Business magazines, business schools, sports coaches, teachers, and most people you talk to likely have a positive opinion about and an actual admiration for the word focus.
Focus leads to results. If you are a true believer on multitasking, I would love to offer you a free assessment on the effectiveness of your organization (you can contact me via the contact form on this website), and hope to change your mind.
In this post, I explore two questions about the word focus:
1. How does focus at a personal level interact with focus at an organizational level?
2. Are there any business functions for which focus actually works to the detriment of the business?
Personal focus vs. focusing leadership
At a personal level, you have probably experienced that time in which you were fully concentrated on reading a report, or writing an important email with no interruption. You probably did not notice time passing by and your understanding of that report or your ability to communicate exactly what you wanted to communicate on that email were pretty high. That is because the quality of what you do increases with the level of focus you put into it.
You have probably also experienced that time in which you had your diet at the top of your mind during a full month, you made it a priority and thought about it daily.
These situations are examples of personal focus.
Photo by Steven Wright / Unsplash
“Quality is directly proportional to focus”
But there is another type of focusing ability, which you may or may not pay attention to on a daily basis. This is the ability to instill focus into your organization (or team). I call it focusing leadership – it focuses your team on the most important goals of the organization.
While personal focus does not come natural to all managers, focusing leadership is something that all of them start learning on the day in which they start exercising their first leadership position.
Personal focus requires you to 1) understand the value behind doing one thing at a time and 2) to exercise a great deal of self-determination. Both of these are at your fingertips. You probably are already convinced of #1. To attain #2, look at yourself in the mirror for five minutes every day, in silence, and ask yourself the following question: “Am I ready to achieve what I really want to achieve today?”
Focused leadership, on the other hand, requires a great deal of soft skills. You must develop clarity of mind about what are the priorities of a complex organization. You must also develop very strong communication skills (listening, for example) that will ensure clear understanding of those. You must start to state the WHY of the things you say, frequently. You must empower your team with the right tools and remove organizational barriers to enable them to do their jobs efficiently. You must create an environment that fosters the cohesiveness of your team. You must gather feedback from your team, constantly. And, finally, you must reiterate these priorities frequently.
So, where does personal focus meet focused leadership?
There are three points of intersection:
1. Execution: not only will personal focus help you be a better focusing leader, but focusing leadership shall be one of your personal priorities.
2. Example: you want your team to see you exercising personal focus on the priorities that you have communicated to them and be the role model and champion of your ideas.
3. Enablement: you want to teach your team members to exercise personal focus and become focusing leaders, as a way to grow the results achievement power of your organization.
Two tests
To evaluate your personal focus and your focusing leadership abilities, ask yourself these two questions:
a. What are the 3 most important things you want to achieve today? Are you spending any time on other things?
b. What are the 5 most important things that your team or organization need to achieve this month? Do you know how much time they are dedicating to these?
At Renspire Insights we work with top-performing clients, helping them uncover and solve their deepest business and human challenges.
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