Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management

Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research on Talent Management.

Understanding Behavior Styles Can Turn Conflict into Growth
For the past two semesters, I’ve been part of the Highlands College Leadership Institute, and if I’m honest, I’ve often felt like an imposter. Leadership hasn’t always come naturally to me. Speaking of understanding behavior styles, I know I tend to thrive in supportive roles rather than taking center stage. According to the DiSC personality assessment, my style is SC-calm, conscientious, and supportive. That means I avoid the spotlight and steer clear of conflict when I can.

But here’s the twist: this very discomfort has become a space for deep growth.

Through both Highlands College and my professional work with Horizon Point, I’ve been diving into conflict resolution. It turns out, understanding personality styles-not just our own, but others too, can dramatically shift how we handle disagreements in the workplace.

At Highlands, Chris and Sophie Corder from Designed for Unity have been helping us explore how our DiSC styles shape our approach to conflict. They draw from Robert A. Rohm’s powerful framework in The Ultimate Discovery System, which teaches how understanding behavior styles can unlock harmony at work.

Here’s what I’ve learned-and why it matters.

The Four DiSC Styles: How They Handle Conflict Differently

(Note: There are many models for understanding behavior styles, and we recommend using more than one to better understand ourselves and others. This is simply one tool we like.)

According to Rohm, people tend to operate within four key behavioral types:

Dominant (D): Assertive, results-focused, and direct. In conflict, they can seem intense or confrontational. To resolve issues, speak to their need for efficiency and solutions.

Influential (I): Outgoing, optimistic, and persuasive. These people might avoid tough conversations, so approach them with empathy and affirm their ideas.

Steady (S): Calm, patient, and loyal. They value peace and can shy away from conflict. Give them reassurance and plenty of time to process.

Conscientious (C): Precise, logical, and detail-oriented. They’ll want facts, not feelings. Offer clear data and structured solutions.

Know Thyself: The Power of Self-Awareness in Conflict

Understanding others is key-but knowing yourself might be even more important.

What triggers your frustration?

How do you respond under pressure?

Do you tend to avoid conflict or rush to solve it?

By becoming aware of your own behavioral style, you can better regulate your reactions and navigate conflict more intentionally.

Communication Tips for Resolving Conflict Effectively

Conflict can either divide teams or deepen trust. The difference often comes down to how we communicate.

Here are some key strategies from The Ultimate Discovery System:

Listen actively. Before offering solutions, seek to truly understand the other person’s point of view.

Tailor your communication. Match your tone and approach to the other person’s DiSC style for better connection.

Focus on solutions. Keep the conversation future-focused instead of rehashing problems.

Collaboration > Competition: Shift the Workplace Mindset

One of Rohm’s most valuable insights? Conflict resolution isn’t about winning. It’s about understanding and collaborating. Teams function best when they embrace diverse styles and strengths, working together instead of pulling in different directions.

When we honor different perspectives and communicate with intention, conflict becomes a tool for progress, not a threat to it.

Ready to Rethink Conflict?

Conflict is inevitable. But with the right tools, self-awareness, communication, and behavioral insight, it doesn’t have to feel like chaos. It can be the start of something better.

Want to dive deeper? Check out more from The Point Blog:

Conflict, Conflict Everywhere: How to Resolve Conflict at Work

4 Steps for Handling and Diffusing Conflict

Let’s Move Away from Cowardly Leadership in 2024
April 8, 2025
Investing in People Makes Cents
Last week, Emily kicked off our new series on professional development. What it is and why we should care about it. I’m pulling that thread to talk about the dollars and cents of why you should invest in people and why you should do it NOW.

I just read a powerful article from McKinsey titled Increasing your return on talent: The moves and metrics that matter that hit me square in the face with this quote: “McKinsey research indicates that companies that put talent at the center of their business strategy realize higher total shareholder returns than their competitors.”

One more time for the people in the back: spending money on your people makes you more money. McKinsey’s research let them to the startling stat that some companies could be missing out on $480 million a year just by not investing in employee engagement and skill development.

