Maintaining Focus...Keep your Eye on the Ball (or the Win)

When you watch a dog at the beach chasing a ball in the waves, what do you see? Intention from the time his owner holds the ball through his retrieval. Eyes on the ball…always.

When adapting to change, everyone needs to keep their eyes on the purpose and plan. Whatever the strategies and timeline may be, focus must be intentional. You need to reframe the way you typically follow your processes and consider the behaviors of key employees responsible for the change or you will likely swing back to the “way it’s always been done.”

Let’s say that you have decided to implement new processes for how you engage with your clients. You as the owner or president of your business have decided that you will more effectively communicate, influence, and retain valuable information by tag teaming with your engineer, operations manager or another key person who is important to delivery of a project. This involves more attention to scheduling and planning prior to meetings with the client; however, there may be behavioral factors to consider, often starting with you! Do you feel that your long-standing relationship with your client might be jeopardized by bringing along someone else? Ask yourself why. Have you considered the positive and negative results of not making the change? After a couple of meetings do you find yourself scheduling meetings and going alone like you did in the past? Focus on the purpose of changing a process and commit to it or don’t expect less in your outcomes.

As a nonprofit professional or board/committee member, are you the naysayer on trying something new? If you are the lead on a change, are you keeping people focused on the change that everyone said they want?

Maintaining focus takes baby steps and passion for the change. Define processes with the understanding of baby steps--today, next week, a month from now--what do you want to see?

I love collaborating with clients to develop those baby steps while helping them focus on winning the client or increasing donor engagement. What can Managing Communications do for you to bring that idea for change to where it will improve your efforts? You would have to have your head in the sand not to know that communications planning is essential in making any change! If you would like to learn more and identify a project, new product, startup initiative, or operational challenge, please call me at 757-513-8633 or email: [email protected] .