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.

  • 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?

  • Don’t Want to Wake Up With Regrets? Create a Mission Statement

    Don’t Want to Wake Up With Regrets? Create a Mission Statement

    Mission statements are critical to directing success.  Companies have them, why don’t individuals?  Having one can help you focus and reach what you want to accomplish in life by answering the who, what, why and how of you.  Its not a mission statement unless it is written down. Whether or not you are trying to make career or college decisions in your life, everyone needs to have a personal mission statement.

    The exercises focused on identifying finding your talents, passions and values, for career purposes are a good starting place to help you discover your mission.  Just as the best place for shining your light for your career is at the intersection of these three things, so is your personal mission.   If you haven’t taken the time identify your talents, passions and values, I would encourage you to identify your top three in each area by looking at the resources here on the blog that have focused on talents, passions and values throughout 2013.   When you define your mission, you should be able to live out your talents, passions, and values through it.

    Don’t want to wake up with regrets?

    We use a workshop called The Power of 3 to walk people through creating personal mission statements, goals and success strategies for themselves in order to help them insure they are living life to the fullest.   They help people not wake up one day with a whole list of regrets.  Mission statements also help people say no to things that aren’t inline with their mission (more on this later).

    You can download the worksheet to this workshop here: Power of 3 Worksheet.

    We’ll be talking about each area as they relate to being successful over the next few weeks.

    Here are some other tools for creating a mission statement for yourself:

    What is your personal mission?