicide.

    When my oldest was in elementary school he was bullied by another child at his daycare. While he has always been a very headstrong child, the bullying continued to the point where he had put up with enough. Together we sat down with his martial arts instructor, who is phenomenal at working with children to tackle such hard issues, and he helped us to formulate a game plan on how to handle it. With his help, my son was able to show his bully that his words weren’t having the effect he was aiming for, and eventually the two actually became friends.

    Bullying isn’t limited to children. A survey sponsored by the Workplace Bullying Institute in 2017 showed that a staggering number of U.S. workers experienced bullying in the workplace.

    • 5 million U.S. workers reported experiencing bullying in the workplace
    • Women experience bullying, from both women and men, at a much higher rate with 65% of male bullies targeting women and 67% of female bullies targeting women
    • 61% reported that they were bullied by a boss
    • 25% reported that their employer did nothing while 46% reported that their employer conducted a “sham” investigation

    Bullying in the workplace has an impact on the organization as well, including increased turnover, loss of valuable talent, decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and even the risk of litigation. So how can employers minimize these risks?

    1. Have a well-defined Harassment Policy. Workplace bullying is a form of harassment. While most bullying may not be illegal, that doesn’t make it okay. Make sure your Harassment Policy includes workplace bullying. Train your leadership on what bullying is, how to conduct themselves to set the example, and how to handle it if an employee reports bullying. Review your Harassment Policy with all new hires, and annually with all staff.
    2. Have and follow a formal investigation process. Your policy should include information on how reports will be handled. Determine who will conduct the investigation, how it will be conducted, and make sure your findings are well documented. Do not ignore reports of bullying and do not put off investigating those reports.
    3. Take proper action to eliminate the behavior. Once you have completed a thorough investigation, determine what action needs to be taken to make the bullying behavior cease. That could be anything from a documented verbal conversation with the accused up to termination. If the accused is not terminated, monitor the situation to ensure that the actions have in fact ceased. Do not assume that it has and let it go.
    4. Promote a workplace that welcomes diversity, inclusion, and a difference of opinions. Work hard to promote an organization that encourages teamwork, uniqueness, and freedom to communicate- even when what an employee has to say may go against the grain. Pay attention to where there may be breakdowns in this and work to build them up. Host company functions that encourage employees to get to know each other. Provide new employees with mentors who can help guide them and integrate them into the organization. And have an open door, where employees feel comfortable voicing concerns or issues. And again, take those concerns or issues seriously because not doing so leads to a breakdown of trust.
    5. When needed, provide employees with outside resources to help them cope. I’m a huge proponent of Employee Assistance Programs. If you have one, make sure both the accused and the accuser are provided with that resource. If you don’t have an EAP, there are other resources available to employees that may help them. You never really know why someone bullies, or what is going on in the mind of someone who is being bullied. Sometimes it takes a trained professional to assist them.

    60.5 million is a staggering and unacceptable number. Bullying is not an inherent trait, it is a learned behavior. Just as I aim to teach my children acceptance and kindness, employers can aim to promote those values in throughout their organization as well.

    Below are some additional resources on bullying:

    www.stopbullying.gov

    https://www.apaexcellence.org/resources/special-topics/workplace-bullying

    https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2016/05/workplace-bullying-online-anti-bullying-resources-for-employees.shtml

  • 6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values

    6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values

    “….In other words, only 10 percent of organizations have be goals (what Andy Stanley means by a set of values that guide our decisions) effectively integrated in their daily practices. Mind you, many organizations write about their mission, vision and values in their annual report, but that’s only lip service unless those be goals are integrated into their recruiting, training, evaluating and promoting. How can an organization claim that its be goals are important when none of its leaders’ performance evaluations or pay is based on adhering to those values.”

    I was recently in a meeting talking about performance management systems, when a colleague told our mutual client that the company she saw do this best was one of her former employers.  She said all people related practices and decisions were designed around the company’s core values.

    She said, it was hard trying to explain to the unemployment office that someone was terminated for “a core values violation”, but they did it every single time because a core values violation was the only reason anyone was ever fired.

    Yet as the quote above states, very few people design their performance management system and practices around values, even when we find that doing things this way, well, adds tremendous bottom line value (pun intended):

    “The surprising thing is that it has been proven that companies with be goals (values) do better financially over time.  If you don’t believe me, read Built to Last by Jim Collins, in which he demonstrates empirically that companies with an unchanging set of core values and behaviors (be goals)- while still being open to changes in their day-to day practices (do goals)- outperform those that don’t have this attribute.”

