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.

  • 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.

  • 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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