Permission to Focus
Whether it’s a laundry list of new year’s resolutions or an incredibly ambitious organization plan, there’s something about the dawn of a new year that brings forth SO MANY different ideas about what we want to accomplish and how we want to spend our time.
We declare big goals, get excited about the future, put together detailed plans, and then… well, often we get overwhelmed, and rather than hitting those big numbers or milestones, we miss our marks.
There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest one – the one that influences all the other reasons – is that we are trying to do too much, and so nothing is a priority.
When we try to do everything, we’re working against ourselves and our ability to achieve our goals.
Many years ago, I was brought on to lead a business unit transformation in support of an organization’s new strategic direction. The few team members still remaining in this unit were working so hard to do their own work and cover the work for several open positions, but this meant that in spite of their efforts, many things weren’t getting done particularly well.
I spent some time with each person on the team listening to the challenges they’d been facing, their thoughts about what our highest priorities should be, and what they believed was the most time-consuming and lowest value work on their plates. I also asked what opportunities they thought we were missing by being bogged down with low-value work.
In one of our next staff meetings, I showed them our department strategy for the year – it had four key priorities and a mantra: Permission to Focus.
Good strategy gives you permission to focus on what matters most.
Permission can feel like a strange word if you aim to build a collaborative team culture, but I’ve found that in teams of high performers who want to do their very best work amidst changing circumstances, sometimes “permission” from a leader is exactly what the team needs to feel confident in where they’re spending their time and what they say no to.
I’ve written before about psychologist Adam Grant’s perspective that our scarcest resource isn’t our time, but our attention. Studies show that our collective attention span is narrowing, in large part due to an abundance of information. As humans living in the digital information age, it’s becoming harder to apply sustained and selective attention (the kinds that enable us to truly focus) rather than divided attention (which leads to lower productivity and more mistakes as we split our focus between many different tasks).
As leaders, we can help our organizations, our teams, and our volunteers focus their attention on what matters by articulating strategy clearly and concisely, and then communicating it well.
If you’re not sure whether your strategy is giving you and your team permission to focus, here are a few diagnostic tests you can apply:
Summary vs. Strategy – does this read like an annual report or a brief overview of everything your organization does? If so, you don’t have a strategy – you have a summary of activities. Good strategy clearly identifies your top few priorities with enough information to guide the team’s decisions and actions about how to spend their time.
What won’t we do? – strategy is a series of interconnected choices about how you’ll work to achieve your big goal(s). Making choices means there are tradeoffs. Some things won’t happen. When you look at your strategy, ask “what won’t we do?” If the answer isn’t clear, or if collaborating teams don’t have a shared understanding of what’s on the “don’t do” list, then your strategy needs refining.
Is it manageable? – a strategy is not a wish list of all the things you hope to accomplish, and while that great big list of what the organization will do may seem attractive to certain supporters, it is often overwhelming and defeating to the people who power the organization. Give your team permission to focus on a manageable set of strategic objectives, including one objective that is about improving your ways of working. Part of making your strategy manageable is prioritizing the operational or supportive systems that will enhance the organization’s ability to do its work more efficiently and effectively – it is difficult to grow your impact without building your capacity to support that growth.
Giving yourself and your team permission to focus isn’t always easy – especially when there’s so much to do and so many competing demands. But it is worth it, because it leads to better morale, performance, and progress toward your goals. And a team that knows how and what to focus on builds its capacity for accomplishing great things together.
In case you need to hear it going into this new year, consider this your permission to focus on the things that matter most to you as a leader and the things that will have the most meaningful impact for your organization. Limit your priorities – try to keep it to three – and then thank yourself for the clarity now that will help you spend your attention wisely all year long.