Focus

"At my core, I am a minimalist. When you put limitations on what you're working on, that's when you find your voice and your beauty. I'm always telling crew members or filmmakers: Think of what we do as sushi making. The least amount of ingredients at the highest quality level."?Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan

More. More information, more data, more content, more channels, more choices. In a world of more, it’s important to master less. The path to less is not yes. To reduce more to less, we need the discipline to focus.

To focus is to intentionally channel your attention, effort, and resources toward a singular point. That point may be a person, project, activity, or goal, but it stands alone in your mind. At least for now. The moment your eyes, ears, hands, or thoughts wander to something else, it’s gone.

Focus is a foundation of both organizational and individual success. When you think of successful companies, they typically begin by focusing in one area to become great—Google in search, Nvidia in graphics processing units, Amazon in online retailing, Nordstrom in service, etc. As Kevin Plank, self-made billionaire, and founder of sports equipment maker Under Armour said, "Focus is one of the most important things to have in your business. For the first five years, as we grew our company from zero to $5 million, we made really one shirt. Another way to say it is that a company needs to become famous for something, to find that niche."

The challenge is that it in a world of more, it’s easier to not focus. A survey?of 350,000 people worldwide?conducted by?Franklin Covey found that 40% of people spend their time on things that are completely irrelevant to their goals and work. This equates to wasting two out of five days of the work week, so in a 50-week working year, erasing any and all productivity in 100 of 250 days. Ouch.

During the past twenty years of facilitating strategic thinking workshops for leadership teams and providing strategic counsel and executive coaching, I’ve identified three causes that lead to a failure to focus along with tools and techniques to overcome them.

Cause #1: Unclear on the core.?If focusing means we’re directing attention toward a single point, we’d better make sure that it’s the right point. The right point is an activity, area, offering, or initiative that will help you progress toward a predetermined goal. Are you and your team spending time on products or services that don’t offer customers superior value relative to the competition? If so, why? What are the core competencies (areas of expertise) and capabilities (skill sets) that are most responsible for your success? Would everyone in your business agree on the same 3-5? How much time is your team spending on these competencies and capabilities versus other less valuable aspects of the business?

A Bain & Company study of 8,000 companies found that, "…the most common strategic root cause of stall-out is the premature abandonment of the core business, or the inability to say no to new opportunities that don’t fit with a company’s core mission." Once a company has stalled out, the research found that only 1 in 10 was able to regain their market position. Therefore, it’s critical that your team is not wasting time chasing the shiny objects outside of the core of the business without a solid innovation strategy in place. Apple CEO Tim Cook advises, "One traditional management philosophy that's taught in many business schools is diversification. Well, that's not us. You can only do so many things great, and you should cast aside everything else."

To gain clarity on the core, consider the following exercise I refer to as Target Practice:

1) Draw a target with three circles and a bull’s eye in the center.

2) In the bull’s eye, write the product/service you’re focused on that deserves to win in the market.

3) In the inner most ring, write the one customer group that finds the most value in this offering and is willing to pay for that value.

4) In the second ring, write the most important channel for reaching the most important customer.

5) In the third ring, write the most important competency (area of expertise) and capability (skill set) for creating and delivering value in this channel to this customer for this offering.

6) Below the target, identify the primary goal, corresponding objective, strategy, and tactics to successfully hit this target.

Cause #2: Multitasking.?The crack cocaine of the business world is multitasking. Both flood the brain with dopamine, provide a brief high, and kill your productivity. The primary pipe for multitasking is your smartphone.?Studies show people check their smartphones, on average, every 6 ? minutes, or roughly 150 times a day. This constant shuffling back and forth between tasks has become the norm and is assumed by many to be a hallmark of highly productive people. It’s not.

Professor Clifford Nass’s studies from Stanford University suggest that managers who continually shift between multiple tasks do not manage those tasks as well as those who focus on one thing at a time. His data show when people switch between tasks, they take up to 30 percent longer to complete them and make twice as many errors as those that don’t switch. While multitasking may make you feel more productive, it’s actually hurting your overall performance much more than you imagine. Professor Nass concluded:?"High multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Multitaskers were just lousy at everything."

To dramatically improve your productivity, focus on monotasking. Here are some tips for maintaining a monotasking approach to your work:

1) Batch your work. Identify the groups of tasks that you are doing on a weekly basis. Then select days/times to work on similar groups of items. For example, several executives I work with batch their email at three intervals per day, 9:00 am, 1:00 pm and 4:30 pm. Many of you may have fallen out of your chair at the thought of only checking email three times per day, believing, "I couldn’t possibly do that. I need to be highly responsive to my team." Here’s a newsflash for some: your team would prefer it if you weren’t checking and sending email so often so that they can get significant work done and not be continually chasing fire drills. And for the majority of folks: you’re not a trauma surgeon—there isn’t a patient waiting on a table somewhere for you to save their life by checking your email every few minutes.