    So how do you integrate values into performance management?

    6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Values

    1. First, clearly define your set of values and the competences/behaviors that demonstrate living these values. You can use a case study approach we described in an earlier blog post to design values and tie behaviors easily to them.
    2. Your employee handbook should be designed around values.  The values- be goals-  should be stated first and examples of how to live the values should be given.  Company policies should be linked back to values.   It should be more focused on we do this here or we behave this way here, instead of a running list of what not to do.
    3. Take the handbook case further by designing videos that illustrate actual employees living the company values.  You can embed these videos into your handbook and/or use them on the first day of onboarding to facilitate a discussion about company values.
    4. If you have a formal performance appraisal system, the dimensions should be your values.  Use a three-point scale – meets, does not meet, exceeds – and again give behavioral based examples or anchors to show what it would mean to meet, exceed or not meet expectations.
    5. Design your rewards and recognition system around company values. One of our former clients does this through an annual all company values awards ceremony where peers nominate people for values awards.  At the event the winners are announced and given a gift that directly relates to the value the person demonstrates.  They become the values champion for that year and help others grow in living the company value they demonstrate so well.Another client does this through quarterly values awards that are also peer nominated.  The company owner presents the winners with the award by giving them personalized gifts based on the winners “favorite things” that have been gathered when they are hired.

      If you have another system- whether it is formal or informal, integrated through tech system or not- make sure it is structured around values.

    6. If you think you need to fire someone or put them on a plan for performance improvement, consider how their poor performance relates to a violation of your core values.   When you talk with them about performance improvement or termination, describe the reason for doing so in terms of the value(s) that have been violated.  Designing any PIP forms or tools you may have around values can help facilitate this.

     

    If it is hard to do any of these things around values, you most likely don’t have a comprehensive set of values in place and you may need to reconsider what is lacking as it relates to things that warrant rewards for great performance and the opposite for poor performance.

    How do your company values help you be successful?

     

    Like this post? You may also like:

    What are Company Values and How do you Create Them?

    A personal account of performance management that works… and doesn’t

    Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

    The Changing World of Work: Is the Policy Going to Die?

  • How to Move Your Goods to Greats

    How to Move Your Goods to Greats

    Our previous post, “Leaders, Focus on Moving Your Middle – Play Offense, Not Defense”, emphasized the importance of focusing on moving your middle majority to high performers.

    But how do you do that?  How do you get your good players, or your B players, to become A players?

    They all can’t be converted, but those who have usually have a leader that:

    1. Sets high expectations.   This comes in the form of setting challenging goals and holding people accountable to them.

    2. After high expectations are set, the leader then provides Assurance and Confidence.  This involves saying things like,  “I know we’ve set challenging goals, but I know you are capable of achieving what we’ve set out to do.  This is why I’ve given you responsibility to do this.”

    3. Finally, Direction and Support is provided. This involves:

    • Being approachable and available when needed.
    • Providing stretch assignments to help the individual grow.
    • Creating exposure to risks and failure. As a leader, you should expect failure and help people be comfortable with it coming.  This could include asking people when you meet with them regularly about how they failed during the week.  This shows you expect it and you want to know what was learned from it.

    When a leader can successfully set high expectations, provide assurance and confidence as well as direction and support, it leads to increased self-awareness for an individual.

    This then allows for authenticity to be shaped through hard work, determination and challenging assignments.

    Finally, and most importantly, you’ve then done what leadership is all about.  You’ve modeled how leaders create more leaders – completing the full circle of equipping someone else to move others (not just themselves) from good to great.

    How do you grow people to become star performers?

  • How to Know When to Fire the Prima Donna

    How to Know When to Fire the Prima Donna

    How do you know when to fire the prima donna? You know one when you see one. Before you can define exactly what a prima donna is, you can name one. In the flesh. And they have most likely made your work life hell at some point or another.

    Prima Donna – noun: “a vain or undisciplined person who finds it difficult to work under direction or as a part of a team.”

    Merriam-Webster

    What do you do when faced with one?  Or, how do you get leadership to realize there is one in your midst?  

    For a variety of positive reasons that have nothing to do with prima donnas, I love 360° assessment and feedback tools.  If you need to spot and prove you’ve got one in your midst, a good 360° and a person’s response to their 360° feedback will help you nail one.   (Any type of formal or informal feedback mechanism can work, but a 360° gives you quantifiable data.)