McKinsey goes on to lay out a 5 step plan for companies to “maximize their return on talent”, and it’s a an excellent plan that relies on an already existing, already strong HR team. If that doesn’t describe the situation at your company, you might not be ready for McKinsey’s 5 step plan. Instead, maybe you need the Dollar Tree plan.

Last week, I had lunch with a great friend who also works in the HR space. She recently stepped in for me to facilitate some pro-bono training when I couldn’t make the date work. Her tactic? Conversation cards from Dollar Tree.

She spent $3.75 plus tax on conversation cards that turned into meaningful relationshipping for the group and several people left interested in adopting conversation cards with their own teams. Weeks later, my friend is still riding the high of a $3.75 investment. When we invest in people, it’s about the intent and the follow through more than the amount of money spent.

Horizon Point’s operating values include Continuous Learning & Improvement, and it’s truly part of everything we do. Our operating values make up the structure of our planning meeting agendas. Seriously, the line items are grouped by value:
1. People First
  - Catch up
  - Review accomplishments
  - Schedule one-on-ones
2. Productivity
  - Company performance
  - Open projects
  - Business development
3. Continuous Learning & Improvement
  - Review program & project feedback
  - Identify continuing ed / professional dev opportunities
4. Give Back
  - Volunteer leadership
  - Financial support
Just the act of talking about our learning with intention generates engagement and a future-focused mindset. But the impact is compounded when we put our money where are mouths are. I asked Mary Ila today about Horizon Point’s investment in continuous learning for team members, and the total so far this year is over $10,000, just for the 5 of us. She doesn’t hesitate to invest in people, as long as the purpose is aligned with the mission of our work at HPC and, of course, as long as the investment is reasonable and works in the current budget. Our work is about talent development and better workplaces, and it only counts if we practice our own preaching.

To close the loop on the McKinsey research, they reported that:

the most effective organizations encourage personalized, adaptive learning. Employees are motivated to own their journeys by deciding which skills and areas of expertise they want to focus on. They are given feedback, along with coaching and peer-learning opportunities, and they are supported by a digital ecosystem that can help them track their progress over time.

We strongly agree with this approach, and we spend a lot of time and resources talking about it and being about it. We learn together, we learn individually, and it’s all based on the skills or areas we want to develop. As McKinsey puts it, we own our journeys. We also train and coach our clients on this adaptive learning model using our Leaders as Career Agents process. We help them customize learning opportunities that drive their organizations forward and create more value.

To invest in people is to invest in a thriving future. Talk about it and be about it. Investing in people makes cents!
September 10, 2024
AI for Talent Development: Good, Scary, or Both?

AI is everywhere. Have you recently googled something and used the AI generated answer without ever clicking a link from the list? It’s one of my new favorite efficiencies…and it freaks me out a little. In the “if something scares you, it probably means you should do it” kind of way. We’ve been talking about AI for HR over the last few weeks in the context of our work and industries we support, and today I’m wrapping it up with my take on AI for talent development as a whole. It freaks me out a little, so it’s probably a good thing. Right?

Speaking of Google’s AI Overview, here’s what came up when I googled “is AI for talent development?”:

Yes, AI (artificial intelligence) is being used in talent management to improve efficiency and outcomes at every stage of the talent lifecycle. AI technologies like machine learning algorithms and natural language processing can help with:

Recruitment
AI can help match candidates with roles based on their skills, experience, and cultural fit. AI-powered semantic search can also help recruiters find qualified candidates by running Google-like searches that go beyond keyword matching.

Employee development
AI can help create personalized training plans, learning suggestions, and development goals for each employee. AI can also provide real-time feedback based on performance data, which can help employees make immediate improvements.

Performance management
AI can help set dynamic goals and provide actionable insights to drive employee performance and development. AI can also help with succession planning by analyzing employee data to identify high performers and predict future leadership needs.

Skills intelligence
AI-powered tools can help HR leaders gain an in-depth view of their workforce’s skills and potential knowledge gaps. This information can help leaders evolve job architectures as skill needs and business priorities shift.

