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.

  • Want Real Teamwork? Start With Vulnerability!

    Want Real Teamwork? Start With Vulnerability!

    I was sitting in a multi-day training with a group of executive leaders. I had yet to put my finger on what was missing with this team, when a question was asked that made me realize, these people don’t know each other. Through this question, it became apparent that they aren’t “allowed” to put their guard down and be real. They don’t feel like they have permission to be vulnerable.

    Some of these people had been working together for ten plus years and were hard pressed to name any of their colleagues hobbies much less their co-workers spouse and/or kids’ names.

    And they were passing this mindset down the chain and throughout the company. The uber-professional guard they had up was creating issues with trust, teamwork, and ultimately business results.

    To be an authentic leader requires a certain level of vulnerability. As Criss Jami said, “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.”

    It’s hard, though, to just come flat out and ask, “tell me how you are weak” especially with people in leadership roles. If you have a team lacking in vulnerability with each other, here are three suggestions (starting from easiest to most difficult to facilitate) to get people talking in a way that exposes vulnerability and allows strength to rise out of weakness:

    1. Ask the group to answer a pre-prepared list of questions about themselves. Then have the group simply share their responses. These questions can be anything from, “Do you have pets? What kind and what are their names?” to “Where did you grow up?” to more probing and thought provoking questions like “What is the best advice you have ever received?” to “What do you want your legacy to be?”
    2. Simply ask the group to share their response to what has been their greatest success in life so far and what has been their greatest failure. I would also suggest you ask for the greatest professional and personal success and failure so that people don’t limit their responses to only work related answers that the team may already know.
    3. Ask the group to share their story. To do this, ask them to share the 5-7 defining moments of their life that have shaped who they are.

    As Brene Brown said, “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
     

    How do you help people step into the light by way of darkness?

    Shine today.

     

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  • 3 Things to Consider Before Your Employee Rewards System Goes Bad

    3 Things to Consider Before Your Employee Rewards System Goes Bad

    She looks like a precious angel doesn’t she?  They both do, actually, but that’s my three year old, loving on my niece before her baptism.  Picture perfect.

    Flash forward to lunch after the baptism at my brother and sister-in-law’s home.  My husband and I refused to make a special lunch for our kids, telling them that could eat what was prepared. Beef tenderloin, homemade rolls, green bean and roasted potatoes. For this 30 something, the lunch was a major treat. For a three year old, who just wants a peanut butter and jelly, not so much.

    But, if we had possibly succeeded for a split second in parenting by not giving in to our kids’ desires, we failed with our motivation tactic to get her to eat it (which we do quite often). We provided a carrot or should I say, ice cream and cookies. If you eat what’s on your plate, we told her, you can have dessert.  

    She fought us on it, tried to negotiate with us on it, and tried to hold out longer than we could. But we stuck to it, and she eventually brought her plate to me clean.  

    “Can I have my ice cream and cookie now?” she asked.  She looked about as precious of an angel asking this as she did in the picture.

    Fooled me.

    A few minutes later, my brother’s good friend comes in with handful of small pieces of beef tenderloin in his hand and throws it away.   

    “I found this under the baby bouncer,” he said.  “Did someone drop it?”

    Angel turned devil. She had hidden her food, not eaten it.  And downed her ice cream and cookie in record time less she be found out.

    Total backfire.

     

    Are you incentivizing bad behavior with your employee rewards system?

    How many times have the rewards and recognition programs at your company backfired?   

    At the least, they just don’t motivate people towards the results you are trying to achieve.  

    At the most, it causea people to lie and cheat.  Three year olds do it for ice cream and cookies. Teachers and educational leaders have been known to do it achieve bonuses and improved reputation.  Just ask Atlanta.

    So before you go incentivizing certain behaviors at your company, think first about the following:

    1. Do you really need an extrinsic reward to motivate behavior? In most cases, intrinsic motivators- things that are naturally satisfying to someone- instead of a extrinsic motivation- things that people do to receive a reward or to avoid punishment- are better long term motivators.  The best way to do this is to link employees to a bigger purpose and mission and hire people that naturally link their purpose to the organization’s.  A really good example of this can be found in Adam Grant’s study related to call center employees.  (If you’d rather skip the scholarly journal article and get right to the point, The New York Times Magazine article sums it up well or grab a copy of Grant’s book, Give and Take.)