2) Block time. If you intentionally carve out time in your calendar to work on significant initiatives, projects, and decisions, it creates a greater sense of purpose and enables you to get more done. Ensure that your assistant protects those time slots and doesn’t allow others to book over them. Cal Henderson, co-founder of Slack, provides some helpful trigger questions: "What are the things that are the most strategically important, and am I allocating my time to them correctly? Am I spending the right percentage of my time on them? It’s easy to get lost in the weeds."

Cause #3: Inability to make trade-offs.?A trade-off is defined as, "The exchange of one thing for another of more or less equal value." In order to make trade-offs, we need to make decisions. The Latin term for decision is?decidere, which means "to cut off." If you have trees on your property, you know that every few years, you should cut off or prune the lower or dead branches in order to promote new growth in the tree. However, in business, we have a harder time pruning—cutting things off from our attention, time, and other resources. A survey of 463 managers by McKinsey & Company asked if their senior leadership team cut off unsuccessful initiatives quickly enough, and 52 percent responded "no."

When you agree to pursue a new opportunity that’s not related to your goals or serve on a committee with little connection to your priorities, you’ve also agreed to not invest your time and talent in other potentially more valuable areas. By not making a trade-off, you’ve actually decided, even if you didn’t consciously state the decision. In economics, it’s referred to as the opportunity cost: the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Before agreeing to put your time, talent, or budget to something, consider the opportunity costs involved and then determine if it still makes sense.

The inability to make trade-offs has serious repercussions throughout an organization, including overworked employees, poor morale, toothless strategies, and middle-of-the-roadkill offerings. Another key consequence is a lack of priorities, or stated differently, "everything is a priority." Research published in the?Harvard Business Review?found that when it comes to employee’s issues understanding strategy, mid-level managers are four times more likely to point to too many priorities rather than unclear communication.?John Chambers, former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems said, "My biggest challenge is not growth but how well we prioritize."

To improve your team’s ability to make trade-offs, consider the following techniques:

1) Clarify priorities. The next time your team gets together for a staff meeting, ask each person to write down what they believe are the organization’s top three priorities. Read the cards aloud and see how many people had similar priorities listed for the organization. Then have them write down their top three priorities and see how many are aligned at the individual level. Once priorities have been whittled down and agreed upon, implement an approach where no new priorities may be added without first eliminating an existing one.

2)?Say No.?If on a daily basis dozens of people asked you for money in varying amounts, from 50 cents to $50,000, you wouldn’t say yes to all of them. If you did, you’d be bankrupt in a few days. We’ve heard the adage "Time is money." Now, it’s time to start acting that way. When people request your time for meetings, teleconferences, special projects, etc., ask yourself if these requests are directly related to your goals or are extremely valuable in helping others reach their goals. If the answer is no, then your response should be as well.

3) Visualize the trade-offs. A powerful technique for creating a short-list of priorities and not continually adding things to your team’s already overflowing plate is to create a graph of trade-offs. When I facilitate the Prioritization Matrix exercise with teams, we first create a list of everything that’s considered a priority. We then plot the priorities on a graph by evaluating each item on two criteria: Probability of Achievement, and Impact to the business using a numerical rating scale from 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each. Once priorities are plotted in this manner, it becomes clearer which should remain, and which are ripe for pruning. As Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said. "It's prioritizing that makes us efficient and makes us succeed."

Focus saves us from the swamp of meaningless activity. Focus separates us from mediocrity-inducing multitasking. Focus demands our full attention, and deserts us without discipline. Focus is our friend if we intentionally invite it into our day. Focus slaps more in the face, throws its’ arm around less, and responds to no. Focus…until it’s gone.

The workshops offered by the Strategic Thinking Institute are based on proprietary content from the?New York Times?and?Wall Street Journal?bestselling books on strategic thinking, planning, and execution.

"Rich’s Deep Dive Strategic Thinking session with our global leadership team was incredibly valuable, serving as a springboard for our strategic planning process. The session provided my executive team with a methodical way of thinking about strategy and the tools to do so. There has been an immediate impact in the elevation in the way in which my team is thinking about strategy for the long-term health of our business. I give Rich my highest recommendation."

~Taryn Owen, President, PeopleScout