For each topic featured in the AI Overview, Google provided links to the source material used to inform the AI response. I wanted to know more about AI in Recruitment, so I clicked the link icon and found more detailed articles:

(Shoutout to Avature and HireRoad)

If you’ve kept up with the latest news at Horizon Point, you likely know that I (Jillian) just returned from a 6-week paid sabbatical. During that time, I slept a lot, I made time for hobbies, and I let my brain slow way, way down. Now coming back to work, it’s nice to ease into slow productivity and learn to incorporate the good of AI into our talent development work.

I don’t think anyone can say for sure what the future of AI for HR holds, but for now, let’s be curious and explore AI for talent development with open minds. After all, the simple definition of development is the act of improving by expanding, enlarging, or refining, and AI can certainly help.

August 20, 2024
Effective Delegation: Closed Doors Lead to Open Ones
As we begin our series on the theme for the year, “Open the Door”, we realized it was important to also consider that in order to open doors, you also need to know how to close them. The first step in effective delegation is to identify where closing a door for one person or organization is opening one for another.

As we sat around a table brainstorming our 2024 theme at our annual company retreat, we realized we were all in somewhat of a state of transition and so were many of our clients.

We often work with people, organizations, and communities that are in a place of “what gotcha there, won’t getcha here,” and we help them make the necessary steps to move to the next level of success. Whether it is coaching a middle manager to make the transition to an executive, working on organizational processes and culture to transition a company from a small one to a larger one, or helping a community understand things like wage rates and labor participation and how that is impacting their workforce landscape, we are often walking alongside people in the middle of a paradigm shift. And oftentimes we have to remind them, you are going to have to say no to something to say yes to something else. This is where growth lives.

And so are we as a business and as individual team members- working to embrace growth by opening some doors and closing others. Each of us are masters and some things, novices at others, energized by some tasks and drained by others. Seasons come and seasons go, and as a team we sat at the retreat and realized some specific plans needed to be put in place in order to do so.

Delegation has to be intentional for everyone involved in order for it to work successfully, so we embarked on an exercise where we worked to get intentional with our transitions and delegation plans. If you or your organization is in a season of transition, here are steps to think through closing doors and opening others:
1. List all of your service offerings up on the wall (literally).
2. Have everyone identify the areas they feel fully skilled at doing, the areas where they want to grow, and the areas of work they would like to divest in doing.
3. Discuss things you aren’t offering that need to be offered and how you will go defining and executing them. For example, we’ve realized that we have been called upon to do one thing for clients that then turns fully into another. We are calling this something along the lines of “Talent Development/Workforce Strategy” and we are taking the first half of this year to be able to fully articulate what this means and market it.
4. Identify a team leader for each line of business. This is ideally someone who is both fully skilled at the area and also energized by doing it and teaching it to others or is drained by doing it and wants to offload it but is interested in teaching it to others.
5. Give the team leader the full reign to execute the line of business and equip others to get it done. Identify a timeline for doing so. Is it going to take three months, a year, etc. to allow enough time for the person(s) to open the door to the task so another person(s) can close the door to it?
6. Capture the plan in a document or spreadsheet where you will remember who is doing what and can track progress.
7. Use the document you created to check back in regularly on the transition of the skills from one door open to one door closed.
When we did this activity on our retreat, we identified a lot of opportunities for us all to learn from one another. We identified ways to energize ourselves around work and transition things where people were fatigued or bored by certain types of work. This doesn’t mean that we all don’t have to continue to do “laundry” as we call it- stuff no one really wants to do- to keep the business running and our clients happy, but it does mean that we are being intentional about opening doors and closing them, all for the sake of both individual and organizational growth.

How do you know when to delegate? Do you have a process for doing so with intention? What are you looking forward to closing the door on in order to grow?
February 20, 2024
Why Appreciation in the Workplace Matters
Remember Mary Ila’s take on “How to Be Authentic with Your Appreciation at Work”? We reference Chapman & White all the time in training and coaching with our clients. To celebrate Valentine’s Day with full hearts in the workplace, we’re bringing you an early look at the new updated version of The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.