    2. If you think an extrinsic reward is needed, think through possible outcomes before implementation. I’m not sure if I could have found a developmentally appropriate way to intrinsically motivate my three year old to eat her food. Of course that begs the question of whether a reward is even needed or justified for getting a kid to eat. Probably not.  We could have just let the hunger naturally run its course.  And in many cases rewards probably aren’t needed in the workplace for a lot of things we implement a rewards system for.  So, you need to think about these things before implementing:

    • Is a reward even needed?
    • If we don’t implement a reward or punishment, will natural rewards and/or punishment happen?
    • If we don’t implement some type of reward and/or recognition will people leave?
    • Does the reward motivate some but demotivate many?  Google’s $1M Founder Awards are a good example of this.
    • And to that point, does your reward system fit with your culture? Maybe you want to reward only those high achievers and demotivate the ones that don’t perform right out the door.
    • Can you afford it?

    3. Test it before rolling out a full implementation. If you decide the reward system is needed, test it on a sub-set of your employee population before rolling it out to the whole organization. Have outcomes you want to measure it against (like productivity, revenue, etc.) This requires having a control group that doesn’t get the reward structure as well.  Then, you can effectively answer the questions above by having actual results to prove the need. It’s better to fail fast and fail cheap through testing than to have to recant a system after a lot of time, effort and money.

     

    Is your reward system driving the right results?

     

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  • Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

    Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

    My 1st grader comes out of school most every day chomping on bubble gum. When I was a kid in school, gum at any grade level was strictly prohibited, so this peaked my interest.

    “Where and how did you get bubble gum?”  I asked one day when he got in the car.

    “I turned my penny in for it, my teacher gave it to me.” He said.

    Interesting.

    “How’d you get the penny?” I asked.

    “I helped clean up,” he said.

    I realized his teacher was using a method that is hot in HR now regarding employee rewards and recognition. Many systems allow bosses and peers to give employees points (i.e.- pennies) to cash in for things the employee (or first grader) desires.

    When I was in his class for open house a few weeks later, I realized that his teacher’s system is even more like the rewards and recognition tech systems on the market today.  You can save up your points (pennies) to earn bigger prizes. Four pennies gets you trip to the treasure box for a toy.

    My son never brings home a toy. He is still chomping away on bubble gum whenever I pick him up from school. Maybe he can’t ever earn more than one penny because he hasn’t done enough to be rewarded, but he is a child that gravitates towards instant gratification instead of the delayed variety.  As soon as he gets the penny, he cashes it in.

    And some of your employees may be like him, whereas others may hoard points or pennies for greater rewards.  Today’s tech-based rewards systems play to

    1. Personality and
    2. Personal preferences related to what “stuff” is most desired

    in an automated way.

    But this way still feels somewhat impersonal for some strange reason.

    The latest- and I think more interesting- trend in employee rewards and recognition revolves around experiences.  Because let’s face it, who really needs more stuff these days? We are flooded with stuff. And experiences are highly personal.

    I got a chance to see Blueboard in action at the #HRTechConf competing for the prize of the Next Great HR Tech Company.  They won my vote. They are reinventing the rewards and recognition space by focusing on a scalable and easy to use rewards system that gives away experiences not stuff.   

    And, wouldn’t you know, my 1st grader’s school is onto this trend too.  At their Fall Festival, many of the silent auction prizes were for experiences with different teachers at the school. Go get ice cream with Ms. Smith. Get to build a Lego farris wheel with Mrs. H. (aka- Lego Lady- we love her!).  

    You would guess correctly if you assumed that these door prizes had the highest bids placed. Forget the basket of actual Legos, parents know their kids would rather have an hour of Mrs. H’s undivided attention with the Legos.

    So I don’t know what came first- schools catching onto this motivational trend or companies. But, I’ll say, the experience of Vegas with my husband and the #HRTechConf with colleagues has been a much greater reward and motivator than the purse that I for a split second thought about buying while here. I’ll save my pennies for the next experience.

    What do you value more- stuff or experiences?

     

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  • The Unattainable Work-Life Balance

    The Unattainable Work-Life Balance

    Is our elusive hunt for a work-life balance causing us undue stress in our lives and the lives of those around us?

    Generation X introduced the philosophy of the work-life balance in the 1970’s, and organizations and employees alike have spent the last few decades searching for that balance. But can anyone say they’ve found it?

    The major flaw with the work-life balance philosophy is that it’s based on the premise that your work self and your life self are two separate entities and to achieve balance, you must maintain that separation and seek a level of equality between the two.

    A study published in 2015 by the Harvard Business School and Stanford University showed that workplace stress can be just as harmful as second-hand smoke. If we’re bringing that stress home, imagine the impact it must have on our families.

