Focus

You can't do it all!

When I look back at the success of our company it is very clear that our greatest success was always aligned with our periods where we had narrow focus. When we started our journey we had one product and one way to go to market. What an easy time to maintain focus! Everyone knew what we did, what we sold, and most importantly there was never a question of priority. Five years later, we are now 33 times larger. This growth has been a huge success, but along with that success came complexity. Now, maintaining focus is much harder.

The secret is always in the strength of your team, the alignment of roles, ownership of roles, empowerment, and accountability! Great buzzwords, right? By the way, you need to make that work while achieving a culture that enables a focus on the team working together to achieve a goal, while each person on the team each delivers on their own component in a focused manner. In other words, focus as you grow becomes much bigger than you and becomes more about the organizational dynamics you create and the secret to success are those same old buzzwords that we have used for 30 years. Your role is maneuvering among the team to communicate and build organizational alignment, empowerment, accountability, and a team spirit. Focus continues forward, but looks completely different. The leaders role is not to provide focus, but to build organizational elements that cultivate focus and ultimately deliver results.

When I reach a frustrating point where I feel the team is losing focus, I need to step back and ask basic questions:

1. Do we have the right team players who I trust to be accountable, empowered, and to focus on their own to achieve the results?
2. Do we have the right metrics, KPI's, metric driven goals, and rewards to align individual, team, and corporate success?
3. Do we have the right organizational structure to align focus on corporate mission and outcomes?
4. Have we been clear in the communication of corporate goals, mission, objectives, and priorities?

In my role, I can usually find a corporate miss leading back to a failure in one or more of these areas. The reality is that, in a fast moving, fast growing company, you will never be perfect in these areas and focus becomes a relative scale in your ability to manage the organizational dynamics at the highest possible level. Stay focused in your delivery of those organizational dynamics in everything you do, and you won't have problems with organizational focus. If focus goes awry, look in the mirror and own the solution by asking the questions above. Best wishes!