We subscribe to the newsletter from Appreciation at Work^TM and got one of the first announcements of the new, post-COVID research on professional appreciation. Right away, I asked the team if we could do a blog about it. New research!? Yes! Here’s the blurb we got:
Appreciation at Work has done peer-reviewed research and polling through and post-COVID. The result of this research is a completely new chapter on how to effectively show appreciation to remote and hybrid employees including topics such as:
- the variety of remote work relationships
- trust in remote work relationships
- creating and maintaining a workplace culture
- the employer/supervisor perspective
- the employee perspective
- the key to keeping remote employees
- what neuroscience is showing
This edition also includes updated research (50+ citations) of data shared about the importance of appreciation and its positive impact on the functioning of businesses & organizations (including increased productivity and higher profitability when your employees feel appreciated.

Source: Appreciation at Work
I read it, loved it, laughed, cringed, and mostly just appreciated for the millionth time that Gary Chapman & Paul White adapted the Love Languages for professional relationships. They present their research on appreciation at work in a relatable, real life way. Here are some of my favorite quotes, classic and new:
- “During the Great Resignation of 2022, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that employees were three times more likely to resign due to a lack of appreciation in comparison to financial compensation issues.”
- “When leaders actively pursue teaching their team members how to communicate authentic appreciation in the ways desired by the recipients, the whole work culture improves. Interestingly, even managers and supervisors report they enjoy their work more. All of us thrive in an atmosphere of appreciation.”
- “74% of employees never or rarely express gratitude to their boss.” (Reminder that appreciation is important up, down, and sideways!)
- “There is a distinct difference between the Quality Time employees desire from their supervisor and what they value from co-workers. In response to this issue, we expanded the Motivating by Appreciation Inventory to allow individuals to indicate what actions they desire and from whom they want them.”
- Acts of Service are about the other person, not about you. “Ask before you help. Don’t assume you know what help they want or need. If you are going to help, do it their way.”
- “Our research with over 375,000 employees found that Tangible Gifts is the least chosen language of appreciation.” So if you’re going to do it, it’s important to give gifts “primarily to those individuals who appreciate them” and “give a gift the person values”. (Lorrie wrote about HPC’s take on gifts in “A Few of Our Favorite Things”.)
- “The surest way to find out the appropriateness of Physical Touch is simply to inquire.” Many people appreciate a good high five, fist bump, or handshake to celebrate a job well done. Just check with them first, and don’t hold it against them if they prefer not to touch.
Chapman & White also devote an entire chapter to the ROI of genuine appreciation. Take a look at these charts from the book:

Regarding remote and hybrid teams, Chapman & White basically say the needs are the same as fully in-person teams, but the intensity of certain needs are different. Here’s a snippet from the chapter on remote teams:

“In one study, prior to COVID-19, with almost 90,000 individuals who had taken our online assessment…we found that Words of Affirmation was the most desired appreciation language, followed by Quality Time and Acts of Service. But remote employees chose Quality Time as their primary language of appreciation more frequently (35% of employees) than workers on site (25%). The same pattern was found with employees both during the pandemic and afterwards.”

They go on to say, “…the single most important lesson we learned for effectively communicating appreciation to remote colleagues is that one must be more proactive than in face-to-face relationships. The most important factor is to understand, affirm, and relate to your colleagues as people.”

If you saw our new team video highlighting our operating values, or if you’re a longtime HPC friend, you know that People First is our number one value. We are all just people, with the same ups and downs, and the same desire to be loved, appreciated, and valued. If we were to sum up the 5 languages book(s) in the simplest terms, we’d say Be People First. Be people first toward yourselves, and be people first towards others.

If we remember to be People First, we just might get better at genuine appreciation all on our own.

For individuals or teams interested in learning more about The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, we highly suggest starting with the MBA Inventory^TM, then reading the book (or listening to the audiobook). If you purchase the book, it comes with an access code to take the inventory. If you’d like to jump straight to the inventory, you can buy a single access code or codes for your entire team here. (I feel like it’s important for me to say that we’re not being paid to promote any of this, we just really like it.)
February 13, 2024