Focus Driven Results: The Value of Doing a Few Things Well

We live in times where people demand a lot from us. Shouldering the burden of pleasing multiple constituencies, we tend to make pressurized decisions, without taking time to consider our options, or even consider whether less is more. The pressure to always say yes comes from different sources, including competition in the marketplace, government, and society generally.

Have you ever considered that saying no is the right answer? Conceivably, our results could be better if more of us were at liberty to say no, and felt less pressure to please everyone all the time. Let’s consider the power of saying no for a moment.

Why Saying No is Difficult

As soon as someone asks you to do something you are not comfortable with, our minds amplify the impact of what we anticipate will be a negative response. We forecast discomfort and unpleasantness in a way that stimulates avoidance. Avoidance is a powerful, natural response to distress. So, to save yourself the discomfort, you say yes.

While you might consider saying no in principle, or for practical reasons, the moment you are faced with the challenge of declining action, the atmospherics of the conversation become challenging. Rarely do we want stakeholders to think we are against taking decisive action on any issue. Alternatively, saying yes seems so much more powerful and affirming.

Still, consider how many times someone has asked you to do something, and you said yes only to be overwhelmed by all the tasks a few days later, or to reaffirm your initial concerns that the agreed course was not the right one. The same happens on an organizational level.

Revenue quality can be degraded when the functions of an enterprise are overwhelmed with low impact, non-core work because someone said yes when they should have said no.

Agreeing to every project, chasing every opportunity for profit, and generally demonstrating a lack of discipline in executing a plan, can overpower even the most talented teams.

Debiasing an organization to saying yes, reflexively, requires creating a shared culture around clear objectives. It requires rewarding laser focus on executing a plan rather than maintaining de minimis profitably at any cost. Employees at every level should be inclined to ask: how does this task align with our shared priorities? And, stakeholders should be given space to decline low impact, non-core work that is misaligned with the enterprise strategy.

Staying Focused

Focused work has few disadvantages. It means creating ample space and time to do important tasks impactfully. At an organizational level, focus is a function of team effectiveness in executing goals. While we can empirically demonstrate an organization’s focus year over year by auditing non-critical, non-core work against resulting profitability when such work is terminated, it is qualitatively a measure of how empowered your teams are to decline or discontinue work that is non-core and fundamentally misaligned with a defined corporate strategy. The challenge for leaders, then, is to define what work is in scope, what work is out of scope, and to ensure escalation procedures exist when exception work is visited upon our teams by well-meaning partners. 

Focus Helps You Build Momentum

Concentrating on a clearly defined scope of work, in the context of corporate strategy, enables teams to execute more efficiently. Finishing tasks in quick succession motivates teams to take on the next challenge. Realizing the increased velocity and impact with which core tasks can get accomplished has a positive influence on results and motivation, and carries forward to the team’s next win. Leadership can influence  momentum by zealously guarding work groups from distractions. And, the resulting momentum generated by focused teams, differentiates organizations with rapid and sustained growth from those with middling or episodic growth.

Focus Makes You More Productive

Practically speaking, staying focused on defined tasks means completing work expeditiously and moving forward deliberately. In the long run, more tasks will be accomplished by focusing efforts. For individuals, the secret to focus is avoiding distraction as it helps condition your brain to center on what requires your attention. The same can be said for organizations. Organizational distractions come in every form: new technology, world events, competitor moves, etcetera. The secret to organizational focus is avoiding distractions too. Leaders can promote organizational focus by encouraging teams to be entrepreneurial within the bounds of a corporate strategy while discouraging any fixation on trivialities like the new shiny object competitor X announced on their recent earnings call. 

In 2006, Apple’s iPod division didn’t flinch when Microsoft introduced the Zune for this very reason. Today, Zoomers (generation Z) have no idea what a Zune is.

Filtering distractions, nurturing productivity, and encouraging creativity in alignment with corporate objectives is the key to leading focused teams. 

Focus Helps Increase Profitability

For a business, sustainable growth and profitability are clear objectives. To achieve these, leadership must determine what is, and is not, worth investing resources. 'Leaning out' operational engagements often creates opportunities to increase margins and grow. McKinsey & Company describes the process of focusing on leaner operational modalities as “value streaming”. A value stream map tracks inputs and losses for each step of a process, offering insights into where a resource waste might be reduced. In layman’s terms, often bigger is not better. Sometimes declining a new product or service is the right answer. Sometimes selling a business unit is more profitable. Occasionally a leader should consider culling the tasks being performed by a team because it is low impact and non-core. In the end, the goals of sustainable growth and profitability can be achieved by embracing limits and maximizing the finite resources of time and effort.

Less Stress, Motivated Teams

When employees concentrate on fewer tasks and increased productivity, it translates into less tension and stress. Focusing on one assignment allows you to complete more tasks in less time and correspondingly increase unstructured time for creativity. Directing your team’s energy to discrete work means calibrating common workplace stressors like aggressive deadlines and distracting busy work. All stressors will not be removed. To be sure, deadlines will be with us always, but decreasing their impact on our lives makes the occasional stressor more manageable. Teams that are less stressed, and that have more time for creative work, are happier.

Better Quality of Work

Ksenia Ermakova describes focus as a force multiplier that enhances the quality of work. Specifically: [high quality work produced] = (time spent) x (intensity of focus). There is both a neurological and psychological argument supporting the idea that focus impacts quality of work. Suffice it to say, the more time you have to concentrate on a single task, the better the quality of your results. You will start completing tasks faster and they will be progressively error-free. This is particularly impactful when thinking about the intersection of focus and strategy. When the strategic thinkers of an organization are focused, the resulting strategy they produce becomes progressively sounder, and more likely to produce desired results. This can have an enormous impact on mid-term and long-term growth.

The Power of No

It is as distressing to waste effort doing unnecessary things as it is executing tasks inefficiently. In such cases, elimination can be as valuable as optimization. There is value in doing a few things well. Leadership today requires learning the power of embracing focused work and, occasionally, saying no to misaligned tasks that detract from full execution on the corporate strategy.

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Andrew Cooper is a husband, dad, brother, son, and life-long student of human behavior and leadership. In his spare time he is an author, patent inventor, attorney, lecturer, and company executive.