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.

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
Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement
Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog.

Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring everybody on the manufacturing floor with her big, bad, scary HR presence…until she just started talking to people. Every day, she walks the floor and speaks to each individual person with a smile and a “good morning”. She talks to people without needing anything from them. Now, the employees respect her and see her as a valued resource, not a spooky monster. This is “relationshipping”, and it’s critical for workplace wellness and employee engagement. Just like Ivey trained herself to be a relationshipper (and indirectly trained others), you can train yourself by practicing these strategies:
Today, I talked with 50 program managers about “Creating a Culture of Radical Candor”, i.e. Kim Scott’s framework of caring personally about people and being willing to challenge them directly. The spooky version: instead of tricking people into believing you care about them (manipulative insincerity) or treating people like besties (ruinous empathy), let’s train ourselves and those around us to practice radical candor, or graceful accountability as we call it at HPC.
Have stories about effective employee engagement? We’d love to hear them! Send us a note at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.
October 31, 2023
The Crossover of Adaptive Leadership and Storytelling

I recently read an article by the Huntsville Business Journal about adaptive leadership, and I immediately sent it to everyone on the HPC team. I thought, “This is what we’re always talking about!! The HBJ gets it!!” We truly believe that leadership behaviors rooted in CODE have significantly higher impact, and we’re seeing this play out in a big way with one of our clients.

Four years ago, a client asked us to explore gender equality in their organization. This included analysis of leadership demographics, a comprehensive survey to all employees, and focus group discussions. During the study, some challenges beyond the scope of gender equality emerged. As a result, we implemented a pilot Encounter Group program. Encounter groups are defined as “a group of people who meet with a trained leader to increase self-awareness and social sensitivity, and to change behavior through interpersonal confrontation, self-disclosure, and strong emotional expression.” In other words, we gather in small groups and share perspectives, life-changing events, backgrounds, and factors that affect decisions across the workforce. The end goal is to bring about mutual understanding and respect in order to address issues of polarization and awareness.

Our Encounter Group curriculum addresses the CODE model of adaptive leadership through storytelling and conversation.

Our very first exercise with Encounter Groups is Share Story, where the facilitator creates a safe environment for participants to share real stories about their lives and listen respectfully to others, aligning with the EQ element of the CODE model.

Through a series of implicit bias exercises, including examining bias in workplace practices, we discuss organizational integrity in the context of DWYSYWD: do what you say you will do. If you’re going to have policies and procedures that are meant to establish fairness, it’s just as important that everyone is equally held accountable to them. In other words, if you’re going to preach fairness, you have to practice it, too.

We also read stories of others. Business leaders, athletes, veterans, immigrants; we read stories of people that are different from our stories. This exercise stretches and develops our understanding of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace culture.

The capstone session of our Encounter Groups includes a critique of stories we consume day-to-day, whether from news outlets, social media, or managers in our own organization. We talk about getting out of your filter bubble – intentionally seeking stories and information that represent people who are different from you and your “feed”. We talk about silos in workplaces, in-groups and out-groups, and how important it is to examine who or what is shaping your perspective. Is your opinion of your workplace shaped by a person or group of people you work with? You might think your workplace is fair and inclusive, but are you missing a key perspective that’s different?

Now, four years later, the Encounter Groups are ongoing, and the organization has strengthened its support for an employee-led DEI Council. Through storytelling and adaptive leadership principles, people are becoming the focus once again.

April 11, 2023
Bring Me a Rock

My husband has a great analogy for ineffective communication that goes like this:

It’s like when they say, “Bring me a rock”. You go outside, grab the first rock you see, and take it to them. They say “No, we need a different rock.” You go back outside, grab a different rock, take it back, and they say “No, not that rock. It needs to be gray.” And so on and so forth until you eventually figure out that they wanted a big, round, gray rock from the bottom of the Mississippi River. How were you supposed to know that? If they knew what they wanted, why didn’t they just say it?

When people experience this type of interaction over and over again, they become less trusting and less engaged with the work. They start to feel like nothing they ever do will be the right thing, because it’s never clear what the right thing actually is. It’s a very demotivating work environment where accountability is high and psychological safety is not: the anxiety zone.

We should all be working to find the right balance between accountability and psychological safety. In other words, we can absolutely have high standards of performance and a people-first, inclusive culture. I call this Graceful Accountability.

If you’ve heard me talk about Graceful Accountability, you know I’m serious about it. I’ve seen countless healthy and unhealthy teams over the years, and the difference is almost always the result of either too much “speak up” or too much “do what we tell you to do”. It’s either so relaxed and accepting that results suffer, or it’s so structured and rigid that people suffer. When we practice Graceful Accountability, we reset the balance.

Next time you need someone to bring you a rock, meet them in the middle – figure out what it is you really need and communicate those expectations clearly (accountability), then allow space for questions, discussion, and gratitude (psychological safety).

What are you doing now to find the right balance of accountability and psychological safety?

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Attending the UA HR Conference? Catch Jillian’s session October 27th at 11am. Learn more about #UAHR22 at horizonpointconsulting.com/whatsup.

October 18, 2022