Horizon Point Consulting

Category: General

Horizon Point writes about dozens of leadership, career, workplace, and workforce topics. Sometimes we write whatever we want. Read this category for general blogs from the HPC team.

  • Schedules Communicate Priorities

    Schedules Communicate Priorities

    On Sunday morning about 7 AM, I was in the middle of a run. It was a quiet, beautiful fall morning until I looped back around and through the sports and water park complex near my house.  Cars started driving by and turning into the parking lot by the tennis center. I could hear an abundance of tennis balls popping off rackets as ,what seemed to be, many people warming up.

    I’ve run by on other Sunday mornings about this time to see what couldn’t be older than five and six year olds warming up for soccer matches. The mini vans and SUVS of their parents had to have filled the parking lots with license plates from other counties and even other states before the sun even woke up.

    On a Sunday.

    Call me old fashioned, but this early morning quest for getting more travel soccer, or travel tennis, or travel whatever sport in for young kids just blows my mind, even if it is driving in tons of revenue for my hometown as people come and put heads in beds with their entire family for an elementary school kid to play sports all weekend.

    What is the reasoning behind what has seemed to largely be held by society as a day or rest a day to get in more sports, Sunday after Sunday? Maybe it is the mindset of practice makes perfect as I wrote about last week, but whatever it is, it’s communicating that the sport, whatever it may be, is the priority.   Our schedule communicates our priorities. On the weekend, family time isn’t the priority, or church or even time for a kid to rest a little and enjoy a free day to just be a kid.

    Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several discussions revolving around this idea of how priorities are being communicated to kids. One mom whose little girl isn’t even six months old mentioned her concern with her family growing “overscheduled” as kids activities develop. Another expressed concern over an hour worth of homework for her daughter on a night when she had church and dance.   My own mother even expressed her observation about how kids don’t have time to just be kids anymore.

    Even the Today Show had a segmentaddressing the increase in homework kids have to complete these days, with one teacher expressing it is not the amount of homework but the amount of extracurricular things on kids’ calendars today that results in what should take 15 minutes of homework “double and triple” that amount of time because by the time the student actually sits down to do the homework, they have already had so much packed into their day that they are just DONE (fast forward to 2:15 of the clip to hear this comment).

    Traveling and playing soccer all day every weekend for a season to me, brings on the sense of DONE before the week even starts.  Especially for a six year old.

    But if I’m honest with myself, I worry that I’ll be sucked into the travel soccer or tennis or baseball or dance craze with my own son and daughter (who will arrive in March) and they are only two and not even born yet.   When everyone is doing it, aren’t you just supposed to follow suite?

     

    What does this have to do with leadership?

    Whether we are the leader of our households or the leader of a team or company, or even the leader of our own lives, realizing that we are communicating priorities to our people and ourselves by how we prioritize time is important.

    Do you occupy your own time or your team’s with multiple meetings? I had one professional in leadership class tell me most of his weeks are composed of 30 hours on average of meetings.   By the time he was able to get to the work that he was supposed to do as a result of all these meetings, he was just DONE, not being able to contribute meaningfully to his purpose, and therefore his ability to produce value, for the organization.

    Maybe as a parent we do want sports or other extra curricular activities or homework to be the priority for our children. But my challenge would be, if one thing takes the priority, by the time they get to everything else are they just DONE? And is it even what they want? Is what we schedule helping them express who they are and how they can contribute to family and to society in a meaningful way or is the schedule communicating something else entirely?

    As a leader, help people define how they contribute meaningfully and then avoid overschedule them with things that don’t help them see this through.  

    Where are you, your team, or your family overscheduled with things that don’t truly matter?

  • The Voice and 10,000 Hours of Practice

    My husband has suddenly become glued to watching The Voice on NBC. I have no idea why. He can’t carry a tune and he is, in general, not a music buff. For some reason, though, he finds this show extremely entertaining.

    Different from it’s rival show American Idol, The Voice features singers who all have some type of musical talent. They aren’t any folks off the street trying to get camera attention.

    Because he was watching it (yes, even over Monday Night Football) on Monday, I sat down to tune in for a minute. On this episode, a 17 year old with a unique voice was auditioning before the judges. The judges sit facing the audience instead of the singer, so they can’t see the person.   This tries to drive home the point that the show is solely about “the voice” or raw talent and no other factor.

    The girl stated in her intro that he had been singing for about two years. Although she had talent and a sound that was intriguing to the judges, none of the four turned around to pick her. They encouraged her to continue to practice and come back again.

    In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, a chapter is devoted to the rule of 10,000 hours of practice.   Throughout the book, Gladwell takes a different approach to framing the reader’s thinking about how people find success, citing that people reach “their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage.”

    However, he writes that “achievement is talent plus preparation” arguing that although arbitrary factors like when you were born play into whether or not you will have success in certain fields (Many of history’s richest people were born between 1830-1840. Why? They were born at a time when they could take advantage of “perhaps the greatest transformation in [American economic] history.”) practice really does make perfect.

    Gladwell cites just how much performing the Beatles had under their belt before they took the American music scene by storm in 1964, oftentimes playing 8 hours a day, seven days a week.

    Whether you want to be a musician or not, if you want to achieve mastery in you field which fosters success, thenabout 10,000 hours of practice should do it, so the research says.