    Here’s what you do and the signs you look for along the way:

    1 Give a 360° assessment and/or encourage leadership/HR to administer them. Make sure it includes a self-assessment and a 360° (peers, subordinates, boss) view. If you need some ideas on good ones, email me. You can also read our case study for Total Employee Engagement with a client that used 360s successfully.

    2. Look at the results of how the person rates himself or herself compared to the aggregate of the way others rate them.

    Sign one:  Prima donnas have an inflated view of themselves.  In other words, a prima donna will rate themselves as higher than their raters on almost all if not all dimensions of the assessment.

    3. Look at the results of the aggregate average of the way others rated them compared to the sample/norm average.

    Sign two: Prima donnas have lower aggregate ratings from their peers than the sample average.  In other words, prima donna’s raters rate them an average of 2.6, let’s say on a dimension and the sample norm is 3.5 (on a five point scale). You see this across most if not all dimensions of the assessment.

    4. Have a feedback session with the potential prima donna to explain and discuss the results.  Up until the feedback point, you really don’t know if you have a prima donna based on sign 1 and 2. You may just have someone who is incompetent either in skill or will. But you have real trouble when….

    Sign three:  A prima donna doesn’t own their results.

    Sign four:  A prima donna places blame on everyone except themselves for the less than stellar results.  It could be another person, a group of people, the organization, or heck, they could blame it on the weather, but they take ZERO ownership.

    The Coup de Gras:  A Prima Donna (or maybe we’ve crossed over into clinical narcissism by this point) expresses a level of PRIDE in their results. You may hear something like “Well this shows why I’ve been successful.” Or “This is what I’ve had to do to be successful.”

    Once you get to Sign Three, you know you don’t have any choice but to fire the person.  Because when behavior isn’t owned, you can’t do anything about it.  The person has declared they are uncoachable. Sign Four and the Coup De Gras are just icing on the cake.

    The prima donna will continue to reek their toxic nature to the organization and continue to be proud about it because you did nothing about it, even with the quantitative feedback on it.

    Furthermore, those who rated them will also be punished because you did nothing with their feedback. You may even be showing them that to be successful, the prima donna is in fact right. It does take behavior like theirs to be successful. That’s when you know you’ve lost the game – empowering toxic behavior.

    Do you have prima donnas in your midst?  What do you do to diagnosis and deal with the challenges they bring?

  • Make It Effective… Improve Communication Within Your Organization!

    Make It Effective… Improve Communication Within Your Organization!

    Think about your family, organizations you volunteer with, the company you work for. How would you rate communication in each of these groups? Do the members of each of these groups communicate effectively with each other, or is something lacking?

    We learn to communicate from a very early age, learning to listen and speak as an infant and later on learning to read and write. However, even though we learn to communicate very early in our lives, many people have difficulty communicating effectively.

    As an HR professional, one of the complaints I hear most often from employees and leadership within organizations is that there is a lack of effective communication. This lack of communication in the workplace often leads to added stress and tension among employees, loss of productivity, a decrease in employee morale, and turnover.

    • Businesses with effective communication are 50% more likely to have lower employee turnover. (ClearCompany)
    • 33% of employees said a lack of open, honest communication has the most negative impact on employee morale (HerdWisdom)
    • Miscommunication costs even smaller companies of 100 employees an average of $420,000 annually. (Top Ten Email Blunders that Cost Companies Money, Deborah Hamilton)

    So how can you improve communication within your organization?

    1. Keep employees informed. Make sure employees know what is going on in the organization. If your company just made a major policy change or won a new client contract, make sure your employees know. Send out a communication to all employees, have managers announce it during team meetings, or post it in the employee break room.
    2. Provide training to your leadership. Good communication starts from the top. If your leaders aren’t effective communicators, that will trickle down to the rest of your employees. Make sure leaders have the training and tools needed to communicate effectively.
    3. Listen to and address employee concerns. If employees come to you with concerns about communication, take those concerns seriously and address them. Whether the concern is regarding a single employee or a department, determine how you as a leader can help improve communications.
    4. Remember, it’s not always what you say but how you say it. Communication involves a lot more than just what you say. Body language and tone play an important part as well. So be sure you’re conveying the message you intend to convey through your body language and tone.
    5. Use the appropriate method of communication. Make sure you’re using the appropriate method of communication to get your message across. Is the message best communicated via email, phone, or in person? This may vary depending on what message your conveying as well as who your audience is.

    For information on Communication Training, as well as other training topics we offer, click here.