    It took my thirteen-year-old son’s insight to show me that the struggle to achieve a work-life balance doesn’t just affect those trying to achieve it, it also affects everyone around them. About a year after moving to Huntsville from Northern Virginia I asked him if he was glad we moved. He told me that he was glad we moved and that his friends here were very different than his friends in Virginia. He explained how his friends here are more laid back, he could be more open with them without fear of them judging him, and how his friends from Northern Virginia were much more rigid and easily offended. His response both shocked me and made me realize just how much of an impact living in the rat race of the D.C. area had on my children.

    As the Indian Yogi and Poet Sadhguru said “There is no such thing as work-life balance- it is all life. The balance has to be within you.”

    The reality is that our work self and life self are two parts of the same whole and can never be fully separated. The Millennials have figured this out and taken the work-life balance philosophy and given it an overhaul. They have introduced us to the work-life integration philosophy. The work-life integration philosophy is a more synergistic approach, in which we must learn to blend our work self and life self into one cohesive unit.

    Many organizations are starting to buy into this concept and provide benefits to help employees integrate their work-life selves.

    • Evernote, a software company, provides their 250+ full-time employees with bi-weekly housecleaning services free of charge, $1000 annual vacation stipends, and a baby bonding program that provides an additional six weeks of paid leave.
    • SC Johnson & Son provides employees with concierge services, on-site childcare, flexible work hours & compressed work weeks.
    • Google provides on-site physicians, free lunches, massages, car washes, up to 12 weeks of paid leave, as well as $500 in “Baby Bonding Bucks” for new parents.

    While these examples are from larger companies, there are benefits that smaller employers can offer as well. I currently work with a client that offers their employees PTO hours in addition to vacation time. These hours are to be used for things such as doctor’s appointments, hair appointments, and parent-teacher conferences. They also provide a car wash service that comes onsite and employees can pay to have their car washed while they work.

    What benefits can your organization offer employees to help them achieve a work-life integration and reduce stress?

  • Career Development: A Resource For Talent Retention

    Career Development: A Resource For Talent Retention

    Guest blog written by: Steve Graham

    In a recent study, conducted by the Work Institute, career development was identified as the top reason people leave or remain with organizations. In their study titled, 2017 Retention Report, 240,000 employees were interviewed about factors that were most influential in their decision to stay with or leave an organization.

    For decades, organizations that have invested in developing their people also experienced higher market shares and lower turnover than competitors. Despite the positive data to support career development, many organizations continue to fall short.  Lack of growth is a common reason given during exit interviews for leaving. In a study conducted by Empxtrack, reviewing data from over a number of years and involving approximately 52,000 exit interviews, the research identified lack of growth opportunity as the second most given reason for leaving an organization. The study indicated that 22% of job exits were directly related to growth.

    The good news is that with a little more focus on helping people develop their careers, organizations can reduce turnover.  Fears that investing in an employee and then having them leave the organization is one of the most common excuses for not offering training or other development opportunities. The truth is that people will leave anyway, to find an organization that offers them opportunity.  Having a well-trained and engaged workforce does not happen without an emphasis on career development.

    Career development initiatives include: formalized training programs, mentoring, internal coaching opportunities, and other opportunities. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) offers resources in integrating career development within an organization.  According to SHRM, having a designed career development path for employees allows managers to address gaps in training.  This is helpful in preparing people for promotions as well.

    Career development impacts performance. When people feel like their organization cares, and is focused on their development, it creates a deeper level of engagement. This increases the level of commitment on reaching individual and organizational goals.  Helping people become their best can help your organization stand out.  Designing a culture that supports career development also enhances your employer brand.

    Here are some basics steps in creating a career development focus:

    1. Know your people. Take time to learn them as individuals.
    2. Conduct a career path inventory and find out where they want to go.
    3. Use technology to create learning opportunities.
    4. Search for outside assistance and resources.

    Resources include, but are not limited to, workforce development programs, degree programs, mentoring, and career coaching.  The National Career Development Association (NCDA) is a great place to start.  The world of work is changing and organizations need to be in better alignment with the needs of their people. If an organization is not offering career development, people will find it elsewhere. They will seek places of employment that embrace their individuality, interest, and goals.

     

    About the Author: 

    Steve Graham serves as vice president for marketing, HR business partner and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive and professional coaching, health care administration and strategic human resource management. Steve is also the Founder and President of Valiant Coaching & Talent Development, LLC.

    He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development and International Coach Federation.