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.

  • 3 Tips for Checking your Facts: Leaders Know Things Aren’t Always What They Seem.

    How many times a week do you get second or third-hand information? By this I mean information that comes to you through someone other than the source or person that created that information. I tried to count up how many times I received information this way this week, and it was too many times to count.

    For example, most news we get is through the lens of the writer, the reporter, or the producer. When we hear from someone else about another person’s mistake or misbehavior, it isn’t from the original source or we didn’t see it first hand. Some people would say it is just gossip. Even when we look at what may appear to be black and white facts of data, sometimes it isn’t even what it seems. The data has often been filtered to through the lens of someone who wants to paint a picture or make a point with it.

    I’ve notice that good leaders always have this things-aren’t-really-what-they-seem radar up and they are prone to check their facts before make decisions based on the information. They realize not everything can be viewed just at the surface.

    Based on observation of these types of leaders, here is some advice for making sure you have your facts straight before making a decision or passing judgment:

    Be aware that things aren’t always what they seem. It all goes back to (self) awareness.

    Go to the source. If you hear that someone has a problem with such and such, then ask that person- in person. Not in email.

    Get both sides of the story. If person A says this and person B says that get person A and B together and figure this out.

    When has your things-aren’t-always-what-they-seem radar helped you make a better decision?

  • Who Keeps You Accountable?

    Who Keeps You Accountable?

    If you’re a goal-oriented person, having someone to keep you accountable for your personal and professional goals may seem trivial. Why would you do that if you are able to keep yourself accountable for your own goals?

    However, the best way to keep yourself on track with goals and actually make the journey through your goals more meaningful is to have some partners in crime to keep you on track no matter how focused and motivated you are.

    That’s why the Power of 3 Worksheet points to establishing three accountability partners to help you live your mission.

     

    An example may be helpful to illustrate the value of accountability partners. You may have seen when I went pubic with my goals at the beginning of the year (Go Public with Your Goals) that my first goal for 2013 is to maximize my mornings.

     

    Maximizing my mornings wasn’t going so well after the newness of New Year’s resolution time wore off around the end of January. But, with a friend and neighbor of mine, we committed to running the Nashville half-marathon in April. Because of her schedule and mine, this required 5:30 am training runs. There was no other time to do it. Two to three mornings a week, we rose before the sun to get that training run in. If she had not been waiting on me those mornings, I doubt my feet would have hit the floor. This sprung into action my whole day, and helped me maximize my morning time in the ways that I had sought to at the beginning of the year, but wasn’t quite able to do on my own.

     

    You see, establishing an accountability partner isn’t a process where you necessarily have to go up to someone as ask, “I need your help, will you be my accountability partner?” Oftentimes, accountability partners come in the form of friends and family or professional colleagues that help keep you on track, and they may not even know they are serving this purpose.

     

    Even though the half-marathon is long over, we still meet 2-3 times a week for that 5:30 am run, and my mornings and days have gone a lot better because she is waiting on me bright and early. This doesn’t take into account the time we get to spend talking while we run which, through her listening and wise council, keeps me accountable and grounded in many other ways. My dad has also served this purpose on morning runs for many years as well, and he joins us often.

    Accountability partners are valuable for the habits and behaviors they can help you create. But more importantly, they are valuable because of the relationship. Nothing gets done, or anything of true meaning really gets done, in my opinion, without lasting relationships.

    Who keeps you accountable?

    You may also like:

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  • Real Leadership

    I have a good friend who cannot stand fake people.   Her philosophy is, be anything you want to be, just be real.   She has all types of friends, with all different background and interests, but she can spot a fake from a mile away. And once you are insincere with her, she writes you off. She has no need for you. Want to make sure she writes you off? Act like you are invincible, with no flaws, which to her is really the largest form of insincerity.

    Although her philosophy could be a lesson in leadership on giving people a second chance, I think her viewpoint also gives pause in considering authentic leadership.

    Keeping it real leads to leaders people want to follow.

    Consider these quotes:

    “…the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.” From David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell 

    Why? Because it humbles us and makes us truly human. It gives us something we can learn from. We like people who are real, and we can get on board with following them. Invincible people really aren’t all that fun because they seem to make us, as individuals, feel more flawed than we already are. The truth is, we are all flawed and we have all made mistakes.

    “There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what the seem.” From David and Goliath

    Do we like the giants more when we learn they aren’t always what they seem because they make them more real and more human?

    And finally,

    “I used to be afraid that if I was authentic I might take a hit, but now I know that being real means I will take a hit.”From Love Does

    There is a fine line between having being able to cast a vision and lead people towards the implementation of a mission and acting like you know it all and are invincible.

    I think the leaders that are most effective can cast that vision and mission to inspire people towards action, but they do it with the humility that comes from acknowledging they are human too. This can be done by exposing their weaknesses and, quite possibly, taking what the world sees as weaknesses and using them as strengths.

    We’d rather root for or follow the underdog, David (as Gladwell points out in his book David and Goliath) than Goliath any day. But why? I think mainly because he appears to be more human or real than Goliath does and we can get behind someone we can relate to.

    When has a leader expressing humanness made you want to follow him or her more?

  • 4 Tips to Set Mission Focused Goals

    A few weeks ago, I discussed the need to set a personal mission and then question yourself when it comes to living out that mission.   The Power of 3 Worksheet can help you with this.  Another component to this worksheet and living out your mission is to set goals for yourself.

    Here are some tips for setting goals:

    1. Set just three goals related to your mission.  Any less is not enough, get too many more and nothing is really a priority.
    2.  32- Square the power of your three goals by writing them goals down.    Research shows that those who write their goals down are 9 times more likely to achieve success.
    3. Are your goals SMART?  Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable Realistic and Time Bound?
    4. Are you goals outcome based or task based?  It’s important to have both.  I used to think that all a person needed in terms of a goal was an outcome.  For example, “Achieve $100,000 in sales in 2013”.   This adheres to the SMART goal principles (of course if this is achievable and realistic based on what you are trying to sell).  However, this alone, I’ve come to believe is not enough.  We need to create habits and behaviors within our goals that get us to the end results we want. Setting task-specific goals on how to get there will help tremendously For example,  “Make 10 sales calls each week” would be good task-based goal that is behavior based and creates a habit that can help reach the outcome goal of an annual sales figure to achieve.

    What goals have you set for yourself this year?

     

    Some other helpful posts on goal setting:

    SMART Goals

    Diminishing Returns

    Feedback

    Go Public with Your Goals – (note, I violated tip #1 here!)

  • 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?