    The young girl with the unique voice, even if she had been singing 40 hours a week for the two years she cited, she would have only tallied about 4,000 hours.

    Want to capitalize on your talents, passions and values in a career at a young age? You better start working “much, much harder” as Galdwell cites, practicing now. It’s never too early to start.

    How much time do you spend “practicing” your passion?

  • Why Do Performance Appraisals?

    Why Do Performance Appraisals?

    My almost three year old has just learned to ask the question, “Why?”

    He loves it, and uses it ALL the time.

    For example, I’ll say, “Don’t climb on that.”

    “Why?” He asks as he continues to do it.

    Or he says, “Mommy, where is the moon?”

    “In the sky,” I’ll say.

    “Why?” he asks.

    “Because it’s in space.”

    “Why?” he asks again.

    It can go on forever, and quite often I have no idea how to answer his “Why?”

    I think too often we neglect to ask “Why?” when it comes to evaluating employee performance or any other talent management process for that matter.   Yet in anything we do related to talent management and leading others, we might be able to learn a thing or two from a toddler. We need to constantly be asking ourselves, “Why are we doing this?”

    In working on a couple of performance evaluation projects this fall, I have to constantly remind myself and my clients about the “why” of performance appraisal. There are two real “whys” in evaluating employee performance, each of which is very different.

    Brannick, Levine and Morgeson (2007) explain these two reasons in Job and Work Analysis:

    1. “To support administrative rewards and punishments for past performance”
    2. “To improve performance through feedback (coaching).”

    They go on to note, “It is unlikely that one appraisal system can achieve both administrative and performance improvement goals as well.”

    Are you going through the motions of an appraisal process because its just one of those things you do annually, or are you doing it for the reasons above? If you are doing it for administrative and feedback purposes, realize that separating these two process can help you meet maximize results in achieving your “Why?”

    Read more about this topic from Horizon Point here:

    A Performance Development Tool for Servant Leaders This post includes some sample employee evaluation and development tools that separate the administrative function of evaluation from the development function.

  • You Need to Question Yourself.

    You Need to Question Yourself.

    If you want to be able to actually live by your mission everyday, then you need to create a list of at least three questions to askyourself daily.

    For example, if your mission is to become a best-selling author, what do you think would be some questions that you would need to ask yourself daily?

    The most obvious one would probably be:  Did I write today?

    Others may be, Did I read something new today?  (Good writers are always avid readers, at least in my opinion).   After you have something written you want published, one of your questions may be, Did I reach out to an agent or publisher today that might be willing to consider my work?

    What about if part of your mission is to be a loving spouse or parent?  What questions would you ask yourself?   First would probably be, Did I spend quality time with my spouse/child today?

    Many coaching clients that I work with find that the 3 questions they ask themselves daily are the best way to hold them accountable for living their mission. They are usually “yes” or “no” questions and even if people already have a mission statement, this helps truly test if they are striving to live it day in and day out.  It makes people think about the behaviors they exhibit and if they exhibit them regularly enough to make them habit.

    More on this with 10,000 hours of practice next week…

    Committed to forming and living out your mission? You may want to follow our worksheet here: Power of 3 Worksheet

    What questions do you need to be asking yourself daily?

  • Do you have a better half? A final word on Leadership Lessons for College Football

    I’ll admit, after writing about leadership lessons gleaned from Nick Saban and college football over the last several weeks, even I’m beginning to tire about all the hype over the man.   As Warren St. John points out in his GQ article on Saban,  many people associate him with the devil.   (Note:  Even if you don’t like football, read St. John’s article, he is a fabulous writer.)

    Love him or hate him (in the sake of full disclosure, we love him at our house), one thing I got out of St. John’s article, among many is that Saban has a better half.  “Ms. Terry”.

    St. John writes,

    “The role of helping Saban interact with the outside world falls to his wife, the outgoing daughter of a West Virginia coal miner who is known in Saban’s world simply as “Ms. Terry,” a down-home nickname that undersells her savvy. When it comes to her husband, she serves as both a protective gatekeeper and an all-knowing oracle.”

    And more,

    “The big question in Alabama, and in college football, is how long Saban will stick around. Everyone has a theory. Steven Rumsey remembers asking him once about the possibility of his leaving. Saban’s response: “Terry likes it here.”

    “I remember getting my feelings hurt,” Rumsey tells me. “I thought, It’d mean the world to me, Nick, if you said, ‘I like it here.’ But after thinking about it, a practice field looks the same if you’re at Baltimore, U.S.C., Texas, Tampa. The grass is the grass, the goalposts are the goalposts, and if you work sixteen-hour days it’s all thesame to you. So really when he said, ‘Terry likes it here,’ what he was saying was, ‘That’s the most important thing to me, because she’s the one who’s got to experience the life here.’”

    Leaders come with all types of relationships in their lives, some married, some single, among many other things.  I don’t think there is a rhyme or reason to leadership capabilities and whether or not you mark “filing jointly” on your tax return.

    However, I would venture to guess that every leader who is striving towards a purpose and a passion has someone at their wing, someone who completes them and whothey are, who supports them continually.

    You’ve heard the saying, “Behind every good man is a good woman.”  Well, BESIDE every good leader, male or female, is a good man or woman.

    Who is by your side?